Grant Goddard : radio broadcasting expert
by Grant Goddard
Grant Goddard is a radio broadcasting expert with a lengthy track record of creating successful, innovative radio stations and programmes. He has worked in the radio industry for several decades as a senior manager and consultant, both in the UK and overseas, for some of the world’s largest media owners. As an independent media analyst, he writes extensively about the radio business for consumer and trade magazines, books and sector reports for stakeholders.
Episodes
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DAB Radio Switchover: Dead As The Dodo
In 2004, I wrote my first article predicting that the UK’s implementation of DAB digital radio was headed for failure. It was not guesswork. I had analysed radio industry data since 1980. I had worked at The Radio Authority when it implemented DAB. I had worked in Ofcom’s radio division. I had…
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Growing DAB radio usage in the UK. Confused? You should be!
“Digital listening at an all-time high,” shouted the headline of one online news story. Yes, it was the quarterly RAJAR radio ratings, offering opportunities for some journalists to pitch their stories just about any which way they wanted. The opening sentence of this particular report said: “The...
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UK listening growth demonstrates radio's strengths in a multi-tasking world
The latest RAJAR ratings data for Q2 2011 demonstrate the continuing strength of the radio medium in recession Britain. Maybe if your TV or mobile subscriptions are having to be pruned, you turn to radio instead. In times of austerity, one of radio’s greatest attributes is that it appears to...
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UK commercial radio sector revenues Q1 2011: local advertising hits 10-year low
Data published last week for 2011’s first quarter demonstrate that revenues of the UK commercial radio sector are still struggling to rebound from the previous two years’ ‘credit crunch.’ A large part of the problem is the coalition government’s swingeing cuts to its marketing budget since May...
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Andy Parfitt leaves BBC Radio 1 on a high: separating the man from the myth
Andy Parfitt’s departure from the station controller job at BBC Radio 1 after thirteen years marks a significant event for the UK radio sector. Parfitt’s accomplishments during his tenure were many, but did not extend to significantly turning around the station’s audience ratings. This episode is...
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When is a consultation not a consultation? When Ofcom consults about radio
Each of us has dozens of 'consultations' every day. You know the sort of thing. 'I’m going to the corner shop – anything you want?' 'A Kit-Kat?' 'OK.' However, if I came back with a cat rather than a chocolate bar, you would understandably be unhappy. That had not really been a consultation at…
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DAB in cars: the straw that will break digital radio switchover’s back
Speaking today at the Intellect conference in London, broadcasting Minister Ed Vaizey tried to assure us that digital radio switchover was still “on course” to happen in the year twenty something or other. This episode is also available as a blog post:...
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Radio Invicta: the genesis of black music radio in London ... still unfulfilled
I only knew Roger Tate through listening to his programmes on the radio. He was a DJ on Radio Invicta, London’s first soul music radio station, launched in 1970. Invicta was a pirate radio station. Back then, there were no legal radio stations in the UK other than the BBC. The notion of a…
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Government expenditure cutbacks clobber UK commercial radio
As soon as the coalition government came to power in May 2010, it implemented Conservative Party policy to make substantial cutbacks to the amount of public money spent on government marketing campaigns. Commercial radio was hit the hardest because, more than any other medium, it had become...
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When UK radio listening figures are this good, why does RAJAR need to fib?
It is good to know that radio is still an extremely popular medium in the UK, something borne out by the latest radio audience metrics published by industry body RAJAR for Q1 2011. However, in its determination to make every quarter’s results newsworthy, RAJAR has a track record of bending the...
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DAB Radio Downgrade: how is ‘90% of FM coverage’ a sensible target for DAB to replace FM?
Moving the goalposts. Governments are adept at doing just that to help them achieve their targets or to make figures look better than they really are. Digital radio switchover is no exception. Given the technical and financial impossibility of the task plotted twenty years ago to completely…
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Which? says: DAB radio switchover must be “consumer led or not at all”
What would have to be done to make DAB radio successful? “What there does need to be, as Freeview and digital satellite has shown in television, is simply a sufficient combination of services, technology, simplicity and price or discount to provide a value proposition for the consumer,” suggested...
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DAB Radio Downgrade? The new masterplan to deliver DAB radio reception worse than FM
When something works well, it just works. You do not need to analyse why it works. It just works. And nobody asks questions as to why or how. That is the case with FM radio. During half a century of development, more and more FM transmitters have been built across the UK (2,100 currently in...
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DAB radio sector rubbishes its own digital radio receiver sales figures
When UK companies that had once anticipated they were poised to make a mint out of ‘DAB radio’ realise that things are not going the way they had wanted, they lash out. That seems to be what happened yesterday. ‘Shoot the messenger’ appeared to be the digital radio industry’s reflex response when...
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AM/FM switch-off of national radio stations? An empty threat whose expiry date has long passed
Some of Digital Britain’s radio recommendations were unworkable. However, the notion has remained that FM and AM analogue transmitters of the UK’s national radio stations will be switched off once digital radio listening passes the 50% threshold. This was never practical. It was a ‘threat’...
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Public spending cuts impacted commercial radio 2010 revenues by £24m
Who was UK commercial radio’s biggest advertiser in 2010? British Gas? No, it was second. Autoglass? No, it came third. Volkswagen? No, it was fourth. Unilever? No, it came fifth. Radio’s biggest advertiser in 2010 was the government (in the guise of the Orwellian-sounding Central Office of...
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Does the nation love its digital radio stations? 86% of UK adults say ‘no’
In his perceptive commentary on last quarter’s RAJAR radio audience figures, IPSOS’ research manager Andy Haylett noted: “18.5 million adults are DAB owners, yet only an estimated 12.6 million are confirmed listeners. What are the other 6 million doing with their DAB sets? Further investigation...
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Rubbish DAB radio reception: why is Ofcom working hard NOT to fix the problem?
When something is broken, you have to fix it. Thinking about fixing it, planning to fix it, talking about fixing it, convening meetings about fixing it – none of these will actually fix it. You just have to fix it. DAB radio reception has been broken since the broadcast platform was introduced in...
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DAB radio numbers: why do they keep making them up?
I’m a numbers man. I can tolerate a little numerical exaggeration, a few rounding ups, or even the odd ‘nearly x million’. But when people invent numbers and stick them in their press releases, I reach for my calculator. Not for the first time, today Digital Radio UK advanced the concept of ‘mind...
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DAB radio switchover: the view from the government bunker
The government’s second stakeholder consultation on DAB radio switchover happened this afternoon. It was held in what felt like an underground government bunker in Victoria. No windows, long corridors, and lots of seemingly identical numbered rooms hidden by massive doors that had no viewing...
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Bauer Radio talks the DAB talk, but walks its Magic brand off DAB
Bauer Radio is the second largest commercial radio group in the UK. It publicly supports the government’s plans for DAB radio switchover. Only this month, Paul Keenan, chief executive of Bauer Media, told The Guardian: “What part if any is the BBC going to play on the local DAB level?” He went on...
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Q: Who is the government commissioning to produce an objective report on the costs & benefits of DAB radio switchover? A: The government
For two decades, the British government has pursued a policy to replace analogue radio broadcasting with DAB digital radio broadcasting. Why? The real reasons might as well be lost in the mists of time (or maybe were never made public). However, this has not stopped the government and its civil...
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UK commercial radio revenues Q3 2010: still no sign of “renewed growth”
2008 had been a bad year for commercial radio revenues, down 6% year-on-year. 2009 was a worse year, when revenues fell a further 10% year-on-year. So how is 2010 shaping up? Radio Advertising Bureau data for Q3 2010 demonstrate that, although revenues are likely to be up marginally for the...
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Ofra Haza: the making of world music’s first international star
In January 1985, I had arrived in Israel to work as a DJ on a radio station, but this was no ordinary radio. The studios of ‘The Voice of Peace’ were on a ship anchored permanently in the Mediterranean Sea. Aware of my interest in cutting edge music, the station’s popular breakfast DJ Dave Asher...
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GERMANY: planned 2011 re-launch of national DAB “solved a problem that did not exist”
On 15 December 2010, five commercial radio stations in Germany – New Wave Radio, Lounge.fm, ERF Medien, Radio Energy in Hamburg and Regiocast Digital – signed contracts with transmission provider Media Broadcast to broadcast on the new national DAB+ platform, scheduled for launch in 2011. One…
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Which? advises: two of “seven Christmas gifts to avoid” are DAB radios
A reader comment appended to an online newspaper story this week about the decision of some commercial radio station owners to launch an anti-DAB radio marketing campaign said jokingly: “Now all that's needed before Christmas is for 'Which' to warn consumers of moral hazard in purchasing DAB...
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Roll up! Roll up! Enjoy the radio industry pantomime: ‘DAB Radio’
The Ministerial Group for the government’s Digital Radio Action Plan will meet tomorrow. That meeting has all the hallmarks of a radio industry seasonal pantomime, with participants dressed up in their gladrags to play the appropriate parts. A select audience has been hand picked, though the…
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Trick or treat? £55m to be spent scaring UK consumers into buying DAB radios
The Daily Mail is the perfect medium to scare middle Britain into reaching for its credit card. So it was no surprise to read in Saturday’s edition that: “Four out of five car radios are expected to become obsolete in less than five years, experts warn.” Why? Well, according to the Daily Mail,...
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Lobby the EU to mandate Europe-wide digital radio switchover? No chance!
The European Union [EU] has always made its position perfectly clear on radio broadcasting policy for its member states. It will not adopt an EU-wide digital radio strategy. A year ago, Viviane Reding, then EU commissioner for information society & media, reiterated the policy in an interview:...
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The Digital Radio Stakeholders Group: another ‘faux consultation’
Did you hear about the inaugural Digital Radio Stakeholders Group meeting held on 1 November 2010 at the government’s DCMS [Department for Culture, Media & Sport] office? Probably not, unless you were one of the couple of dozen people who were in attendance. Otherwise, you were in the majority…
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DAB radio usage: going nowhere slowly
Sometimes it seems as if the UK radio industry operates in two parallel universes. On the one hand, there is the virtual world of the DAB radio lobbyists, a reality that only seems to exist within the confines of their Soho office and its funders. On the other hand, there is the real world of the...
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Digital Radio Upgrade? More like Digital Radio Groundhog Day
It was the Radio Festival, the industry’s annual get together. Everyone wanted to talk about how wonderful the DAB future of radio would be. But nobody wanted to explain how ‘Digital Radio Upgrade’, the government policy to make the UK’s DAB transmission system fit for purpose, will be paid for.…
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David vs Goliath: commercial radio spends £27 per hour on programmes, BBC Radio 2 spends £4,578
There has been an abundance of fighting talk from the commercial radio sector in the press in recent weeks. Commercial radio seems determined to pick another fight with BBC Radios 1 and 2, two of the three most listened to radio stations in the UK. This ongoing phoney war between the BBC and...
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UK commercial radio: Q2 2010 national revenues down 40% since 2003
It seems like only yesterday that the Radio Advertising Bureau [RAB] was telling us that: “The [commercial radio] sector has turned a corner and not only halted [revenue] decline, but moved into renewed growth …” In fact, it was 20 May 2010 and the reason for the RAB’s optimism was the sector’s...
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Having DAB cake and eating it: temper tantrums in the Global Radio playpen
This week we saw an outburst in The Guardian that would have done any rich, spoilt brat proud. But no, this was the founder and CEO of Global Group, Ashley Tabor, which owns Global Radio, the UK’s largest commercial radio group, demanding that the BBC “put their money where their mouth is” and...
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The exit strategy for DAB radio switchover: the Consumer Expert Group addresses Vaizey’s “big if”
When you are looking for an exit route from a product you have been developing for nearly two decades, and which has consumed hundreds of millions of pounds, you need to find a damn good reason that will deflect the blame elsewhere. You need a report, an organisation or some bona fide research…
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Without local commercial radio, switchover to DAB will not happen
I am often asked why I believe that digital radio switchover will never happen in the UK. My answer is always this – the available statistics and data on consumer take-up of DAB radio fail to demonstrate that it will grow sufficiently to become the mass medium for radio broadcasting. I can see...
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Back to the future of radio – the FM band
Help seemed to have arrived for those consumers who are confused by the contradictory messages they are receiving about DAB radio, digital switchover and the future of FM/AM radio. The government created a ‘hot topic’ web page that addresses these issues in the form of a ‘FAQ’. Does it help…
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UK commercial radio audiences: one swallow doesn’t make “long-term and sustained growth”
UK commercial radio has been in the doldrums for the last decade. Its audiences have been battered by competition from the BBC, revenues have been declining, and some local stations have been forced to close or merge (sorry, ‘co-locate’). So, when a piece of good news comes along, it is natural...
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Download The First Annual Not ‘The Ofcom Digital Radio Progress Report’ Report
In July 2010, Ofcom had published its first annual report on the progress made in the UK with take-up and usage of digital radio. I criticised the report in this blog for being selective with data and distorting the real picture of the slow take-up of DAB radio. Ofcom responded to two of my...
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Lies, damned lies and … Ofcom’s first digital radio progress report
Ofcom quietly published its first Digital Radio Progress Report in July 2010, without fanfare or a press release. This report has been a remarkably long time coming, given that DAB radio has been with us more than a decade. During that time, Ofcom has published 26 Digital Television Progress...
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Digital radio switchover: talk is cheap, action will never happen
Politics is the art of flip-flop policymaking (and justifying it convincingly). This is evident in the new UK government’s first statement about DAB radio and digital radio switchover, published this week. What is its new policy? Well, there is no new policy. The Conservatives are simply…
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DAB radio: a national platform that no one wanted
In 1998, the Radio Authority advertised a licence for the “first and only national commercial digital [DAB] multiplex licence.” There was no stampede of applicants. By June 1998, the regulator had to issue a press release with the headline “Radio Authority receives one application ….” The sole...
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Choice FM R.I.P.: the birth and near death of licensed black music radio in London
31 March 1990 was the memorable day when London‘s first licensed black music station, Choice 96.9 FM, arrived on-air. Until then, the availability of black music on legal radio had been limited to a handful of specialist music shows, even though about half of the singles sales chart was filled…
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The cost of upgrading DAB radio: why it will never happen
The current DAB radio transmission system in the UK is presently not robust enough to rival old fashioned, but more reliable, FM. All parties are agreed on that point. To get DAB up to FM standard, a huge amount of work needs to be done, which would cost a lot of money. How much money? Nobody…
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What is RAJAR’s function? Cheerleader or research bureau?
This week’s publication of the latest UK radio listening figures begs the question as to what RAJAR’s function is: * Is RAJAR a cheerleader for radio, to convince Licence Fee payers and advertisers how successful radio is? Or, * Is RAJAR a serious research agency providing objective data to...
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UK commercial radio’s growing reliance on public sector funds
The UK radio industry divides into two main sectors: BBC radio and commercial radio. BBC radio is funded by the Licence Fee, whereas commercial radio is funded by advertising and sponsorship. Each adult (aged 15+) pays around £13 per annum for BBC radio via the household Licence Fee. What is not…
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Digital Economy Act 2010: a smokescreen for backroom radio ‘deal’
On 8 April 2010 at 1732, the Digital Economy Act was given Royal Assent by Parliament. Who exactly will benefit from the radio clauses in the Act? Certainly not the consumer. Sadly, the Bill/Act was not really about digital radio at all. For the radio sector lobbyists, it was all about securing…
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Marketing DAB radio: misleading listeners only damages the medium
The radio medium’s loyalty amongst consumers derives substantially from the trust engendered between the on-air presenter and the listener. Research has demonstrated that radio is trusted more than any other medium, and that its audience feels a much greater affinity than it does with less…
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Digital radio stations: listeners abandon ship
The latest RAJAR radio audience data demonstrated one thing clearly: the UK radio industry’s strategy for its digital stations is in tatters. Audiences for digital radio fell off a cliff during the last quarter of 2009. This did not appear to be the result of any specific strategy shift (no…
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About this show
Grant Goddard is a radio broadcasting expert with a lengthy track record of creating successful, innovative radio stations and programmes. He has worked in the radio industry for several decades as a senior manager and consultant, both in the UK and overseas, for some of the world’s largest media owners. As an independent media analyst, he writes extensively about the radio business for consumer and trade magazines, books and sector reports for stakeholders.
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