I think podcasts give the best indication of the future of radio. Radio currently gets driven towards the lowest common denominator because it's a commercial concern with high running costs due to the special equipment needed to broadcast a radio signal. These costs need to be recouped, so it's audience-chasing all the way.

Podcasts, on the other hand, can be made and distributed by anyone with a PC, at little or no cost. They can even be all-music, since small labels are usually quite willing to allow a few tracks to be played in return for the exposure this gives to relatively unknown artists. Though I was sad to see The Jazz vanish, that was never the channel through which I heard lots of new jazz. All my exposure to new jazz for the last year or so has been via all-music podcasts such as "No Idle Frets", "In The Groove - Jazz and Beyond" and "Bending Corners".

I think that subscriptions to music podcasts such as these will become far more important than radio to people who are seriously into music, rather than simply requiring the kind of comfy, predictable aural wallpaper provided by the commercial radio stations, and increasingly by BBC stations such as 6Music.

And always has been.

I rarely feel any need to divert away from Radios two and four, especially since I made the life changing purchase of a wifi radio which allows you to listen to all BBC shows on listen again at any time from a normal sized radio set (no need to attach to a PC or even have a PC at all).

Also since the Government released a new third tier of FM licences for community radio stations a couple of years ago there has been a slow growing culture of radio stations staffed and run by passionate local volunteers. I'm involved with Cambridge's www.209radio.co.uk which has ad free specialist music shows covering funk, world music, traditional English folk, indie, local bands, reggae, classical and everything in between as well as spoken word stuff in English plus the odd show in Chinese, Polish and Kurdish.
There's also Resonance FM in London and several others popping up all the time.

You can only get them within a short range of the city where they are broadcast on FM - unless you go wifi of course and then you can pick up anything anywhere.

Podcasts are ok but I generally find them a bit fiddly and not very user freindly for anyone who doesn't use Itunes and there's the big problem of music licensing.

I used to listen to the radio a lot. I tended toward specific DJ's. Nicky Horne on Capital. John Peel R1. Chris Evans on GLR. Danny Baker on R5 breakfast. Mainly listened on car journeys to and from work and also in the evening. I used to listen to a lot of football commentary on radio 5 as well. Peel (and sometimes the shows before him) along with Q magazine informed me a lot around what music I heard.

Now with online sources able to find me a song within seconds I rarely listen to music radio. I listen to talk stations more and podcasts in the car and at home. Word magazine has replaced Q. Sky does the football well but with the mighty Leeds in League 1, I can't be arsed with the Prem so watch and listen to very little. I read about it far more - again online.

I don't like music radio much because it is likely to play 4 irritating songs before it will play a good one. Most music stations are too predictable and I don't recall hearing a song on the radio that has stopped me in my tracks for at least 5 years. That used to be a regular occurence with Peel especially. Now, it seems I'll read about a band in the mag or the website and check them out on the bands site.

If I like them, I'll look and see if they are available on eMusic. If not, I'll order from Amazon. Haven't been in a HMV looking for music for ages - possibly a year. That in itself would have been unimaginable to me 5 years ago.

The suits control the airwaves and as soon as you lock on to something half decent they go and screw it up. It happened with Virgin - when that first aired they played a lot of unexpected stuff - when the listening figures increased they became more mainstream and stopped taking chances. When their listening figures dropped again as they inevitably did they sacked the DJ'S. It's not the dj's you idiots its the bloody crap you force them to play!!!!
Same thing happened with BBC6 - as soon as they get popular they stop playing the decent stuff.

The future for Radio is talk shows and live sports events - in other words programmes not governed by playlists and 'heavy rotation'. We followed mainstream American radio which always was and still is rubbish. The good American stuff is college radio and Public service stations.
I for one dont need radio to inform me what is good these days - my friends at Word do a perfectly good job of this.

...I'm sure I read that Rick Wakeman's Planet Rock show on Saturday mornings, 'Rick's Place' was one of the most popular digital radio shows around. Fish's one, 'Fish On Friday', was up for an award. I don't listen to the radio much but I sometimes check out Planet Rock.

Still, the thing was with Planet Rock was that I often found it to be very 'safe'; you'd often hear Hendrix's 'All Along The Watchtower', Free's 'All Right Now' and The Stones' 'Honky Tonk Women' and 'Brown Sugar' several times a day. It wouldn't have hurt to push the boat out just that bit more. Fish's show was excellent- you'd hear album tracks from John Martyn, Genesis, Simple Minds, Little Feat and Elton John alongside less well known acts like Druid and Gentle Giant. The fact he received a nomination shows that it pays to mix it up a bit.

Good on Brian May though, as he actually looks like he's genuinely offering to put his money where his mouth is and doing his bit for rock music.

Hasn't the ipod see off this kind of radio. I see "normal" people (ie people who wouldn't have had a tape or disc walkman) listening to ipod all the time on the train, most of my friends have them in their cars and so just don't listen to the rock radio that much anymore except for talk and sport etc. A couple of disc of "now that's what i call air guitar 2" will fill your pod with the same tunes arrows play so why tune in.

In springtime, a man's thoughts turn to painting the front of the house. So, I've done a bit lately, before the rain returns. Problem is, I get to hear the frequent noise of over-loud car stereos, played with the drivers window down of course. After a while it occurred to me that they were all rap/urban r'n'b etc, heavy on bass and light on tune. P reg BMWs in black seem to be vehicle of choice. No-one played any loud rock music. (Oddly enough, I'm sure I heard a bit of Dinah Shore at full volume at one point).
Why don't kids or even middle-aged businessmen play loud rock music in cars anymore?
Perhaps they do and they're too polite to annoy others. If I hear any passing Richard Thompson in the street next time I'm in the garden, I know it'll be one of you. Start the fight back now.

that's the conclusion I've come to! As well as the convenience of Listen Again you got the flexibility to get a radio service tailored to your listening habits.

Anyone can set up a station based on their likes and dislikes. I've tried Pandora and like Last.fm a lot. Both allow you to build your own radio station based on your listening habits and stream them to your computer or stereo via a wifi radio. They're not perfect, you haven't got access to all the releases, and sound quality is variable, but I'm sure that will come in time

What about this service that Peter Gabriel has been championing recently The Filter

The Filter scans all of the ID3 tags in your music library and uploads that information to its server (their privacy policy says they won't give this out to anyone). In iTunes, you select a song or two you want the playlist to be based on. Then The Filter's music recommendation engine, which runs partially on the associations provided by other people who have uploaded their library data, builds a playlist based around your starting point(s) that appears within iTunes. From there, you listen to the playlist, sync it to your Shuffle for the gym, or whatever.

Now that's an interesting idea, if only it wasn't tied in with itunes and DRM. The Internet gives you so many possibilities that niche radio can't really compete with.

I think Steve Turner and JJ nailed it when they point out how audiences love to hear something different - it doesn't even need to be by the sort of bands that John Peel championed - the fact that Virgin when it started out with its test transmissions was playing Pink Floyd, Genesis.... etc. but not the usually stuff we hear from those bands and people listened in large numbers. Radio Caroline throughout the 1970's stuck fast to its rock album format and had a huge loyal following. The Dutch radio station The Arrow (far superior to the english version)followed the same format as Radio Caroline and built up such a huge audience (for a foreign language medium wave station)that it had both BBC and ILR station bosses crying foul and asking for the dutch authorities to silence the station (unfortunately the station changed frequency to FM only at the beginning of the year)
Maybe if someone like Bryan May is serious about saving Planet Rock then he could do a lot worse than to examine the success of these two stations in building a loyal following but I think ultimately it will all boil down to money and we'll end up with a diluted pop rock station copying the same playlist as a million others stations.