Definitions - music

[amateur51]

It makes sense to me - for the reasons that I mentioned at the beginning of that sentence.

Fairy nuff but I'm still perplexed. I don't want to find what I'm looking for. I like to tune in to various radio stations to hear what they're doing to see if I'm entertained, engrossed, captivated, even repelled but I don't necessarily think "ooooh where do I find some Dvorak at 11:37 on a Thursday?". What I do know is that bleeding chunk content aside, I don't like what I get from Radio 3 more often than not these days, i.e., idiotic intrusive patronising presenter-led gabbling.

I'm not too clear what is meant by 'generic' radio either. 'Generic food' would be 'meat and two veg' I guess, or 'meatless sauce with veggies, pasta and cheese' if you're a veggie - nothing wrong with that in itself but you're unlikely to set the world on fire with it

[french frank]

I think your style of listening is unusual. Generic radio really started with Radio 1 because the BBC wanted to capture the 'pirate radio listeners' so had to provide pop music for young people. That's what that audience wants to listen to and most will only swap over to another station playing more or less the same thing. Arguably the Third started it. Reith's idea was to 'speak to the nation' not bits of the nation, as if everything could appeal to everyone.

The commercial stations were another boost for the generic idea. They stake out their audience and put on the kind of thing those listeners like. Then radio became a 'background' service which people would listen to for hours on end - hence all the R3 programmes lasting for 2-3 hours instead of all the shorter, more focused programmes.

Now, there are so many kinds of speech radio - news, current affairs, sport, drama, discussion &c - and so many kinds of music (corresponding to broad tastes) that you have to have specialist stations or people wouldn't listen at all. Studies show that people last for less than two minutes once they become aware they 'don't like' what they're hearing. They switch off or over - the last thing that broadcasters want them to do, especially the commercials. So a 'non-generic' station would appeal to no one for more than a few minutes ... It's a different world from when there was no TV, and only two different radio stations.

The 'make-your-own-content' idea is likely to be nothing more than generic narrowcasting in most cases.

[amateur51]

I think your style of listening is unusual. Generic radio really started with Radio 1 because the BBC wanted to capture the 'pirate radio listeners' so had to provide pop music for young people. That's what that audience wants to listen to and most will only swap over to another station playing more or less the same thing. Arguably the Third started it. Reith's idea was to 'speak to the nation' not bits of the nation, as if everything could appeal to everyone.

The commercial stations were another boost for the generic idea. They stake out their audience and put on the kind of thing those listeners like. Then radio became a 'background' service which people would listen to for hours on end - hence all the R3 programmes lasting for 2-3 hours instead of all the shorter, more focused programmes.

Now, there are so many kinds of speech radio - news, current affairs, sport, drama, discussion &c - and so many kinds of music (corresponding to broad tastes) that you have to have specialist stations or people wouldn't listen at all. Studies show that people last for less than two minutes once they become aware they 'don't like' what they're hearing. They switch off or over - the last thing that broadcasters want them to do, especially the commercials. So a 'non-generic' station would appeal to no one for more than a few minutes ... It's a different world from when there was no TV, and only two different radio stations.

The 'make-your-own-content' idea is likely to be nothing more than generic narrowcasting in most cases.

Thanks for the clarification.

As far as my unusual style of listening is concerned, Radio 3 now falls into my 'turn off after two minutes' category wheras it used to be on from about 09:00 most days once I'd retired.Classic FM has always fallen into the category. So I have no music station that I want to listen to - I am a consumer in need of a provider - who will come to my cultural aid?

For spoken word I have Radio 4 and at night BBC World Service and if I need to be wound up, LBC 97.3 in London

[french frank]

On the points that were just discussed ('hammocking', btw, is inserting 'worthy/difficult' items in between popular ones to reach a different audience) and 'generic' broadcasting:

“[...] it worked, to some extent, when listeners and viewers had little choice in the matter. But today - even before the digital devices take full effect - hammocking is a dying art. They just go. You can study the charts of fifteen second audience movements and see them go the moment they realise that a given programme doesn't meet their mood or expectations. [...]

“In Britain, and I guess in many other Western countries, public broadcasters find themselves caught between a cultural elite who are desperate to re-assert the primacy of high seriousness, and a wider public who are marching to a very different drum[...]

“BBC Radio solved this problem in the 1960s by segmenting out into a suite of stations with quite different remits: a classical music station of real seriousness, Radio 3; a rock and pop station Radio 1; an MOR station Radio 2; and a news-led speech station, Radio 4. Each has pursued a public service agenda, but in very different ways.

“I don't believe that the BBC should sit on the fence on the issue of high culture and high seriousness. Keeping faith with the most ambitious artistic achievements and the biggest ideas of our civilisation is an imperative which goes beyond the question of audience size. Nor does it mean curating a museum devoted to a dead classical canon. Serious music is alive and well in Britain: a few weeks ago we broadcast Mark-Anthony Turnage's brilliant new opera The Silver Tassie, for example. It was watched by perhaps an eighth of the normal audience for BBC TWO, but so what? It's a musical landmark. And of course even that modest TV audience was many multiples of the numbers who saw it on the stage. [...]