Local Independent radio in Ireland v England

Nokia 2630

People always complain about local radio in Ireland but Jesus local radio in England is dreadful, voicetracked jukebox another 9 hits in a row rubbish all day long.

musicboy

So local radio is just as bad in England as it is in Ireland then

SCOOP 64

Thats ok then as long as its as bad in England were all happy here.

Antenna

A big difference is that England has a network of mainly talk based BBC local radio stations

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Local_Radio

L1011

The UK ILR sector almost makes the US look high quality.

With a few notable exceptions pretty much every ILR now is networked and voicetracked with, at best, local news inserted at the top of hour. Most larger areas have had their ILRs gutted and converted to a member of a fake-national station like Heart or Smooth. Smaller areas often end up with voicetracked messes.

Its become the case that in a lot of areas the RSL (community) stations are far superior to the commercial ILR!

Declan A Walsh

L1011 wrote: »

The UK ILR sector almost makes the US look high quality.

With a few notable exceptions pretty much every ILR now is networked and voicetracked with, at best, local news inserted at the top of hour. Most larger areas have had their ILRs gutted and converted to a member of a fake-national station like Heart or Smooth. Smaller areas often end up with voicetracked messes.

Its become the case that in a lot of areas the RSL (community) stations are far superior to the commercial ILR!

I don't mean to be finicky (or maybe I do!), but permanently licensed community stations are not really the same as RSL stations. RSL is short for Restricted Service Licence. There are two types of RSLs.
1. Short-term RSLs, which are the U.K. equivalent of our temporary licenses.
2. Long-term RSLs, which are licenses given to closed areas of private land like university campuses and hospitals. I suppose the Irish equivalent of the latter would be Limerick's Flirt FM and the hospital stations that used to broadcast on FM.

As regards ILRs, it does seem we are going down a similar road to the U.K.: voicetracked programs, syndicated/shared news services, common ownership of stations, overlapping styles of music on different stations and homogenized music in general.

It does seem that the best bets for diversity in music are the RSLs in the U.K. and the temporary licensed stations, community stations and college stations in Ireland. Within the commercial I.L.R. sector, the best bet is late night specialist shows such as Radio Nova's Off The Record presented by Pat James on Sunday nights, or the nighttime weekday specialist shows on TXFM.

Radioman44

I'm sorry, I don't fully agree with you here and feel strong enough to post a comment. There are "many" local Radio Stations around the Country that cater for and specialise in a wide range of music and talk programmes that suit all tastes. However, if as the comments made here are "only" relating to Dublin, then I'm in full agreement as most if not all, play the same kind of music and have a policy more music less talk - just like the UK. Many were given licences to broadcast a certain genre of music but came to the BAI asking to change for "the excuse - financial reasons" and then were let do just that. Local Radio outside Dublin is without a doubt must more versatile - in my opinion....

BuilderPlumber

I think local radio stations vary. Some are actually great, others are beyond poor. Admittedly, most of the best ones are in Dublin. The three types of local radio I don't like are:

1. Those who play a diet of bad Irish country music 7 nights of the week.
2. Those who have presenters who overtry to be Pat Kenny!!
3. Those who have these chirpy chirpy morning presenters who talk a lot about nothing.

Declan A Walsh

I suppose in my previous post I was thinking of the ILR sector that is based in or close to Dublin. I suspect that similar arguments could be put against the other city-based ILRs. It is true that there tends to be somewhat more variety in the local stations as you move outside the cities. However, the regional stations - the likes of Spin SW and iRadio - are pretty generic in the style of radio.