As the founder of the only national commercial radio station that’s remotely like 6Music – and someone who recently complained to the BBC Trust about the commercial impact of ‘BBC Introducing’ – I’m dancing on its grave, right?
Wrong. 6Music embodies what the BBC should be doing. It’s fresh, original, rightly popular, and sits happily alongside our more focused and entirely different offering in Amazing Radio. It brings more listeners to digital radio, where it and we are about the only interesting things going. It may have fourteen times our annual budget, but we’re not jealous. We’re lean and mean and growing rapidly, building a global private sector business that indirectly benefits from the BBC’s heritage (it trained most of our people, after all) but contributes to GDP too.
The BBC may be bloated, but 6Music is the wrong place to wield the axe.
