An open letter to BBC Director General Mark Thompson from MW editor Paul Williams

09:45 | Monday March 8, 2010

This industry fully understands the pressures, both financial and otherwise, the Corporation is facing in the months and years ahead, but to try to address these issues by closing one of your organisation’s most important and distinctive music radio stations would be a huge error.

The same BBC Strategy Review that confirmed the plans to close 6 and the BBC Asian Network singles out “inspiring knowledge, music and culture” as one of the five clear content priorities of the Beeb going forward. Nowhere more is the BBC fulfilling this priority than on 6, a station that every year provides a platform for many hundreds of artists that would not get a look in on the airwaves if this service did not exist. That is surely fulfilling the BBC’s public service remit so to axe 6 now would only weaken the BBC’s ability to properly deliver this content priority in the future.

We are also deeply concerned about some of the conclusions that have been reached as to why 6 should be sacrificed in this drive to deliver what BBC Trust chairman Michael Lyons describes as a “more disciplined and sharply focused BBC”. The report, for example, points out that the average age of a 6 listener is 37, which it says means that the station is “competing head on for a commercially-valuable audience”. But that only makes sense if you assume that what every 37-year-old wants to listen to can be reasonably delivered by the commercial sector. If that were the case then commercial radio would already have its own version of 6, but it does not.

Although we would agree the commercial sector is not in the fortunate position to finance a station like 6 in the way the BBC can do presently, it is also true the musical make-up of 6, in championing a range of acts that at least initially do not have mass-market appeal, does not make such a station commercially attractive to launch. But that is why we have public service broadcasting and why only the BBC can make a station like 6 properly work.

The report further talks about the BBC “limiting activity” by recognising the role commercial radio plays in delivering popular music to a 30 to 50-year-old audience. For many millions of people commercial stations do this very well, but the reasons many millions more of the population turn to the BBC’s popular music services is that the commercial sector is not able or willing to deliver what they want. 6 is a prime example of music fans having to look beyond the commercial services to fulfil their music radio listening needs, but then so are Radios 1, 2 and 1Xtra.

The planned closure of 6, alongside that of the BBC Asian Network, has naturally grabbed the headlines, as has the music industry’s opposition to it. But it would be wrong to think this is the only aspect of the BBC’s Strategy Review that is causing deep concern to labels and other parts of the music business.

Radio 2 has been an incredible BBC success story and there has been no greater recognition of what it has achieved over the last decade and a half, firstly under Jim Moir, then Lesley Douglas and now present controller Bob Shennan, than from the music industry. But its massive growth to become the most-listened-to radio station in the country has been met in some quarters with resentment, with the popular line being fed that at peaktime it duplicates too much of what the commercial sector is doing.

This argument has only intensified with the arrival of Chris Evans at breakfast, but it is one commercial radio and others have been voicing long before he took over from Terry Wogan, even though the station’s weekday daytime output has not changed anywhere near as fundamentally as people might want to make out. Wogan, who had the country’s highest breakfast audience figures before he left at the end of last year, had been in the slot during his most recent run since 1993, while mid-morning presenter Ken Bruce has been part of Radio 2’s daytime line-up since 1985. Although a much newer figure, lunchtime presenter Jeremy Vine offers the kind of non-music output provided previously by his predecessor Jimmy Young across many years.

However, despite all this, the BBC Strategy Review wants to put under threat the very reason why Radio 2 is such a hit with licence payers as it pushes for a commitment of at least 50% speech during the daytime. Again, Director General, where does this suggested huge reduction in the music output of the UK’s most popular music radio station fit with placing music so high in the list of the BBC’s content priorities?

It is now four-and-a-half years since you addressed the BPI AGM, but for many in the music industry it seems that since then the needs of this business are being recognised less and less by your organisation. The planned closure of 6 and these harmful proposals for Radio 2 are the latest acts to rile the industry, but we must not forget about the axing of Top Of The Pops just a year after you spoke at the AGM. More than three years after it went off the air, the BBC still cannot find a single regular primetime slot on one of its terrestrial TV channels for a music programme, leaving a massive service gap that no terrestrial commercial broadcaster is filling.

For decades your organisation and the music industry have had a strong, mutually-beneficial relationship with deep respect on both sides. It is in this context that when this business has legitimate concerns about what is happening, it should be properly listened to. It does not expect favours, merely a fair hearing, but genuinely believes what is being proposed in the Strategy Review is wrong and potentially very damaging. For that we urge you and the BBC to think again about what you are doing, starting with reversing the decision to close 6 Music.

Paul Williams