Radio - Richard Cook on pop programming

Although it didn't exactly pique national interest, a song broke a couple of records in two consecutive weeks last month. The current hit single by Robbie Williams, "She's the One", twice overcame the previous all-time high for the number of people to hear a record on the radio in one week. The second time, the track was heard by over 100 million people in the UK - which suggests an unexpected population explosion, but is accounted for by some of us hearing it more than once.

Actually, if you were tuned to a station playing chart music, you would have heard it so often that it would have become about as familiar as "Happy Birthday".

The record scored a total of 2,337 plays on the radio in one week. When pop radio here was in its infancy, that kind of statistic would have suggested that the track was played almost continuously for seven days. Now, there are numberless stations playing - and creating - chart hits. Yet the nature of pop radio has hardly changed at all since Radio 1 took over from the pirates a little over 30 years ago. It still marches to a drum beaten on behalf of little more than a handful of tunes, recycled to the point of staleness, then traded in for the next batch. You will never hear them again until they are resuscitated for greatest-hits formats. Like so many of our cultural imperatives, the style of pop radio follows an American model which, in its home base, has become so regimented that it has whole stations standing or falling on the minutiae of tiny degrees of programming. Institutions such as Capital or Radio 1 pretend a certain aloofness from this slavering after ratings, but the bigger they are, the harder they fall: in the chase for audiences, nothing is sacred.

Least of all, any sense of a diversity in programming. Londoners have been witness to a recent battle for the soul of the local BBC station GLR, which has so far stood by a reasonably eclectic mix of both musical and talk-radio styles. Jazz FM, which opened as an uncompromising minority-music station and has struggled to find an identity since wavering from its first principles, has given over most of its daytime schedules to a boring diet of what American radio calls "smooth jazz". The radical indie-rock station Xfm was quickly toned down after its initial salvo was found to be insufficiently pleasing to advertisers; its small, diehard following has grown, but the station already sounds like many others, its early intensity a dim memory.

None of this is very surprising, but it does seem perplexing that, at a time when pop has mutated into so many different and exotic styles, its chief megaphone, the radio, seems convinced that it has only a handful of different records to choose from. Even Radio 2, only recently a cosily unpredictable outpost of a wide range of music, now shelters Martine McCutcheon and Melanic C on its A-list, just as Radio 1 has Geri Halliwell on its list.

Perhaps it's time for pirate radio to make its latest comeback. In the 1970s, pirate reggae stations played mysterious dub records in endless loops. In the eighties, before dance music took over all of pop, its underground status was heightened by pirate protagonists. Most pop radio gets treated as wallpaper, and it has always been that way, but its current indifference to marginal players is creating a McDonald's of the airwaves which, for all its insistence on being up to date, seems paradoxically old-fashioned. If I want to hear modern bebop, severe heavy metal, new reggae, old rockabilly, fresh ambient or any other kind of strain that programmers have filtered out of their schedules, I have to go somewhere other than the radio. Programmers might argue that none of those things are the stuff of pop radio. Why not?

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