Feature: Capital Buys Into The Scottish Beat

Capital Radio last week announced the acquisition of youth radio station Beat 106 for £33.8 million, representing the group’s first move into Scottish radio. Beat 106 was set up to provide ‘dance and new rock’ for Central Scotland’s 18-35 year olds with backing from a range of investors, from Emap Radio to footballer Ally McCoist. Beat is just eight months old and received its first RAJAR in March showing a weekly audience of 334,000 and a share of listening at 5.5%.

To be snapped up by a major UK radio group like Capital for almost £34 million less than a year after launch shows that Beat 106 is clearly an attractive proposition. A look at radio across the Central Scotland area, as defined by BARB, shows a conspicuous absence amongst the radio operators of the main players, which dominate radio throughout England and Wales. The majority of stations are owned by Scottish Radio Holdings (SRH) and it is only recently that Kelvin MacKenzie’s Wireless Group moved north of the border with the purchase of the Independent Radio Group (IRG) in autumn 1999. The likes of Emap, GWR and, until now, Capital Radio are strangely not to be found in Scotland.

The chart here shows regional stations that broadcast to the Central Scotland area and have a RAJAR audience figure. Of the fourteen, ten are owned by SRH, including Clyde 1 FM which has the largest audience of the set, with a weekly reach of 780,000 listeners. Beat 106 has the fourth largest weekly listenership of the regional stations in the area and its potential audience is 60% of the Scottish population, including the key cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow – another key factor for Capital which now has a presence in all of the UK’s major conurbations bar those in Yorkshire.

The Beat acquisition will allow Capital to increase its potential audience in the UK to some 58% of the adult population and provide the group with a Scottish base from which to operate its new digital Xfm stations later this year. Beat’s young audience, numbering 2.6 million, is also particularly attractive to advertisers and Capital is hoping to use the station to drive its national advertising revenues.

It is perhaps surprising that Capital is one of the first key UK and Wales radio operators to move into Scotland, as research from the Office of National Statistics shows that personal disposable income in Scotland is the highest in the country outside London and the South East.

Feature: Scott Billings