In article <586343.53869....>, ... () wrote:

As I said Eric, what choice. Apart from community licence's (one
returned and one bankrupt project) the main licenced Regional /
local stations are all POP. Newstyle is ok if you like
Afro-Carribbean (the odd track is ok) – Smooth / Galaxy / Heart /
BRMB / Kerrang and that is no choice, mainly playing 80's to today
with Smooth and Heart playing an occasional 70's track (Smooth told
Roger Day they are going for a younger market?? – how they are
staying with their licence is beyond me considering the argument
about the London and Manchester licences)

I get your drift Roy and it is very much a thing of taste.
We have just sat together for our weekly new music meeting and I, ME, JA, MOI, was pushed into accepting some tracks which were so border-line that on my own they wouldn't have got loaded onto the music PCs.
Now when it can to the upbeat/power tracks there was no debate at all.
I even moan when I hear a ballad and two in a row would send me to the playout system faster than a knife through hot butter.
Equally, we have no 50's music even in the parked music section, well not that I know of. Whilst we did have a time when tracks were being requested by people who were clearly on a wind-up mission, we didn't play them nor add them.
And when you look at the age span of the listeners we do encourage people of 50+ as well as those in there 20's.
So where does the younger market break-point appear, 51, 52, 53, 54 or even 55? Oh gawd that's me :-)

I do take a listen to many of the stations mentioned here, from time to time, and I can't say those which are supposed to be for my age do anything for me at all, in fact if I manage two tracks it's a miracle. Most times they have me running for the handset.
R2 isn't that bad but some of the specialist shows are way out of my ear/range, even though the presentation is clearly very high standard.

Just my thoughts
Eric