Rolling Interminable 6Music Daytime Canon

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.

Riley / Coe are still playing some of the most interesting stuff you'll find on the station, new and old. though Riley's post punk bent is probably going out of fashion even among nostalgists and maybe it's pushing luck to have a teatime radio show that might play the Fire Engines in 2023.

the "new music fix" sounds incredibly cringe and with no individual stamp on it there's sure to be daytime playlist creep (more of the blandest part of the station by far). "the best new music" has always felt like such a lame attempt to get down, esp in an era where music from every decade is getting rediscovered and repurposed by the Kids on tiktok. look son I've got the newest music on my MP3!!

unfortunately the optics + mini Craig Charles dummy spit from retrograde elements of the listener base will probably have a lot of casual listeners believing that this is a necessary freshen up / diversifying clear out of the male pale and stale rather than a blandening and narrowing step. feels like a decision made on paper.

Not really invested in 6Music but the lack of sensitivity in dealing with Coe’s move just days after his father’s death stinks.

Woke up this morning to give my dad his tablets and I told alexa to play 6music and Funkadelic - Standing On The Verge Of Getting It on was playing. Happy days!

Then sadly they went and spoiled it all by playing something stupid like Where's Me Jumper by Sultans Of Ping F.C.

That was cited as a 6music staple (I think) in the 3rd post on this thread.

Agree with koogs that Coe is supportive to various musicians who can't make a living from music. Perhaps to a fault, perhaps too loyal to the same old names.

Agree very much with cw's post.

Agree with verhexen who is quite right about 'new music' and to say that bad decisions making the station worse will be obscured by misleading publicity that will make people think it's getting better.

I don't know the Fire Engines but Coe the other night played a quite good track that turned out to be by a band from Fast Product 40 years ago who had just reformed and made their first LP.

Agree with Dan Worsley about the personal aspect.

Nice discussion. Don't care about 6Music but imagine this:

"Keep Steve Lamacq till he's 80."

The way the country is going I can see it.

Going to assume that Lamacq consistently pulls in listeners and might be the most popular show?

Disaster if so. I assume it's someone like Laverne.

Of the residual old guard, Coe's my favourite and Lamacq's easily my most bad and hated: the one show I simply cannot bear to listen to. (It was the same with daytime Radcliffe and Keaveny, and I've basically been on board with all the other recent major changes until this one.)

I never listen to the radio but, among Radio 6 listeners I know, Coe seems to be the go to guy.

... I'm more familiar with his dad tbh!

The day they shift Cerys Matthews from Sunday mornings is when I'll get outraged. (Apparently, it's the "biggest single show on Radio 6, and the most listened to digital show in the UK" so I guess she's safe.)

Would venture that she probably plays more records from the 1920s than anyone else on the BBC right now.

ok that makes me want to check her show out!

Her show is a wonder. It's given me so much pleasure over the years. Sure, it's geared towards Sunday morning and errs on the gentler side (a plus for me tbh), but she ventures more widely around the world and through time than 99% of anything else that's ever been on the radio.

ILM fave O Superman is being played right now.

re Matthews: Not having listened much for years, I think what she does with musical diversity, and even other sounds and literature? - is creditable. I just don't much enjoy her own voice and persona. I once heard her interview the Irish Ambassador, which was quite exciting for me as I'd met him myself. And coincidentally I saw him on the 10 o'clock news last night.

Tom D: I know nothing about Tony Coe, but he died recently and I think Coe played an hour of records he'd been on. (I think the news of cutting Coe's programme came about 3 days later.)

re Lamacq, I wouldn't choose to listen to him, but I think his continued existence has comedy value. He will still have features like "listeners recommend underrated records from the 1990s", giving him a chance to play Kingmaker and Senseless Things. Music that didn't sound good when we were 19.

Oddly I couldn't bear Keaveney, finding his voice, delivery, persona unbearable, yet many people seemed to like him a lot.

Last night Coe stated that his programme will end on 11th May. Sooner that I'd imagined. It was a sad moment.

something we can all agree on then: Keaveney is/was terrible

Good to hear!

I didn't like Keaveney's voice much either.

For a long time I thought he was Vernon Kay. Then I saw a photo and thought he was Chris Moyles. My mine has never quite settled on a coherent conception of Shaun Keaveny. No need now.

Cerys Matthews' show is a delight. I don't really understand why her persona rubs some people up the wrong way. I think someone said they find it too homely or something? I love home I do.