[cma-l] Community Radio Fund & the CMA

[Phil Edmonds]

Thinking aloud here....

Every Community Radio station has the Ofcom Licence fees (which unless 
it's changed since I last looked a couple of years back, that if you 
were an analogue Commercial Radio station would be zero rated if you had 
the turnover of an average CR station) plus at least the 'minimum' 
PRS/MCPS and PPL fee.

So there's 500k in the Community Radio fund....

Maybe someone should put in an application to the Community Radio Fund 
to mass pay "everyone's" Ofcom and minimum music royalties basic costs 
(hey it might even mean that PRS can sort out the admin correctly on 
such a 'block booking'!)

Back of the fag packet calculations gets me broadly to the 500k mark 
with this.

I could be even more radical and suggest a mass submission of the same 
"spilt up the fund to all stations equally" set of applications...


Now my initial thought on this front was somewhat "tongue in cheek", but 
maybe there is a little nugget of an idea in there?

I'll duck and cover now....

Phil.
(Personal views, not necessarily those of any organisation I'm involved 
with.)



On 17/05/2016 13:24, Alex Gray, Two Lochs Radio wrote:
> Clearly a grant to Community Radio is not in any way a handout to a
> ‘begging bowl’. The whole justification for there being CR licences
> available is that such stations are expected to provide ‘social gain’ –
> so the government has already accepted that there is a value to society
> in having these stations. In which case it seems to me that in principle
> it would be perfectly proper for public funds to contribute to
> delivering that social purpose.
>
> As has already been mentioned, that was indeed proposed to the tune of
> £30k per station in the original 2003 recommendations for CR licensing.
> That didn’t happen, presumably because of a lack of political
> will/lobbying from the commercial companies.
>
> There is another potential practical route to value this social purpose
> – one that has worked well for us in Scotland for the stations that were
> licensed prior to CR licences and their restrictions on commercial income.
>
> That is to persuade the Government of the need and value to run ‘public
> service’ and ‘social message’ advertising on community-based stations.
> This avoids any need to think about or discuss ‘begging bowls’ since we
> are selling them a product of value in return for the income, not asking
> for ‘something for nothing’.
>
> In Scotland the Scottish Government instructs the advertising agencies
> to place a small share of the overall public service advertising budget
> with the community-based non-profit stations such as ours, and it has
> been a very important income stream.
>
> Of course there is a problem in this scheme in that as things stand it
> couldn’t be applied to stations with CR licences that limit or bar
> commercial airtime income, but maybe it would be easier to persuade
> Ofcom/DCMS that this requirement should be eased/removed in the case of
> official social/public service messages from Government – ie that such
> advertising would not count as commercial income for Ofcom purposes, or
> that licence conditions would be amended to permit such income.
>
> Just an idea. While it’s provides nowhere near as much as the originally
> proposed core CR funding from Government,  It has been a substantial
> help for us for over 10 years in Scotland.
>
>
> Alex
>
> *From:*cma-l-bounces at mailman.commedia.org.uk
> [mailto:cma-l-bounces at mailman.commedia.org.uk] *On Behalf Of
> *Canalside's The Thread
> *Sent:* 17 May 2016 12:36
> *To:* 'The Community Media Association Discussion List'
> <cma-l at mailman.commedia.org.uk>
> *Subject:* Re: [cma-l] Community Radio Fund & the CMA
>
> Let’s not get into the debate    re:- value of the product
> our product is viewed differently by possibly every Tom, Dick and Harry
> on this Island. It is irrelevant owing to the very reason why Community
> Radio was set up….
>
>
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