I just wanted to add another voice of agreement here.

SET THE MUSIC FREE!

Hope for positive change is alive. Fingers Crossed.

Madness are a great example. If I only knew of them through Virgin, I’d think they’d only ever recorded a cover of It Must Be Love. They recorded loads of top ten hits that I’m sure would ‘test well’.

Razor Cuts was an excellent show and should have become the model for Virgin’s output. Familiar enough to be unthreatening but different enough to keep me listening.

If I ever hear Scouting For Girls again, it’ll be 14 billion years too soon.

Two of the great things that good music radio can offer is (i) introduce the listener to new music – new artists, new songs, different genres etc. and (ii) reintroduce the listener to music that they’ve forgotten. I’ve pretty much stopped listening to Virgin over the last couple of years, because it doesn’t really do either of these. I should say that this is pretty much the case with all commercial radio stations at the moment, whilst this is something BBC Radio 2 can seem to manage.

Geoff mentioned Razor Cuts – this was an excellent Sunday evening show. It used to be followed by the equally good, but quite different, Captain America show. Both these programmes, which played a diverse range of music, were compiled and presented with passion and care. They were replaced with the standard Virgin fare that could be heard right through the rest of the week. What a shame. I stopped listening on Sunday nights, and began not to bother with Virgin much throughout the week either.

I can never understand why every commerical musicstation feels the necessity to only play music that none of its listeners will find offensive, the results being deathly bland broadcasting. There are two Virgin examples that really drove me mad. Firstly, following an interview with the legend Tony Bennett, Paul Coyte played Kate Bush ‘Runing Up That Hill’. It’s a great song, but having just spent the last 10 minutes talking to Tony Bennett about his music, why not illustrate it to listeners? No, it’s not the genre of music associated with Virgin, but if Tony Bennett is worthy of the interview, playing just one of his songs would surely be acceptable – it may well have been the first time some listener would have heard this. Secondly, an interview with Ray Davies of The Kinks, the interview being about The Kinks new music. The interview was followed by ‘You Really Got Me’. Enough said. Glad I’ve got that off my chest after all these years.

So in summary:
- reduce the predictability of output across the schedule (the two spice tracks sounds good!)
- put in some specialist shows with passionate presenters
- oh, and don’t go for catchprases! (‘more music variety, ‘today’s best mix’) etc.

I look forward to checking out the new station, maybe I’ll become a regular listener again!

I’ve never known anyone to go into radio DJ work who didn’t love music, and love a lot of music from all eras and genres. The catch-as-can US format with the preposterous label of “Jack” is sort of but not quite what I have in mind – but there definitely needs to be plenty of “if you like this record, you should hear this as well.”

Honestly, I can’t talk – my current employer is very security-conscious as they put shuttles into space and as such have blocked all streaming audio, so it’s all podcast for me these days.

And on behalf of all of America, I apologize profusely for the whole Katy Perry nonsense. I promise it won’t happen again. Really.