It’s only five years now until the big switchover from analogue radio to digital, yet the most recent audience figures suggest that the number of digital listeners is actually going down.
It’s only five years now until the big switchover from analogue radio to digital, yet the most recent audience figures suggest that the number of digital listeners is actually going down. Less than a quarter (21.1 per cent) of listeners are now via the digital signal and most of that number are probably listening on their laptops via broadband or cable rather than on a DAB set. It’s not surprising. We may be living through one of the most exciting periods of technological advance since the great age of James Hargreaves’s Spinning Jenny and Jethro Tull’s seed drill, but in the 11 years since DAB radio was launched in 1999 it’s become more, not less, difficult to listen to. Those occasional pips and squeaks have become much more frequent, and often end in shut-offs, as the signal waxes, wanes and then disappears — no matter how swanky and credit-card-busting the radio set. Staying at my mother’s for the past few days — in the heart of the Home Counties with not a rolling hill in sight — I was surprised to discover how the digital reception has deteriorated. Without her ancient analogue radio, I’d have been stuck with Classic FM (comfort-food music, irritating ads) or Gaydar Radio. The only BBC station I could muster was BBC London.
We should be worried. If the legislation goes through Parliament then analogue will vanish overnight before new ways of funding digital radio, and its transmitters, have been devised. It’s yet another case of unjoined-up thinking. In this new digital era we need a radical discussion of how we’re going to pay for the broadcasting we want to tune in to.
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