[London Lite]

Well, you explained it yourself. We lost local radio because it wasn't deemed a good business model. Not because it wasn't popular or that it wasn't serving the needs of its audience but because it didn't make good business sense to preserve it. In it's place we got these generic quasi-national brands... which are "profitable" but serve local audiences how? And, contrary to the spin we were sold to justify this, people do actually want local content. The fact that so much of the media is now bending over backwards to desperately try and prove they're not London centric is testament to that. But all their efforts are performative compared to what we've lost of. I'm not saying everything Global does is terrible. They've managed to not ruin Classic FM like they did with XFM for example.

There were loss making smaller sallie stations that wouldn't have survived in the old GCap portfolio that required them being part of a regional network. Note during the pandemic that when Bauer acquired stations from Lincs, Wireless, Celador and UKRD that there was a panic to rebrand and relaunch them as Greatest Hits Radio in the quickest time possible when the ad market crashed due to the lockdowns. When Bauer's accountants saw the books for some of those stations, it had to be done promptly.