News announced last Friday that the recent series of economic earthquakes has forced Channel 4 to withdraw from its plans to launch a digital radio network has sent shockwaves through the radio community. But what does the loss of the three new stations promised by Channel 4 — one of which, 4 Radio, was designed as a direct rival to the BBC’s Radio Four — mean for us as listeners? Would we ever have found the time to listen to them? Will we notice that they’re not there?
According to the latest figures, 7.7 million of us have so far been lured into buying a far-more-expensive digital (DAB) radio receiver, but we digital-listeners tune in to just 17.9 per cent of all radio, and most of that we could have heard on our old-fashioned analogue sets. Have we wasted our money on a technology that is going nowhere? The BBC has successfully developed new digital-only stations which offer different kinds of programmes to new audiences — especially the Asian Network and the newly renamed BBC Radio Seven — but there’s only one commercial station, Planet Rock, which lives up to its name as a music-only station.
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