Bauer rebranding 53 stations to The Hits/Greatest Hits

I'll admin I havent heard a Top 10 at 10. I would imaging that that hour is more of a feature and would allow them to deviate from their core playlist to a degree.

The whole idea of the Top 10 at 10 or Golden Hour or whatever is as old as the hills though. You'd have expected that from the network of small stations they took over. Thought the benefit of a national service was supposed to be a 'bigger' sound.

No, you were first to mention presence.

As for listeners, its been 5 months since the network rolled out on FM across a lot of the UK and there's been no audience figures released. If there were the churn from the old brands would be too soon to make any conclusions


Being present in the minds of the national ad sales houses does affect advertising, and they're all in London. It and Hits are the only big analogue radio brands that aren't on the radio dial in London.

It certainly has been the case with other stations and networks in the past.

I listen to it quite a bit too and it's perfectly fine as a station. Certainly the proportion of songs it plays which I know and like is far higher than any other station.

When we were in the family car which only has FM I did listen to Absolute but that was mainly because it was the least worst of what we had to choose from - that or BBC Local. But it was tooblokey and rocky for Mrs Sands. Whereas we much prefer GHR

The only bad production I've heard is Janice Longs show where she links every song with a dull anecdote about meeting the artist... usually literally just being in a lift with them at TV Centre

Yes, I do wonder if features like that are actually something the audience like, or just an easy way of trying to create some excitement for an hour of music. It always reminds me of Pat Sharp on Capital circa 1988, I think he is the only presenter I'd allow to get away with doing it (and he has done that slot on GHR)

Musical features are always risky, especially if it's way off playlist or a novelty song is involved. Doesn't give a good impression to the casual listener or one who's literally just tuned in mid way through.

GHR do the Top 10 at 10 at 10am and 10pm. It's probably the most interactive feature they do on the station as it allows listeners to guess the year and the like. They also do music marathons which are also 10 in a row commercial free, which means the the presenter will speed link after 5 songs and then play the next 5 tracks.

As mentioned above GHR sounds like a product that isn't quite complete. Listen to Magic or Smooth and you have well constructed older skewed stations already targeting that market in London.

Another issue is that the breakfast presenter Simon Ross who calls himself 'Rossie' is quite frankly not up to the job. He's an old style ILR presenter who hasn't quite grasped how to present formatted radio. They have started to shift some of the other ILR deadwood, Rick Houghton is leaving at the end of the month and Sean Goldsmith left after Christmas.

There are some positive parts of the output, such as Andy Crane on the late show who can make any time slot sound good and the weekend specialist shows, but as it stands GHR isn't up to the job of being in the UK's most competitive market when Absolute is a much better polished national brand.

Simon Bates talks about the Golden Hour in The Nation's Favourite, saying he thought it was a really important feature, especially when he did it at 9am. He said the idea was that you had a high profile personality breakfast show, and then there was a very volatile audience that were all on the move, whether going to work or starting housework, and so you wanted to play lots of music back to back. He said it didn't matter if you were playing records from last week or twenty years ago, it was a load of familiar records, and the audience would know it was there and stick with it - "do that for six months and you'd get an audience". He also said it didn't matter who was doing it as when he went on holiday it had no effect on the figures.

I always thought when Simon Mayo did it on Radio 1 it worked quite well, an effective bridge between Chris Evans talking for two hours and Mayo's more involved features later in the morning. As Bates says, that period is one where people are usually on the move and don't have time to sit down listening to long chunks of speech.

In the book he says it with a lot more swearing, mind. He's incredibly foul-mouthed in it.

I was actually quite disappointed when Sean was let go. I quite liked him, although he presented the Breakfast show on my old ILR station for a decade, so there's probably a bit of bias at play.

Ah, I see what happened - I meant presence as in 'makes presence felt'. Whereas I think it was taken as 'present/is available there'.

It does feel to me as if Bauer are putting a heck of a lot of eggs in one basket for a brand which is anything but tried and tested.

The Capital, Heart and Smooth networks all managed to prove their worth at a regional level, and be fine-tuned into really polished products, before being rolled out nationally, whereas GHR only has a handful of mostly dismal Rajar books in a few local markets so far, and is still undergoing a lot of tinkering. It strikes me as one very big shot in the dark for Bauer.

They must be absolutely convinced there’s a massive demand for this service. But if it bombs when Rajar returns, it could be a huge embarrassment for them. I think it’s a huge risk.

Pirate and Lincs are going to start airing Bauer’s chart show:

https://radiotoday.co.uk/2021/02/pirate-fm-and-lincs-fm-to-take-bauers-chart-show/

I know generally posters here don’t approve of local radio morphing into national brands, but I was retuning my car radio last night and the variety I now have is far greater than it used to be. Previously I’d pick up 4 or 5 local stations that sounded vaguely the same. Now I can pick up the local Hits variant, Heart, Capital, Greatest Hits... all a lot more tightly focussed than before. I know people have a fondness for local stations but I’d argue that listeners are much better served now.

This is roughly where I am with this, too. I feel like it's too specialist a service to have replaced so many very generalist local stations. The UKRD family in particular seemed to do well in RAJAR from being a "something for everyone" local service, and the replacement is quite a specialist oldies station full of dad rock and geeky DJ links about chart positions ("that got to number three in 1978"). Its heritage is as an oldies service in northern England, it was the AM side of FM stations like Metro, Key and Viking, and that influence still feels very present in the current output.

There is always social media whinging when a station changes nowadays, but when the switch happened with these stations, there were a lot of comments from listeners complaining about the ancient music on stations which used to play a mostly 80s-90s-00s-today mix. I think it's disappointing to lose the localness, but even if they'd kept local programming and changed the format to this, they've still narrowed down wide-ranging stations far too much, and you're right that the tinkering should probably stop before the station is launched on London FM. It may be that Bauer have internal metrics showing that GHR is wildly popular and taking the nation by storm - we haven't had a RAJAR for a year - but I just can't see it. It feels like the kind of station that is going to be very popular with a small number of enthusiastic listeners, but Sarah taking the kids to football practice who used to listen to Minster will probably just spin the dial to Heart to get away from the endless Queen and Fleetwood Mac.