Bauer rebranding 53 stations to The Hits/Greatest Hits

That might be the case in some areas, but where I live, the only local stations were BBC Radio Derby and Peak FM. BBC Radio Derby has always seems a bit dull in terms of music choice and rarely acknowledged anywhere north of Belper, so if you wanted a mix of local news and decent music, you'd listen to Peak FM. Whereas now, if I want a local radio station, I either get oldies on BBC Radio Derby or oldies on Greatest Hits Radio. In some areas, the choice is probably better, but in my area, I'm not even sure you can call it a choice.

Isn't the Peak FM area covered by BBC Radio Sheffield, rather than Derby?

The music on BBC local radio is still dreadfully bland and incredibly repetitive, but they have now found a couple of CDs released after 1990, they're playing some fairly new tracks, so in a lot of areas we're now in the odd situation where BBC locals are playing newer tracks than the ILR.

I can't either, particularly given that this is Bauer's third shot at an oldies brand in not many years, after the Northern AM Magic network, the Big City 2 network, and now GHR.

When you look at the figures for what was Magic 828 in Leeds which have gone from 98,000 down to 20,000 listeners across three rebrands in only 6 years, you'd have to wonder what their strategy is.

It was less than three years ago that Bauer's big plans seemed to revolve around Hits Radio, following the rebranding of Key 103 and the launch of the Hits Radio Network. Now that seems to be on a something of a back-burner after the change in Manchester only accelerated Key's audience decline.

Maybe this is all part of some brilliant long-term strategy, but you'd be forgiven for thinking that they're just making it up as they go along and blindly hoping for the best.

It's awkward. The Chesterfield side (107.4) is Radio Sheffield turf. The Matlock side (102.0) is covered by Radio Derby. I'll be honest, as somebody from the Matlock side, I'd rather have Radio Sheffield on FM than Radio Derby, but hey ho.

I havent really looked through the financials on this, so am prepared to be totally wrong, but it looks like the long term strategy is long term managed decline.

Bauer bought a lot of good properties, in EMAP.

Their magazines were popular, their TV stations were doing well (particularly among the younger demo), and their radio business was well focussed - national brands and a killer network of local stations.

Now, most of the mags are gone, and Channel 4 runs the TV channels.

The EMAP Performance network was huge among the same demo that these days belongs squarely to Captial - and they dominated most big cities in the UK. The regional Magic network was really popular too, despite being on medium wave.

Under Bauer, they've been the unloved step-children and as a result, stations which would once have had flagship status, like Key 103, just ended up falling apart.

Global came up with a concept and took it national (sucks for the listeners of stations they took over, but at least it makes sense as a business move). Bauer just seem to have bought the distribution network and just seem to be playing around, seeing what sticks.

They would have been better looking at what was in the big box of Bauer brands (Magic, Absolute, Kiss, Kerrang, Scala) and working out which one could carve out an audience share in any particular city.

Liverpool, for example, could have had Kiss in place of Radio City and Magic in place of City2. Manchester and Leeds could have had either (Leeds Magic with Kiss in place of neighbouring pulse?).

Business wise, what is best, to claim you have near-national coverage for an unloved, poor network with few listeners, or taking a little time to understand the TSA of each of the areas they bought and put the optimal programme service on that channel? - You're already making the programmes, so just route the ones with the most chance of success in a particular area to that transmitter!

There'll be a digital switchover at somepoint, so the amount of time available to maximise the return on its 53 station investment is ticking away.

I think time has already run out. Most people either don't listen to radio at all at home, or they listen to radio via DAB, smart speaker or app at home. The place where FM radio still had a large, captive audience is in the car, and none of us are in the car nearly as much as we used to be. Even that was starting to diminish, as old cars with FM/AM radio age off the roads and are replaced with new models with DAB+ radios.

They bought a bunch of FM stations expecting to be able to sweat the assets for FM's final few years of dominance (if that). Instead, a pandemic came along, changed the way everyone lives, and decimated the advertising market. I think they cocked up.

If Global had acquired the assets of UKRD, Wireless and Celador, you can guarantee that all of them would be one of their national brands, regardless if Lincs and Pirate are revenue makers as they want to expand their coverage of those brands on FM regardless. (i.e. Smooth Radio on the small scale Lakeland Radio).

What we got here was a haphazard integration of small scale local stations and some medium sized ones like Eagle into a mouldy oldies network, some became part of the Hits Radio Network and three were left alone, Sam Bristol (soon to be Hits), Lincs FM and Pirate Cornwall.

IMHO Bauer left it too late to match Global nationally by keeping the likes of Rock FM and TFM as stand-alone brands. Instead the latter merged with Metro while keeping local branding, while Key 103 was ripped to shreds by Hits having the amazing feat of being worse than Key was!

Some good points here, particularly why they're not rolling out their existing tried and tested brands. Kiss would have been a fantastic fit in a city like Manchester - much better than the uninspiring Hits Radio brand. Rolling out Magic across the country instead of GHR would have been a much better fit for the licences they acquired too, and would have provided a much less jarring transition.

I supect the reason this didnt happen is internal politics. The strategy for the local stations comes from Manchester. Using the Magic or Kiss brands on the local stations would hand power to London – and the bosses there aren't going to do that.

Sadly though, just about every decision out of Manchester for the past 15 years or so has gone hand-in-hand with a drop in audience. It's a pity as Bauer's brands from One Golden Square are all really decent, polished and successful.

There was once a Kiss FM in Manchester, albeit a brand license run by another company.

Exactly this.

Why you would trust an increasingly expensive pair of quasi-national networks to a part of the company with a proven track record of screwing up every single decision for the last 15-20 years? It's borderline corporate negligence.

It's not like Bauer can't pull this stuff off... they have a national network of stations in Poland that mostly play out network content (RMF-FM). Australia too.

The problem seems to be that way too much trust seems to be vested in the management in Manchester. Sod the politics, they're damaging the company!

And as I remember it did pretty well, as did the short-lived Kiss FM Yorkshire, before they both were rebranded as Galaxy... which also was very popular. I still think it's a shame that the Galaxy brand was scrapped, as I still think it would be doing well today, but it suffered from the 'not available in London' problem, so was a difficult sell to the agencies. Anyway, I'm going off on a tangent here.

Remember listening to the test transmissions of Kiss 105 and remember how different it sounded in terms of presentation to the very safe other offerings on FM at the time. Was a bit confused when it flipped so quickly - but that was a problem with EMAP not being able to have Kiss 105 as a regional and also owning Viking, Aire, Hallam, Magic 828, Magic 1161 and Magic AM in the same area, I believe - ironically, these days wouldn't be so much of a problem.

Galaxy was a strong station and with a good following. Accessible but still had a bit of an 'edge', compared to what replaced it.

Given that Capital 95.8 was going through a bit of a 'bad decade' in the last days of GCap, I do wonder if there is an alternative reality somewhere where Galaxy was the template that was rolled out across the country, with off-peak continuing to come from Leeds.

On the subject of Yorkshire stations that did well. Real Radio was very safe, but had a very well produced sound (at least at launch). If Bauer are determined to persist with the folly of GHR, they would do a lot better by mercilessly ripping off that format.