You can have indie, but we won’t pay for Indian

It was a day of mixed news yesterday for varied, intelligent programming on radio, not to mention my own DAB listening.

The BBC’s digital radio stations 6 Music and the Asian Network – which serves not just the UK Indian community, but the wider South Asian one – have been under threat of closure since March.

They are the only stations I tune into, as I wrote earlier here, so the news that the ‘indie’ 6 Music has been saved was tempered by the bitter knowledge that the Asian Network would now be on the way out.

Save 6 Music and The Asian Network

The Asian Network and 6 Music are exactly the sort of thing a public service broadcaster should be pursuing.

Put simply, you don’t hear Minor Threat or John Coltrane on the drive-time slot on XFM and you don’t get Raj and Pablo or a sales-based chart of Asian music (the world’s first no less) on Sunrise Radio.

So the BBC’s proposal to close the two digital radio stations, the only  stations that hold any interest for me and  the sole reason for a recent DAB radio purchase, is particularly galling.