After a year with many key departures both on air and off, changes continue at New Broadcasting House, observes RotD Music Editor Lee Thompson. The latest emerged on Wednesday afternoon

29 January 2016 - Editorial

This article first appeared in the Record of the Day weekly magazine. Subscribers can access the archive here.

The newly-appointed Head of Music for Radio 1 and 1Xtra is Chris Price, who among many illustrious roles at Radio 1, MTV, Last.fm and others, was our Music Editor for two years up until two years ago. He’ll replace George Ergatoudis, who stands down to take the newly-created position of Head of Content Programming for the UK at Spotify.

As a new music fan constantly searching out the next big talent or musical genre to emerge before going mainstream, the Head of Music role at the youth-focused station is surely the best job in the world. But with it comes with so much expectation, many might regard it as the ultimate poisoned chalice in the British music and broadcasting industries. He joins the station just 18-months shy of a milestone birthday – 50 years on air in September 2017.

“Let Radio 1 break new music. Let commercial radio just play the hits.” It was a phrase that I used to hear all the time back in the late-‘90s when I was working at local stations in the north of England. It’s a self-perpetuating mantra that still gets trotted out in label boardrooms in Kensington, but it’s questionable as to whether or not the target audience for Radio 1 actually believes or cares if that’s still the case in 2016. Kiss and Capital (along with sister stations Kiss Fresh and Capital Xtra) seem to now be much more impactful when it comes to playing new music on high rotations, which then cuts through quickly on Shazam tagging stats, Spotify plays and download sales. Radio 1 says its traditional younger radio audience is vanishing, moving instead to YouTube and online. Which begs the question: why then, is Kiss still successfully hoovering up under-30s right now? It’s something we’ll perhaps spotlight again when the quarterly RAJAR UK audience listening figures are revealed next week. 

But all is not lost at Radio 1. Now’s the perfect time, with this changing of the guard, to grab the bull by the horns again.

In 1995, at the height of the Britpop summer that year, station programme boss Trevor Dann and then-Head of Music Jeff Smith took delivery of Common People by Pulp and loved it so much, they promptly went ‘Fuck it, let’s put this straight onto the A List, shall we?’ As a statement of intent regarding where they felt the station needed to be musically, it was a spot-on decision. Gut-feel told them it was absolutely the right thing to do, even though it was a month ahead of release, and Radio 1 flourished with listener numbers growing again after taking a kicking following the exit of old names like Simon Bates and Dave Lee Travis. Today, it can often feel like the station, under the musical guidance of Ergatoudis, has been far too much on the major labels’ side and not the public’s, particularly when it comes to bonafide international commercial pop hits, emerging through people power. This is, after all, a public service radio station, supposedly aimed at giving listeners what they want, using the vast array of available data from key sources to quickly pinpoint what that might be. It shouldn’t be a promotional service for major label priority acts, but that’s the way many observers feel that it currently is.

One recent online petition that we’ve seen gathering a head of steam is the desire for a requirement by UK law for Radio 1 to play at least 30% of music from acts not signed to any of the three majors. It’s worth remembering that in France, the Toubon Law requires 40% of all songs to be played in French, although that has often been flouted in recent years. Having said that, we surely have enough great music being made by unsigned or indie-label artists in the UK to make this a hugely popular, cleverly strategic and wise political move for the corporation to implement, don’t we?

It’s very interesting that amongst many of the industry folk we’ve spoken to in the past 24 hours (since the announcement of his appointment), almost all of them have said there’s an urgency for Radio 1 to take much more notice of what’s reacting well in the streaming world, not just in the UK but globally. Radio pluggers tell us they feel that social media stats or the number of Instagram followers an act has has been perceived as being much more important than actual streaming song stats when it comes to adding new music to the playlist. That feels a bit wrong to us.

We’ve heard that when you go into the Radio 1 playlist meeting, you’re given a wad of stats and info regarding each of the 20-30 songs that’ll be played. During the meeting, numbers and metrics are looked up and assessed to decide the merit of the track being considered. What seems to have been somewhat overlooked though is this simple question: ‘Is it any good?’ Jumping on a new single by an act whose previous hit has been huge for you doesn’t always mean this one will work for you too. We remember the station going huge on the Major Lazer/Ellie Goulding collaboration last summer, whilst previous hit Lean On remained in the chart for another six months, despite Radio 1 dumping it from daytime high rotation fairly early in its life span. In this new world where massive hits prevail for so much longer, you could argue the station needs to just slow down a bit going forward.

Aside from the daytime output, there’s a bit of a dichotomy elsewhere. How do you cater for a specialist audience (one that tends to be older and made up of people who’ve cultivated their own individual taste over time) yet serve a keen young audience too, one that’s still exploring what they’re into? Annie Mac has successfully filled Zane Lowe’s shoes in the evenings to a certain extent, but it’s always going to be an issue. It seems as though those Spotify viral pop hits are still not being played, which is odd. If there’s a sense that something is shaping up to be a big hit, then why not play it then and there to at least acknowledge you’re across it?

The station’s reliance to fall back on older guitar acts like Coldplay and Foo Fighters has been cited by many as an issue when it comes to attracting under-30s. Both acts have been around for 15 years or more. OK, so they station needs these headline acts, it could be argued. But are they the right acts in 2016? Remember when Muse were banished to Radio 2 around a decade ago, only to then find themselves back in favour at Radio 1 a couple of albums later when fewer and fewer new guitar acts were emerging? Declaring ‘next year is going to be all about guitars’ several times at the start of each new January that rolled around was always going to bite them on the arse. Especially in a world continually dominated by proper pop stars. 

Through the station’s annual Teen Awards, they’ve been partly able to tap into a young connected pop crowd but maybe to not as grand a scale as Capital has managed through their Summertime and Jingle Ball ball events. It’s a fault of the music industry generally that 10-14 year olds simply haven’t been super served like they were in the past. A dearth of maintsream channel Saturday morning kids-TV music slots (no CD-UK, no Popworld, and no Woolworths to buy your singles once you’ve seen those acts perform on TV) has done more damage than you might ever expect. In that same timeframe Hollywood and the cult of celebrity via YouTube has stepped in and stolen music’s easy audience. The ripple effect is now being seen at radio. And it’s hurting Radio 1 hardest. They’ve lost focus on their core product itself – the radio output.

For the station’s 50th anniversary, there’s a chance to show that young savvy under-25 audience just how important the station is and has been culturally for five decades now. In a world where curator is king, the opportunity to be the guiding, respected, trusted fan who’ll bring you treasures of old that you had no idea about is a golden one. For example, tell young fans of a band like The 1975 who their influences are, play those old artists, start the discussion online, stimulate interest in the archive. Teens are fascinated by bands that made ‘real’ music that they’ve vaguely heard about like The Smiths, Stone Roses, Led Zeppelin and Bowie. They don’t naturally seek them out as they don’t know where to start. Bowie’s recent death could’ve been a great starting point for all this, but it was something Radio 1 played down a lot more than we expected, to be honest. In fact, Capital played more of his music on the day of his passing. For the station to be embarrassed about its history and its astonishing legacy in 2017 would be tragic and misguided.

The entire RotD team wishes Chris well and congratulates him on the gig. But he has tons to get his teeth into. Spotify are bringing videos to their streaming service, Amazon Prime are adding a radio service to their existing platform and Apple will continue to grow. It’ll be hugely unfair if the figures drop again at Radio 1 and much of the blame is apportioned to him. Let’s hope his appointment signals a few tweaks and changes though, first to steady the ship and then see the station reconnect on air with the life-blood who’ll see them through into another 50 years.

If the target audience continues to look elsewhere and finds they’re better served by a rival radio service, be it digital, online or analogue, there’s a tough old battle ahead.