Smothered in bubbling mud, out-competed by audio books and Spotify
Is national-broadcast UK DAB radio a defunct medium? Even the niche stations can’t seem to get traction…
“£12.1m per annum on the Asian Network when its peak audience nationally is only 31,000 adults”
In speech radio, the presentation format is the problem. BBC Radio 7, for instance, strings content out into highly missable episodes (e.g.: “part 12 of 18″), presumably to try to prevent piracy and maintain sales of the BBC audio books. And the science-fiction there currently seems to polarise between depressingly worthy “issues” SF (Handmaiden’s Tale) and teen comedy (Red Dwarf, Paradise Lost in Space). If you want classic / hard SF you have to go to audio-books, where you also get exact control over where to stop for a break. BBC Radio 7 also has almost no documentaries worthy of the name. The BBC must have literally millions of high-quality radio documentaries sitting in its archives? Yet it doesn’t give them a dedicated repeats station? Why? The same goes for all those substantial hour-long and 90 minute radio plays. I can only guess that the repeat-fees demanded by the trades unions are what’s keeping such content off the air? Or is that the producers believe that no-one can sit still and listen for more than 15 minutes these days?
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Smothered in bubbling mud, out-competed by audio books and Spotify
