Interesting news from GCap this morning, which has announced the first set of post-merger changes which will actually be noticeable by listeners out there in radio land. As he confirmed that GCap's operating profits for the six months to the end of September were down 27% while revenues fell by 11%, the radio group's boss, Ralph Bernard, has confirmed he is cutting both the number of brands and stations within the collective GWR and Capital empires.
First up, GCap will sell off nine of its analogue stations in the south-west, north-west and North Wales, presumably to the highest bidder. Second it will merge the various Capital Gold stations with national digital station Life, and rebrand the merged channel. Third, it will stage a big relaunch of Capital FM, the group's flagship London station that has suffered while rivals Heart 106.2 and Magic have grown in recent years. As part of that revamp the station will cut the number of advertising minutes each day, and never broadcast more than two ads in a row.
Finally, GCap plan to further expand the national reach of alternative station Xfm, currently in London and about to launch in Manchester. The national digital station that GWR brought to the merger, The Storm, will be rebranded as a national Xfm, while Scotland's Beat 106 will become a Scottish outpost for the station.
Quite what the changes mean internally at the already streamlined GCap remain to be seen. As both Capital Gold and Xfm are almost national already on digital, presumably the respective mergers with Life and The Storm will mean one digital channel replacing two in both cases. Whether that will mean a national Xfm channel on digital that differs from either the London or Manchester output remains to be seen.
As for Beat 106, GCap's decision brings to an end the possibility of the group owning two competing stations in central Scotland. Although Capital Radio slotted Beat 106 into its regional radio family when it acquired the Scottish station, the youth orientated brand, when originally launched as an independent, was often dubbed as 'the Xfm of Scotland', and when its playlist was overhauled last year it once again had something of an Xfm feel about it. With Xfm back in London having definite ambitions to expand North, on digital at least, for a time it looked like Capital would own two stations doing pretty much the same thing for the same audience in the same region. The Beat 106 rebrand will accelerate Xfm's national ambitions and stop possible internal competition. What it means for Beat 106 remains to be seen. From what we hear Xfm Manchester will be pretty autonomous from its London sister station, so there is no reason that Xfm Scotland shouldn't keep much of the Beat 106 schedule, although the rebrand might not be good news for the dance biased specialist shows that dominate the station's weekend schedules (somewhat ironically, given that at one stage it looked like Beat was going to become a Kiss FM style station).