WORK: Bath FM - Day 2

I had an early start with Paul today and sat it on the breakfast show, which he presents, I also got to meet Steve who does the early morning breakfast show.

What’s notable about watching someone on the air on the radio is the need for some precise timing as Paul had to often backtime what songs were being played before certain segments like the news, which starts one second after the hour. Paul stays true to his companies catchphrase "keeping it local" by hosting a competition, "Where am I?" Where he describes a nearby location and the listeners have to call in to guess the location. There is a definite sense of community in the station as most of their competitions have prizes to local shows like the Drive-Thru screening of Grease and the Katy Setterfield concert who is a Dusty Springfield tribute act. Paul also supports the Bath Comedy Festival by giving information on the upcoming gigs and plugs the upcoming Joke-off between himself and fellow presenter Kate Constance.

After the show Paul dealt with invoices for a while and answered some emails before launching my favourite part of the day: Listening to new music. I learnt that invoices usually need to be checked by Paul before going to Head Office to get processed.


We listened to new singles to see which he would choose to potentially get played on air. The artists included U2, EG, Daniel Merriweather, Kelly Clarkson and Marmaduke Duke and I found it pretty exciting as he was getting early listens to new singles.

He decided which songs would go on his A or B list for this week and possibly the following week and which songs would not be played at all.

He had to update the playlist for the other station programmers to see as well as the band's publishers.

We spoke about the PRS, I was curious to find out how artists got paid for their music being played on air. He explained that PRS take a percentage of the companies’ annual gross for playing copyright music.

Paul took calls from the manager/promoter of a band who had sent him a promo CD for the band Grasshouse (or something like that). He listened to it while still on the phone to the manager, which I thought was extremely courteous, he even admitted there was a chance of the band getting some airtime since he liked the song. A lot of the choices Paul makes regarding the music depend solely on the song and whether its good or not, it seems that even being a big name doesn’t secure you airtime as we discussed with Steve that some of the songs by artists like Pink and Justin Timberlake weren’t suitable for the stations image, however they do have some songs that they will play because the audience like it like Justin Timberlake's "Senorita".

Most of what he did today was regarding the radio side of things; he also spoke with his sales department about looking for weather sponsorship. It's a shame I couldn't spend more time with the Sales team as they seemed like nice guys and I think that knowing about Sales and having some experience with it would be vital for business management.