The Sunday Telegraph

BBC concedes defeat in the battle for radio audiences

- By Christophe­r Williams

THE BBC is to give up competing with commercial radio stations for audiences and instead focus on the threat to its future from music on Spotify and podcasts via Apple.

James Purnell, the BBC’s director of radio, will signal the shift this week by declaring he does not “care” about audience share or beating commercial stations in the battle for listeners.

In a speech seen by The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Purnell will say that the BBC needs to change quickly and shift spending away from traditiona­l broadcast programmin­g to serve younger and more diverse audiences better.

“We need to change faster than we have in the past few years,” the former Labour cabinet minister will say.

“We’ll need to change where we allocate our money. We’ll need to change the kind of content we offer.”

BBC radio has been losing ground to commercial broadcaste­rs such as Global, whose phone-in station LBC employs high-profile politician­s including Nigel Farage and Sadiq Khan as presenters. TalkSport, part of the Wireless Group now owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, has been buying football coverage rights.

Commercial radio is now reaching a bigger share of the population than the BBC, according to industry statistics known as the Rajars.

Mr Purnell will dismiss the shift as irrelevant to the BBC’s mission. He will say: “I don’t care about share. We care about the future of British audio.”

However, young people already spend more time listening to Spotify than the whole of BBC radio.

Mr Purnell will suggest that the challenge to radio is not as urgent as the threat to British television from Netflix and others, where he “can see a world emerging in which children can only choose American content”.

 ??  ?? Charlotte Caldwell with her son Billy. She had cannabis oil, prescribed in Canada for his epilepsy, confiscate­d at Heathrow airport when she returned to Britain. The Home Secretary yesterday used an ‘exceptiona­l power’ to ensure that the 12-year-old...
Charlotte Caldwell with her son Billy. She had cannabis oil, prescribed in Canada for his epilepsy, confiscate­d at Heathrow airport when she returned to Britain. The Home Secretary yesterday used an ‘exceptiona­l power’ to ensure that the 12-year-old...

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