The
Independent, UK, Saturday 05 January 2013, A new community radio station is
launched every fortnight - from the residents of Melton Mowbray running The
Eye, to one man broadcasting beats from above a pub in east London.
It
wasn't the slickest of plans. Femi Adeyemi had been made redundant from his job
as an online manager for a fashion company. He was 28 years old and soon found
the days were skidding past: "I didn't know what I was going to do. I had
a girlfriend at the time who worked in a bar with a little space that wasn't
being used," he says.
"I
asked the owner one night what he was doing with it and he said, 'What did you
have in mind?'. On the spot I said, 'I'm going to set up a radio station'. It
was the first thing that came into my head. He said, 'Go on then'."
Once
the panic had subsided, Adeyemi set to work, digging deep into his archive of
musically-minded friends. For his first show, he signed up a bloke called
Martin whom he'd met at a party the night before.
It was
April 2011 that the volume was turned up on NTS Live for the first time, with a
four-hour session of Sunday-night-friendly house and electro. Eighteen months
later, Martin is a distant memory, but NTS is here to stay.
Today,
Adeyemi has eight staff members at the station's HQ at a suitably trendy spot
in Dalston, east London.
They are applying the finishing touches to an exciting new project. Following
on from a musical extravaganza in New York City
in 2012, NTS is heading to Krakow for the next
instalment of a programme that sees local DJs and cultural know-it-alls lead a
10-day exposé of the music scene in selected cities. After Krakow, Tokyo and Sydney
are next on the hit-list.
NTS, a
purely internet-based station, already blasts its unique medley of
non-mainstream music and random chit-chat to 10,000 listeners a day – exporting
150 presenters in the process. They include Leyla Pillai, whose slot, 'Who's
That Girl', focuses on a different female artist each week, and the eponymous,
'James's Show', which has been known to fill a whole hour with nothing but
static noise.
The
key to NTS's success, Adeyemi says, is the element of surprise – and if you
don't like what you hear when you switch on, there is a whole back-catalogue of
podcasts on their website to choose from.
The
smart kit the station uses to trace its listeners already shows little black
blobs in Russia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, the United States,
France and Germany – with more appearing every day. This goes some way to
explaining why the presenters on the station pay for, rather than get paid for,
their time on-air, to the tune of £25 to £50 a month.
"Lots
of these guys want to be professional DJs, so they use this as a platform to
get themselves out there. It's a tough game to get in to…" Adeyemi says.
"This way, you get heard and you can end up getting lots of bookings and
make that money back tenfold."
Now
big brands, too, are queuing up to bask in the station's glory. Nike and Red
Bull are among those who pay to have their events broadcast through the hippest
station in town.
The
majority of presenters on NTS are from, or live in, the Hackney area, and with
a little help from the internet they are beaming their collective voice to all
corners of the globe
.
But in
villages, towns and cities across Britain, local people are clubbing
together to create a more intimate conversation.
There
are now some 200 community radio stations filtering through airwaves across Britain,
according to a new report from Ofcom. These local projects, which operate
through tune-in FM frequencies rather than online, cover small areas and serve
the needs of a specific population.
Melton
Mowbray is a picturesque Leicestershire town, best known for its world famous
pork pies. It is also home to 103 The Eye, the first community radio station to
be awarded a licence by Ofcom, back in 2005.
Since
then, the station, which is run entirely by volunteers, has gone 24-hour,
broadcasting from a range of premises, including a school and various
presenters' living rooms. "This morning, as part of our Sunday community
focus programme, we had someone on from Vineyard Church in Melton, then a lady
came on to talk about a new food bank being established in town, followed by a
local councillor and a member of the rotary club talking about their charity
club," explains the station's co-managing director, Christine Slomkowska.
There
are 45 presenters on The Eye, their ages spanning 16 to 77. Their voices echo
across an area home to some 80,000 people – through Melton Mowbray, past the
Vale of Belvoir and beyond to Rushcliffe. "We are the community,"
Slomkowska says. "What we can offer that others can't is localness. We
give a voice to people that a larger station could not."
(Source : The
Independent, UK)
