Rumours have been circulating for a while but yesterday came the official announcement by Global Radio that London’s Capital FM, the present ‘Galaxy’ stations, as well as Red Dragon in Cardiff and Trent, Ram and Leicester Sound in the East Midlands, are to form a ‘national’ network under the Capital name.
Although I fully understand the reasoning and business strategy behind this decision to create a 'national brand' I’m not entirely convinced whether the 'Capital' name is the right one to use. It's a familiar heritage brand in London but will it mean “diddly-squat” to many people ('normal' listeners not radio anoraks) in Leeds or Newcastle?
Many people who grew up listening to ‘Capital Radio’ often look back to how they remember the station in the past with a certain amount of affection and dewy-eyed nostalgia. Admittedly I’m biased because I was part of the team that helped make it happen from 1991-1994, and it did sound great, but I’m not one of those who believes turning back the clock is the answer.
It’s too easy to forget that, back then, Capital had the mass London radio audience to itself and much has changed since then; not just more stations, such as Heart, as well as the transformation of Melody into Magic, but also the gradual evolution of Radio 2 into its current position as the nation’s most-popular station.
What I’ve always found interesting was the way Magic grew slowly and quietly by re-defining its focus and appealing to a younger audience than its predecessor. Once anybody at Capital realised what was happening it was too late and, together with Heart, Magic had squeezed Capital in the middle of a ‘pincer movement’ for the listeners that advertisers find most attractive.
The radio landscape has also changed elsewhere in the country and the ‘heritage’ ILR stations have come under increasing competition from targeted regional/local stations with common brands, such as Heart, Galaxy, Real and Smooth.
Since Global acquired the Chrysalis Radio stations and then those owned by Gcap (itself the product of a merger between GWR and Capital Radio Group) it has turned Heart into a large semi-national Adult Contemporary station. It is now doing the same with its Galaxy and Hit Music stations.
Is this the final nail in the coffin of local radio?
At the risk of repeating myself, these changes could provide an opportunity for smaller local stations to punch above their weight and build audiences by really playing the local card. Listening around, though, I hear too many of them programmed by those who seem to be stuck in a timewarp and have yet to realise that the world has changed, or "that'll do" seems to be the standard to which to aspire. “That'll do” just isn't good enough right now and 1980s-style local radio is not the answer to the problem either. I suspect in most cases it's because those in charge don't know any better or prefer to keep within their comfort zone.
Obviously I’m not advocating a return to the days when ILR stations were shackled by ‘needletime’, required to provide ‘meaningful speech’ and presenters were regularly giving out details of jumble sales and lost pets; far from it. Local doesn’t have to mean yokel.
There’s more to ‘localness’ than just doing ‘What’s On?’ features or tagging local place names onto the end of weather forecasts; for example “In (say a different place name each time) it’s currently 22 degrees”. Is it really, or is it just somewhere selected at random from a list of places for that hour’s forecast? I suspect the latter.
Those local stations that are successful understand that their strength is not only in being able to give listeners a sense of ‘belonging’ but also providing the feel for an area a listener should get by tuning into a particular station. "Love of life around here" as one former group's stations used to put it.
The question to be asked is ‘Does a particular programme/strand clearly come from the area it is supposed to serve, or could it come from anywhere?’ On that basis, it would seem that some stations are going to have to work at providing greater ‘localness’ because they appear to be rather lacking on that front.
In many ways it could be argued that it's those badly-run stations that are as much to blame for "killing" local radio as the expansion of 'national' brands by the big groups. Poor programming drives away listeners.
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