Radio

Over the years, from the time I spent without a television, I have really fell in love with radio again as an entertainment form. Why I say "again" was as a child I listened to a lot of radio, In the past I use to listen to BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio5. Since then with the advent of DAB with have more stations to listen too from the BBC I have loved the music BBC 6 Music and the comedy and drama on BBC Radio 7. If you don't have a DAB radio then get one and listen to what you have been missing out on, it not just the BBC that use it there are loads of other stations to listen to.

I know my love of radio started when I was very young when I use to listen drama and comedy on BBC Radio 4 and later late night listening to LBC secretly while I was in bed and meant to be sleeping. Even my love of cricket comes from the radio through years of listening to Test Match Special as I did my paper round as a child. The introduction of BBC Radio 5 was ideal for me with it's mix of news and magazine format shows and that is one station I still listen to for my news and comment, before that it was the today programme on BBC Radio 4. When I discovered DAB radio and BBC 7 I started reliving my past with their great radio shows from the past that are still relevant today as they were when were first broadcast. Great comedy in my opinion is timeless. 

Like many radio was a great introduction to music while growing up. In the morning my mum would listen to Radio 1 while I had my breakfast and I got older I moved onto classic pop stations about like Radio Luxembourg, Radio Caroline, which was a pirate station that broadcast from a ship in the north sea, and the new commercial radio stations that had just started to appear as my musical tastes formed. Without radio back then there was no real means of listening to music without physically going down to the record shop and buying it. I remained a loyal commercial radio station listener for years to come before finally listing to Virgin Radio which I once managed to get a request played on much to my amazement. Then there was few lean years until I discovered BBC 6 Music which became my stable radio station of choice and where I discovered lots of new music. So for me it was bad news when the BBC announced it would be winding up the station sometime in the future and just make sure it lost listeners it started making it sound like BBC Radio 2. So at the moment I am Musically devoid of a station to listen to and now go looking for new bands and music on the internet.

So what of the future of radio, well that is going to be interesting in todays world of the internet and downloads. What I see is a bright future for talk radio while I see the popular music stations suffering. There are whole generations growing up now where their source of music is the internet and they have never heard radio in the same way as the generations before them have. This new generation is accustomed to picking and mixing there own music and playing it when and where they want to. It is this choice that will see the numbers of young people listening to music on the radio decrease year in and year out. Music stations won't die altogether but a lot of the smaller commercial stations and medium ones won't be able to generate the incomes to carry on broadcasting and with the pressure on the BBC to save money even some of their music services will go. I hope I'm wrong because radio is an ideal platform for music broadcasting.