I agree Cotton should not have been given Whiley’s spot but I also believe it was Whiley’s decision to leave her spot not people forcing her out. If you want to say a station is killing music you should look at the local stations. They pick out 10 songs a week and play them again and again, changing one each week, its depressing stuff.

What with last.fm, iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, &c., there seems little or no point in mourning the loss of a former institution. The radio is a dying breed of entertainment, and has been too slow on the uptake in embracing the ‘internetisation’ of music as a whole.

I agree with the article, but do not care as much as the author seems to. I don’t think I could name you two ‘personalities’ on radio 1 that I can actually bear to listen to (names like Lamb, Chung, Zane, Bowmen, Moyles, Cotton make me shudder something rotten). Annie Mac, and Laverne would the two that I enjoyed most, and eh, what with the things I’ve laid out they just can’t keep up.

Yesterday afternoon I opened Spotify, and listened to 4 of the albums it recommended to me as ‘new’ or ‘you would like’. I enjoyed 2 of them, one of them enough to add to one of my playlists. Unbelievably, if I open radio 1 livestream I get Casablancas’s ‘I wish it was Christmas today’, but fortunately it then goes on to say “I wish it was Christmas today, not in three weeks [...] now let’s talk about 50 cent.” Thus proving my point. Shame, I missed “Twiggy” doing “innuendo bingo.”

Sigh.

6 music has given Radio 1 a get-out clause. They know people who are serious about music will listen to 6 instead so now don’t need to appeal to anyone apart from the very lowest common denominator.

I don’t particularly care for the music playlist myself, but then I don’t listen to Moyles for it. I’d actually be happiest if he got rid of it completely and made it a full speech show, and that’s genuine because I love that kind of radio (Howard Stern is my favourite presenter, so go figure my tastes). But no, I’m not too fond of the music they do choose to play. But I also understand why they do it – they have experimented with certain new music before and, for whatever reason, some of it just hasn’t been well-received by the listeners. I used to ask for more Metallica and Slipknot, but apparently it attains negativity from the audience responses and therefore they tend to avoid it. Shame, but how it is.

Sure they play a lot of crap on there – but to make a comparison, BBC1 shows wall to wall bilge during the day and then show more interesting shows in the evening. Radio 1 still has some genre pushing shows that play interesting music, Rob Da Bank and Gilles Peterson spring to mind and the addition of iPlayer means that these more nocturnal shows are available whenever you like. I remember being a kid and having to tape the late night shows I liked to listen to later so things ain’t changed that much.

Though I find the playlist system on Radio 1 depressing and the back scratching situation is very much in effect. But I wonder when this halcyon time of Radio 1 when they played interesting music all day long was?

I think the main issue I have with this article is the suggestion that Jo Whiley was some sort of bastion of indie cred on daytime radio. The fact that you say that means you never listened to her show, which was filled with garbage music and endless chatter about what she’d watched on TV the night before. Yes, she does great work but rarely for Radio 1 in recent years.

Finally:

“with the presenters mostly talking about late night drinking sessions, X Factor, football, celebrity gossip and fashion, it’s an insult for any 29-year-old that I know. I think the BBC are completely out of touch with modern culture and what the public actually desires.”

Interestingly I think it may be you who is out of touch with what the vast majority of the public want as those are the sort of things the majority of people are into – hence their rampant popularity.

Anyways, I enjoyed reading your article, just thought I’d throw my tuppence in….I’m not a fan of daytime Radio 1 at all, but the idea that it can bring interesting dynamic music to people is lovely – but the sad fact is that most people don’t care about hearing it.