Time for deregulation ?

Never Say Never Again

Should Ireland go down the same road the uk are planning to down and deregulate radio? I think we should, i think it would be great if music stations could play music and not have to insert long winded sports news etc. Also with teck changing rapidly, it makes no sense for FM radio to be stuck with regulation from the days before dial up.

marno21

We don't need deregulation and the absolute mess that radio in the UK has become in order to make improvements to Irish radio. The current batch of soulless rubbish that once was UK local radio is criminal. In addition to the BBC stations & Classic you have Capital/Heart/Bauer city network. All bland and no local identity whatsoever.

Stations such as 4FM should have zero requirement for talk programming. 4FM was setup to be a over 45s targeted music driven service. The talk market is already catered for in national terms by Radio 1 and Newstalk, and in local terms by the ILRs. The requirement for the regional youth services to have talk radio has been relaxed in recent years and it has yielded good results. When a station like Beat 102-103 had to have 5 news bulletins and a half hour news magazine as part of a 3 hour drivetime show made no sense whatsoever.

I agree that there is scope for changes to licence terms in Ireland, but what has happened to the UK radio market is not the solution.

Never Say Never Again

Yes, i think the bai should at least change the terms of the 4fm licence when it goes out to tender again. Drop the talk requirment and maybe expand it to cover more of the country as so many older listeners have been abandoned by 2fm and today fm. Should Today fm for example really be required to have so much talk, when they have a whole sister station that talks all day?

MikeyTaylor

marno21 wrote: »

We don't need deregulation and the absolute mess that radio in the UK has become in order to make improvements to Irish radio. The current batch of soulless rubbish that once was UK local radio is criminal. In addition to the BBC stations & Classic you have Capital/Heart/Bauer city network. All bland and no local identity whatsoever.

Stations such as 4FM should have zero requirement for talk programming. 4FM was setup to be a over 45s targeted music driven service. The talk market is already catered for in national terms by Radio 1 and Newstalk, and in local terms by the ILRs. The requirement for the regional youth services to have talk radio has been relaxed in recent years and it has yielded good results. When a station like Beat 102-103 had to have 5 news bulletins and a half hour news magazine as part of a 3 hour drivetime show made no sense whatsoever.

I agree that there is scope for changes to licence terms in Ireland, but what has happened to the UK radio market is not the solution.

Controversial.

Ursus Horribilis

Controversial why?

MikeyTaylor

Ursus Horribilis wrote: »

Controversial why?

Because national brands taking over more local ones (see what Capital did to Juice Liverpool) splits opinion. When that happened they dropped some of the popular niche dance music programming. Just an example

end of the road

i don't believe for one second that the deregulation of radio in the uk is about providing good radio or trying to get younger listeners to stick with terrestrial radio. young people are going to abandon terrestrial radio anyway.
it's about bending over in full for the big radio corporations who want to cut costs to the bone and extract what they can from limited fm spectrum. now of course these are businesses, and making profit is what they are there to do, that's fine.
what my whole problem in relation to how the uk has been going is the complete dishonesty in terms of the government and regulator who allowed without competition, semi-national brands through the back door, meaning the destruction of most of britain's independant local radio.
i would understand if they had simply deregulated in the first place, or just advertised national licences for commercial radio with community radio and the BBC left to do the local thing. but the shambolic way in which radio in the uk has been handled has meant stifled creativity, soulless brands that mean nothing to nobody and just a general feel of cheap and nasty. there are exceptions to the rule of course but they are going to become less and less i fear.
note that i'm talking in terms of analogue here, as dab becoming the main platform would effectively allow local and national stations anyway, so there would likely be little incentive to buy up local licences to turn them into national stations.
the uk is not a country we should follow in terms of radio, or anything if i'm honest.
what we should do?
1. insure that licences don't duplicate what is already availible. so if the already existing local station in an area has talk, then the regional has no need to offer it.
2. not be afraid to go forward with platforms such as dab.
3. leave the business side of things to the stations themselves. the BAI should have no input or involvement in any way in terms of the business aspect of radio stations. stations should be able to run a business model that can be tailored to their means. the BAI should only be concerned with service quality and compliance with the regulations.
4. if a station is licenced to a particular format, then it should be forced to stick to that format or go off the air.