Rolling Interminable 6Music Daytime Canon

His voice (Tom R) is bad for radio and I don't find anything good about him.

I don't think it is good that he is being promoted more and more as key voice of 6music.

Gilles Peterson on a Saturday afternoon still manages to be fresh and enthusiastic. The other week when they were all broadcasting from Salford and had obv. been told to give the shows a local slant, he announced one track as "by one of THE ALL TIME GREAT Manchester bands....KALIMA!" and it made me laugh bcs which other DJ on the staion would even put Kalima in their top 20 Mcr acts?

He did a great tribute to Simon Booth last week which had Sade calling in.

Yeah Peterson is always a good time imo.

I've never felt old enough to enjoy Peterson.

there's always that feeling that he's been into everything for years before you even heard of it, but I think he's been DJing since he was about 15.

Part of me just thinks fuck this boring endless struggle that every media outlet has to bring in new, younger audiences while not pissing off existing ones. Give up. Just let your station's audience be a cohort that gets older and older, liking things just the way they are. Keep Steve Lamacq till he's 80. Bring back Liz Kershaw. For the younger listeners, launch a new station and let the old one decline into ossified irrelevance till its last listener is in the grave.

cannot even for rhetorical purposes allow the possibility of liz kershaw being on the radio sorry

I agree with alba actually.

in general yeah it sounds good, set up a load of stations for different people and let them age with the audience. right now for example there is almost nowhere to hear 60s music on the BBC. you know, that obscure decade nobody cares for or remembers any more.

Which is odd as the oldies stations growing up concentrated on the 50s & 60s then eventually added the 70s then the 50s was dropped and the 80s added..

Sounds of the Sixties, radio 2, er 6am on Saturdays (and on Sounds if, like me, 6am Saturdays is inconvenient)

(i wonder if TB keeps up the pretence that the show is an lp with two sides?)

that's the show I was thinking of

looking at the listings it's a very mixed bag. a lot of the sixties feels like the end of the fifties...

My Dad & I listened to sounds of the 60s via sounds app on alexa the other day. Lots of sweet soul music.

Sounds of the Sixties has now been going four times as long as the sixties themselves, I'm suprised there's anything left to play. Last time I heard it about 20 years ago Brian Matthew had started to include TV theme tunes. Perhaps soon even actual sounds: football rattles, steam trains, a Ford Prefect reversing...

There's lots of people who enjoy it still.

btw this is a good site for telling you a full list of what's been played on all the radio stations.

Here's the 6 music one

https://onlineradiobox.com/uk/bbcradio6/playlist/

oh no, 6music is ilmmusic Robyn is playing.
https://i.imgur.com/fEKIQzg.jpg

Sounds of the Sixties has now been going four times as long as the sixties themselves, I'm suprised there's anything left to play. Last time I heard it about 20 years ago Brian Matthew had started to include TV theme tunes. Perhaps soon even actual sounds: football rattles, steam trains, a Ford Prefect reversing...

tbf if this was how it worked Sounds Of The Sixties could now be playing yé yé, Caetano Veloso and enka music. I'd tune in!

If I was in charge of 6 music I would have them do a show that is just old tv theme tunes, also I would bring back 'The Organist Entertains'

https://www.tiktok.com/search?q=the%20organist%20encores&t=1680685175927

there are some pretty good viewing figures here, someone should get Nigel Ogden to set up a tiktok

They could bring Ted Heath back from the dead to present it.

he can be prime minister too while we're at it

I liked Sounds of the Sixties a lot when it was, as I recall, 8-10am. Gave up when it moved earlier, and don't really need Blackburn.

re Alba's comment, I think it's supported by the fact that the population - and certainly the population that thinks of itself as liking popular music - is ageing. Given demographic change, the notion of shunning the over-40s, over-50s, over-60s or whoever as an embarrassment doesn't make sense.

6music has never been perfect, from my POV it has always contained dross (Keaveney, 'Huey') along with things I quite liked (Craig Charles on Saturday evening, used to listen quite often), things that are frequent and adequate (Laverne), and some things that were actively good and valued (Coe). From my POV the latest changes are moving in a bad direction (less Coe) and the station will become much less a part of my life. Presumably someone at the BBC knows what they're doing and they don't need people like me.

My last comment was pretty ill phrased - '6music has never been perfect' a pretty poor statement, for whoever said it was?

My main point really is that for some of us, Coe has long been the best thing about the station, so cutting back on him means shedding a lot of listeners, presumably with the aim of replacing them (us) with younger ones.

The BBC Trust used to put out reports every five years that gave you some indication of the demographics of the radion stations. Since the Trust was dissolved, it seems very difficult to find publically available information on age of the listeners. I guess if you're a RAJAR subscriber you could see the data. The old BBC Trust reports seem to show the 6 Music audience ageing faster than the general population. Interesting, back in 2009, the Trust said both it and Radio 2 should particuarly look to serve needs of older listeners.

Thanks Alba. Typical of you to bring the facts.

6music clearly now doing the opposite of what they were then advised to do.

I do think much more generally than 6music that "chasing a younger audience" is a dubious strategy in practical as well as ethical terms, for the reasons given. The older audiences are more loyal to the old medium (radio more than podcast, tiktok or whatever; newspaper rather than online news; paying the licence fee rather than not; etc), and given current demographics they are not going to disappear as quickly as older generations once did.

Publically, radion - not bringing the language

I heard Coe talking about the changes on hiw show last night (see, I do listen to it!), and he sounded shall we say less than ecstatic about them, while retaining his dignity. He did say that he had done his dream job for 16yrs and not many people get those sort of chances, which is a philosophical way of looking at things.

pinefox the BBC considers your demographic to aready be "super served" by BBC Radio I'm afraid.

Commercial stations have the luxury of appealing to whatever demographic they think will attract advertisers, which tends to be older listeners with disposable income. An extremely serendipitous byproduct of going after older listeners is that 1) they grew up with a radio habit 2) they are not constantly on Tiktok and Snapchat.

The BBC doesn't have this luxury, apart from the stations that are explicitly set up for older listeners eg R2, R3, R4, er, 4Extra (there are actually quite a lot)! The BBC is supposed to try to reach everybody, which includes young people. I guess you could say they're served by R1 and 1Xtra, but that doesn't really cover all the things younger listeners might want, so the BBC tries to reach them in a number of other ways - with podcasts, with certain shows on R4, etc and yes, certain shows on 6M.

Alba I think those old service licenses from the Trust got kind of merged into one mega-license held by Ofcom, which is a bit less prescriptive but still has stuff about minimum hours of news and speech etc:

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/107072/bbc-operating-licence.pdf

No demographic data in that though?

@BBC6Music Such an incredibly myopic strategy. Kids won’t want what you serve, as they never have on your music radio — your managements tried so often and failed to capture “youth”. Stop repeating the pattern. Let older people & outliers who still centre music have @bbc6music.

— Chris Thorpe-Tracey (@christt) April 6, 2023

What are typical Coe bands? Used to think his GLR show with Fi Glover was fantastic to wake up to ... but for some reason have never tuned in to his 6Music show.

(6Music has never really landed with me, for some reason).

FWIW, djh, two things about Coe are

a) he is the only DJ on radio who plays C86 [as in eg: original bands that were on C86, or bands that were around or could have been on it, or C86 type people who are still going now] - almost literally seems the only one who even remembers or cares what it was or is;

b) he plays reggae very regularly.

Neither of those things is for everyone, perhaps they're both niche.

I've just been listening to this programme from last week - but NB this tracklisting is NOT correct:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001kd0y

- and I actually came back here to say: the BBC could avoid so angering all the people who don't like this change, just by putting, say, 500 hours of old Coe programmes on BBC Sounds in perpetuity. Many people would be content enough just to go back and play them again. Perhaps there are technical or financial reasons they can't do that. Or perhaps they just don't want to create something that competes with the inferior new replacement programmes.

I broadly agree with Alba's tweeter, and again note that the population is ageing, so 'older listeners' are no longer a feeble minority who should be swept away or given an hour of Vera Lynn a week, but must increasingly be most of the audience; so wilfully alienating them doesn't seem rational.

Said tweeter goes on to have a dramatic exchange with a 6music staffer.

Well, I trust my source Tom and you don’t appear to be an insider by your bio — but you’ll note I was careful to include the possibility it was wrong in the original tweet.

— C J Thorpe-Tracey (@christt) April 6, 2023

I've still to read that c86 book.

The BBC only has rights to the songs it plays on the radio for 30 days after the transmission date. So any programme with music in it expires after a month.

I really am amazed at this idea that 6 Music is "too young", or angling that way. Let's look at today's schedule: Lauren Laverne starts things off with a playlist that includes Pavement, Ian Dury, Nick Cave, Moby, Nina Simone, The Specials, St Etienne, etc etc. Lauren herself first came to fame in an indie band that broke up 25 years ago.

Mid-morning we get Mary Anne Hobbs, always a little more dancey and forward thinking than Lauren, but she still finds space for The Fall, Beastie Boys, Four Tet, The National, Feist, Radiohead, etc. All pretty squarely aimed at the millennial and Gen X cognoscenti. About half the playlist became famous 20 years ago at least.

Afternoon we see Chris Hawkins sitting in for Craig Charles. Almost boomer territory here. Prince, Patti Smith, Sugarhill Gang, The Smiths, Cocteau Twins. An interview with The The!

As I type this Huw Stephens (formerly Radio 1) is sitting in for Steve Lamacq. Playlist includes Pavement, Japan, PJ Harvey, The National, Hole, Daft Punk, Eddie Grant, R.E.M.

I could go on. The idea that 6 Music is forgetting about older listeners just doesn't feel like it holds up. If the beef is that not enough specifically C86 music gets played, well, fair enough. Despite this post I don't actually know the schedule well enough to know how true that is, but you're probably right that it's a niche thing in 2023. And yeah, probably not tons of reggae. But pinefox if you want to hear reggae, 1Xtra has some fantastic reggae shows! Rodigan does two hours of it every Sunday! More here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/category/music-soulandreggae?sort=popular

I think a lot of this is a hangover from when 6music was launched as a station for "new music" (however you unpack that)

Epic trolling, Tracer.

Tracer: personally I haven't said that 6music is 'too young' at all. I think it has been, for some time, roughly as you describe.

The question, I think, is about trajectory and what is changing. Apparently it is aiming to attract younger listeners, and this seems to mean younger DJs. Maybe it will mean younger artists played also.

So this is a distinction between 6music past and future.

As far as I can see the tweeter quoted by Alba wasn't necessarily saying much different from that, though they're sounding more polemical than me.

I thought there would be a technical or legal reason that programmes could not be retained online for long, as you note. (Though tons of things are on eg iPlayer for ages that *contain* music - but that must be another matter.)

Another question on which I started to reflect was about the relation between audience and presenter ie: how far does the latter have to resemble the former, to be accepted by it? It seems that this is itself something that has changed. I think there is a kernel of truth in the idea that 'the audience will identify with someone who's like them'. But it's also true that eg: 35 years ago, John Peel was quite a lot older than most of his listeners - the ones who taped The Wedding Present off his programme and voted in the Festive 50 - and his difference from them wasn't seen as a disadvantage. He was 'avuncular' or a 'reassuring wise old head'. Maybe that category of appeal to youth is one that has gone.

Another odd instance: about 15 years ago (?) when Jonathan Ross behaved dreadfully and was taken on air, much talk was that 'The BBC needs Ross to appeal to its youth audience'.

As some people pointed out, he was already in his 50s!

It might even be that young vs old is not the most helpful frame (though it is easy to perceive and it's somewhat logical to use it). There are lots of older people on 6music I don't like. And I'm not going to say that we need to campaign to preserve Steve Lamacq - who for me mainly has comedy value only. Nor Hobbs, whom I don't like, let alone 'Huey' - etc etc.

In my own case it's mainly that I happen to value Coe, and I think when you have a good thing, removing it is a bad idea. In a way the question is no more complicated than that, from my own particular POV.

+ Tracer: I wouldn't dare to say that not enough C86 music (even broadly defined) gets played. It's a niche. It's not as if I think I can demand that Laverne, Charles or others must play it (they wouldn't).

It's more that when I do hear Coe play it, in some form or other, I feel somewhat contented and comforted, to think that the BBC does, despite everything, still serve people who like this music.

Clearly it's moving away from that. Presumably it will say it needs to appeal to other people. Fair enough. By the same token, it will no longer appeal to me.

Last night I was thinking something like: "Pinefox, you've posted all these posts to an ILX thread about 6music, and got into discussions about audiences, which were beside the point in a way, because all you meant to say was that you liked Coe's programme -- and do you even like it that much? You haven't listened to him from the start, you only started a few years ago, you don't listen to him every night or all of every programme, and he sometimes plays things you don't like ... maybe this whole campaign is OTT at best".

Then I actually turned on Coe, live, halfway through, and heard the usual mix of music, much more diverse than I would usually hear from other sources: African pop, Latin music, reggae, electronic music, rock & roll, blues, folk-rock, some tremendous old acoustic folk ... and amid this, remarkably, a song by 1,000 Violins which, despite knowing this band better than most people would, I had never heard before. It was delightful to hear it: a very average 12-string riff in C much like something I've come up with myself, an old BBC session track. An old 1,000 Violins session - I wouldn't even hear that by listening to my own music collection, let alone anywhere else on radio. It segued into an acoustic, atmospheric track, driven by ukelele, that sounded curiously like Magnetic Fields, and after a while I started singing a random Merritt vocal over the top. Then after a while it turned out it *was* Merritt, with a solo track I'd not heard in a decade and, again, wouldn't have heard again even by delving into my own music unless I'd deliberately delved quite far. This also was marvellous.

I concluded that I had not really overrated Coe's programme, that it's by far the best popular music programme on the BBC in any format, it's a public service, and they're wrong to cut it.

Do you listen to any of the other shows?

Sometimes. Over the years, quite a lot.

I used to play Craig Charles' Saturday night soul / funk programme regularly but have got out of the habit (I assume it's still going).

African pop, Latin music, reggae, electronic music, rock & roll, blues, folk-rock, some tremendous old acoustic folk

I will say that sounds like Giles Peterson's show as well, though perhaps with less folk.

gideon coe, i've never heard, but he's been very generous with his airplay to friends of mine in bands / with record labels

Gideon Coe is a sweetheart and plays a wonderful variety of stuff, I unfailingly catchup with his show first thing as my work morning ritual. I honestly don't think its really a question of the vintage of music 6 music plays in general so much as blandness and dearth of invention? the playlist dominates during the day and is frequently deathly, and the old stuff they'll play seems to be similarly reaching for the same worn out, uh, classics. The irony of axing Marc Riley's show is he plays overwhelmingly the newest and most youthful bands (albeit quite a narrow furrow) and god help them, they all love him cos he played in the fall...

... which means he knows their life more than most.