Popular music commissioning for TV

Our focus is to bring our audiences the best UK music stories and performances as well as a global music. Working as a pop portfolio, we aim to bring creative impact from across our BBC platforms: iPlayer, TV, Sounds and Radio, to amplify great music content - growing habit-forming behaviour for our audiences and reinforcing the BBC as the home for UK music.

Music TV is delivering real impact for broadcasters and streamers right now.

In a time of heavy content saturation, music programming – from live events to documentaries - plays a pivotal role, creating appointment to view, must-watch moments which in turn allows us to also super serve our audiences with on demand content.

While performance programming and factual documentaries remain the bedrock of the department, we’re looking to explore how we can expand those boundaries and create a vaster content option for our audience. We want to hear ideas that have a flavour of factual entertainment or popular factual and are celebratory in tone, to broaden our offering to the viewers and reach new audiences.

If we love an idea we’ll find the right home for it across the BBC, but it’s important to note that BBC iPlayer is becoming a pivotal part of how we filter new ideas and make commissions, so it’s worth considering how your idea will stand out on digital as well as on linear - including what thumbnail image and programme title will hook people in on the platform.

What we’re looking for

Premium feature documentaries or boxset series that have scale and can follow the successes of recent commissions Boybands Forever, The Battle For Black Music: Paid in Full and Rylan Meets….

Although not always essential for shows such as this to include access to big name creatives, we’re looking for ideas that feel elevated above a traditional talking head/archive show. If your idea isn’t fronted by a recognised name we’d need to understand how the story would still stand out from the pack and create that talkability element - what’s the news story that will create that water cooler moment before and after it lands?

Returnable volume which feeds into our established BBC Two Saturday evenings, with a nostalgia focus that spans the decades of popular music, particularly the late 80s, 90s and 00s, and can make use of the rich BBC archive. Examples of this include When X Came to Britain, Reel Stories or Top of the Pops, the Story of....

As with our premium documentaries, we want to see stories told in new and varied ways rather than genre-retrospectives. How can you tell distinctive stories that resonate outside of a genre or artists’ immediate fanbase?

We’d like to see shows that could help our slate break into new parts of the linear schedule and which take a range of different forms: from topical content like our festive season with Wham!: Last Christmas Unwrapped and The Making of Do They Know It’s Christmas? - or our Country season which includes the three-part series Rob Brydon’s Honky Tonk Road Trip, to large scale entertainment ideas or even comedy. Think about how we can reach as broad an audience as possible, including those who may not avidly consume music documentaries, but still love music.

Our commissioners and how to pitch ideas

Please send all ideas for popular factual TV content to Head of Popular Music Jonathan Rothery or Commissioning Executive Rachel Davies via the PiCoS submission system.

Please note that ideas for classical music content should be pitched via the contacts listed on the arts and classical music page.