IT’S MAGIC! NEW DAB COVERAGE FOR COOL STATIONS.

Good news for digital radio listeners: Bauer Media has just announced that leading London station Magic is to go national on DAB digital radio from January 2015.

This is a major milestone for digital radio as Magic is one of London’s top radio stations, with nearly 2 million listeners in London alone. This will be the first time that the Magic brand and their popular breakfast show ‘Foxy in the Morning’ will be available nationally. Outside London if you want to listen to Magic you will need to listen on digital radio.

Bauer also announced that it is expanding their largest radio brand Kiss, which has 4.6 million national listeners, by launching two new Kiss sister stations on local DAB; Kisstory, which will launch on DAB in various cities around the UK including London and Birmingham, and fellow station Kiss Fresh, which will be available for the first time on DAB in London.

In addition, Bauer’s network of strong local stations such as Key 103 in Manchester and Radio City in Liverpool will each be expanded with the addition of another new local DAB station, giving a total of around 20 new local DAB stations.

These new stations will be launched in January 2015. See more detail on Radio Today here.

NEW NATIONAL NETWORK

Bauer Media has also announced that it has submitted a bid for the new Digital Two national commercial DAB network as part of the Sound Digital consortium, in partnership with UTV and Arqiva (who own and run Digital One).
In July, Ofcom advertised the licence to run Digital Two which will feature an additional 10-15 new DAB stations with potentially up to 30% of the network using DAB+. Bid applications need to be in by the end of October, Ofcom expects to award the licence early in 2015 and anticipates that the new stations would launch in early 2016.

The launch of the new digital radio stations and the Digital Two network will significantly increase demand for DAB digital radios.