Bauer rebranding 53 stations to The Hits/Greatest Hits

You missed out Classic FM there on your FM dial listing. Pirate FM doesn't have nearly as much heritage as Plymouth Sound did. Plymouth Sound launched in 1975 and was the only commercial station for years west of Exeter & Torbay. They didn't even have the BBC as competition until 1983. Pirate didn't launch until 1992, and already had the BBC as competition. The "heritage" angle really only ever applied to the initial 40 ILRs, and Pirate was not part of that.

Right now, Pirate FM is the only station in Cornwall with a reach in the hundreds of thousands, with both Radio Cornwall and Heart Cornwall in the 90,000s. But when you look back 1 year to Q1 2019, Pirate FM has only gained 1,000 more listeners. In the same time, Heart Cornwall has lost 16,000 listeners, and BBC Radio Cornwall has lost 19,000 listeners. So where have they all gone? I think it's safe to say, that the listeners have gone to other stations, and the biggest beneficiaries from what I can tell have been the community radio stations, and Goldmine.

Dont forget that Pirate did bid for the independent Plymouth licence when it was readvertised over 10 years ago. They lost to the group which became Radio Plymouth.

I think that Radio Plymouth does ok in SE Cornwall, as you hear a lot of callers and comments from listeners read out from say Saltash, Torpoint and Looe.

Cornwall is not badly served at all, in fact, it's served very well by radio. Some of us actually lived through a time when Cornwall didn't have a single local radio station, and yes, I do remember those days. It seems weird now to think when I was knee high to a grasshopper, there were only 4 radio stations that we could recieve and they were all national ones. Heck, BBC Radio Cornwall felt like a breath of fresh air when it launched in 1983. So did Pirate FM when it launched in 1992. Nowadays, you have over 50 stations available, more if you can pick up the Plymouth multiplex as well like I can.

The loss of Pirate 80s is sad, but ultimately, not a big deal, because it only garnered a reach of about 14,000 listeners, which in a market of around half a million is nothing.

Gosh, the stories you must have of those dark, dark days. The hardship!

Yorkshire Coast Radio broadcasts from studios in Scarborough. Street View: https://goo.gl/maps/GwWoJTQiU35fqCpd6

Compared with most other parts of the country, its badly served - as I say there are only 4 local stations, two of them DAB only.

As you say it got local radio late (if you don't count the Radio 4 opt outs) but also of course geography is not in its favour, unless you're in the Eastern side you don't get stations from adjoining areas because there aren't any. And of course the days you could get lots of choice from Devon are over.

Compare that with where I live which is also poorly served for radio, but has lots of overspill including from a big city


Stop bragging about have 'over 50 stations', the 3 national DAB muxs have 50 between them so it's not unusual


And of course how many 80s stations do you need? Presumably they'll reuse the slot for GHR or Hits?

Yes 'heritage station' does normally mean the early ILR stations - pre Radio Authority, but that wasn't what London Lite said.

It can't be denied that Pirate does have a lot of heritage, its been on air almost 30 years after all.

Considering that both GHR and Hits are already on the Cornwall and Plymouth muxes, then no, the slot won't be re-used for either of them. I don't think the slot will be immediately re-occupied by something else. If they wanted to, maybe one of Magic stations that isn't currently available. Magic Soul, or Magic At The Musicals. But my expectation is that 112kbps is going to become available for other stations to use.

As to how many 80s stations you need, well, we already have both Heart 80s and Absolute 80s, do we really need Pirate 80s? To say it was a local station, well, considering that only the news, weather and a 60 second update segment per hour, which could vary between what's ons, local information and occasionally even a single news story were actually local, and everything else was networked, I think calling it a local station is a bit of a stretch. It was a network station with local optouts and branding. Add to that the fact that Gold, Goldmine, Greatest Hits Radio and many many others play 80s tracks as part of their mix, and I think it would be fair to say that as a musical decade, the 80s is overdone right now.

Oh and by the way, how many radio stations do you really think we need to have available to us. There's plenty of stations out there right now for whatever takes your fancy. Classic FM, Gold, Goldmine, Jazz FM, LBC News, Magic, Mellow Magic, Pirate FM, Radio Plymouth, Scala Radio, Smooth, Smooth Country and many others are available to me and those stations listed tend to be the ones I turn to first, dependent on my mood. If I want a wider selection, well I have a mass of online stations available to me from around the world, and I can choose whatever I want. But most of my listening is based around the stations available to me on my portable radio, and honestly, that's enough for most people.

Sorry, but I cannot use the term "heritage" in relation to Pirate. Only the original 40 ILRs had "heritage". Pirate has a lot of history, having been on air for 28 years, but that's what I think of it as, history. Plymouth Sound had "heritage". Pirate FM has history.

Why can you not regard it as having heritage? The term ‘heritage station’ does usually refer to the likes of BRMB, Red Rose and Capital in terms of how the industry defines that specific term. But here we are talking more about ‘brand heritage’ as a concept in more general terms. Could you explain why Pirate doesn’t warrant use of that term and Plymouth Sound does?

I suspect most of Cornwall had more stations that I had in Hastings in the early 90s. Until 1995 the only decent signal on FM was from Southern Sound/FM who had a relay in the town (now Heart). The reception of the BBC nationals from Wrotham was poor at best and BBC Radio Sussex from Heathfield was also poor on FM with only decent reception on 1161 AM from Bexhill.

There was also a period when we didn't have Radio 1 after the 1053 switch off in 1994 and the switch on of the Hastings BBC relay in 95.

DAB is a lot better that when I lived there, they have BBC National, D1, SDL and the local Sussex mux.

I did. Plymouth Sound was one of the original 40, that were licenced by the IBA between 1973 and 1980. Pirate FM was not, it wasn't licenced until the Radio Authority came along in 1991. It's as simple as that. Not that "brand heritage" meant anything to Global, when they canned the Plymouth Sound brand in 2010 and replaced it with Heart.