Ofcom takes on the pirate

Pirate radio. It's still a major problem, as far as Ofcom's concerned, in this world of iPods and digital and streaming music leaking for every pore. Ofcom insists its actually getting worse:

"In 2006 Ofcom's field operations team responded to 70 safety-of-life cases (a significant increase from the 41 such cases reported in 2005)."

These, we'd guess, include pirate radio pumping from emergency service radios and cutting into tower-to-plane communications. Curiously, though, while Ofcom has these seventy violations, there's no evidence so far that anyone has actually had their life terminated by pirate radio.

The regulator paints a picture of modern pirates as cash-hungry, gun-toting thugs - in much the same way that the record labels insist the people who don't play by their rules are outlaws who'd cut your throat soon as look at you - which might well be true in some cases, but seems a bit far-fetched. Ofcom's response is to call for more stringent punishments, although you might have thought that if there's a demand for these programmes, it might make more sense to supply them legally than pour resources into trying to close down a dangerous, shifting, lucrative illegal operation that will always return while there's a profit to be made.

In effect, this is like the argument that you'd be better off legalising hard drugs, but without the awkward 'won't the government then be selling heroin' ethical problem.

Of course, ancestor-regulator the Radio Authority tried to do just this - legalise pirate formats, not sell heroin - by cutting a deal where pirates could apply for a full-time, proper licence in return for no longer popping up illegally. Unfortunately, the RA dropped the ball awfully after taking this brave step, and failed to protect the new, legal stations, with the result that former pirates XFM and Kiss both got swallowed up by conglomerates, ridden into the middle of the road and abandoned their key audiences. Thereby creating demand for the new pirate stations.

How about - instead of issuing licences - creating a radio service where you can buy airtime? The chances of a pirate turning itself into a successful, legitimate 24-hour a day radio network competing for advertising with the big groups seem slim; the chances of hundreds of DJs being able to pull together the wherewithal to hire three or four hours a month on an FM transmitter (or even DAB) seem much happier. It's worth a try.

They could fund it by selling heroin.

French kicked off Sussex airwaves

For a long time now, Brightonians have enjoyed a slightly-dodgy rebraadcast of French station FIP thanks to one enterprising resident and a small transmitter. Now, though, about ten years of blind-eyes and official unconcern have come to an end, thanks to a single man from Hove, actually. Iain Smith bubbled the deal to Ofcom, forcing them to act as a complaint had been made. His reason?

"[J]ust make sure it wasn’t unfairly competing with properly licensed stations.”

How public spirited of him. Because, of course, anyone who tuned into a French station being rebroadcast in Brighton will now, obviously, turn straight to Southern FM instead.

The mercy pirates

There's been some interesting research done into illegal radio in the UK by Ofcom, which has turned up some fascinating facts:

The research found that 30% of all UK radio listeners say they have experienced some form of interference to their service. Of those, 14% believe the interference was caused by illegal broadcasters. In London, these figures rise to 40% and 27% respectively.

Almost two-thirds (64%) of all UK radio listeners turn off their radios or switch to a different station when they encounter interference. Some 2% of listeners who experience radio interference say they complain about it. This figure increases to 8% when listeners believe the interference is caused by illegal broadcasters.

The research found that six out of ten London adults surveyed were concerned when told that illegal broadcasting can cause interference and disruption to the communication systems used by safety-of-life services.

In other words, if our maths are accurate and the survey was truly representative, that just over 200,000 people have been upset enough about interference from pirates to have complained about it, or about a third of one per cent of the UK population.

So, we're not really talking about a major problem, then.

Naturally, if you say to people "did you know people playing crunk can knock out ambulance broadcasts", they're going to be alarmed. But we can't actually find that bit in the published research - we can find a figure which suggests that when separated into age stratas, not two-thirds of 65+ respondents were seriously or fairly seriously concerned - and the figures fell away for younger listeners.

The level of interference pirates caused to emergency and aviation services is left untouched by the report - some figures on that would have been nice, but at least Ofcom did ask people why they were listening to these stations. The response, effectively, was "you have managed to oversee an official radio market which doesn't match the audience's needs and desires".

Ofcom indentifies three major audience groups for pirates - what they call "urban music scenesters" - young people who don't hear their choice of music on licensed radio; communities who feel that legal radio ignores their interests, news and needs; and people who prefer to listen to radio in languages other than English.

To be fair, there will always be a chunk of the audience who will see radio coming from the top of a tower block in Peckham as being more tuned in than something coming from a studio with a nameplate and official logging, which means that there will always be some form of unlicensed broadcasting. But a lot of the other complaints - that there are entire genres missing from the radio dial, there are languages unserved, and area for which it takes a house fire or arms cache to hear their names on the news - could have been avoided by a slightly more effective approach to handing out community licences and forcing people to stick to their promises, instead of allowing them to flog 'em off to bigger groups and change their formats to chartier, more mainstream stuff.

Ofcom also shares its clean-up rate for pirates: 63 convictions out of 1,085 investigations. Even if you assume all those convictions were individuals from separate cases, that's a conviction-to-investigation of 6%. Not exactly winning the war, are they?

Jolly Rogers

The Commercial Radio Association is taking its own action against pirate radio - fair enough. But we have to ask whether the claim that pirates are "endangering people's lives", which solicitor Phil Sherrell tells the Guardian.

Now, back when the emergency services were all tucked up the top of the FM waveband, there might have been a point. But surely no pirate broadcasting on FM should be anywhere near the emergency frequencies? And this bit:

"Just last month a jet coming in to land at Heathrow had instructions from ground control drowned out by a garage music pirate station.

sounds like a bit of a cod to us - what, the pilots were communicating with the ground on an RSL licence?