“Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose”
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr
It's now well over six years since Share Radio started broadcasting. We made a big change in May 2017 in delivering our services wholly online and moving to registered access. Then, during 2020, we introduced a subscription fee for access to both our ‘live’ stream and our audio podcast library.
Throughout this time, we've kept you informed with our weekly newsletter and delivered a schedule of new audio programmes: this will continue as we move forward.
Over the next fortnight, we’ll be streamlining our broadcast service into a single channel. This gives us the opportunity to look afresh at our business model, including returning to free access as the new arrangements settle in.
So, during next week we’ll be merging the two channels of Share Radio and Share Music. This will mean that all speech programmes broadcast on our ‘live’ stream will be current output; but, because weekly production is currently somewhat less than the available hours in the day, you'll be able to enjoy our substantial portfolio of instrumental folk music in between.
Key speech programme output times will be scheduled to follow the 9 am news each morning and the 2 pm news each afternoon. The schedule is planned as follows:
Our audio podcast library will continue as at present but, over the months ahead, we plan to provide much improved visibility and additional features.
This streamlining of our services will enable a higher degree of automation. However, we recognise that the move away from a mainly continuous speech programme format does change significantly the nature of the service for which listeners have subscribed, and we will therefore postpone monthly subscriptions charges with immediate effect while we look afresh at Share Radio’s business model.
Listeners will continue to register - just once - for access to this free service, and we will therefore be raising the profile of partner-enabled access; and we encourage you to register via www.sharefound.org/shareradio from now for free access:
If you are aware of other organisations which would like to provide free access to their customers, please get in touch with me at [email protected] . There is no sponsor charge for charity partners, and we are happy to discuss mutually acceptable terms for commercial partners.
Please bear with us as we put these changes into effect, and we hope you will continue to find both our spoken programmes and our music content informative and entertaining.
As you will be aware, quality speech broadcasting presents quite a challenge in the United Kingdom, where the BBC provides a flow of radio output financed by the television licence. For this reason, most other commercial speech stations rely on call-in or sports programmes, or are supported by large conglomerates with very deep pockets!
We will continue providing quality output and access to our huge audio library, built up over the past six years; and we will continue to welcome ideas and suggestions for broadening the reach of our output and improving accessibility, while at the same time ensuring a realistic business model for the future.
Gavin Oldham OBE
Share Radio