The BBC (AKA the British Broadcasting Corporation) announced earlier this week that it plans to launch its own streaming service.
The platform, which as of now has no name (or at least it hasn’t been made fully clear), is set to be one focused around new music discovery, which is something that the BBC has always been known for. While traditional radio in America often relies pretty heavily on playing just the hits, the same cannot be said about stations across the pond. There, acts break all the time, singles rise and fall much faster, and championing new music is taken very seriously. According to a report by MBW, the new platform would focus on the 50,000 songs played every month by all of the BBC’s channels.
Recently, the BBC lost one of its most popular DJs, Zane Lowe, to Apple just before the company’s streaming platform launched. Lowe changed the industry forever by bringing some of the best new artists to the country’s attention—some of which have gone on to become the biggest stars in the world. With this new discovery streaming service, the BBC seems to want to continue Lowe’s legacy, and perhaps even enhance it by making those songs, albums, and artists uncovered by the staff at the organization more widely available to the public.
It is clear that the BBC is working on this new service as a way to stay relevant and to compete with outside services like Spotify. Since most people go to the internet for their music listening needs, that’s where anyone who wants to be a real player in the music game needs to be. Traditional radio (and even online playing of those stations) is great, but things are moving in another direction, and to ignore that is to eventually be left behind.
As of now, there is no saying exactly when the platform will launch, but for the organization to be speaking publicly on the idea, it must already be in motion. While the service is in development, it sounds like the BBC has not yet licensed any of the music it plans on playing, which could be the biggest roadblock to getting this out to the public. The three majors seem ready to talk, but this will not come without payment to the artists and rights holders, that much has been made clear.
Interestingly, this new platform comes at a time when the organization is headed into a period of scaling many other projects back. The government-funded organization is reportedly going to scale back several hundred million dollars, so this must have been made a top priority.
