No Rock And Roll Fun

THE VIRGIN SOLDIERS: We've been desperately trying to get interested in the battle over at Virgin Radio for the ownership of the precious radio station, but we're finding it difficult for some reason. It's not so much bald men fighting over a comb; it's more some combs fighting over a bald man. The latest twist in the battle - which appears to be Scottish Media Group and Lord Alli having a spat about who gets to throw money away pumping Fleetwood Mac over the medium wave network - is that Richard Branson is threatening to withhold his blessing for the use of the name unless he's happy with the investment Alli is planning to make in the station. Which really only serves to point up that Virgin Radio doesn't really have very much to do with Virgin, the Branson-brain-wrong empire, or Virgin, the record label. Indeed, we'd suspect that Alli might be about this bothered that he couldn't use the name of the crappy rail service for a radio station; we'd bet that he's more interested in the juicy London FM licence and has other plans for the AM network anyway. We really have no idea, but if it was us, we'd be snuggling up to another music-based radio outfit - probably SAGA - and saying "would you be interested in providing programming for this licence, assuming Ofcom doesn't mind a slight shift in the promise of performance?"

music radio business