18 Music Week 23.11.12


FEATURE RADIOFESTIVAL BEN COOPER ROLLING BACK THE YEARS


RADIO 1 CONTROLLER BEN COOPER admits the station may have to go back to the drawing board if it is unable to persuade its trendy older listeners to switch to other BBC stations. Cooper and his team have been tasked


by the BBC Trust with bringing down the average audience age of the network from its current level of 33 to below 30 to more reflect its target demographic of 15- to 29-year-olds. This, he told last week’s Radio Festival in


Salford, he was attempting to do in a number of ways, including changing the schedules and music the station played and the events it was involved in. As part of this, Nick Grimshaw was brought in to replace Chris Moyles at breakfast and the likes of Robbie Williams have been excluded from the playlist. However, he acknowledged the plan


might not work because some older listeners, officially outside Radio 1’s demographic and which he has previously branded “festival dads”, did not want to stop listening to the station. “I’ve been tasked with the job of reducing


the average age and I’m going to try my darnedest to see if I can do it using traditional radio ways in terms of schedule changes, the music we play, the events we do,” he said. “That could work. If it doesn’t work then I think we need to look more at the issue of festival dads and I think we need to try to examine that and say, ‘OK, I’m a festival dad, you’re a festival mum’, there is a part of society that just loves new music and will not move and budge from Radio 1.” If that happened, he said it would then be


a case of going back to the Trust and to say it had tried everything in its powers in terms of radio but society had changed and it


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try my darnedest to see if I can bring down the average age because I think Radio 1 has always had a history of appealing to young people and one of Radio 1’s aims should be to attract young people into the BBC and I am going to try my hardest to do that,” he said. Meanwhile, Cooper revealed he was


should instead become a question of giving stations briefs around the attitudes of their target audience rather than basing them on age. “There are some 21 year olds who love


listening to Heart and don’t want to be challenged by drum & bass or the latest sounds so we are different people with different attitudes and that could be the way forward, but in the meantime I am going to


“I often think you have to create the hits first before commercial radio wants to play them... I would love to see commercial radio take a few more risks” DAVID JOSEPH, UNIVERSAL


command an audience of around 14.2 million people, according to latest Rajar figures, that is a serious handicap to being heard by radio listeners. Michael Kiwanuka and Maverick Sabre have


most-heard tracks of 2012 to date. The most glaring omission is Lana Del Rey


whose Born To Die is the year’s third top artist album seller behind only Sandé’s Our Version Of Events and XL act Adele’s 21, but who Joseph revealed in his speech is only the 107th most- supported act of 2012 on UK radio. The Universal boss was quick to praise the


BBC in his Radio Festival address, noting: “The BBC do an amazing job when introducing their acts to people. I’m very happy with In New Music We Trust with Radio 1 and 6 Music is terrific.” He reserved his main concerns for the


commercial sector, suggesting: “I often think you have to create the hits first before commercial radio wants to play them and I do believe there’s a whole audience out there who want to hear things first and not 10 weeks later. I would love to see commercial radio take a few more risks.” However, a closer look at the airplay patterns of


the six breakthrough acts which have not won widespread support reveals some commercial stations are heavily backing new talent. The problem is that if it does not include one or the other of leading Global Radio networks Capital or Heart, overall airplay support is significantly reduced. That state of affairs certainly applies to Ben


Howard and Lana Del Rey who have been strongly backed in the commercial sector by the likes of Absolute Radio and Global’s XFM. However, neither act appeared anywhere in Capital or Heart’s Top 100 charts for Q1, Q2 and Q3 this year. Given the two networks combined


also enjoyed pockets of support by commercial stations, but not Capital or Heart, while in the case of Kiwanuka he failed to get a foothold at Radio 1 despite in January being named as the BBC Sound Of…2012 winner. Instead it was left to Radio 2 and 6 Music to


back him. Sabre has also relied on Radio 2, rather than Radio 1, for his biggest radio audience, helping his album Lonely Are The Brave to


RICHARD PARK THE SMOOTH APPROACH


Commission to make a ruling. Its decision is expected in March. Park told the Radio Festival


GLOBAL’S DIRECTOR OF BROADCASTING Richard Park is confident his group will win competition approval for its takeover of Smooth and Real Radio. The two brands, which were operating as GMG Radio, were bought by the leading commercial player in June, but the deal has been subject to tests on grounds of plurality and competition. Culture Secretary Maria Miller announced in June it would not be investigated in terms of plurality, leaving the Competition


that approving the deal would be “right, fair, proper and in the public interest” as he defended Global’s policy of bringing together previously-separate regional radio brands into quasi- national networks. Rather than killing regional radio, he argued at the Salford event the policy had rejuvenated it. “What’s forgotten around the


country is they were turning transmitters off,” he said. “We need to realise how serious it has been and the work that has been done has breathed fresh life into an industry I love and I’m passionate about, so as far as I’m concerned people who [criticise] this do not know what they are talking about. They don’t know the facts.”


debut at No.2 in the weekly sales chart and go on to sell more than 200,000 copies domestically. It should be noted Howard, Kiwanuka, Lana


Del Rey and Maverick Sabre are all Universal acts (as are Military Wives), so Joseph clearly has a vested interest in seeing them prosper at radio. But his speech also reflected both what he observed was still the leading influence radio has on what people buy and the vast sums of money he and his rivals continue to invest in new talent. “Over 16-year-olds go to radio as their main


source of discovering new music,” he said, quoting YouGov findings. “That to me is the perfect partnership we have between the music industry and the radio industry. They go to radio more than live gigs, more than word of mouth, more than television in this very complex, fragmented media landscape. That is incredibly heartening that they are coming to you.” Whatever the apathy among some radio


stations towards some of his company’s new acts, Joseph stressed there would never be any let-up in Universal investing in new talent, which he called “our lifeblood”. “We invest about 20% of our revenues on A&R


and signing new artists,” he said. “That’s more than if you are a pharmaceuticals company – that’s 10-15%. And that is something with Universal that’s always a sacred cow. We must never ever touch or play with our A&R investments and we literally ring-fence and protect that at any cost. It’s worth saying, though, for that money we do expect some return on the investment for the artists we sign.”


looking to partially fill the gap of T4, which is being taken off the air by Channel 4 after 14 years in December, with changes it is making to the Sunday chart show. This includes replacing Reggie Yates as host with Jameela Jamil, who was previously part of T4, while introducing more exclusive content to the show’s final hour, which is visualised. “[Jameela] has got a TV background and


that’s on purpose because what I want to do is get a much more televised feel to that last hour,” he said. “T4 is sadly going, but we can use those sorts of things and experiences she’s got to make this last hour feel like T4,” he said.


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