What If INR Had Happened In 1973?
meerkat-martin
Posts: 274 Forum Member
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Have just been reading MDS975 UK radio history. On the piece about commercial expansion it says "The potential operators had hoped for a national pop station that would be cheap to run, generate large audiences and therefore make large sums of money from advertising."
What if in 1973 the IBA rather than setting up ILR had gone for one national station. How would the radio landscape look now?
Would it of been a pop station or of had the same requirements as the original ILR's had?
Would we now have 2 FM INR's?
Would local stations of started when the emergency services moved of the the FM band?
What if in 1973 the IBA rather than setting up ILR had gone for one national station. How would the radio landscape look now?
Would it of been a pop station or of had the same requirements as the original ILR's had?
Would we now have 2 FM INR's?
Would local stations of started when the emergency services moved of the the FM band?
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Comments
In fact from a listener point of view I think the stations were to a large extent ruined when the Radio Authority embarked on their crazy programme of destruction in the late '80s ie splitting AM/FM output.
They all started sounding too similar, and the local identity was lost at a stroke.
Of course the ownership of so many stations by so few companies hasn't helped either.
Certainly I think if the Conservatives had won the 1964 election, I think they would have gone for commercial radio rather than Radio 1.
Does whatever you've been reading also talk about Hughie Green, a UK/Canadian businessman who following a series of cringeworthy talent shows on TV called Opportunity Knocks, seriously considered a bid for a UK commercial radio franchise ? In about 1971, he pulled out and stormed off, proclaiming that "There wouldn't be enough left to pay the tea boy !" ? The Conservative government of the day, who FINALLY were implementing commercial radio in the UK, knew all about big profits from advertising, and were ready to levy equally big licence fees...
We now know that ever since then, those licence fees have been so high that they have restricted the amount of advertising that has been sold on commercial radio, contributing to the demise of many otherwise excellent national radio channels in the UK.
It would be great to see a healthy number of successful national commercial stations in the UK, but until they get more of a chance to make a profit ( to reinvest in programmes and presentation ), and operate in the same playing field as the BBC, it won't happen.
It would be so easy for the UK to have a far better commercial radio sector, if only the regulators, politicians, civil servants et al would give the matter a bit more benevolent thought.... Well, I'm only a listener...
Yes it is. I'm inclined to think that if we'd had two or three national commercial stations first, then introduced a tier of local stations later, we would have a better choice of radio stations today. Smaller stations would have to find a viable financial model but they wouldn't be competing with networked stations, they'd be competing with each other, which ought to produce better radio.
It's happened in commercial radio. It's happened in commercial TV. It's happened in the press. It's happened in most industries to a greater or lesser extent. The media is no exception, although perhaps it should be?
In the end shareholders want the maximum return on their investment and radio company bosses are duty bound to give it to them.
Anyway, don't we effectively have national commercial radio, albeit though the back door and in the guise of something else?
If we had always had national commercial stations and radio companies had always been able to sell national advertising then there would have been no need for local stations to network. But there would - perhaps - have been an opportunity for local stations to sell local advertising, or to get local sponsorship.
The regulators we've had over the years have done little to stand in the way of that.
I'm no fan of what we've got in the commercial radio sector these days, but in many ways it was surely inevitable, no matter what the starting point for local commercial radio was?
Unfortunately, there are too many people running commercial radio that don't care about the output and only care about the money they return to pump back into the shareholders pockets.
In the age of iPods/Smartphones, speech and identity needs to return to the majority of airtime on ILR stations. You only have to look at podcasts to see people want speech content. Too many ILRs waste their evening/overnight programming with automated/networked crap.
The time to introduce more national FM services would have been during the big regional push which saw the likes of Scot FM introduced. However, I can see what they were trying to do, and it did challenge the established order for some time, forcing the local stations to become better.
The major problem is an entirely new tier of competition has been introduced that doesn't have to necessarily spend money on content - the internet. That's something the IBA/RA could not have anticipated back in the early 90s.
That would have led to fewer stations, but at least they would have been much more viable. Of course it would have eventually led (and perhaps sooner) to what we have now - fewer owners and more networking as has happened with ITV.
Independent Local Radio could then have developed as a more community-based system possibly partly financed by IRR in a similar way to how Channel 4 was originally partly financed by ITV.
Alas, this rather logical pattern of development didn't take place and we now seem to have a confused and distorted range of stations that struggle to survive in a market with limited advertising funds which are spread too thinly.