Bauer rebranding 53 stations to The Hits/Greatest Hits

It's all complex. Wireless stations including Wave Blackpool had their final shows yesterday morning.

Wireless and Celador stations have had live breakfast shows locally weekdays, then 20 hours of voicetracked shows from GHR presenters, while UKRD and Lincs FM Group stations have had live programming throughout with the final shows on Sunday, only playing out pre-recorded shows such as Greatest Hits Superstars.

A brilliant and funny last link from a DJ on Minster FM:

New audio - @timlichfield at Minster FM North Yorkshire (Aug 28th 2020). This is a funny final link!#aircheck #radio pic.twitter.com/t7TXKhOsyg

— Aircheck Downloads (@airchecks) August 30, 2020

On Yorkshire Coast Radio earlier this week before one of Dawn French’s “GHR is coming” sweepers, the DJ said “watch out, the vicar’s back” or something to that effect. Had to laugh at that.

I only just saw this so I thought I’d put in my input.

My local radio station, Eagle Radio in Surrey, broadcast some of its last shows today.

Loads of people unhappy - more than I expected if I’m honest. A lot switching to Heart, etc. I am merely gauging this off social media such as Facebook, but there’s a fair amount of noise being made.

In my opinion, an awful decision. It’s such a shame that local radio is being lost.

Odd way to protest against against losing a local radio station by switching to Heart.... especially when there isn't a Heart for that area (there's ones all around it, but not officially in Eagles patch)

The funny thing is when Heart dropped all of their breakfast shows a lot of posts on social media were like ‘I’m never listening to Heart again!’, but many people who protested previously still do, maybe out of habit. Whilst it is clear many people are unhappy their local station is being dropped in favour of GHR, I wonder how many will stick with GHR out of ease?

If you look at the former UKRD portfolio, most of these were in distinctive areas that have no local rivals or like Eagle Radio which is inside the London regional TSAs, but provided a USP of local radio for Guildford and the surrounding areas of Surrey and NE Hants which aren't being provided by the London stations.

Most of the GHR FM stations that are being launched on Tuesday are on small scale FM licences launched in the 90s which were another failure of regulators in this country who thought that by licensing tiny stations for small towns instead of a couple more national commercial stations was the answer to providing more choice.

We're now in a situation where there are a handful of local commercial radio stations left, while local radio has been left to the BBC and the voluntary sector to provide that service, while the rest of the former ILR, regional and small-scale commercial radio sector is now providing quasi-national brands such as Heart, Capital and GHR.

I’m not sure you can say it’s a failure of ‘the regulators’ the point is these stations have survived for a relatively long time. It’s not like they lasted 6 months and handed the licence back in most cases, so they must have been viable on some level to last as long as they have. But obviously over the last few years and particularly into 2020 they will have started to become less and less viable. But I think it would have been a bit difficult to predict the media landscape of now in the 1990s.

It’s also not like the old GWR and Capital Group stations weren’t viable at the time they became Hearts & Capital either. It was a decision made because it would increase profits.

This misconception is completely bonkers. None of the "enthusiasts" you talk about ever suggested such a thing. Most enthusiasts want to see a return to personality radio, rather than the more minimalist style that's been the way for some years now outside of breakfast.

Sadly, the closest thing we get to personality radio, is famous people presenting radio shows, **cough**Amanda Holden**cough**

All the talk about GHR has left me feeling cold. I'm actually surprised that they're going to go to the effort of actually creating a GHR Cornwall, which I suppose will replace the current network feed on the Cornwall mulitplex. But considering what they're doing to other stations across the country, creating GHR Cornwall seems a little weird.

Whilst in previous big radio changes, people may have got angry on social media for a few weeks, and then just carried on listening, I think this time there are some fundamental differences.

GHR is a very different proposition to many of the stations it’s replacing. The Lincs Group and UKRD stations in particular have been very family-focused, playing songs from the mid 80s to the present day. I just can’t see an oldies station replacing these as the top choice of listening on the school-run. And whilst many might enjoy the odd sing-along song from the 70s or 80s, people who enjoy listening to Adele, Sam Smith, Pink, Coldplay, (recent) Take That, Michael Bublé and other big, accessible, popular current artists aren’t going to be satisfied with a diet of classic hits. I expect there will be a lot of tuning around.

And to compare this to other big rebrands in the past, almost all of the stations which became Heart or Capital were already heavily networked with a limited amount of local content at the point of changeover (The Bay and 2BR being two recent notable exceptions). UKRD’s stations, in contrast, have been relentlessly local to the very end, so the switch from 100% locally produced programmes to 100% networked is going to be considerably more jarring. I wonder if, had it not been for the pandemic, Bauer might have introduced off-peak GHR networking to all of its acquisitions as a stepping-stone to the full rebrand.

I suspect the former Breeze stations will fare the best, switching from one fairly bland, mostly networked, adult-orientated brand to another. But there’s not a cat in Hell’s chance of stations like Yorkshire Coast or Spire FM holding on to their large, loyal, local audiences.

Annoyingly, with Rajar sampling currently suspended, we’ll not know for a while how the rebranded stations will fare in terms of audience. My guess is this will spare Bauer some of their blushes during an inevitable dip in listening.

As I managed to find myself bored on a Sunday evening, I decided to have a look through the public files to see where each of the news bulletins are being produced. Surprisingly, whilst some of the centres are closing, the following are remaining open:



I'm not sure why they've decided to keep these studios open, whilst others stations are having bulletins read from two counties over.

(Guess who's slightly bitter about North Derbyshire news coming from Leeds)

Has part of the decision making behind this been proximity to existing Big City / Hits stations? I don’t claim to know much about local radio but I know that what was Radio Wave in Blackpool overlaps with Rock FM in Preston. I’d say it makes more sense to have 2 different offerings rather than to continue to compete against each other as they have done for years. Anyone switching off GHR will probably tune into Rock FM.