Will Radio die?

Discuss all things relating to the busy London Pirate Radio scene.
thewoodstarr
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Will Radio die?

Post by thewoodstarr » Tue Apr 16, 2019 3:55 am

It has to be said, with the current trends, will FM radio be put to bed? I am aware that most operators are now mostly in their 40`s, branded as Criminals, but still supplying a need to the community, but it is a dwindling ordinance, Kids use other platforms, is it just us old die hard buggers?
Your thoughts,

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by yellowbeard » Tue Apr 16, 2019 5:09 am

I don't think it's just the kids. I have a couple of nice, expensive shortwave radios and a tuner amp with 8 speakers within reach - but the only time I listen to the radio is when I am in the car. Even then half the time I turn it off because of the crappy pop music and the bland deejays with a ball of snot stuck in their throats. I am in Dublin - its 20 copies of the one commercial station format here and they have killed radio off with their dread fear you are going to touch that dial and miss their sofa adverts. The few pirates are mostly kids acting the bollocks in their bedrooms, so there is nothing for a greasy old rocker like me. That's my thoughts.

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by Globular_Cluster » Tue Apr 16, 2019 5:38 am

The FM band has already been phased out in Norway, I think it is just a matter of time.

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by McDonalds » Tue Apr 16, 2019 9:51 am

No there are quite a few older people even I know that have no tuner in their set ups no more.
I broadcast just music on my station but only think about 5 people know about it.

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by Matt » Tue Apr 16, 2019 7:17 pm

We've been discussing this over on the UK Radio bit of this forum:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2135

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by bristolpirates » Thu Apr 18, 2019 6:05 am

Globular_Cluster wrote: Tue Apr 16, 2019 5:38 am The FM band has already been phased out in Norway, I think it is just a matter of time.
Not entirely. There are some community stations still on FM. Aalesund has two.

That seems to be the plan for the UK too.

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by Albert H » Fri Apr 19, 2019 2:47 am

I have many Kilowatts ready on 89.1MHz for the day that the BBC vacate the frequency!
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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by thewoodstarr » Fri Apr 19, 2019 6:33 am

Globular_Cluster wrote: Tue Apr 16, 2019 5:38 am The FM band has already been phased out in Norway, I think it is just a matter of time.
Really, thing is DAB doesn't really work here, I was going to say, to Hilly, but as Norway is one of the most mountainous in Europe, so that argument doesn't stand up. DAB just hasn't taken off here. The BBC, I heard wanted to pull out of it altogether. DAB is not the answer. We will have to be connected to the web, just to listen to the radio in our lifetime.
It's coming! :( Hopefully not in my lifetime.

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by radionortheast » Tue Apr 23, 2019 10:06 am

if you mean fm, the bbc is going to keep going for the forseable future, problaly half of all cars don’t have dab, so they can’t close it down, they always get on about norway listening figures dropped after they did it, they jumped the gun, they wouldn’t want that happen here. There was some poor guy there who repaired radios, now he dosen’t have anything to listen too. Really it think it may come down to finance in the end, maybe become too expensive to keep stations going on fm,
in the old days people would take a radio to the beach because they had nothing else, they couldn’t of taken a record player, now people have smart speakers and internet, some stations already went bust durring the past few years, they will problaly have to invest time and money in the internet to stay afloat, if they just went the fm way I don’t think adverizers would want to put money on them, maybe the cost of the fm licence becomes to much.

Really we could of had dab stations on fm to provide more variety instead we just got a version of an 80’s llR, DAD radio, they inticed people over to dab with the prospect of more choice, didn’t innovate when it came to fm. Who knows they make it easy for people to get a licence for 1 w in future on fm, it would be a long way off, the band would have to cleared, then would could listen out for each other transmissions, there would have to demand for it, you have to look at am in away, theres very little interetst there, its dead now, fm is much easier to do. The other thing is obviously are you going to have interest if its all dead? if theres no car radios to recieve might be like what is the point, the feeling of like been in an empty school years after everyone else has left. If theres nothing there could boarderblasters come back on air, aiming their signals at the uk from ireland, if they can’t get adverizers to pay the bills that wouldn’t happen, they would have turn a blind eye to it once again, it would be nice idea thought. The future I would want would be both those things it would give us something interesting to listen to again…realisticly it problaly will be afew community stations and maybe radio caroline trying to get on air! but nothing really interesting, it will die very slowly. :)

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by Albert H » Wed Apr 24, 2019 11:57 pm

Unfortunately, there are two predominant owners of radio stations in the UK - the BBC and the commercial concerns. The commercial radio stations are now largely owned by one of three conglomerates, and most stations have no local content any more (which was always a term of the licence conditions).

The BBC has been taken over by the rabid left and since they became an "affirmative action" employer, they now just fill their positions with the "appropriate" people, rather than people who can actually do the jobs. The BBC got rid of all engineering functions about 25 years ago, and got Siemens and other contractors to carry out all their maintenance and installations. This led to a significant drop in standards: The BBC were once the world's premier broadcaster, today they're a sad joke.

The automated and voice-tracked dross that now passes for commercial radio in this country is another sick joke. Capital Gold started the rot - a Sony CD jukebox with 600 tracks on it provided their record library. If you heard The Beatles "Help" at 9.15 on Monday morning, you'd hear it at 9.35 on Tuesday, 9.55 on Wednesday and so on. They've enlarged their library a little since the early days, but the automated clones that present the pap are dreadful. The whole mess - Capital, Heart, Galaxy and the rest - are unlistenable.

There are a few small local stations trying to fight against the rising tide of crap, but money, licence rules and OFCOM are against them succeeding. They're limited in their possible income - making it impossible to pay staff properly - so they just end up as a volunteer-driven Hospital Radio clone.....

The UK pirates are a waste of time these days - playing a few records to their pals, with no real audience. Most have little or no idea of how to assemble a radio programme that people will want to hear, and they're really just an irrelevant nuisance.

Over here in the Netherlands, we have a fairly liberal licencing system for LPAM - there are literally hundreds of little AM stations all over the country. There are a few FM pirates too - many of them really worth hearing. Some of the Eastern pirates run kilowatts, but their operations are intermittent. There are a lot of shortwave stations too, catering to a large "anorak" audience, and achieving almost worldwide coverage.

However - all that said - as the internet comes to mobile phones and the service providers realise that they can't charge by data quantity, ever more people will begin to listen online.
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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by Lordunderground » Thu Apr 25, 2019 12:21 pm

Internet there's too much emphasis on it... run it in tandem with another platform FM or DAB or other for optimum results.

Stations that do this have better online listening figures and interaction. You see this in vacant chat rooms and low streaming figures of online only stations (in the main). Whom face competition from the 0000s of other internet stations, so streamers just get split and split, even if your output is ok. I've seen this play out on numerous stations over the past five years.

Conclusion to the subject is NO it still has a role

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by thewisepranker » Thu Apr 25, 2019 2:37 pm

Albert H wrote: Wed Apr 24, 2019 11:57 pm The UK pirates are a waste of time these days - playing a few records to their pals, with no real audience. Most have little or no idea of how to assemble a radio programme that people will want to hear, and they're really just an irrelevant nuisance.
So how do you assemble a radio programme that people want to hear? Have you got any examples that I can listen to?

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by Casual » Thu Apr 25, 2019 7:17 pm

thewisepranker wrote: Thu Apr 25, 2019 2:37 pm
Albert H wrote: Wed Apr 24, 2019 11:57 pm The UK pirates are a waste of time these days - playing a few records to their pals, with no real audience. Most have little or no idea of how to assemble a radio programme that people will want to hear, and they're really just an irrelevant nuisance.
So how do you assemble a radio programme that people want to hear? Have you got any examples that I can listen to?
Non-stop Monkees, Beatles & Cliff Richard records (giving us all the platters that matter!) with the odd phone in about the underlying/unfinished/word around the old boys pub table Mods & Rockers beef, positive views on Brexit & how it will affect things such as wife purchasing & Climate Change being a myth I'd imagine. All programming sponsered by Stannah & Bovril.

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by wazza » Thu Apr 25, 2019 10:15 pm

Albert H wrote: Wed Apr 24, 2019 11:57 pm The BBC has been taken over by the rabid left
I wouldn't call the likes of Laura Kuensberg, Nick Robinson and prize twat Andrew Neill (chairman of The Spectator) "rabid left" by any stretch. All tories and they're the beeb's flagship political commentators.

Albert, you sound like someone who has spent too much time reading alt right bullshit on the web - where do you get your news from? If you think that the BBC is biased, who would you recommend as an objective, reliable source of information?

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by Albert H » Wed May 01, 2019 1:06 pm

Wazza - that problem has worried me for the last few years. There are too many biased news broadcasters - wildly to the right as in the case of Faux News, or wildly to the left (mostly by omission TBH) like the BBC.

As an example: The Anti-Brexit march a couple of weeks ago in Central London was reported by the BBC as having "over a million marchers". LBC reported the figure as "around 200000". The Police (who are very good at this sort of thing) said that there "may" have been "as many as 130000".

All we can agree on is that "quite a lot of people marched through Central London".

News gathering, news programme assembling and editing, and even news broadcasting is no longer objective - as it should be. There's always the underlying political bias that the discerning listener or viewer has to take into account.

This is fundamentally wrong - news reports are supposed to be just that - reports. Unfortunately, nobody does that kind of news reporting any more.
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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by thewisepranker » Wed May 01, 2019 3:51 pm

thewisepranker wrote: Thu Apr 25, 2019 2:37 pm So how do you assemble a radio programme that people want to hear? Have you got any examples that I can listen to?
Albert H wrote: Wed May 01, 2019 1:06 pm :ugeek:
Well?

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by Albert H » Wed May 01, 2019 4:13 pm

Listen to "Radio Free Wohlman" online. He used to programme a major station in LA (that I worked on - he was my boss for a while). He puts out a couple of programmes most weeks, and they just sort of hang together rather elegantly. The range of material played is from pop through to thrash metal, via hip-hop and reggae. There something for everyone. http://radiofreewohlman.blogspot.com/

There are hundreds of other examples. Pick a genre, then just do a quick Google for the best streams. You'll be amazed at the stuff that's available online these days.
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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by pure94 » Wed May 01, 2019 5:02 pm

Centreforce have shown the way on dab ....fm. is dead...even select going for a license...times change

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by sinus trouble » Thu May 02, 2019 1:32 am

The BBC has always dominated the airwaves since I was a kid and probably well before!
You could argue having a monopoly on such an enterprise is a breach of conduct, However society has submitted to the 'Age of compliance' The drive to stand up for meaningful rights has diminished!
I am as stupid as I look! :|

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Re: Will Radio die?

Post by Albert H » Thu May 02, 2019 1:59 am

Pure94: Centreforce have three listeners and a dog. Most of the DAB stations are the same. The BBC claimed that "51% of listening is now digital" which turned out to be nonsense when OFCOM actually surveyed listeners throughout the UK. About 15% of listeners still listen exclusively to AM services FFS!
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