Originally Posted by pjex:
“Adding U2, Prince, Stevie Wonder and ZZ Top in the 2nd half hour, Radio X reaching out beyond its core indie artists and sounding much better for it.
I can hardly see the playing of those artists are going to make their indie audience run away screaming yet it will broaden their appeal and attract new listeners. Unfortunately doing this for 1 hour a week won't make much difference they need to drop these type of artists in occasionally during all the other shows.”
You are funny.
Do you really think it's an audience revolution to play the odd well worn song from an established artist?
Global has never made a proper success of Xfm because it doesn't understand the nature of it's potential audience. I will never forget my conversation with Richard Park (I'd written to him telling him to keep his filthy mitts off my radio station - and he called me up at work. They said "It's Richard from Capital Radio for you"!! I appreciated the gesture, but everything he said was rubbish). His exact words were "we're going to format this new music, and I guarantee you'll love it". "New music"

. I suppose to him, it was.
Global have one modus operandi - it's to test and test again. Never do anything that might un-nerve it's audience even for a second. Never take the slightest risk. Endlessly repeat a very small number of songs. This obviously works for Heart and Capital, but simply does not for lovers of independent music. You seem to think there's a vast chunk of folk who only like music if there's a guitar in it, and then only one type of guitar. I'm sure to those immersed in the world of Buble and Mars, The Vaccines are the very epitome of cutting edge guitar music, when in fact, they're as dreary meat-and-two-veg as you can get short of The Stereophonics. The morph into Radio X makes perfect sense at Leicester Sq. They never understood the genre, they never liked the genre. They were corporate types who bought a station run by people who loved music, thinking they could lobotomise it and make a pile of money. It failed in relative terms, so they are much more comfortable with an Absolute clone.
Nope, Xfm had no cred whatsoever under Global. It was a laughing stock amongst the festival crowd. Radio 1 was far cooler, and remains far cooler. And still plays more genuinely new music than anything on any commercial station, despite its core CHR mode. Despite all the blanding out, the sanitisation, the repetition and Park's bloody formatting, Global never managed to grow its London audience significantly from that it was achieving when one year old, independent, and playing scratchy, obscure, exciting music.
Playing a Stevie Wonder song will not scare off its "indie" audience. 6Music plays loads of Stevie Wonder. What does scare off a large potential audience is its predictability and sheer dullness.