Lack of closures / mergers / consolidation / automation in Irish Radio

Also, how long has i102-104 and i105-107 been essentially iRadio for?
I reckon most of their current listeners have never even heard of the previous two radio stations.

end of the road wrote: »

if i remember correctly they merged not long after 105 107 launched.

I think 105-107 got about 2 years. I remember Bernard O'Shea and Keith Walsh cut their teeth on Breakfast here before Breakfast Republic on 2FM. They shared presenters here and there and occasionally networked the news, weather and sport (messily owing to different sponsorship deals) but stayed apart. i102-104 moved to Athlone but stayed their own station before the merger finally happened. (though for JNLR advertising reasons, they actually remain separate stations)

Moon_shoes wrote: »

This whole thing about how the Brits have a booming dab scene and we got left behind is just silly, it's just we are too small. Ireland (Bar the temp little arrangement for Century) has also never had commercial radio on medium wave, the Brits still have an alternative rock national commercial radio station for 25/44yos on Medium wave today.

Almost every commercial radio station was on medium wave in Ireland until the new regime commenced in 89 and no AM licences where issued despite eg Capital 104.4 installing a MW transmitter such was their desire to be on AM.

The notion that Ireland is too small for DAB based on the MW experience does not add up.
As an aside I have never heard of Galway Bay FM having an AM licence - the IRTC where not issuing AM licences afaik but I am open to correction.

I have tried listening to radio in the car using my smartphone and the results are variable. I rarely have buffering issues with Spotify or podcasts but radio is more problematic.

Moon_shoes wrote: »

This whole thing about how the Brits have a booming dab scene and we got left behind is just silly, it's just we are too small. Ireland (Bar the temp little arrangement for Century) has also never had commercial radio on medium wave, the Brits still have an alternative rock national commercial radio station for 25/44yos on Medium wave today. In the 90s Galway bay fm were given a medium wave licence for a country music station but when they did the math they realised Galway was just too small to sustain enough advertising for a second radio station and that was long before the internet.

I normally stay well out of online debates - I know from experience where they generally end up but while I'm here, this is my two cents:

1) The radio industry has been caught up in platform debates for a long time now. I remember us (Phantom at the time) being involved in DAB trials in the mid/late 2000's and all the same arguments about scale, competition and the size of the country being aired then.

Fast forward 10 years and an industry group was to be set up (in 2017 I think) to ventilate those same debates again. Here we are in August 2020 and that never happened either which is not entirely a surprise.

In the interim, we have the Radioplayer platform which is good but unlike pretty much everywhere else where it is in use, it is basically closed to all non-aligned stations and always has been. We all know the story with FM licences. That's platforms dealt with

2) More important than the platform debate or the technology debate is of course content. All that matters to a listener is that they press a button and content they like comes out. They couldn't care less how it got there and neither should they. The rapid takeup in Ireland of Podcasting demonstrates that clearly. I don't believe that it is any coincidence that radio listenership is consistently a good deal higher in the UK (89% UK v 82% all adults here or even more starkly 78% v 55% amoung 15-24 year olds in London - Dublin) where good quality content is provided.

3) Scale is seriously overstated as a factor in this debate. The Solent Minimux in Portsmouth for example is fully populated with 24 Ofcom licenced services. Some are good, some are not. Some have listeners, some don't. The good ones succeed and the bad ones fail. Most are either local by nature or specialist in terms of content. Portsmouth has a population roughly 25% of Dublin at a push (250,000) yet amazingly can still support these stations alongside the big Global and Bauer brands along with the BBC National and local channels. Not bizzarely at all, the growth in stations has led to a growth in ad spend on Radio in the UK in each of the last 5 years. Meanwhile radio revenues here (pre-covid) have fallen along with audiences particularly for music stations.

Our method of regulation, the protection provided to existing players and our archaic beauty contest licencing system are serving nobody well. The status quo has generally been maintained (to come back to the original post) but it's being chipped away slowly (or rapidly if you're a station aimed at under 40s) and without radical change it's only going to keep shrinking much to the delight of the Social Media and Streaming companies.

Simon