Has UGC Killed The Radio Star?
Last week saw the anouncement by radio station Xfm that it was to get rid of all DJs on its shows between the hours of 10am & 4pm. Their managing director Nick Davidson said of the move,
Our listeners are used to being able to control what they watch or listen to as these days people are inundated with choice..
Allowing them to shape their own content seems the next logical step.
According to The Guardian, which first broke the story, the station will
play songs suggested by listeners via text, phone and on the Xfm website, where users will be able to compile playlists, join debating forums and vote for their favourite songs.
Now obviously, we’re massive fans of user generated content (UGC) in all its many forms, whether it’s the videos submitted to YouTube, or the questions and answers sent in by readers of the New Scientist (and later published as the best-seller Does Anything Eat Wasps). But I do think that this may be going a step too far.
Although DJ free radio has long been popular in the US, and has had mixed success here in the UK, I’m really not sure that it’s the right match for the audience (I presume) Xfm are going after, i.e. the 18-35 demographic.
Whilst there will always be a small buzz for those whose songs & playlists make it on to the air, I don’t see what will separate the new daytime Xfm from an iPod for all those whose suggestions don’t make it that far - except that unlike an iPod, the radio station will have been programmed by strangers.
Xfm may have been thinking of the success of services such as last.fm & Yahoo’s LAUNCHcast which provide playlists for users, based on the listening habits of others. But these services do this by monitoring what the individual user listens to, so that they can match him or her up with people with similar tastes, thereby creating ‘personalised’ radio stations. A ‘real’ radio station can’t do this, as it has to broadcast one service to thousdands of listeners, rather than thousands of broadcats to individual listeners.
And this brings us back to the DJ. Whilst Morrisey may have had no time for them, the best ones connect with an audience in a way that a faceless service will never be able to match. If you think of any of the great music DJs of the past few decades, whether it’s John Peel, Chris Evans, Gilles Peterson or even Christian O’Connell (formerly of Xfm), they manage to bring a disparate listening group together with wit, interaction and by introducing them to new music.
And so far, that’s something that even the best websites haven’t been able to match.
