According to the latest RAJAR results, BBC Radio 1 is in rude health. Its audience of 8.1m listeners aged 15 and above is up 5.6% year-on-year, while Radio 1 Breakfast With Greg James remains the biggest for young audiences in the country. It’s the third-most-listened-to BBC station in the U.K., behind Radio 2 and Radio 4, respectively. The brand’s social-media stats are also impressive—the Radio 1 YouTube channel has more than 8.3m subscribers, and there are 9.5m followers across its Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and X accounts.
As head of BBC Radio 1, Aled Haydn Jones tells us in an expansive interview that he and his team are as committed as ever to using their reach to help the U.K. music industry grow artist careers at home and abroad. We also chat with Jones about the evolution of radio, the biggest challenges about working in the space and the most exciting developments.
You’ve been head of BBC Radio 1 for four years now. What was your vision for the station upon taking on the role and how has that been realized?
The first thing in my mind when I started the job was not to mess it up. Radio 1 is such a heritage, legacy behemoth of a station that has so much clout and importance for the U.K. and the global music industry that it isn’t the station I needed to fix. I wanted to make sure it was doing its right job and doing it as well as possible, but doing it in a way that didn’t ruin anything. On that front, I think we’re good. We’re still the biggest radio station for young people in the U.K. We still have music industry buy-in and regular conversations with some of the biggest global superstars in the world.
The thing I wanted to make sure we focused on was what our strengths were when the market was changing so dramatically for consumption. We’ve done two things: We’ve focused on under-35s and under-25s to make sure that young people are getting what they need from the BBC. Also, we’ve homed in on not just playing lots of music, which we do effortlessly, but doing it in a way that has artist journeys at the heart of it.
How do you choose which new acts to back? I’m wondering how much of a role streaming and social-media stats play in playlisting decisions.
It’s a factor, of course, but the playlist is so unique these days. The playlist meetings are 10 young people in a room with the Radio 1 music team. Some producers in that room produce the specialist shows, which play new music and new artists, and they can give first-hand reactions to how tracks have been going down. You’ve also got some producers from the daytime shows who are experts in music and youth culture and are able to use their gut for what feels right. Then there’s the relationships the music team have with labels about what support they’re getting and how artists are coming through on TikTok or socials. It all comes together, rather than it being a stats-driven model.
Our team can have conversations with artists to say, ‘We will back you’. We’ve launched Brit List, which supports certain artists through a number of tracks to help them gain traction with an audience. A streaming site, say, operates on a track-by-track basis. There you’ll get large visibility if a song happens to connect and do really well. But the next one could disappear because you haven’t built a fan base around it in the way you would through a radio station that is championing your name across billions of impacts across the radio industry over a course of several months.
You mentioned focusing on attracting an under-25 and under 35-year-old audience. How are you able to do that and compete with the many other things out there clamoring for their attention?
It’s a million-dollar question, and if I got it right I’d be a very rich person. The good thing about Radio 1 is we’re not just a linear radio station; we’re part of BBC Music, which has access to iPlayer, BBC Sounds, BBC TV channels and other radio stations. That gives us clout. We have partnerships with music festivals, which means we’re able to host stages and artists in front of young people when they’re having the time of their life, and they’re able to connect that experience with the Radio 1 brand.
We’re the world’s biggest social channels for a radio station and the world’s biggest YouTube channel for a radio station. When we did Big Weekend, we had five-and-a-half million streams for the festival in the U.K., through iPlayer and Sounds. We had around the same number, if not a little bit more, from live listening to the radio. Across the BBC social channels we had over 100 million views of our content.
That figure is multiplied three times when you take in all the audience members at the festival with us. We see ourselves as content creators with a range of platforms to broadcast on. Radio 1 is the big one; that’s the one that brings in 8 million young people on a weekly basis. But when you add in everything else, it levels up to a big impact for artists.
How do you see audience listening habits evolving?
It’s more targeted. The amount of hours all audiences in the U.K., but young people especially, are listening has gone up considerably. That’s because you’ve got listening on YouTube, streaming sites and radio. When you look at under 25s and under 35s, they’ve grown up with media that’s personalized to them, whether that’s Netflix, TikTok, Spotify or YouTube. If you’re a broadcaster like Radio 1, you are a broad broadcaster, not a narrowcaster that’s personalized. It’s important we understand our audience and have access to different platforms to be able to serve content to different need states.
For example, 20 years ago, most audiences in the U.K. just listened to Radio 1, day and night, whatever we put on there, whatever mood you’re in, it was Radio 1. Nowadays there’s so much choice. You might have Radio 1 in the daytime but in the evening, if I’m having some friends over, I might want a mood met and that will be different to what radio would supply.
We need to meet the moods of social media, which is time-killing entertainment and snapshots of attention span. We need to be able to take the content that we consume, the artist journeys we’re working on, the relationships we’re having with the industry, and supply that content to meet those moods in those spaces. No longer is it a passive one-stream linear output from Radio 1, it’s infinitely more complex because the audience is more complex, has more needs and more opportunities to meet them.
How are you tackling diversity in your output and striking the right balance between supporting U.K. and international acts?
Our service license requires us to play 45% U.K. music and we exceed that. We do that with gender and we do that with genres. Radio 1 is hugely, overwhelmingly, a force for good for U.K. artists and acts. Hand in hand with that fact, we’re also a reflection of popular culture and it’s a global artist industry. Having a space like Radio 1 is important because we’ve got to keep the U.K. music industry strong. The BBC plays a huge role in making sure that U.K. artists get that first leg up, from new tracks to traction in the U.K., to someone like Stormzy, who can then leapfrog to a global perspective.
There was a lot of disappointment over the decision to reduce the number of the BBC’s Introducing shows across local radio last year, which provide a platform for new talent and acts that may not have a big audience yet. What role does BBC Radio 1 play in filling any gaps left by those cuts?
Sixty percent of our daytime playlist is new music released in the last six weeks. After 6pm, 100% of our music is new music. We play over 1,000 unique tracks per week, which is more than our nearest competitor plays per year. The vast majority of that percentage is music from new acts who have never achieved traction in the U.K. Radio 1 is already a massive machine giving new artists, whether U.K. or abroad, a huge platform for hundreds of thousands or millions of people to listen to.
What I believe is most important for Introducing is that the department is connected to the rest of the BBC. I don’t think it is solely the job of local radio to do the Introducing job; otherwise they’ll only achieve a certain amount of results for the artists in those areas. What’s much more important is that the local BBC networks connect with the national BBC networks, which connect with the festivals that we put on. We have a BBC Introducing stage at Big Weekend, as well as Reading and Leeds Festivals, Glastonbury and many others. 6 Music has Introducing, as does 1Xtra, Asian Network, Radio 1 and Radio 1 Dance. The connection of local, national and festival is really what the power of Introducing at the BBC is.
Much has been said about the fear that streaming could eventually make radio obsolete. How would you respond to that?
In the pandemic, I saw a stat that said 99% of under-25-year-olds have some access to some streaming sites and, at that time, over 76% listened to radio. The best way to look at streaming, and the way I see it working, is back in the day you’d have your private collection of songs that you’d go and buy and then you’d listen to the radio. That then morphed into iTunes, where you can download and then listen to radio. Nowadays, you are paying a subscription to have access to the music that you want to listen to regularly, but when it comes to a live connection with other audiences, the fear of missing out, Beyoncé or Billie Eilish releasing a new album and you want to know what you’re meant to think about it, massive news stories like the death of the Queen, that’s when people tune in in mass numbers to radio. Those needs never go. Streaming music sites will supply a part of the thing that’s needed but not the full story.
If someone wants new music or to reminisce with songs that are a surprise, that will come from curated playlists through radio stations that are streaming at you through the car, the radio or the smart speaker in the office or home, rather than the set of songs you listen to regularly as your own private playlist on one of the streaming sites. They are 100% coexisting. As for podcasting, there’s more people listening to more audio and that’s how we’re able to have such a high percentage for radio, which for all audiences is still in the 90s percentile of people listening, and still have the growth of podcasts. There’s room for all in the more established markets.
What are the biggest challenges about working in radio today?
There’s a perception that radio isn’t new or cool tech, whereas actually we reach 76% of very young audiences to 90% of all. For the music industry, where are the levers you pull when it comes to streaming sites? You’re either going to have an algorithm that gets your song played or it’s not. There’s no conversation. There’s no building of relationships like you do with the radio industry. When Ariana Grande comes to town, she can have a Live Lounge performance where she shows off her skill set, she can have an interview with someone about the craft of music and what she puts into it in the evening, and she can go into our breakfast show and have a game, which means that a new slew of audiences can see a different side to her, pick up that personality and become connected to who she is as a person, which is way more than what technology can bring with playing you tracks in a playlist.
How about the most exciting developments in the space that you’re working in?
Data is not all bad. When it comes to selecting music, you don’t want to replace the human, but when you want to know what audiences are into, data has been really insightful. With radio moving to digital, whether that’s smart-speaker apps or connected devices, we’re able to see what levers we can pull that make audiences listen for longer and consume us for more moments across the week.
It means that we’ve changed how we do things. For example, for Radio 1 in Ibiza in August, we broadcast 80 hours of dance, rather than a six-hour Ibiza performance night, because we’ve seen how to make audiences stay with us across the whole weekend. We repeated that two weeks later in Malta. For Reading Festival, we’ve extended how much coverage we do. Again, from audience insights about what it is they want from us, it’s given us a lot more insight into how to better serve audiences, and that’s happened in the last three, four years. I’ve been in radio for 26 years, and it’s really changed how targeted we can be in our broadcasting.
What’s unique or special about British radio in particular?
In the U.K., you’ve got a very strong and healthy commercial radio market and you’ve got a very healthy license-funded public-service radio market. The two of them coexist really well. For Radio 1, because of the license fee, we’re able to do what’s healthiest for the music industry and take bets and artists at a very early stage and work with them, management and labels for the entire journey. Commercial radio then comes in once we’ve done the legwork and started getting traction to take those artists to other parts of the population that don’t consume the BBC. That symbiotic approach in the U.K. is extremely strong and is quite unique around the world. There’s only a few other markets that have that balance.
Here’s a final question for you: What does the future look like for BBC Radio 1 and its music strategy?
It’s about personalization and how far we can go with that. Our Sounds app is going to get better and better at serving BBC content that meets your needs. We have a second stream on BBC Sounds called Radio 1 Dance, and we’re working on a second brand extension. We have Radio 1Xtra as well. It’s about the BBC being able to meet more of your needs, no matter where you are, whether that’s audio, visual or social. We’re going to continue with that strategy and continue to work with the music industry, not just for playing songs in the U.K., but using our huge footprint around the world on YouTube and social media to create impact for all artists, but particularly U.K. artists.
