[Adsales]

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.

They were loss making and we would likely have lost many by now in any event.

More importantly, commercial radio is a business as much as you don’t like it. As it stands, the large majority of people in age groups relevant to advertisers (the people who pay for commercial radio), could not care less about local content on radio. In fact, they simply want music, often in the background. For many even DJs are too much which is one reason why more and more are switching to their own playlists on streaming platforms.