Bauer Media Audio is the third-biggest radio network in the U.K., boasting 23.5m weekly listeners across its owned and partner stations, which is up 6.8% year-on-year, according to Q3’s RAJAR stats. Its flagship Hits Radio Network tallies 7.2m weekly listeners (up 10.7% YoY), while its catalog station, Greatest Hits, tallies 7.4m (up 12.9% YoY). Over a third of Bauer’s listening is now via connected devices including smart speakers, web and app, with a further 52% of listening on Digital Audio Broadcasters [DAB].

The network’s USP is the diversity across its portfolio, according to Head of Audio Gary Stein. “We’ve got some incredibly world-famous brands under the portfolio, including Kiss, Hits, Magic, Absolute Radio and Greatest Hits,” he says. “We’ve also got specialists, like the incredibly successful country music station we launched over the last few years, as well as jazz and rock. We’re constantly looking at other genres that are unexploited. These are all ways we’re trying to make sure we stay relevant and stand out from the competition, while making sure the curation of those stations is done in a way that is absolutely unique to Bauer.”

Here, we chat further with Stein about how streaming has had an impact on Bauer’s offerings, what’s next for its music strategy and how radio can take advantage of what he calls a “golden age of audio.”

How do you support new music talent and British talent, in particular, at Bauer?

Radio still has an incredibly important part to play in developing artists who want to have sustained, long careers and become catalog artists. Over the last couple of years, there have been a few really good examples of how we’ve supported talent.

One of our brands is Hits Radio, which is our biggest commercial hits music network across the U.K. Developing artists like Dermot Kennedy, Tom Grennan and Cian Ducrot have been part of a bigger strategy there over the past few years. These artists are now mainstream radio acts in the U.K. but they all started with conversations between record labels and our heads of music about suitability for our radio stations. We’ve also got a couple of live arena events every year where they’ve performed. There’s still real strength in that record label and radio station relationship, nurturing and finding the talent that’s going to work for the audiences of our different brands and building them through radio.

Can you talk me through your team’s playlisting strategy? What do you like to see before choosing to playlist an artist or a song?

If you go back 10 years, it was really simple. You would just use your own insight and research. We still have that, and we test our music weekly with our listeners and our potential listeners, but now, we will look at everything. “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims is a great example of a choice that was streaming-led and a massive U.S. hit. We saw that blow up, and Hits was one of the first stations [in the U.K.] to play it. Recently, we saw the Mark Ambor track “Belong Together” blow up on TikTok. It felt right for our audience, and we jumped on it. We are looking at all of these different data points, but ultimately, we still test the music we’re playing with our audience and make sure that it’s right. You have got to program the music for the specific audience that you’re targeting.

How much risk taking is involved in playlist decisions? How much of a chance do you take on songs that don’t have a lot of data behind them yet?

That ultimately comes down to the human element of the playlist meeting and I don’t think that has massively changed over the years. You have experts in the room who have a long history of seeing the type of music, genres and artists that are going to work for a particular audience. There is, of course, always an element of risk-taking and the team still tends to get [choices] right most of the time. With a new record that you’re putting in the playlist, you can’t really use testing to see how that’s going to perform, that comes later. Hopefully, that discovery element is what makes radio exciting.

How have you seen audience listening habits change alongside the evolution of streaming?

In the U.K., five years ago we launched a new station, Greatest Hits Radio, which is a Classic Hits format. We had a really clear strategy, which was, let’s create a station for over-45s, built around music that was played on the radio when they were growing up, presented by presenters they know and love. We signed up some pretty well-known broadcasters in the U.K., including Ken Bruce from BBC Radio 2, who had the biggest show in Europe in terms of audience. That station has, over five years, become the most listened to commercial radio station in the U.K., and has grown to an audience of 7.8m listeners. There is still a huge opportunity to grow audiences but obviously, that example is an older audience who are very comfortable listening to radio.

In terms of younger audiences, with Kiss, we have had to look at things in a very different way. What we’re seeing is that it’s getting harder and harder to get younger audiences, especially those age, to spend a lot of time with radio. What we do know about this audience is they’re spending a lot of time on social media and they’re spending a huge amount of time listening to audio. So we’re having to change the way we think about measuring success. The content we’re serving them is not just judged on what its performance is on a linear radio station, it’s how successful that brand is across all different platforms.

As those older audiences get slowly replaced by younger generations who’ve grown up with streaming, where does that leave traditional radio?

I think people have been ready to write radio off for a long time. The fact is, radio has survived because it’s a complementary service to what is offered by the streaming platforms. It offers a liveness and a companionship that has huge value and has proved to be incredibly successful. 89% of the population in the U.K. are still listening to radio every single week, so I don’t see that going anywhere.

In the U.K., we target some very different audiences across the country. The strength that we have in different markets is also down to the way that radio can be specific, whether it’s news or sports content. In Scotland, for example, you’ve got big markets like Glasgow and Edinburgh where football is hugely important. One of the biggest shows in Scotland is a football phone-in every single night. These shows are still massively popular with young and old audiences alike. I don’t think that’s something that streaming platforms can necessarily compete with in the same way.

There are challenges around fragmentation, technology, the need for constant evolving and adapting, and that’s something every operator has got to think about. Earlier this year, we launched a streaming platform called Rayo, which brings together all our live radio stations under one place for the first time. We need to take steps like that but it’s really about the content and having live radio at the forefront.

What’s the future for Bauer’s music strategy?

Bauer has always been a very digital-first business. We’ve been at the forefront of popularizing DAB with a number of successful digital-only spin-off stations, including KISSTORY and Absolute ’80s. We think that by 2030, the number of people that are going to be consuming our stations [online] is going to be far and away higher than anything else.

Over the next six years, it’s about investment in content and working with record labels to do 360 campaigns around artists. It’s not just about a playlist anymore; it could be about a live event or doing something extremely special in the digital space to build careers. A tech platform is one thing, but Netflix isn’t successful because it has a great tech platform. It’s successful because it invests in content.

How has Bauer’s relationship with the music business evolved over the last decade?

Bauer has always been seen as a really collaborative partner. The relationship around championing artists and driving music discovery hasn’t changed. The element that has possibly changed is that we are now seen as a much more valuable partner in terms of catalog. That’s because we’ve got formats like Greatest Hits that have such a significant share of U.K. radio and catalog has become more important for record labels. Streaming platforms have obviously driven that change as well.

For the first time this year, we’re able to put on major arena shows. The new Co-op Live Arena in Manchester, which is one of the biggest venues in the whole of Europe with a capacity of over 20,000 people, will host our first-ever catalog artist event for Greatest Hits in late November. We’ve got more in our portfolio now to open up different types of conversations. I’d say it’s a more holistic partnership involving artist development, live events and content creation.

What are the biggest challenges about working in radio in 2024?

Audience fragmentation, evolving technology, constant adaptation. But that’s something that radio has always done. The most exciting part is that audio is so powerful now. That’s speech audio, music radio—which is still very strong for many parts of the audience—and the rise of podcasts. The U.K. has also adopted smart speakers incredibly fast. That’s driving a lot of our listening now and it’s bringing radio back into people’s homes. There are new ways of engaging audiences, through social media, live events and Rayo. For me, we’re in a golden age of audio. Radio’s opportunity is to take advantage of that and lean in.

What would you say is unique and special about British radio in particular?

Radio in the U.K. has always held a really special place in the history of the country. It’s got an incredible amount of diversity, creativity and cultural significance. It has played a big role in shaping British music culture since back in the late ’60s. The live local output and strong connection some of our radio stations have with our community is incredibly powerful. Across Scotland, we have seven radio stations that all share, for the most part, the same output, but news, travel and any local information from presenters can be split out by market. That works incredibly well for us because an audience in Glasgow is very different to an audience in London. We still think about that and take that into account in a big way in terms of how we program these radio stations. All of that makes British radio quite unique in the world.