Helping audiences develop a lifelong love of classical music

I’m writing this on my way back from Manchester, where I’ve just spoken to the Association of British Orchestras’ conference.

I was never going to be a musician - my efforts at learning the recorder ended up with that instrument splintered on the floor after I’d hurled it against a wall.

But that defeat only left me with a stronger commitment to helping everyone discover classical music - you’re never too old or too young to fall in love with it. That’s why we’ve launched our Bring the Noise campaign to help all children between the ages of 5 and 7 learn the joy of making music.

It’s been a busy week - I was also in Paris on Thursday, with a group of colleagues, meeting Radio France to swap lessons on what we’re doing.

There and at the conference, we all agreed that the pace of change in our sector is accelerating.

Audio is exploding - Apple recently changed their advertising to say they have 60 million tracks. Only last year, it was 50 million. Spotify tell us that 40,000 tracks get uploaded every week. Again, last year, that was just 20,000.

Spotify made a splash last year by announcing they had $500 million for acquisitions - that’s significantly more than the whole of my radio budget. And they’re only just beginning.

So we are competing against the biggest companies in the world and they have huge resources. That might make some despondent. And it’s fed some of the coverage in recent weeks about the future of the BBC. But that’s the opposite of how we feel. Far from being despondent, we’re excited about the possibilities. Because this is a golden age for audio - for listeners, who have more choice than ever before. But also for organisations like us, who have more ways of delivering our mission than ever before.

Where once we only had mass radio stations, today we also have Sounds and specialist music stations. Where once the listener essentially had to accept the choice of the scheduler and presenter, today the power has shifted to them.

That means that radio is no longer a default option. We have to earn the right to be part of someone’s day.

But when we do, we can also make sure they make even more of the time they do spend with us than in the past. We can make sure audiences aren’t overwhelmed by those millions of tracks and instead get greater enjoyment and discover more in the hours they spend with us.

And far from fearing the streaming services, we can help audiences make the most of this cornucopia. To do that, we’ve had to change BBC radio. 

It’s working - BBC Sounds is reaching 3m people per week and means that there is at least one British app in the top ones in the UK. We released data yesterday to show that it’s our whole audio portfolio that’s driving the growth: our brilliant live stations together with a mixture of new content - like Brexitcast or our Classical Focus music mix - and popular favourites like the Archers and In Our Time, hits with young and old alike.

And we’ll have to change again - keeping our live stations strong, developing Sounds and adding specialist radio streams to our portfolio so that we can offer every licence fee payer something especially for them from the BBC.

In this more competitive world of course this isn’t motivated by a desire to increase the overall time spent with BBC Radio. What matters to us is serving our audiences better, and more equally. Making sure they get even more joy and discovery from the time they spend with us.

In a world of such huge choice, competing against the biggest companies in the world, we can continue to do what we’ve always done - bringing the best music and spoken word to listeners, a very democratic mission to ensure that everyone, not just those who can subscribe, get to enjoy the best audio the world has to offer. But only if we keep on changing, embracing new possibilities, as we always have.