NEWS: Two DAB radio stations come off air
Britain's newest DAB national radio station, theJazz, has ceased broadcasting as has another DAB station, Capital Life. Both stations failed to attract sufficient advertising revenue, according to their owners.
TheJazz was launched a year ago on Christmas Day 2006 and finished broadcasting at midnight last night. In its brief life it attracted an audience of around a third of a million listeners.
Attempts were made to find a buyer after owner GCap Media announced it wanted to sell the station six weeks ago, as we reported here, but these proved unsuccessful.
In a related move, jazz programmes have been introduced on theJazz's sister station Classic FM. There's now a rolling jazz music stream on classicfm.com.
The adult contemporary music station, Classic Life, is also closing down after more than eight years on air. The station launched in January 2000.
However, Planet Rock – also under threat of closure – has been given a temporary reprieve. GCap has given the station another month to continue discussions with a number of interested buyers. Negotiations continue.
Technorati Tags: Capital Life, Classic FM, DAB radio, theJazz
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Being a pioneer purchaser of a DAB only Hi Fi tuner about 6 years ago, ( videologic model) much was predicted for the mass roll out of DAB, and the death of FM.
However, it took a lot of hard work to get a good DAB signal, but once there Capital Life has been one of my presets and was a good listen as one of the benefits was the lack of ad's and annoying DJ's. They did introduce DJ's for a while a couple of years ago, but dropped them again. There was a really irritating one called Suzan Spence on Sunday evenings! She could have been resplonsible for the station's failure on her own!
Anyway, the fact you can pick up broadcasts from the web or via digital TV and the fact FM remains the format of choice for most car systems, has IMHO contributed to the failure of these stations' ability to generate sufficient advertising revenues.
Adieu Capital Life...........I will certainly miss you! It's over to Virgin and Virgin Classic Rock now.
Agreed, Capital Life will be missed. My favourite DAB station since I got my Pure One tranny. Have to say the choice on DAB is p*ss poor really, and one can only fear for it's future. Still, as long as Radio 2 are on it's ok.
RIP Capital Life....
....I would have thought that one of the advantages of DAB was the number of more specialist channels that would be available ....obviously not!
I listened to quite a lot of "The Jazz" often late at night ....but lets be honest it really consisted of track after track being played with no interaction with the listener.
I would have preferred to have heard a bit of background to the music being played but never did....OK irritating DJ's it didn't have (thank goodness) ..but it didn't have anything but various tracks playing really!
...it might as well have been someone switching on their ipod and letting us hear their jazz selection ..surely there's a spot somewhere within the DAB network for a credible jazz station with news, views, etc.?
....Or is jazz simply not commercially tenable?