BBC 6 Music: Music doesn’t need saving unless it’s in danger.
Who is the publicist for 6 Music – does anyone know? I’d like to, they’re a genius.
Since Monday I’ve gone from not knowing that the BBC had a digital music channel called 6 Music to knowing that it faces the off switch; that Lily Allen thinks this is the death knell for new British music, David Bowie thinks stations like 6 keep the ’spirit of music’ alive and Ed Vaizey – like me – didn’t know it existed at all and didn’t particularly care. Until he listened, that is and realised it had a ‘passionate and articulate’ fan base who can presumably vote as well as creating polysyllabic soundbites.
It’s been a very quick story to catch and no doubt social networks have sagged with soggy sentiments like ‘Save 6 and save music!’, ‘Sign the petition for BB6!’ and ‘If I use lots of exclamation marks people will think I’m passionate even if I can’t punctuate!!!’. A whole 90,00 people signed up to a Facebook group in a day. The is the kind of viral marketing that people who attend Google ranking workshops have wet dreams about, that and all the pithy copy and the very public support of right on, left of centre press.
So why I don’t I want to slay the BBC for making me pay a licence fee and then having the audacity to cut funding and the chance to listen to Lauren Laverne live online? Why as a music lover am I not making 10ft banners and recruiting likeminded citizens to romp the streets spreading the music to tune in and save all that is sacred about sound? For me, it’s related to some very simple and, for those who have been committed and genuine listeners of 6, possibly upsetting factors.
The main one being that none of this is about music. Yes, there are superb broadcasters who know music and want to communicate something they’re passionate about to an equally engaged audience. They may not be totally throttled by the demands of a playlist so constricted that a GP would diagnose a severe nut allergy. But, like music television which has long ceased to devote itself entirely to music videos (an invention made wholly by MTV as a promo outlet before the channel began to think programming quasi-real series about models-turned- lobotomised-trust-funders was the way forward), the concept of staying loyal to a one source seems like an archaic business model.
This is not to say that people are fickle beats who are incapable to fidelity to a provider of content and entertainment. But the internet isn’t just for porn and posting sentences exhorting people to support various causes and tend to their virtual vegetable patch. It’s a brilliant source of new music and platforms for artists and communities to build a fan base, share content and recommend similar artists without having premises and overheads and egos to manage in order to do so.
The democratisation of the internet which made expansion to include ‘niche’ channels like 6 possible is the very thing that makes it difficult to sustain without extensive awareness that it’s there. It’s pretty difficult when your choices of Radio station are limited to listening to Chris Moyles testing whether speech counts as proof of owning a brain cell or listening to a channel that no one’s ever heard of because it’s never promoted anywhere. If you don’t know about something, how are you expected to know it exists, much less expect it to compete against a flagship product.
It could do, too. It’s hardly as if it really were the fringe venue for unsigned artists who, without 6’s patronage, will starve in a hovel in Hove. Hove is quite affluent and 6’s current playlist isn’t revolutionary. I mean, Vampire Weekend, Goldfrapp, Friendly Fires and Jimi Hendrix are all great choices. Some of the bands have Myspace pages instead of being featured, established artists. But you can’t tell me that a station that features the Arctic Monkeys isn’t populist, even if they have come over all quirky and popped Rammstein on because they probably count as world music.
I do hope that 6 gets saved. Evidently it will make a lot of people very happy to have all of their rare music back.. But if that doesn’t happen and people want to, say, discover new music among seminal works by consummate craftsmen, chosen by people who’ve run a radio station for free purely for their love of music and do this without promotion or interruption (except for news bulletin in French on the hour), I’d recommend you listen to Radio Sing-Sing. It’s French pirate radio at it’s best and it’s very, very good.
