It has been a fixture of Radio 1’s Sunday afternoon schedule for nearly 50 years, but the weekly Top 40 chart is to be moved to Friday for the first time.
The show, which will be presented by Radio 1’s afternoon DJ Greg James in its new home, will lose one hour of its current three-hour running time.
The switch mirrors a change in the release date for all new music in the UK, which will move from Sunday to Friday as part of a global industry bid to tackle piracy.
As part of the changes, the BBC will also launch a weekly half-hour TV chart show – its first since the demise of BBC1’s Top of the Pops in 2006 – on children’s TV channel, CBBC.
Radio 1 controller, Ben Cooper, said: “I’m sure people will be shaking their cassettes in rage, but you have to react to the market place. If you don’t you are dead in the water.
“We could keep it on a Sunday but the audience would say it’s two days late. It’s not being downgraded, if anything this gives the chart a new lease of life. It gives it exposure to a new audience on a Friday afternoon, a new presenter and a new format.
“It’s going to have to be tighter and slicker and answer the demands of that new audience. Actually. I’m really excited about it.”
James said: “The chart must feel like it’s providing news, not just conformation of something the listeners already knew.”
The Top 40’s audience has been in long term decline and is currently listened to by around 1.2 million people a week. It will move to Friday in mid-July, coinciding with a shift by the music industry to a new global release date.
With its running time cut by a third, the programme will inevitably play fewer of the top 40, but will still play the top 20 in its entirety.
Cooper said Radio 1 now had to compete with global technology giants such as Google, Amazon and Apple – the latter last month poached the station’s award-winning presenter Zane Lowe to work on its new streaming music service, expected to launch in the summer.
Cooper said younger listeners were obsessed with their smartphones but no longer tuned in to the radio in the same way as previous generations, with listening among 10- to 14-year-olds halving in a decade.
“As a person running a traditional radio station, you should be afraid, you should be very afraid,” said Cooper.
“The BBC needs to stop thinking about TV channels and radio stations and think about content for certain demographics. If we don’t adapt, we will die.”
Radio 1 has more than 10 million listeners a week but the amount of time people spend listening has fallen by a third, from more than 10 hours a week in 2007 to six and a half hours at the end of last year.
As part of its efforts to keep in touch with younger listeners, Radio 1 has set up a “youth council” of around a dozen people aged 16 to 24 who will share opinions and feedback about the station and what it should do.
The CBBC Official Chart Show will be presented by Cel Spellman, the Waterloo Road actor and presenter of the children’s channel’s Friday Download entertainment show, live from Radio 1’s Live Lounge in Broadcasting House.
Beginning in May, it will be broadcast on CBBC to coincide with the last half-hour of the chart show. It will also air on the Radio 1 channel on the BBC’s iPlayer.
CBBC will also be closely involved in creating the replacement for the three-hour Sunday afternoon slot vacated by the Top 40, likely to be a brand new show broadcast live from the CBBC headquarters in Salford.
The BBC has broadcast a chart rundown on Sunday afternoons since Pick of the Pops, presented by Alan Freeman, was moved to Sunday afternoons in 1962. The official UK singles chart began 10 years earlier.
The top 40, currently topped by Sam Smith and John Legend’s Comic Relief single Lay Me Down, has previously been presented by Simon Bates, Bruno Brookes, Fearne Cotton and Reggie Yates.
The current host, Clara Amfo only took over the show in January, but has the consolation of taking over from Cotton on Radio 1’s weekday morning slot in May.
Originally on the Light Programme, the chart moved to the newly launched Radio 1 (and initially Radio 2 as well) in 1967, and recently started including streaming data for the first time. Commercial radio also airs a top 40 chart on Sunday afternoons.
Cooper said he wanted Radio 1 to help the BBC be “the leading youth brand in the UK”.
But he said Madonna, whose recent single was not included on the station’s playlist, had not been banned by the station as part of its efforts to reach younger listeners.
“We do not ban artists. I love Madonna … it’s nothing personal,” he said. “It’s just about the merit of the music that the artist is creating at the time.”
Cooper also responded to criticism by former Radio 1 DJ Nihal about a lack of diversity on the station.
Nihal said on the eight floor of Broadcasting House, where Radio 1 is based, that “all the Asians are sitting in one corner, all the white people are on Radio 1 and all the black people are on 1Xtra”.
Cooper said: “My view on Nihal’s comments were they were untrue, they were unhelpful and they were upsetting. I think he made some sweeping generalisations around some very sensitive issues”.
