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Bauer Media launches Greatest Hits Radio spin-off station Ken Bruce’s Secret 60s
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 3 August 2023
Bauer Media is celebrating the fact that Ken Bruce has nearly doubled the audience of its Greatest Hits Radio morning show by launching a whole spin-off station in honour of the DJ.
While the official remit of GHR is “the biggest songs of the 70s, 80s and 90s”, the spin-off station will play music from the 1960s. In secret seemingly, given the new station is called Secret 60s.
Bruce left his long-standing Radio 2 show to join Bauer’s GHR earlier this year. The latest RAJAR radio listening figures show that he is pulling in about 3 million listeners to his morning show on the station, which is almost double the number of people who tuned in to that time slot on GHR a year ago.
Meanwhile, the morning slot back at Radio 2 lost more than a million listeners in the last quarter after Bruce’s departure, with the BBC station’s total audience also down about a million.
That said, Bruce’s replacement Vernon Kaye only kicked off his new show in the middle of the most recent RAJAR quarter and – even with the post-Bruce slump – that time slot on Radio 2 still gets more than double the audience of Bruce’s new show over on GHR. So it’s all relative I guess.
The new Secret 60s station will be available to subscribers of the GHR Premium service and will be promoted on the main GHR station this weekend with a smattering of sixties tracks being played in among those “biggest songs of the 70s, 80s and 90s”.
Actually, Bruce says he’s already been sneaking some 60s songs onto his GHR show. So, is that why the new station has “secret” in it’s name. Yeah maybe.
Though the GHR listener who picked the name says “it feels as if we’re not meant to like sixties music anymore so in my head this new station is like this little underground club”. A secret underground club, presumably.
Bruce himself says of the Secret 60s spin-off station: “Don’t tell the bosses but I’ve been sneaking the odd sixties record into my show for a while now, so the fact that I’ve got a whole station to now play with is very exciting”.
“You can expect the greatest hits, obviously”, he goes on, “but also some buried treasure you haven’t heard in a while. I’m sure many people will agree it’s the soundtrack of our youth! I can’t wait for you to hear it, just don’t tell anyone – it’s a secret remember!”
