3 Mar 2010 by Chris     No Comments    Posted under: Entertainment

6Music: get it while it lasts

I don’t hold out much hope for 6Music. David Hepworth quotes Bob Harris as saying: “It’s my experience that when management has decided to do something like this, they’ve thought about it a lot and nothing is going to change their mind.” There doesn’t seem to be much logic in the public arguments from the BBC about why they should close it. Only 0.7 million listeners? Not bad for a station on DAB only, which is available in under 30% of households and about four cars in the whole of the UK. The untouchable Radio 3 has about two and a half times the number of listeners, despite being available to (presumably) three times as many households. The cost? £9M for 6Music and £51M for Radio Three.

No, the decision has been made to sacrifice 6Music for reasons other than commercial logic. And that’s why I doubt that even Adam Buxton offering to take Mark Thompson out for a fight (third video down, at 2 mins 30 sec) will make a difference.

In the meantime, let’s grab what we can of 6Music. The highlight of the station’s history has been the brilliant Adam + Joe Show. And the highlight of this show has been “Song Wars”, where they take a subject and each go off and make songs about it with Garageband. They’ve archived the best of these on their show’s website, but don’t assume that’ll stay up forever if the station goes. Here are my favourite two Song Wars songs ever.

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