Here’s a little local story. I spent a LARGE chunk of my working life, just under 20 years, working for BRMB, the first commercial station in Birmingham, in the UK. I joined them 35 years ago, pre-launch, as a baby rock jock, and left as Head of Music and Research, having done pretty much everything there was to do in old-style commercial radio.

News came out last month that their current owners, Global, are selling them off, along with three other stations in the West Midlands. This lets Global off the anti-competition hook, so they can carry on in the much more lucrative London market with, er, Capital, LBC, Heart, Choice, Classic FM and several other AM and digital brands. Go figure.

I’m not really concerned with London radio right now. It’s like New York: the lack of diversity and interesting programming is striking, and of course it’s all down to hyper-competition and the perceptions of the executives who make the programming and marketing decisions. But I still have have stupidly fond memories of the old station where I plied much of my trade, back in the last century.

For me, there are two big questions hanging over BRMB (and Mercia, Beacon and Wyvern):

Question one: given that we are now in a recession, and that, in the UK, radio advertising suffers first and worst when they cut the ad budgets, is there still a shiny future for ‘traditional’ local radio when it is cut adrift from a well funded network? Remember that these stations were all launched as full-service stations, and all those old-time features have been ruthlessly stripped away as competition piled in from Networks and the Internet.

Question two: That old-fashioned appeal is fondly remembered by many who listened twenty and thirty years ago. It was that same old-fashioned approach that let me experiment as a Rock DJ, with a degree of freedom inconceivable by today’s standards. I went on to record many of the region’s finest bands, and in so doing built up frankly extraordinary listening figures, again, by today’s standards. But is this kind of approach remotely cost-effective, appealing though it may seem? In short, have we seen the best, and maybe last, of old-school radio?

I do know that it’s possible to do great things really cheaply, and that is encouraging. Modern kit means it now costs less to run a business and far less to cover some of the radio basics – doing the accounts, keeping in touch with staff, building running orders, assembling a library, scheduling advertising, setting up promotions via email and the web, and so on. But that’s only part of the picture.

Are these old businesses worth paying good money for? Is it worth breathing life into them anew, once all emotion has been put aside? You tell me. I’d love to see it done the right way. But I wonder how many people share my opinions.

I love radio … it is important. Part of the way we do things. “Socially central” in many ways.

So, I like to think about what happens when we reconfigure the radio spectrum as a tradable commodity in a free market, rather than a social, cultural, economic and political asset that belongs to the people from the place it is in.

In New Zealand, where I come from, we have sold almost all of our radio stations and radio frequencies to companies from outside of New Zealand. We have no rules on ownership of our tradable spectrum (including cross-media and foreign ownership) and few on radio content beyond legal standards of taste, decency and privacy. We do have a couple of non-commercial publicly-funded radio networks, seriously under-funded community networks and a few other minor players that are not owned by one of two foreign companies. These broadcasters cannot really compete with the international capital that drives New Zealand’s radio system. They are now becoming fringe players in our radio ecology. Our politicians have generally stayed away from the debate around public and private ownership of radio since deregulation in 1990, preferring to let the market run its course. They may also be afraid of the overwhelming audience reach available to the owners of New Zealand commercial radio.

I think this situation is not good. Almost all of New Zealand radio is designed to encourage people to buy stuff. What you will experience when listening to the majority of New Zealand radio is strong advocacy for consumerism, with a few global pop hits in-between, or songs from New Zealand that emulate global pop. The discursive space in which we used to talk about radio as a public asset (and perhaps need) in New Zealand has been largely shut down by lobbying from the commercial industry. To me this is a bleak “radioscape”, a radio-place where you are, but that is hostile in that you cannot truly affect it.

I worry a bit about the expansion of this system. Canwest (one of the companies that operated in New Zealand until late 2007) sold up here to move into other markets (the UK and Turkey for example), using the lessons they have learnt in New Zealand to try to move other national radio ecologies towards the free market. The language of corporate communications is usually pretty subtle, but this slideshow from Canwest is all sorts of fun!

www.ctbc.ca/upload/infofile159.ppt