BBC Sounds - is it going away internationally?

BBC Sounds is a bit of a puzzle.

Though you wouldn’t know from visiting the BBC Sounds website, BBC Sounds is also an app for your phone, and intended to be, I think, the primary place you find BBC audio content (music, radio, podcasts). (More than 90% of podcasts are listened-to on a mobile phone, so it’s curious that links to download the app aren’t front and centre on the BBC Sounds website.)

Try listening to the In Our Time podcast from the BBC on a third-party app, and you’ll discover it’s time-delayed by four weeks, in order to make you “enjoy it first, directly from the BBC”.

Watch BBC News, however - a commercial television channel here in Australia but with copious unsold ad breaks - and the filler promos for the Global News Podcast tell you to “listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts”. No promotion of BBC Sounds, on the BBC’s most-watched global television channel.

“We greatly value off-platform listener consumption to help us find new audiences for BBC content”, says Mary Hough, Head of Growth and Discovery for BBC Sounds, while simultaneously announcing more restrictions to curtail off-platform listener consumption.

There are plenty of shows now being time-delayed, including the biggest shows from the broadcaster. “News programmes which serve a strong public service purpose” aren’t time-delayed, though Money Box, billed as “the latest news from the world of personal finance”, is. Every new podcast promoted by the BBC is only ever promoted on press releases as being “on BBC Sounds”, so I can’t even tell you whether a new podcast I’m mentioning is going to be available on a podcast app without going back and asking a PR person who’d rather that off-platform apps didn’t exist.

Yet - we’re also encouraged to listen on off-platform apps. BBC Podcasts has a paid podcast subscription on Apple Podcasts, launched at US $2.99 a month, but which has quietly changed to US $4.99 a month. Why pay that, though, when many of the same shows are available for free, with no ads, on BBC Sounds, which is a free download in the Apple App Store.

BBC Studios has inked a new deal with Triton Digital for podcast monetisation, so the BBC stands to benefit from podcast listens (which are all “supported by advertising outside the UK”). Yet, the BBC Sounds app has no advertising in it. And, the possibilities to earn more revenue from advertising are hobbled by the BBC time-delaying some of its biggest shows.

And BBC Sounds isn’t just BBC content. It now has two shows from Goalhanger, which are ad-supported elsewhere, but the BBC will get these shows ad free: but this time, after a time delay of its own within BBC Sounds. I’m really unclear why the licence-fee payer is paying for the BBC to comply these shows (and strip the ads out) when they can get these shows elsewhere.

It’s a bit of a crap-shoot as to what works globally, too. BBC Radio 1 Dance, an online-only stream, is available globally on the BBC Sounds app; yet outside the UK, BBC Radio 3 Unwind is not visible on the app, but is visible on the website, where it kicks up a “not available in your location” error if you try to play it. Radio 3 Unwind’s music mixes are, confusingly, available globally - with a logo for a station we can’t see. The opportunity to “Download and subscribe to your favourite 6 music shows on the BBC Sounds app” is promoted in the front of every Radio 6 music “mix”, yet the download button is not available for music mixes, or catchup radio, outside the UK. Audio of the “latest BBC News headlines” is prominently promoted on the front page, but doesn’t work - “can only be played within the UK”, says the app - yet every other item in the “news playlist” is playable. The front page item “Discover more from the BBC” takes us to a page promoting lots of lovely links to the iPlayer that no, we don’t get.

I’m sure there’s a strategy here somewhere.

To me, here’s a guess. Like BBC iPlayer, BBC Sounds is run by the domestic BBC - as evidenced by the fact that the website address doesn’t change from bbc.co.uk to bbc.com when you go there outside the UK, and there are no ads within the app or on the website. And because it’s a domestic service, it isn’t really for the likes of you and me any more who live outside the country.

So I guess that, like BBC iPlayer, BBC Sounds will (at some point) not be available internationally. We’ll be left with the BBC World Service (possibly within the main BBC app), and the podcast output “wherever we get our BBC podcasts” - available everywhere, with ads, and without time delays. And that might be why the BBC is trying to carry ads on podcasts within the UK on third-party platforms: since it enables them to do this cleanly everywhere.

When we lose access to BBC Sounds, we’ll also - by and large - lose access to the BBC’s domestic radio stations. Those only exist internationally because they’ve always been available that way - but they cost money to stream overseas, and the music rights amnesty they enjoy goes away as soon as the BBC starts commercialising the streams.

I can’t imagine this going down very well, but it seems the most sensible strategy. And at least I have one, which is more than - to this overseas observer - the BBC appear to.