boboff wrote:Aled.
This interests me.
Both Kate Nash and Bass hunter were either number two or number one in the charts before I heard them on the play list of Radio one day time shows. I thought at the time that as I liked both that in some way Radio 1 had missed the boat with there two artists, and commercial radio was showing there impact.
As that is negative I wouldn't bring it up on it's own, but with Duffy at number one, an Artist I have heard about only recently though Jo's show, I was wondering....
Does it bother you ? i.e. are you in some way criticized when the play list team "miss" and again are you congratulated when you "discover" a talent which then gets to number one.
I know you have mentioned before you like to hear opinions of what music people like, but as I rather lazily really on Radio on between 7 and 7 to inform me of what music is about, I am interested to know what element of "prophecy" you are charged with in your role of choosing what the Nation listens too.
There are many ways to get a song to number 1. Despite popular belief, Radio 1 isn't so powerful that just going on our playlist will do the job, otherwise you'd have 10 - 15 of high rotational songs that should be number 1. Similarly it's possible to get to number 1 without Radio 1 - although as many of the record companies will tell us (sometimes in rather stressed states) it's a lot harder.
You're question is SUCH a complicated one it's difficult to cover all the angles here - but when you consider there are two whole industries (radio and music) who all have an interest in your question you realise it's never going to be black and white. A couple of years back there were around 280 Commercial radio stations in the UK - I@m not sure what the figure is now. Commercial radio exists to make money. 11 - 15 year old girls don't have a lot of money, similarly neither (really) do the rest of the teenagers. The money is going to be the 20s and 30s. For that reason radio stations will sit either in the 15-24, 20 - 40, or 25 - 45 camp. So just because a song is being played on all of commercial doesn't neccessarily mean it should be played on Radio 1. It could be too old for us, or it could be too niche - and would pee off too many of our daytime audience than it would serve.
Basshunter was a mistake. We thought it would sit nicely on Galaxy and serve the "oi oi" crowd but would irritate the Radio 1 audience - and we were wrong. There was huge talk about Kate Nash and whether she'd succeed because at the time her first single was being released, we'd just had Lily, and our playlist had Nelly Furtado, Fergie, Gwen Stefanie, we were also considering Roisin Murphy, Amy McDonald and one other that I can't remember. We thought there may be saturation and wanted to wait and see which female singer songwriter would break through rather than throw all the new up and coming names to our audience. Once we saw Kate Nash was the one we added her.
Incidentally with Basshunter it wasn't commercial radio that showed it's impact but another example of online communities doing it's thing. Basshunter was one of Bebo's most downloaded videos. Once we (and then a lot of other radio stations) jumped on it - it prolonged it's time at Radio 1.
Radio 1 successes DO come through. Mika was ours months before other stations went with him, as was Lily herself. Duffy (apart from on the WawFfactor
- was number 2 on the BBC up and coming list partly because of our support of her on Radio 1.
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