Well, I'm clear headed after a night that should have seen me out and about at the Other Rooms for Heavyweight, I have to apologise for not going because to be honest things have been a little surreal this last week and it has left me feeling far from 100%. Anyway I have to say I'm gutted to have missed Youngsta.
Next I would like to congratulate Utopia FM who although are on air now with another RSL broadcast, have just been given a community licence for Sunderland, Ofcoms press release is here, nice work. I look forward to it, and hopefully being involved. Interesting to see that Newcastle will now have two community stations. If you want to read about community radio, wikipedia offers some details here.
Anyway on to a related manifesto of sorts, which will be no doubt be interrupted by me laughing at Just a Minute.
Student radio in the UK, in my eyes at least, seems to be in a bit of a squeeze financially, and so the stations seem to be looking at new directions, or seem to be falling at the way side. Online broadcasting seems to be the direction that a few stations have decided to head for, or the other is the community licences as mentioned above in the post. I feel that although both have their pitfalls, it is a great relief that student stations are escaping from the FM RSL broadcasts that dominated student audio media in the UK. These licences crippled student radio, how do you keep a station popular while it is off air for 6 months, you need a dedicated marketting team and a strong promotional campaign, and even that won't do the job.
So what to opt for, well I believe that both will now present challenges to those running the stations in how to create and maintain an audience. If the nations commercial station's are struggling to deal with the challenge of competing with new media sources, what does it mean for the student stations. We, the listener, have access to a huge array of audio, from web only stations specialising in a particular genre, podcasts on demand, or stations that are trying to be a localised station in a worldwide market place.
This is where I reach my key problem facing student radio stations working online alone, that although they have an audience, are they really maximising that audience. A student station operating online only, is not accessible to it's full audience, and even worse I feel will be guilty of alienating any listener who has stumbled across the station by accident, admittedly not as likely as with your FM dial. Online stations are only accesible to the students who have access to broadband, at the library yes, but what percentage of students have broadband at home? In an ideal world, it would be closer to 100% than it actually is. This also raises the question of how the station earns money from advertising without a real hold of the audience.
Cue the advantage of the community licence, you have access to an audience all of the time, through their mobile phones (well the one's that have FM radios), their radios at home, and also at work. It also means that you have access to the wider community of your city or town. And with student reputations constantly being damaged by local media sensationalism, unhappy locals and to be fair poor behaviour, it is a perfect oppurtunity to build bridges within the community. Also, and I hope that this is noted by University marketting departments, if your station is providing something that is local and far more engaging than other commercial stations in your area you can start to attract potential local students to your university.
Though here I draw on a question, one that I can't answer myself. Is a student community station really looking to replicate a commercial staion or is it looking to provide programming for the whole student community?
By this I mean that student radio in the U.K, in my experiences, is certainly dominated, if not totally programmed to the audience of the British music lover, whether that be an indie kid, a hip hop fan, or like Forward Motion when it was on air the electronic/ experimental music lover. And although I cannot deny music does cross borders what I want to know is their a case for student stations to accomodate programming for the more vunerable students those who are in a different country and a new culture, should international students be more strongly targetted by student radio programmers? I think so, and I regret never having tried to push this fact previously. The key issue is accessing these groups and getting them interested in student radio, in doing so I now believe that it would be possible to not only link up with this student community but also similar minority groups in your local vicinity.
What student radio stations now need to do is consider who their audiences are, and how to reach out to the community. Too much time is devoted on air to the same genre, and although the oppurtunity to give a good number of people experience on air cannot be knocked, I think that the need to try and attract a wider community to the station both as an audience and participants is necessary, otherwise community stations will soon become micro commercial stations and is that what is really intended.
I hope some will come and knock my arguements on the head, there are far more points I could make, but let's leave it at that. Community radio can be interesting, look at Resonance, therefore you would hope a station ran by students could offer something just as interesting.
If you want some more community radio related details check this out written by Gregory Whitehead
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