I think Angel Radio on the Isle of Wight is amazing. I don't think any stations play music before 1960 and this one plays stuff from the 20s 30s 40s and 50s. I admit its not usually my cup of tea but it serves a niche of people poorly served by conventional radio
They should be shut down if it's proven they can't provide the volunteers to do community programming during all of the daytime hours 6am to 7pm at least.
I heard a community radio station that was in automation on Sunday afternoon (i.e yesterday). Unless everyone in the area is a fundamentalist Christian I can see no reasonable excuse for this.
The problem was compounded by the truly bonkers content delivered by the playout system. I won't say where the station is or what exactly the full content was because that might give the game away and my intention is not to pick on particular stations but to give examples of some of the crazy things that go on. Suffice to say that that "Baggy Trousers" by Madness and M-Base style, Steve Coleman-esque experimental contemporary Jazz appeared within 15-20 minutes of each other in the same hour. I'm sure some of the purists are creaming themselves at the very idea of such "eclecticism" , but I would bet my life that the vast majority of people in the 99% white, socially conservative, relatively remote, small rural city that comprises the majority of the station's MCA would have listened for ten minutes and then binned it, never to return.
The same station was apparently again in automation this morning. I say "apparently" becauselathough there were no links during the seven or eight tracks I listened to, the news ident appeared on the hour, crashing the track playing before fading out prematurely with no subsequent bulletin being broadcast. The only explanation I can think of is that a real person was actually driving the desk and made a cock-up.
To be fair the presenter following on was excellent and I imagine the station would point to the quality of his show as vindication. However to my mind that's completely misguided. If a station broadcasts too much substandard stuff the average listener won't forgive them just because there happens to be some good shows elsewhere in the schedule. That might have been the case in the days when radio was a primary medium like TV - people who hate Strictly Come Dancing don't tend to ditch BBC One as a result. However radio is a secondary medium nowadays and audiences are far less forgiving. My apologies for stating the bleeding obvious - it's just that I often wonder if it really is that bleeding obvious to some people in community radio who post here.
I think Angel Radio on the Isle of Wight is amazing. I don't think any stations play music before 1960 and this one plays stuff from the 20s 30s 40s and 50s. I admit its not usually my cup of tea but it serves a niche of people poorly served by conventional radio
To be fair music from the twenties and thirties is probably something of an exception to my argument that most things can be easily found on the internet - I was thinking more along the lines that playing soul, funk, jazz, blues, rock indie and contemporary black music and the like is in itself a justification for a licence, when these things are relatively easy to find if you're that way inclined - something which was not the case twenty or thirty years ago.
I would still hope that Angel would meet basic standards of competence and conscientiousness though, rather than believing the mere fact of playing obscure music gives them free reign to allow presenters with little aptitude for radio to simply turn up and wing it without any sort of strategic plan coming from the station or any show prep being done by individual presenters. Unfortunately that sort of nonsense is clearly not unknown in community radio.
I broadcast a fortnightly show on Community radio Cambridge 105 and am part of a monthly show on Harborough FM with occasional appearances on Future radio in Norwich.
All three of these stations in my totally biased opinion are really excellent providing a real alternative to the bland (but popular) commercial stations and the slightly banal geriatric local BBC stations in their areas.
All three stations concentrate on local content, use local presenters and have very high live local broadcasting hours.
Cambridge 105 broadcasts live every day from 7am til midnight and is commited to providing a real radio alternative for the residents of Cambidge
We love to play local music, deep tracks and new music. Local artists often receive their first airplay on Cambridge 105.
Our Daytime shows provide a mix of news, travel and guests from around the city, underpinned by a mix of contemporary music handpicked by the presenters.
Yes there’s news on the hour from Sky News but with additions from our own Cambridge Newsdesk. The Community Desk runs stories of importance to the city that are otherwise missed by the major media outlets.
After 7pm Cambridge 105 Primetime showcases the widest range of music to be found on the radio in Cambridge – covering the best in folk, rock, country, soul and alternative music.
Live studio performances from local bands are a regular feature.
At the weekend our local magazine programmes feature movies, the arts, literature and food. There are also shows for our Polish, Italian and Spanish communities.
You’ll also see us broadcasting live from major events around the city, such as Le Tour de France, the Mill Road Winter Fair, Strawberry Fair, the Cambridge Rock Festival and the Oxjam Music Festival. We’ve also reported from Eat Cambridge, the Cambridge Buskers & Street Performers Festival, Cambridge Open Studios and the Arbury Carnival. - in fact we do more live OBs in Cambridge that every other broadcaster added together!
We’re passionate about being a part of the community as we live here too.
I will admit there are some community stations that let the sector down - but please do not tar all CR stations with the same brush!
Zack FM in Suffolk is a dead duck, and nobody likes a dead duck.
No interaction with the public, no 'zest' or buzz about it, hit and miss music, no stable presenter or programme lineup, terrible website, no presence in the community, overdeviating TX, much more effort required.
A recent filleting of the OFCOM report for 2013 uncovered the following facts (which to be fair to the report did say that ought not to be used in isolation) which seem to amplify some of the difficulties that CR stations have.
Between 2008-2013 there was an overall drop of 33.9% in funding for CR stations. The median cost of running them was £33.250, and 36% of stations run on less than £20,000 p.a.. Of that income 25% of funding comes from grants and staff costs are the greatest expenditure for them. Ethnic Minority stations tend to have the largest income. A typical CR station broadcasts 78 hours a week and has 82 volunteers. The biggest consumers (of all radio product) are over 35.
If you have the time (and energy) the whole report makes fascinating reading!
I heard a community radio station that was in automation on Sunday afternoon (i.e yesterday). Unless everyone in the area is a fundamentalist Christian I can see no reasonable excuse for this.
That's nothing...take a look at this programme schedule - a breakfast presenter, possibly a sports guy on Saturday afternoon, otherwise non stop pop dance, and, er, that's it...http://youthcomm.co.uk/home-page/aboutus/schedule/
Key commitments? Hmmm, here's the passage from Ofcom...
"The main objective of the service is to provide a not for profit community radio service for and by local young people through informal and formal education programmes and partnerships, focusing on inclusion, communication, information sharing, volunteering, active citizenship, practical community involvement and lifelong learning in and through its development and operation. The service will be universal with an emphasis on diversity and equal opportunities.
Programming
We will aim to represent a broad section of youth culture within the area of operation and will have particular emphasis promoting the needs and aspirations of young people. Service content will be decided by the Management Board, volunteers, staff, and listeners to ensure full representation and ownership. There will be an emphasis on educational content, both directly (e.g. a careers based show or exam help) and indirectly (via short informational inserts).
• Weekday daytime output will typically comprise 60% music and 40% speech (‘speech’ excludes advertising, programme/promotional trails and sponsor credits). Weekday evening output will typically comprise of specialist music- based programming and music to speech ratios may alter during this period. During weekends when live programmes are broadcast, output will typically follow weekday daytimes.
• Music output will comprise top 40 & recent pop hits, alternative & modern rock, Urban, Dance, Unsigned/local bands and others such as world music. Off peak may include specialist music shows.
• Speech output may include discussions, debates, phone-ins, interviews, general and specialist news bulletins, sketches and drama.
• Output will be broadcast mostly in English
• We will typically be live for at least 12 hours per day during weekdays with a mixture of limited live programmes, pre-recorded and automated content during weekends.(Live programming may include pre-recorded inserts, if applicable.) The majority of the output will be locally produced. "
"Weekday daytime output will typically comprise 60% music and 40% speech (‘speech’ excludes advertising, programme/promotional trails and sponsor credits). Weekday evening output will typically comprise of specialist music- based programming and music to speech ratios may alter during this period. During weekends when live programmes are broadcast, output will typically follow weekday daytimes.
Yes, well that's the thing.
Even Myers-esque regional radio stations struggled manfully with such formats back in the day. I'm not talking even in terms of audience and revenue, but simply in terms of getting a lot of highly paid staff to make it happen in practice.
So how on earth can we expect CRs manneed mostly by volunteers to stick to such strictures? Answer? We can't.
Community radio needs more support.... more money too.
In answer to the first point - probably - but it will need to earn it in what is an increasingly crowded marketplace and where lots of people are looking for alternatives to listening online. See my post above about what OFCOM claims is the key listening audience.
As to the second it begets the question "What would it do with it?" As Carnivalist has noted in quotes passim the standard of presentation is often rather less good than is required, and this is an area where more money (and resources) might help- and then again it might not. However it would appear that as with the BBC local output more money might get spent on vanity projects or in the case of the BBC on following the current BBC edicts about targeting audiences ( where I live it's an endless litany of the effects of dementia at the moment)
There is no easy solution but Community Radio has to earn an audience- what it appears to have on its side is that in being able to write its own promises of performance it should be able to target that audience fairly easily. Unfortunately the remit that some of the stations give themselves is so broad that they end up doing very little but replicating already existing services in their area.
With the spill over of london stations, no fm channels are available.... A.M only..
There's a debate raging on the Community Media Association chatline at the moment about Why the FM frequencies are not available, and there's some good solid arguments that there could be space on the FM band even around major urban centres if there was more flexibility. It does seem that despite it's apparent move towards DAB the BBC continues to hold onto to frequencies that it may use if the funding ever became available for "Infill" transmitters
Don't get me started on the amount of information required in the application form.
Nonetheless there are over 230 CR stations that have made it to air despite the amount of information that is required. Nor is Ofcom (well, at least the CR part of it) that unapproachable, and it can be quite helpful. Our local CR station wanted to increase its speech based commitment and had a positive correspondence with them about the pros and cons of this issue. I can, however, also testify that falling foul of OFCOM in breaches of their rules releases a positive cascade of paperwork that make the application form look like a yes/no box ticking exercise
At it's best (which is what we aspire to be at Cambridge 105) Community Radio can do the job that BBC Local was originally set up to (and used to) do.
That is to be a great local radio station that can inform all it's listeners about everything in the local area and be on the same wavelength as them. Nowadays I would suggest that BBC local radio is hardly local and appears to only really target the over 70s. You hardly see the BBC at even major local events and generally the level of discussion is dire. I am over 60 and even I find it boring as hell.... phone in topic I happened to hear recently on BBC local radio "why can't you get coloured toilet rolls anymore?" .. straight up - suffice to say i changed stations sharpish...
There are a lot of younger (and middle-aged) people who want to have a "local" station that doesn't just play endless mindless music on a loop peppered by advertising and robotic over-hyped pronouncements like so many ILRs but actually covers local issues in a way that talks to them - which a lot of BBC local radio fails to do.
So to my mind the door really is wide open for CR to fill that gap if individual stations can get their acts together....
Do go down the route of CR stations needing more money - how are they supposed to survive WHEN they are prohibited from taking ANY income from advertising or sponsorship because there is a commercial station closeby.
A commercial station that broadcasts just 4 hours of local programming on a Saturday and Sunday (the rest of the output coming from other parts of the UK) and about 8 hours Monday to Friday. The reasons given by the DCMS are that they could affect the livelihood of the aforementioned commercial station.
Really? Very few of the smaller business that would be more than happy to throw a few pounds at a community station would be unable to afford the rates asked for by commercial radio anyway so how would that affect it, they're not getting their revenue anyway..
Premises and transmitters costs thousands of pounds over the course of a year, not to mention other costs such as licensing, electricity, publicity etc etc., It's time the ban on community stations was abolished - after all you wouldn't say to Asda, oh you can't open a store here we already have a Tesco and you'd affect the viability of it and all the other shops in the area.
Do go down the route of CR stations needing more money - how are they supposed to survive WHEN they are prohibited from taking ANY income from advertising or sponsorship because there is a commercial station closeby.
A commercial station that broadcasts just 4 hours of local programming on a Saturday and Sunday (the rest of the output coming from other parts of the UK) and about 8 hours Monday to Friday. The reasons given by the DCMS are that they could affect the livelihood of the aforementioned commercial station.
Really? Very few of the smaller business that would be more than happy to throw a few pounds at a community station would be unable to afford the rates asked for by commercial radio anyway so how would that affect it, they're not getting their revenue anyway..
Premises and transmitters costs thousands of pounds over the course of a year, not to mention other costs such as licensing, electricity, publicity etc etc., It's time the ban on community stations was abolished - after all you wouldn't say to Asda, oh you can't open a store here we already have a Tesco and you'd affect the viability of it and all the other shops in the area.
Do go down the route of CR stations needing more money - how are they supposed to survive WHEN they are prohibited from taking ANY income from advertising or sponsorship because there is a commercial station closeby.
A commercial station that broadcasts just 4 hours of local programming on a Saturday and Sunday (the rest of the output coming from other parts of the UK) and about 8 hours Monday to Friday. The reasons given by the DCMS are that they could affect the livelihood of the aforementioned commercial station.
Really? Very few of the smaller business that would be more than happy to throw a few pounds at a community station would be unable to afford the rates asked for by commercial radio anyway so how would that affect it, they're not getting their revenue anyway..
Premises and transmitters costs thousands of pounds over the course of a year, not to mention other costs such as licensing, electricity, publicity etc etc., It's time the ban on community stations was abolished - after all you wouldn't say to Asda, oh you can't open a store here we already have a Tesco and you'd affect the viability of it and all the other shops in the area.[/QUOTE
I problem is community radio is up against commershal radio who are pritty big & good at lobbying ofcom government ect ? .
If the local 'big boy' commercial station can't survive against the community station then it says a lot more about THEIR ability to do their job in my opinion.
It's not IMPOSSIBLE for a community station (if there's allowance for it in their licence) to get a good income from advertising revenue. A lot of it, though, is about persuading the right people to come in and do the job, generally on a commission basis at most.
At it's best (which is what we aspire to be at Cambridge 105) Community Radio can do the job that BBC Local was originally set up to (and used to) do.
That is to be a great local radio station that can inform all it's listeners about everything in the local area and be on the same wavelength as them.
There are a lot of younger (and middle-aged) people who want to have a "local" station that doesn't just play endless mindless music on a loop peppered by advertising and robotic over-hyped pronouncements like so many ILRs but actually covers local issues in a way that talks to them - which a lot of BBC local radio fails to do.
So to my mind the door really is wide open for CR to fill that gap if individual stations can get their acts together....
I'd like a Community station like that in our area.
A potential kick-start for community radio and DAB
Makes sense in some areas where there are a number of community stations (e.g. Nottingham where Kemet, Faza, Dawn, and Erewash)
Hopefully a successful trial will allow them to run with local student stations (e.g. URN and Fly FM), DAB only locals and perhaps small scale commercial stations - e.g. in Preston you could have Preston FM and Frequency 1350 on the Preston multiplex, Chorley FM on the Chorley one and The Bee on both; in Nottingham you'd have Kemet, Faza, Dawn, Erewash Sound, Trent Sound, Fly FM, and URN 1350.
Comments
I heard a community radio station that was in automation on Sunday afternoon (i.e yesterday). Unless everyone in the area is a fundamentalist Christian I can see no reasonable excuse for this.
The problem was compounded by the truly bonkers content delivered by the playout system. I won't say where the station is or what exactly the full content was because that might give the game away and my intention is not to pick on particular stations but to give examples of some of the crazy things that go on. Suffice to say that that "Baggy Trousers" by Madness and M-Base style, Steve Coleman-esque experimental contemporary Jazz appeared within 15-20 minutes of each other in the same hour. I'm sure some of the purists are creaming themselves at the very idea of such "eclecticism" , but I would bet my life that the vast majority of people in the 99% white, socially conservative, relatively remote, small rural city that comprises the majority of the station's MCA would have listened for ten minutes and then binned it, never to return.
The same station was apparently again in automation this morning. I say "apparently" becauselathough there were no links during the seven or eight tracks I listened to, the news ident appeared on the hour, crashing the track playing before fading out prematurely with no subsequent bulletin being broadcast. The only explanation I can think of is that a real person was actually driving the desk and made a cock-up.
To be fair the presenter following on was excellent and I imagine the station would point to the quality of his show as vindication. However to my mind that's completely misguided. If a station broadcasts too much substandard stuff the average listener won't forgive them just because there happens to be some good shows elsewhere in the schedule. That might have been the case in the days when radio was a primary medium like TV - people who hate Strictly Come Dancing don't tend to ditch BBC One as a result. However radio is a secondary medium nowadays and audiences are far less forgiving. My apologies for stating the bleeding obvious - it's just that I often wonder if it really is that bleeding obvious to some people in community radio who post here.
To be fair music from the twenties and thirties is probably something of an exception to my argument that most things can be easily found on the internet - I was thinking more along the lines that playing soul, funk, jazz, blues, rock indie and contemporary black music and the like is in itself a justification for a licence, when these things are relatively easy to find if you're that way inclined - something which was not the case twenty or thirty years ago.
I would still hope that Angel would meet basic standards of competence and conscientiousness though, rather than believing the mere fact of playing obscure music gives them free reign to allow presenters with little aptitude for radio to simply turn up and wing it without any sort of strategic plan coming from the station or any show prep being done by individual presenters. Unfortunately that sort of nonsense is clearly not unknown in community radio.
All three of these stations in my totally biased opinion are really excellent providing a real alternative to the bland (but popular) commercial stations and the slightly banal geriatric local BBC stations in their areas.
All three stations concentrate on local content, use local presenters and have very high live local broadcasting hours.
Cambridge 105 broadcasts live every day from 7am til midnight and is commited to providing a real radio alternative for the residents of Cambidge
We love to play local music, deep tracks and new music. Local artists often receive their first airplay on Cambridge 105.
Our Daytime shows provide a mix of news, travel and guests from around the city, underpinned by a mix of contemporary music handpicked by the presenters.
Yes there’s news on the hour from Sky News but with additions from our own Cambridge Newsdesk. The Community Desk runs stories of importance to the city that are otherwise missed by the major media outlets.
After 7pm Cambridge 105 Primetime showcases the widest range of music to be found on the radio in Cambridge – covering the best in folk, rock, country, soul and alternative music.
Live studio performances from local bands are a regular feature.
At the weekend our local magazine programmes feature movies, the arts, literature and food. There are also shows for our Polish, Italian and Spanish communities.
You’ll also see us broadcasting live from major events around the city, such as Le Tour de France, the Mill Road Winter Fair, Strawberry Fair, the Cambridge Rock Festival and the Oxjam Music Festival. We’ve also reported from Eat Cambridge, the Cambridge Buskers & Street Performers Festival, Cambridge Open Studios and the Arbury Carnival. - in fact we do more live OBs in Cambridge that every other broadcaster added together!
We’re passionate about being a part of the community as we live here too.
I will admit there are some community stations that let the sector down - but please do not tar all CR stations with the same brush!
No interaction with the public, no 'zest' or buzz about it, hit and miss music, no stable presenter or programme lineup, terrible website, no presence in the community, overdeviating TX, much more effort required.
Between 2008-2013 there was an overall drop of 33.9% in funding for CR stations. The median cost of running them was £33.250, and 36% of stations run on less than £20,000 p.a.. Of that income 25% of funding comes from grants and staff costs are the greatest expenditure for them. Ethnic Minority stations tend to have the largest income. A typical CR station broadcasts 78 hours a week and has 82 volunteers. The biggest consumers (of all radio product) are over 35.
If you have the time (and energy) the whole report makes fascinating reading!
Key commitments? Hmmm, here's the passage from Ofcom...
"The main objective of the service is to provide a not for profit community radio service for and by local young people through informal and formal education programmes and partnerships, focusing on inclusion, communication, information sharing, volunteering, active citizenship, practical community involvement and lifelong learning in and through its development and operation. The service will be universal with an emphasis on diversity and equal opportunities.
Programming
We will aim to represent a broad section of youth culture within the area of operation and will have particular emphasis promoting the needs and aspirations of young people. Service content will be decided by the Management Board, volunteers, staff, and listeners to ensure full representation and ownership. There will be an emphasis on educational content, both directly (e.g. a careers based show or exam help) and indirectly (via short informational inserts).
• Weekday daytime output will typically comprise 60% music and 40% speech (‘speech’ excludes advertising, programme/promotional trails and sponsor credits). Weekday evening output will typically comprise of specialist music- based programming and music to speech ratios may alter during this period. During weekends when live programmes are broadcast, output will typically follow weekday daytimes.
• Music output will comprise top 40 & recent pop hits, alternative & modern rock, Urban, Dance, Unsigned/local bands and others such as world music. Off peak may include specialist music shows.
• Speech output may include discussions, debates, phone-ins, interviews, general and specialist news bulletins, sketches and drama.
• Output will be broadcast mostly in English
• We will typically be live for at least 12 hours per day during weekdays with a mixture of limited live programmes, pre-recorded and automated content during weekends.(Live programming may include pre-recorded inserts, if applicable.) The majority of the output will be locally produced. "
Yes, well that's the thing.
Even Myers-esque regional radio stations struggled manfully with such formats back in the day. I'm not talking even in terms of audience and revenue, but simply in terms of getting a lot of highly paid staff to make it happen in practice.
So how on earth can we expect CRs manneed mostly by volunteers to stick to such strictures? Answer? We can't.
In ours we only promise 20% speech but we deliver far more...
In my experience OfCom are realists - sadly it's the stations themselves that sometimes are not...
My advice is to Stick to the old addage - under promise and over deliver....
In answer to the first point - probably - but it will need to earn it in what is an increasingly crowded marketplace and where lots of people are looking for alternatives to listening online. See my post above about what OFCOM claims is the key listening audience.
As to the second it begets the question "What would it do with it?" As Carnivalist has noted in quotes passim the standard of presentation is often rather less good than is required, and this is an area where more money (and resources) might help- and then again it might not. However it would appear that as with the BBC local output more money might get spent on vanity projects or in the case of the BBC on following the current BBC edicts about targeting audiences ( where I live it's an endless litany of the effects of dementia at the moment)
There is no easy solution but Community Radio has to earn an audience- what it appears to have on its side is that in being able to write its own promises of performance it should be able to target that audience fairly easily. Unfortunately the remit that some of the stations give themselves is so broad that they end up doing very little but replicating already existing services in their area.
My local towns could really do with a community station.
With the spill over of london stations, no fm channels are available.... A.M only.
A.M is expensive but ok, if the format is right, people will listen and revenue can be generated from advertisers.
No!
Because we have a commercial station covering our town with poor local output, mainly a music jukebox, no advertising is allowed.
It would be down to grants, fundraising and donations.
Possibly achievable with FM, but the sums do not add up for A.M.
Don't get me started on the amount of information required in the application form.
There's a debate raging on the Community Media Association chatline at the moment about Why the FM frequencies are not available, and there's some good solid arguments that there could be space on the FM band even around major urban centres if there was more flexibility. It does seem that despite it's apparent move towards DAB the BBC continues to hold onto to frequencies that it may use if the funding ever became available for "Infill" transmitters
Nonetheless there are over 230 CR stations that have made it to air despite the amount of information that is required. Nor is Ofcom (well, at least the CR part of it) that unapproachable, and it can be quite helpful. Our local CR station wanted to increase its speech based commitment and had a positive correspondence with them about the pros and cons of this issue. I can, however, also testify that falling foul of OFCOM in breaches of their rules releases a positive cascade of paperwork that make the application form look like a yes/no box ticking exercise
A potential kick-start for community radio and DAB
That is to be a great local radio station that can inform all it's listeners about everything in the local area and be on the same wavelength as them. Nowadays I would suggest that BBC local radio is hardly local and appears to only really target the over 70s. You hardly see the BBC at even major local events and generally the level of discussion is dire. I am over 60 and even I find it boring as hell.... phone in topic I happened to hear recently on BBC local radio "why can't you get coloured toilet rolls anymore?" .. straight up - suffice to say i changed stations sharpish...
There are a lot of younger (and middle-aged) people who want to have a "local" station that doesn't just play endless mindless music on a loop peppered by advertising and robotic over-hyped pronouncements like so many ILRs but actually covers local issues in a way that talks to them - which a lot of BBC local radio fails to do.
So to my mind the door really is wide open for CR to fill that gap if individual stations can get their acts together....
A commercial station that broadcasts just 4 hours of local programming on a Saturday and Sunday (the rest of the output coming from other parts of the UK) and about 8 hours Monday to Friday. The reasons given by the DCMS are that they could affect the livelihood of the aforementioned commercial station.
Really? Very few of the smaller business that would be more than happy to throw a few pounds at a community station would be unable to afford the rates asked for by commercial radio anyway so how would that affect it, they're not getting their revenue anyway..
Premises and transmitters costs thousands of pounds over the course of a year, not to mention other costs such as licensing, electricity, publicity etc etc., It's time the ban on community stations was abolished - after all you wouldn't say to Asda, oh you can't open a store here we already have a Tesco and you'd affect the viability of it and all the other shops in the area.
Very well said.
My point exactly !
It's not IMPOSSIBLE for a community station (if there's allowance for it in their licence) to get a good income from advertising revenue. A lot of it, though, is about persuading the right people to come in and do the job, generally on a commission basis at most.
I'd like a Community station like that in our area.
Makes sense in some areas where there are a number of community stations (e.g. Nottingham where Kemet, Faza, Dawn, and Erewash)
Hopefully a successful trial will allow them to run with local student stations (e.g. URN and Fly FM), DAB only locals and perhaps small scale commercial stations - e.g. in Preston you could have Preston FM and Frequency 1350 on the Preston multiplex, Chorley FM on the Chorley one and The Bee on both; in Nottingham you'd have Kemet, Faza, Dawn, Erewash Sound, Trent Sound, Fly FM, and URN 1350.