Sounds investment

You may have noticed that BBC iPlayer (for radio programmes) has been replaced this week with the new BBC Sounds platform. Instead of simply finding your favourite programmes on playback, BBC Sounds will offer you the chance to personalise your listening, discover programmes recommended ‘just for you’, catch up with the latest podcasts. On Monday, James Purnell, director of radio and education at the BBC, talked up the new venture with Martha Kearney on the Today programme. ‘All of BBC audio will be at your fingertips,’ he promised. ‘We will do the hard work of getting the right programmes to you at the right time.’

‘Won’t this involve taking money away from existing budgets?’ asked Kearney, concerned that ‘live’ radio will miss out in this drive to create more online-only content. The director assured her that BBC Sounds ‘will be something that benefits everyone’, with its podcasts and music mixes, personalised content and easy accessibility. But he then insisted: ‘We can’t preserve BBC radio in aspic.’ If we do that, Purnell believes, then in ten to 20 years’ time there will be no radio because of the stiff competition that now exists out there in podcast land. ‘This is about changing to deliver our mission,’ said Purnell. Even such a flagship Radio 4 programme as Today now has to have its own online-only podcast called Beyond Today. ‘I won’t be making any comments about blowing smoke,’ said Kearney.

Meanwhile Desert Island Discs consistently remains in the top ten UK podcasts in spite of, or perhaps because of, being essentially a broadcast. Now with Lauren Laverne temporarily at the helm (while Kirsty Young recuperates from illness) the range of guests appears even more astonishingly varied. Last week she talked to Venki Ramakrishnan, Nobel Prize-winning biologist and president of the Royal Society; on Sunday her guest was Jacqueline Gold, CEO of the lingerie and sex-toys chain Ann Summers.