England Radio: BBC To Change Radio Focus

The BBC is giving up competing with commercial radio stations for audiences to focus on the threat to its future from music on Spotify and podcasts via Apple.
.
The Telegraph is reporting that James Purnell, the BBC’s director of radio, will signal the shift this week by declaring he does not “care” about audience share or beating commercial stations in the battle for listeners.

In a speech seen by The Sunday Telegraph, Purnell will say that the BBC need to change quickly and shift spending away from its traditional broadcast programming to serve younger and more diverse audiences better.

“We need to change faster than we have in the last few years,” the former Labour cabinet minister will say. “We’ll need to change where we allocate our money. We’ll need to change the kind of content we offer. “
.
BBC radio has been losing ground to commercial broadcasters such as Global, company behind the phone-in station LBC which uses high-profile politicians such as as Nigel Farage and Sadiq Khan as presenters.

TalkSport, part of the Wireless Group now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, has been buying football coverage rights.

The explosion of capacity delivered by DAB and the internet have allowed rivals to challenge Radio 4 and Radio 5 Live.

Commercial radio is now reaching a bigger share of the population than the BBC according to industry figures known as the RAJARs.

Purnell will dismiss the shift as irrelevant to the BBC’s mission. He will say: “I don’t care about share. I don’t care about beating Global, Bauer or Wireless in the RAJARs. We care about the future of British audio.”

Purnell will speak as concern rises across the BBC about the impact of the internet on its traditional dominance of broadcasting.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London and it is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees.