The Metropolis

NME Radio gets the axe, 6 Music may be the beneficiary

Darryl Chamberlain | Saturday 3 July, 2010 15:07

Unless you’ve been living in a cave—or listening to Heart FM—for the past six months, you’ll have heard the anger which greeted the BBC’s plans to axe 6 Music, its digital radio station dedicated to alternative music.

What BBC radio boss—and its one-time marketing chief—Tim Davie didn’t expect was to see 6 Music’s audience soar as a result of the row, which had given the station a publicity boost of the kind that his PR campaigns for the station had never quite achieved.

But another champion of new bands has already slipped off the air. On 12 June, NME Radio quietly sank under the radio waves—its DJs thrown overboard and an automated service put in its place. Funnily enough, that automated service is better than most other things on DAB radio right now —if it’s still on air by the time you read this.

NME Radio was a simple, uncomplicated, indie rock station. The NME name may have deterred some listeners at first, but it came as a pleasant surprise, there whenever 6 Music got a bit too talkative or pseudy.

But the sums didn’t add up, with DX Media—the firm producing the station under licence from publishers IPC—suddenly ending its contract.

IPC was serious about NME Radio tearing up trees. For its launch in June 2008, it provided studios inside its Southwark HQ, while NME editor Krissi Murison recently declared the station was ready to “fill the gap” if the BBC axed 6 Music.

But NME Radio attracted little of the advertising it needed to survive. An unintentionally hilarious trailer for the Metal Hammer Meltdown rock show “with Gill and Bees!” (or was it “killer bees?”)—cue drum and vocal racket—seemed to fill every other ad break.

Who was listening? In October 2008, after its launch, it was clocking up 215,000 listeners each week via satellite/cable TV and online. Respectable for a station which had been given very little promotion beyond NME’s magazine and website.

However, by May 2010, with the station on DAB across the UK, it had reached 226,000 listeners. It appeared the station had spent 18 months just treading water.

The station’s launch on DAB was also overshadowed by the furore over 6 Music’s planned closure—which delivered hundreds of thousands of new listeners to the BBC station. Its audience is now over a million.

BBC management claim 6 Music’s output is “commercially valuable” but the woes of NME Radio, and others before it, suggest otherwise.

Xfm’s original incarnation crashed and burned less than a year after its launch in 1997, while an attempt in 2008 to give Q Radio a high-profile relaunch also foundered after just a few months. That station has also now vanished from DAB sets.

Advertisers just aren’t interested in authentic-sounding indie music radio in sufficient numbers to cover the bills—especially when that cash is needed to pay for expensive platforms like DAB.

As for the future, you’ll still find a DJ-free, ad-free version of NME Radio on the magazine’s website, while leading DJ Jon Hillcock has signalled he’ll continue his New Noise show as a podcast.

Now all ears are listening for what noises come out of the BBC Trust, which is deciding if it should approve 6 Music’s closure. NME Radio’s loss will be keenly felt by many—but the trust’s members will surely have seen that alternative music radio simply can’t survive in the commercial sector. 

Maybe, just maybe, the loss of NME Radio may save 6 Music.

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