Radio Has Reason To Party
James Gordon Looks Back On The 25 Years That Have Made Commercial Radio A Success
from The Times 2 October 1998
Commercial radio celebrates the 25th anniversary of LBC’s first broadcast on Thursday. The station launched at 6am on October 8, 1973.
London was not the easiest place in which to start radio with local appeal since the BBC’s then four national services catered for the capital pretty well. Conversely, stations such as Clyde in Glasgow, City in Liverpool, and Downtown in Belfast were able to build on a strong local identity, which they could claim, with justification, was not properly catered for by the BBC.
There was, initially, reluctance to use the word “commercial”. “Independent radio” seemed more worthy and more in the tradition of independent television which, by then, had acceptance across all political parties. The early days of independent local radio (ILR) were dogged, not only by lack of success with the London audience, but the introduction of the three-day week after the 1973 oil crisis.
More problems lay ahead. February 1974 saw the election of a Labour Government, pledged to the abolition of commercial radio. A stay of execution was granted and the IBA was allowed to proceed with the licensing of the initial 19 stations it had said it would advertise, pending the outcome of the Annan Committeeon the future of broadcasting, which Roy Jenkins, the Home Secretary, had set up. That report took three years and it was not until the White Paper of 1978 that ILR could rely on cross-party support and the IBA could proceed with the expansion of the system to cover the whole country.
There was greater emphasis on speech in the Seventies than there is now and more attempts to make “worthy” programmes. This was not due to any more altruistic motivation or superior programming skills, but rather the regulatory environment. The fact is that the Sound Broadcasting Act of 1972 laid exactly the same public service obligations on independent local radio as were enshrined in the BBC’s Royal Charter.
The difficulty was that ILR had to deliver these on one service, whereas the BBC could spread these obligations over four national services. Where the IBA in the Seventies was insisting on a breadth and range of output from individual stations to fulfil that public service obligation, the Radio Authority today is trying to ensure that stations remain true to the narrow niche format that they have submitted in applying for their licence. The IBA insisted on a quota of “meaningful speech” but necessity also pointed in that direction. ILR stations in the Seventies were restricted to nine hours a day needletime – time actually spent playing records.
The years have seen significant achievements. Commercial radio now has a clear lead in audience over all the BBC services. More important, the industry is united behind the Radio Advertising Bureau’s successful efforts to persuade the advertising industry of the benefits of those high radio audiences. National revenue has nearly tripled in the past five years.
The comparatively new national stations have layed their part and account for 12 per cent of revenue. But 79 per cent still comes from the independent local stations set up before Classic FM became the first national independent station six years ago.
The 80 niche formats that have come on air since the launch of Classic account for only 9 per cent of revenue and, if you were to exclude Virgin FM in London, Heart and perhaps Century, that figure becomes much smaller. By and large, the niche formats are not delivering significant audience or revenue and this does not augur well for the introduction of digital radio, whose main attraction, in the eyes of the previous Government at least, was the introduction of many more such services.
The author was the founder of Radio Clyde in Glasgow.
Š The Times, London, 1998