New national jazz station to launch

27th September 2006

GCap Media is planning to launch a new national jazz station on digital radio, and it will replace the Primetime radio station on the Digital One national DAB multiplex.

The new jazz station is apparently going to be a 'sister' station to Classic FM, and GCap hope that the new jazz station will be able to do for jazz what Classic FM did for classical music, which presumably means making it more accessible to a mass market.

As the new defunkt Jazz FM failed to make a profit in its 15 years of existence, and as this new jazz station is apparently actually going to play proper jazz music — including bebop, swing, trad, blues and modern jazz — one has to wonder whether they'll be able to pull it off, or whether after a year or three they'll revert back to a smooth jazz format to attract a wider audience. If I were a betting man, I reckon the latter will happen, but you never know.

I have to say that this is a rare piece of news from the commercial radio industry that I'm in favour of, which makes a refreshing change given that they've shown an almost total lack of imagination with regards the launch of new digital radio stations so far.

That's the good news, now the bad news: There will be 4 mobile TV channels launching on the new service from Virgin Mobile service in the next few weeks (with each of the channels being transmitted at the abysmally low bit rate of 59 kbps), which will be carried on the national commercial DAB multiplex, Digital One. There has already been a public consultation about the launch of these new mobile TV channels, and the fact that two stereo stations will have to be reduced to mono as a result. Therefore, you have to wonder whether this new jazz station will be launched in mono. I wouldn't bet against it.