A lot is at stake in Radio NZ gamble
No doubt you’ve already heard the news of February 5? Radio NZ announced its plan to strip RNZ Concert right down to an AM radio “streaming service”, and fill the vacated FM slot with a new, more diverse service aimed primarily at younger listeners.
Significantly, in view of the supposed scarcity of classical fans, there’s been a huge outcry and much argument pro and con so I may as well chuck my four penn’orth in to the ring.
As RNZ is a public service, this move can’t have anything to do with economics, right? Wrong. The main driving factor seems to be listener numbers, a factor that is as commercial as profits.
Small audiences don’t look good on “the books”, do they? Yet, although RNZ Concert’s audience share is said to be 4.6 per cent (about a quarter of the most popular stations), the all-stations average share is around 2.5 per cent. So, sitting over halfway up the league table, is RNZ Concert really doing all that badly?
And what about this “diversity” thing? Agreed, this proposed station will increase the diversity of RNZ’s own output, but it would immediately go head to head with a small army of comparable commercial stations. On the other hand, effectively abandoning classical music severely reduces diversity: RNZ Concert is the only station catering for the entire country’s classical music lovers — far from all of whom, I might add, are geriatrics.
Like the BBC, RNZ is charter-bound to nurture things of far higher value than mere “commercial” popularity, which is exactly why public money insulates it from commercial risks. And RNZ Concert itself is something of which we should be extremely proud; it does practically the same job, to as high a standard, as BBC’s Radio Three but, I’d hazard, at a fraction of the cost!
Convenient as it may be to regard classical music as some sort of dusty, historical archive, irrelevant to today’s world, to do so is nevertheless just plain wrong. Bluntly, it can’t be dismissed as (to quote Nigel Kennedy) “dead people’s music”.
On the contrary, the body of classical music is far from being a relic of the past. For one thing, today there are more composers adding to that body than ever before; and for another, while past composers are indeed “dead people”, the moment someone starts playing their music, what was dormant on the printed page springs into pulsing, vibrant life. And let’s not forget all those brilliant Kiwi musicians who are proving this every single day, often through the medium of
RNZ Concert.
On a more practical note: what is the point of that “AM radio streaming service”? Any audiologist will tell you that symphonic music is the most complex sound that our ears have to handle. This is what drove practically every advance ever made in sound recording and broadcast technology.
Dumping Concert on to AM, whose unstable mono sound is inferior to even the meanest internet stream, is, for those who will be lumbered with it, tantamount to turning the clock back 70 years.
Well, those are my thoughts — the printable ones, at least. You’ll find plenty more on the web. So admit it, RNZ: replacing the well-established Concert with this more populist station is at best a very risky “long shot”. By all means roll your dice but please don’t use Concert as your stake money.