The Heart Network

Lots of assumptions there!

Do people think they get a second class service? Good quality programmes, very listenable music, friendly presenters, local news and local ads.

Do they understand it’s mostly from London, or Plymouth? No. Is that because they don’t care? Not at all. It’s just that radio isn’t as important to their lives as it is ours.

The media consumption landscape has shifted dramatically in the last few years. Multi channel TV, the Internet, Netflix, DAB, iPad’s, 24 HD channels of the Olympics, mobile data, the list goes on….

You can’t compare things in the Devonair time to now.

It is very difficult for local stations to provide quality, make money and generate an audience. Not impossible and there are some good examples, though there’s lots of bad examples too.

With all of this choice, if listeners don’t want to ‘consume’ the Heart programming there’s loads of other options, local and national, to meet their needs.

I don’t think Heart provides a second class service.

OK, so I’ve not had a station replaced by Heart in my area, but I have had one – the East Midlands regional – where Heart has been taken away, and I personally believe that the service I now receive from the replacement service Gem 106 is vastly inferior to the service I got from Heart.

So like if a shop reduces its’ quality of service, I made the effort so that I could continue getting the same quality from elsewhere. In this case, it was retuning to 100.7 and re-aligning my aerial to get a good signal.

Do they understand it’s mostly from London, or Plymouth? No.

I would have agreed with you in the days of the mix network, when it sounded like Graham Torrington was broadcasting from your local studio. But since the rebrand Heart has become an established name and I think people realise that it’s available in lots of places. There’s also less local content and involvement with local events, which would have strengthened people’s association between the station and local area.

I used to enjoy listening to GWR Bristol on the way to school in the second half of the 90s, but I’ve stopped listening to it as the station is now too old for me – even though I’ve aged 15 years in that time! Obviously some people will prefer the new music policy to the old one, but it does make a bit of a mockery of the whole format-based licencing policy.

I totally agree with Matt Deegan. I admire Global’s commitment to their brands. They do what they do and do it very well, just as the Bauer stations do with a quite different strategy the BBC does with yet another and community and Internet stations with another still. Content is EVERYWHERE and the exact same content you can get on radio already exists in several different places. So the challenge for anyone in the radio BUSINESS is to take the content you think your audience needs the most, package it in the way that’s most appealing, and for a commercial station…sell that to advertisers. Radio changes and that’s why we’re sitting here in 2012 discussing/sometimes arguing about a medium with a bigger reach than Facebook. Isn’t that amazing?! We should be taking things forward, seizing new opportunities and if anyone does loathe what’s currently available then find your niche and have a go yourself. I’m not saying it’s easy but it’s definitely never been easier. What would a 16 year old have to gain by listening to an original ILR station? It’s not that the content is irrelevant or cheesy or not important, that DJs are shit or that nobody cares, it’s simply that all the stuff that made those stations special already exists in a dozen or so different places.

Surely, the real point is that in most cases the frequencies Heart now airs on were local licences and they been changed without any re-advertisment of the licence or any real attempt to consult the listeners in any market.

Claiming people don’t know or care is just the industry line

Where people actually are asked, the results tend to be the opposite: From the Ofcom report:

“Research conducted by Ofcom in 2011 suggests listeners value highly the provision of local radio and the production of content specifically produced for their local area, with 71% of people saying that small-scale local radio was of high importance in the provision of local information (compared to Local Newspapers (56%) and websites (53%).”

My view is that, in any given geographic location in Great Britain, you should be able to get a radio station that is broadcasting locally and featuring content relevant to your community.

It is increasingly clear that, perhaps, this ‘niche’ is supposed to be provided in the longer term by community radio; the issues there being that much community radio still sounds second-rate, and that stations are still shackled by the ’50% rule’, preventing fair competition and revenue streams.

If these two issues can be resolved then it’s not such an issue, for me, if the rest of the spectrum is heavily networked. There should always be something available that is inherently local, though.

Research conducted by Ofcom in 2011

I would be interested to see the demographic breakdown of that data, because my hunch would be that older listeners value the traditions and services that local radio provides, whereas younger listeners would use other sources if they cared about local happenings and events.

I certainly don’t know many 18-25 males, for example, who’d now turn on the radio and listen for a period of time to hear “What’s On Locally”. They’d use Facebook or Twitter, ask their friends, or check a gig listing website or something similar. An older listener, however? They might.

I like local radio and think it’s important to have. However, the question Ofcom asked isn’t the best one.

It’s more akin to the Community Centre argument. If you do a survey and ask people whether Community Centres are important the vast majority will say yes. If you ask “would you ever got to a community centre” the answer will mainly be no.

The best judge of relevance to audience is whether there’s any consumption.

The reason there’s content licensing for radio is, back at the beginning of it, it was judged that there should be an exchange for using a valuable scarce resource – the spectrum. That exchange was public service content – local programming/news etc.

The issue now is that radio sprectrum is much less of a valuable scarce resource. People can provide music and entertainment a number of different ways, which means the value of being the FM broadcaster has steadily reduced. Less scarce resource, less public value – which means regional networking and less format regulation.

But now, we have Heart Cornwall, which is a 3 hour opt-out of Heart South West, which is itself, a 7 hour opt-out of Heart London.

Global have just filed a Change of Format Request with Ofcom to make some changes – including dropping the Cornwall drivetime opt-out:

The only proposed change to Heart Cornwall’s out (sic) following the requested (sic) will be the replacement of the current Cornwall-only weekday drive show broadcast from 4pm to 7pm with the programme currently broadcast on other Heart stations in the South West.

From that document:

we consider that the new, regional drive-time programme will enhance the range of programmes available in the area by offering a broader regional perspective

I’m sure it will be extremely refreshing to hear the broader regional perspective on Jennifer Aniston’s forthcoming marriage or the Spice Girl’s slot at the Olympics, rather than the narrow Cornish viewpoint on these issues that has featured up to now…

I’m not convinced that Ofcom asked the wrong question, although i guess supporters of networking will always say they did as the answers Ofcom got go against networking.

I suspect that Global will find that some now mainly networked stations will do better than they did locally, some will do worse.

I would have no problem with the likes of Global networking it all IF we had a proper frequency audit which meant other outlets could replace what has been lost locally.