Radio Records

By Michael Weadock

There are two main business operations at Anything but Footy – podcast production and radio production.

Podcast listening continues to be an area of growth and we continue to produce bespoke content for our customers as well as recording our own content including the current run of Great British Bosses where we interview the men and women who run sport in this country. This season has attracted some fantastic guests including two-time Olympic medallist Hannah Mills in her role as CEO at Athena Pathway, Olympic Curling Champion and Team GB Chef de Mission for the recent Youth Olympics Eve Muirhead as well as Anna Watkins who won gold at London 2012 and now leads the British Elite Athletes Association.

But radio discussion is never far away in the virtual offices at Anything but Footy. For both of us, it was our first passion and where we started our careers. We are proud to have produced radio programmes for talkSPORT, Smooth, Capital and Heart in recent years and looking forward to being in Paris bringing the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games to UK radio listeners this summer. We are also both commercial animals. Our radio background is predominantly UK commercial radio. In the past few days, the latest listening figures have been released and commercial radio has added another one million listeners with data showing that 39.1m are now listening every week. That is up 3.5m from five years ago, whilst the research by RAJAR, the industry body who measures radio listening, also shows people are listening for longer too.

Interestingly, commercial radio has 7.8m more listeners than BBC Radio. You imagine that following recent changes in BBC Local radio that this figure is set to increase even further.

So, commercial radio is where the big audiences are. And, after over a decade banging on about this, it’s been great to see this increasingly recognised in our sector. For many years, we were considered the poor relation to BBC Radio. There were very valid reasons behind this – BBC Radio were the rights holders for most of the events that we were covering, and this afforded them a certain amount of priority and exclusivity. That is still the case for the most part, but organisations have increasingly realised that commercial radio is another huge opportunity for them – big audiences and new audiences.

It was a big deal for us that Team GB, together with British Canoeing, chose talkSPORT to make the exclusive announcement of the canoe slalom team for Paris. The talkSPORT network reaches 3.3m listeners and for the four canoeists selected for the Olympic Games this was a huge opportunity to reach this new and different audience. We also recorded several interviews that day that we were able to supply to a number of other local and regional radio stations.

We’ll continue to work hard to tell the stories of our Olympic and Paralympic sports and athletes because we think they’ve all got a story really worth hearing – and by using our network of contacts in the radio industry, we know we can help them to reach huge audiences.