It’s been a turbulent year, and not just in the outside world. Inside radio, digital is changing not just when and how we listen but content, too. Classic FM overturned its daily schedule in the run-up to Christmas to stage an all-Mozart day with nothing but the virtuoso’s works for 24 hours. It was a bold step by the commercial station, reliant on advertisers (and therefore listener figures) for its survival. How many non-Mozart-enthusiasts would be turned off by such a monothon? That Classic FM was prepared to take the risk suggests that the conventional division of the day into separate programmes, making sure there is something for everyone in a daily mixed bag, is becoming less important now that digital means we can go in search of something different whenever there’s something ‘live’ that does not appeal.
Earlier this year, Radio 3 (which back in 2011 devoted 12 days to nothing but Mozart) took the idea further by giving us River of Music, 12 hours of continuous music, hand-picked and sequenced as a single stream with not a word spoken to interrupt the flow. Such an idea would have been anathema to the station 70 years ago when it was born, the lack of information about what was being played, the unrelieved diet of music deemed unhelpful if not irritating for listeners. This, though, is no longer a problem because all the information can be posted online.
Digital also means that we no longer need to pore over the pages of Radio Times, checking out what might be on and when so as not to miss it. Podcasts, listen again, downloads have put the listener in charge, not the network controller. Next year this will be taken a step further, the BBC’s director-general Tony Hall has promised, announcing that he wants to develop iPlayer by turning it into ‘a Netflix of the spoken word’.
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