An article in today’s Guardian about Global Radio’s takeover of Gcap Media gave me pause for thought.  I had not really thought about it all in terms of how the independent radio stations can compete with the BBC.

The central theme is that commercial stations spend more time competing against each other, to the detriment of them all, and spend little effort on competing with the BBC. I quite liked the quote from a media analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort, who said:

One of the big problems for commercial radio is they have been competing so much with each other and so they have all gone for the middle ground.

So true.  ((And doesn’t that remind you of party politics under the first past the post system as well?))  Tune in to Heart, Choice, Capital, Magic (as Mrs Skuds does all too often in the car) and you can’t tell the difference between them.  What it does is force all the niche stations to re-brand as middle-of-the-road, oldies stations with identical and predictable playlists.

By definition, niches are small, but only as a proportion of the whole population.  Some of these minority tastes are shared by sizable minorities.  Take Planet Rock for example.  Its a small niche market butmanages to get a bigger audience than BBC 6 Music.

Who knows. ITV needed to have a lot of different companies band together to become viable and maybe that will work with radio.  I’ll be the first to admit that some of my preferred niche channels have playlists as predicable as Heart, but at least its a different predictability.  You might have a fair chance of getting Whiskey in the Jar or Status Quo’s Rain on Planet Rock, but its the only place where you will.

And talking of which…  GCap wanted to close down Planet Rock or sell it off.  Will the new owners continue with that plan now?   Or will they reverse the strategy to withdraw from digital?   They have said nothing about it so far, but I am quietly optimistic.