Listening to radio while eating things

So, my round-the-world trip has started; and I’ve spent the last four days in New York City, acclimatising to the US, and doing holiday things.

I went to a diner yesterday evening in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a proper, US, diner – a menu with bewildering choice, formica-and-steel tables, butter with bizarre names, little booths with friends meeting other friends. The musical accompaniment to all this? 106.7 Lite FM, a radio station that claimed it was ‘the variety station’, but mostly consisted of the syndicated Delilah, a woman with a Diana Luke voice, enthusiastically talking to lovestruck females on the phone and playing rather too much ‘heartbreakers’ type music. Whitney Houston’s “I will always love you” popped up, as one would expect would happen night after night.

I thought back to earlier in my stay, when I remarked to my companion that it was quite unusual to hear the radio on in a restaurant. This restaurant was another diner – nowhere near as lovely, and in the Hell’s Kitchen area of Manhattan. It, too, had a radio station on; not Mix 107.9 this time, but a radio station nonetheless.

Perhaps I frequent slightly different places in the UK – quite possibly – but I couldn’t help thinking that I’d never heard any radio stations in any of the places I go to: bars, pubs or restaurants.

Perhaps part of it lies in music licensing. In the UK, regardless of what music you play in any commercial establishment – your own collection from your iPod or a computer, a pile of CDs, an in-store radio station, or the local FM’er – you still need to pay a PRS licence.

That’s right – in spite of the radio station paying for the music it uses, you need to pay again if you want to play this radio station in a public place. And that’s probably a cost that many establishments don’t really want to pay – particularly workplaces.

I wonder why the radio industry isn’t lobbying “PRS for music” to remove this charge for broadcast radio?

If radio ‘came free’, but other use of music was paid-for with a PRS licence, then surely:

• the record industry is already getting its payment, from the radio industry’s not insubstantial licence payments every year?
• radio could get into many more places: encouraging trial of radio stations?
• any workplace could get great music without any outlay save a radio?
• this could benefit the music industry as well, rather than restaurants playing “songs that are already hits” from CDs or iPods? The industry agrees that most people still discover new music via the radio, after all

If radio ‘came free’, surely everyone wins?

This isn’t new thinking: Passion for the Planet has said their piece, Absolute Radio gives ways to avoid the charge, while Kwik-Fit, a chain of car mechanics, has been fined a fifth of a million pounds for daring to turn the radio on at work.

Indeed, this blog reports that The Federation of Small Businesses has already called for radio to be free.

Hmm. Why hasn’t the Radio Council?