Former BBC local radio DJ Martin Kelner writes in today's MediaGuardian print section about the tyranny of audience testing, which he says leads to playlists featuring ELO's Sweet Talkin' Woman and Meat Loaf's I'd Do Anything for Love.
Regarding Sweet Talkin' Woman, Kelner writes:
Why the sudden ubiquity of a 30-year-old track? Is ELO on the road again, has Jeff Lynne died,does the tune appear on the soundtrack of the latest Judd Apatow romp?
None of the above, as it happens. I believe it "tests well". Music programmers are crazy about testing. The way this works is that a group of people of a similar age and gender to the audience being targeted by the station are played 40 seconds of a series of songs, and asked to give them a score. Popular songs get played on the radio a lot.
The problem is that during the day most of my local radio stations are aiming at a broadly similar audience, roughly women of a certain age, from around 30 to a shade over 55. Those who claim to be in the know say this is the constituency that will help you to a good score in the quarterly Rajar figures.
The slavish adherence to this perceived wisdom was made clear to me at the BBC local station that sacked me just over a year ago (on the same day Madeleine McCann went missing actually, which is probably why you never saw much about it in the newspapers) for not being "female friendly" enough. Fair enough. I was probably still addressing BBC local radio's previous target audience, Dave and Sue, an imaginary couple of whom we were given detailed profiles and photographs, just so we knew exactly who we were aiming our music and chat at.
Kelner goes on to question whether "this kind of malarkey is the very best use of public money".
In Manchester, for instance, there is a community station called ALL FM - ALL stands for Ardwick, Longsight, and Levenshulme, three of Manchester's poorer neighbourhoods - who had to go round begging local banks, in the teeth of a credit crunch, for a couple of hundred pounds to replace its manky, sticky old sofa for guests.
Nobody gets paid for presenting at ALL FM, and many of the programmes are the kind of quaint niche shows BBC local radio did in its early days, like Fire Safety Matters, presented by firemen Steve and Tony. "Push your button at 10.30am," says the programme listing, "and test your smoke alarm." Musically, one show promises "everything from Sarah Vaughan to Japanese bluegrass".
I am not saying I would cancel all arrangements to listen - not to the firemen anyway - but in an area, and at a time, when fundraising must be near to impossible, financing this community stuff is possibly a better use of a teensy-weensy bit of the licence fee than coffee and biscuits and Meatloaf for Sue.
