Amazing Radio: are we amazed?

Amazing Radio describe themselves as an ethical radio station, who exclusively play tracks by unsigned bands. The UK’s newest national radio station, Amazing Radio is available on DAB and the internet, and has some media mogul heavyweights behind it, including the former BBC head of music entertainment Trevor Dann (who famously banned Status Quo from the BBC playlists).
So how does it work? Artists upload their songs to sister site amazingtunes.com, wherein they get streamed and sold. Amazing Radio then plays the most popular tracks, and displays them on a chart which is also published in the music industry magazine Music Week.
That sounds great on paper but what about in practice? I spoke to station founder Paul Campbell to find out how the station funds itself.

“We run incredibly tightly and we never waste a penny", he explained. "So whereas BBC 6 Music costs something like £8m per annum to run (although I’ve seen £9m reported): our total running costs of our entire operation are lower than the BBC Director General’s annual salary – under £800k per annum.” Paul told me.

So what about that rating system that helps decide whether a song makes it to the radio. The stakes are pretty high for bands – how does the station ensure the system is fair?
“There are both software and human interventions to stop the system being rigged,” Paul said. “We also continually monitor activity, of course, to look out for spamming….we’re 100% certain this can’t be rigged, and that it is fair. We also think the system is subtler than pretty much everything else around, since it’s so broad in its assessment of popularity.”

This all sounds pretty good, but does it work for the bands? I asked David Lightfoot, frontman of unsigned band The Fades and Chris Hutchison of The Stereo Shutdown, who recently topped the Amazing Chart. They both gave opposing views.

Over to David:

“The problem is – the average music listener probably has no interest at all in listening to unsigned bands, so the majority of plays you get will be from other unsigned bands and/or your own music fans who you’ll have to hound incessantly to get them to listen to you…

“There are loads of sites giving the artist 70% of the revenue now – that doesn’t really mean a thing, it’s all about the thousands of bands signing up and driving traffic to the site. Where’s the quality control with these things? It just means that any old crappy band that has a recording can sell it online.”

However Chris disagreed: “We found Amazing Radio to be positive as a marketing tool… we played a gig on Tuesday night and were surprised to see people who'd come as a result of Amazing Radio. To have a station actively playing new bands to people is a great idea.

"The only downside is, people who listen to the channel will be people who actively seek new music - which isn’t a huge demographic."

This was an edited version of Mark's blog. To read the complete article, CLICK HERE