No audio this time: just a question aimed at radio programmers.

Q: Why should I listen to your radio station?

After all, I have an iPod with more than 10,000 tunes that collectively form the soundtrack of my life. I have more music on my computer. I can listen to endless computer-generated combinations - better mix, better variety - that can surprise me and amuse me between now and whenever I lose my interest, my sanity, my life. My iPod can do all that; my computer can do it too.

So why should I listen to your radio station?

After all, I can listen to online stations that programme the music I like (70s retro ... electronica ... ambient), and many of these play without interruption, without call-letters, without commercials, without an intervening human presence.

So why should I listen to our radio station in this brave new world of choice and lifestyle-customisation and narrowcasting?

And yet listen I do. I need radio.

It sustains and educates me; it entertains and amuses; it surprises and occasionally infuriates me. And - unexpectedly, certainly more than we might have predicted - the human voice matters a great deal in all of this. As technology make live voices apparently less necessary, an expensive afterthought on some stations, I find I need real, live human voices more than ever.

The best presenters do what they’ve always done: they connect. They talk about things, they signpost the music, they comment on the way life is, its barely noticed trivia or its capacity to change and ‘trend’. And at their very best presenters do this apparently effortlessly, knowing when to speak and when not to, what to say and what to leave unsaid.

It’s the same with the station’s sound, its identity. If I want to listen to a random iPod mix, I’ll reach for shuffle mode. But if I’m listening to radio, I need it to add value. The voices do that, but so do the jingles. They create the feel of the station, its ethos. 

That’s why I love them and why I think some programmers misunderstand or dismiss them too lightly. Those sung station idents, the harmonised call-letters and station names, help me to know that the station belongs to me and I belong to it. They help me to connect. They create a sense of pace and flow on a station sound that spoken liners rarely can. They can reduce the irritation of interuption, smoothing the joins between elements; or they can nudge me into noticing once again who and what I’m listening to. At their best, they make the station memorable.

Which is why, in 2011, if I’m going to start to listen to your station (rather than the handful of channels I currently choose), then I’m going to hope we rediscover the riskiness of radio - the DJs who amuse us, the jingles that surprise us lyrically, the songs we thought we’d never hear on air.

And I’m not being sentimental. This isn’t about reinventing time-warp radio and recreating some golden age of CHR. I’m not asking for flame-throwing hot-rockers to be disinterred. But those stations defined their era and it’s time for programmers to do the same again.

That means realising that in our modern technologically-driven age we can too easily form lazy opinions about what matters and what doesn’t, what’s cool and what’s cheesy. We can underestimate our listeners.

Our modern age needs us to connect more than ever before. Social networking, texting, and those big TV events that draw us together: these remind us that technology can enhance our humanity. Radio is the perfect medium for doing this all day and all night.

And, if I’m going to listen to your radio station rather than retreating to my iPod, it will be your ability to combine the presenters, music, idents and other elements that will demonstrate why my life is richer for choosing your station and how your station is adding value to how I live.

At its heart therefore - as so often in life - it’s about people: the people who speak and sing and choose the right songs in the right order. It’s compellingly simple and massively difficult to get right. And it’s not a formula generated by

a focus group. It’s an instinct learnt from loving great radio.

Get the elements right and there’s your answer: that’s why I’d listen to your radio station.

Bob Dinan