For readers outside the UK it may come as a surprise to learn that a radio station needs to get permission to change its format; especially in the States where such ‘flips’ are commonplace and, in some cases, quite sudden and drastic. I remember reading some years ago about how a well-respected jazz station in New York suddenly switched format to Country (a popular format at the time) with just a few hours’ notice to its staff. Existing presenters were ‘let go’ immediately and the station played non-stop music while new on-air staff were being hired.
In the UK one of the conditions of being awarded a commercial radio FM licence is that the new station must “broaden choice for the listener… in relation to existing local commercial radio services in the area.”
Over the years, the method of defining a ‘Format’ has changed, and the complex system of percentages has now gone, but stations are still expected to remain within their ‘Character of Service’, no matter how much they may be able to negotiate alterations to the Format or re-position themselves through what is commonly referred to as ‘format creep’. Some changes have been done gradually over a period of time (with perhaps occasional approval from the regulator) resulting in a very different station to that which was originally licensed.
A good example of this was Jazz FM in London and Manchester which struggled to gain a commercially-viable audience (mainly, I would argue, as a result of poor programming decisions) and tried re-positioning itself as ‘JFM’ and, by using its very broad ‘Promise of Performance’ which allowed them to play “jazz and any other music related to or inspired by jazz”, began to play a broader mix of mainstream popular music.
Tracks by Eric Clapton, for example, were played; not so much from his blues-based repertoire but the more-commercial offerings such as ‘Wonderful Tonight’ and ‘I Shot The Sheriff‘ instead. At the time some people even wondered whether Simply Red would find their way onto the playlist if it was discovered that Mick Hucknall had, perhaps, once walked past Ronnie Scott’s!
JFM didn’t work out, the station was eventually “reclaimed” by jazz enthusiasts and Jazz FM was re-born. Over the years, though, the station gradually moved towards a playlist that relied more on soul and funk than jazz. A further change of ownership eventually led to the station being allowed a format change to become ‘Smooth’ – with an easy-listening/oldies format targeting a 45-50+ audience. They were still required to broadcast some jazz on a regular basis but it was tucked away in the middle of the night and Ofcom subsequently allowed the station to drop the remaining jazz commitment.
Elsewhere Global Radio’s transformation of a number of individual local stations into outposts of their ‘Heart’ brand ran into regulatory problems. The former GWR-FM in Bristol, for example, was issued with a ‘yellow card’ for playing too much “old music” after Ofcom carried out a three day survey of the station’s output and found that only 47 per cent of its music was less than two years old; even though the station was supposed to be playing contemporary hits.
At least, unlike its predecessor, Ofcom no longer “regulates by stopwatch”. The Radio Authority once fined 2CR-FM (now part of Heart South Coast) for playing one 70s song too few in a three-hour period. Speaking at the Radio Academy’s Music Radio Conference in 2000, Steve Orchard (at the time Group PD of GWR), commented “Presumably had we played ‘Hello, This Is Joanie’ (a novelty Top 10 hit in 1978 for Paul Evans), the Authority would have been satisfied that listener interests had been protected. This is still the same animal which fined Leicester Sound for playing too much music” (They had played one record too many during a programme.
What might happen initially is that stations will move towards the mainstream but, after some jockeying for position, those that do not become a dominant player in the market will look for another potential audience elsewhere.
There is an argument that says that as stations were awarded a licence for a particular format they should be made to stick to it, but many of them date back to the early days of ‘Independent Local Radio’, which was conceived in the early-1970s when the media, social, political, economic and technological landscapes were very different to how they are today.
Much has changed in the past 40 years and radio today is having to operate in a very different, and alien, environment to that envisaged in 1971, when the government ‘White Paper’ outlining plans for ‘An Alternative Service of Radio Broadcasting‘ was published.
Today’s Radio faces new challenges, though, and, despite what some people might wish to believe, the way forward is not to turn back the clock to how things were before.