The news that the BBC could axe 6Music has dealt another blow to new and unsigned bands looking to get their music heard by a wider audience. The message being sent to new bands, and music fans who wish to find them, is increasingly becoming ‘you’re on your own’.
While the BBC’s main stations Radio 1 & 2 continue with play-listed music, it is virtually impossible for new music to break through to a mainstream listenership. The BBC especially, as a public-funded organisation, has a duty to fulfill the wishes of all it’s public, not just those who are happy to be spoon-fed a diet of charted music over and over in a seemingly never-ending loop.
Instead of being seduced by the reports of 7 million listeners tuning into the main stations Breakfast and Drive-time Shows, the BBC should realise that audience figures aren’t everything, and that there remains a large proportion of the public who want to be presented with new, exciting music, and find new bands to fall in love with, as the loyal fanbase garnered by specialist stations such as 6Music will testify. These marginalised networks have become one of the last places to listen to new music that a major label exec, or Simon Cowell, hasn’t decided you should listen to, and any decision to axe a station such as 6Music purely because of listening figures is entirely missing the point of a medium whose main purpose is to bring the best in music to it’s audience.
Increasingly, it appears bands will have to put the leg work in themselves via social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook, to get their music heard, while fans will have to spend hours trawling the internet for their dose of new music. Unfortunately, the days when the passion and expertise of DJs such as John Peel would present their favourites to listeners are now disappearing, with just a handful of presenters such as Steve Lamacq and Zane Lowe grimly hanging on to their ideals of showcasing upcoming acts and rarely aired music.
The values of media outlets bringing a passion for music to equally passionate fans is getting lost in a fog of targets and a need for line-graphs marked ‘Listeners’ to be heading upwards. If the BBC wants to truly believe in it’s tag-line ‘In New Music We Trust’, it should re-address that trend as soon as possible.
(Dave Smith)
