Look Out Moyles, Jack Could Be Coming For You!
Last week saw the release of RAJAR’s latest audience data, covering the three months to September. Programming consultant Paul Chantler looks at the figures, and predicts the next trend to hit radio content from America…
Good news for the BBC in the latest RAJAR audience figures – its highest-ever share of audience in the UK radio market, opening up a whopping 11% gap over commercial stations.
While much of this can be put down to high-profile BBC TV promotional campaigns to encourage radio listening (which commercial radio rightly complains amounts to free national advertising), perhaps commercial radio needs to shake itself out of tired old ‘cookie cutter’ formats that rotate 250 or so songs.
As US researcher Larry Rosin said at the National Association of Broadcasters’ Philadelphia conference in September, perhaps we ought to start believing people in focus groups when they say music repetition gets on their nerves. Many broadcasters, he says, simply misinterpret this as, “well, they don’t actually mean that…”
Leading the way for the BBC is Radio One’s breakfast show DJ Chris Moyles with an audience of more than 10 million. But perhaps Chris needs to look out for Jack who could be coming here soon.
Jack is not a DJ. In fact it is a format – the latest phenomenon taking American radio by storm. There are variations of the format called Bob, Ben, Mike, Sam, Ernie and even a country music version called Hank. They’re aimed at 25 to 54 year olds and break a lot of the well-established rules of American radio.
For a start, there’s the music – 3000 songs instead of the small library beloved of most stations – with no repetition throughout the day.
But the most amazing thing about the Jack format is that there are no DJs. The stations are production-led rather than presenter-led with an enormous effort put into writing clever, witty, offbeat and irreverent ‘sweepers’ voiced by one station production voice. Typically a station can get through 75 to 100 of these a week and they’re all constantly refreshed to avoid listener fatigue. Jack is that it’s bringing the art of good copywriting back into radio.
The sweepers characterise the “arrogant” attitude of these stations, based around the slogan “We Play What We Want”. There are no news bulletins, no competitions and no travel updates. At another NAB conference last week in Athens, we heard travel news, Jack-style: “Here’s the traffic news on Jack FM – there are a lot of cars on the road!”
Jack – or to give it its official name of Adult Hits or Variety Hits – started in Canada three years ago and quickly spread to the US. Audience figures show how well it’s doing in many markets, especially Dallas and Los Angeles.
Of course it’s a reaction to what a colleague of mine describes as the “constipation” of American radio. Americans have grown up on a diet of narrow, niche radio stations and to have such a massive variety of music on one station – and no annoying DJs – is somewhat akin to radio heaven.
We Brits have a more eclectic and wide ranging musical taste, having grown up listening to the old-style ‘Radio One-derful’ on 247 metres and watching Top of the Pops every Thursday night on the telly and being exposed to hard rock next to country and love songs.
Therefore Jack might find it a struggle to work on existing analogue stations – to say nothing of the licensing difficulties Ofcom would have trying to make sense of a station without news, travel and presenter.
By the looks of the dozens of European attendees at the Athens conference, busily scrawling note after note during the Jack session, we’re likely to see Jacques, Juan, Fritz and Pierres sprouting up all over continental radio stations soon.
And here in the UK, perhaps Jack could be on a new digital station. After all, there was some good news for commercial radio in the RAJARs as well – record numbers of listeners are tuning into digital-only radio stations, more than 4 million of them.
But something tells me millions will miss Chris Moyles and his ilk – and it’s likely to be many years before Morrissey’s sung refrain of “Hang the DJ” rings true, Jack or no Jack.