volume 2
july 1999

The economic importance of music in the European Union

5. Broadcasting

by Dave Laing

In September 1996 the European Music Office published its report on "Music in Europe". The first part of this study, written by Dave Laing, describes the economic importance of music in the European Union. This is the fifth chapter of his study, treating the subject of broadcasting.

Music radio. Music provides the programming for most of Europe's 8,000 radio stations. As table 7.1 shows, 600 out of Belgium's 650 stations feature music and 800 of the 1,010 stations in Greece. The proportion of music radio stations is lowest in Spain where the majority of listeners prefer news or mixed programming.

Table 5.1:	Radio and television stations 1995 (source: EMO)
	Radio			Television			Radio
	National	Local	Music	Channels	Music		Staff		Revenues (millions of ECU)
Austria	3	11	3	2	0		3,130	**	783.4	#
Belgium	10	640	600	14	0	(2)	n/a		110.4
Denmark	4	280	n/a	n/a	n/a		5,200		106.0
Finland	4	80	28	4	0		1,944	**	31.3
France	14	900	450	7	2	(2)	n/a		589.0
Germany	3	207	140	20	3	(2)	n/a		635.4
Greece	10	1,100	800	5	0	(1)	6,000		37.0
Ireland	4	29	27	2	n/a		484		45.2
Italy	15	2,500	n/a	9	1	(1)	n/a		184.2
Luxembourg	1	22	n/a	n/a	n/a		n/a		10.6
Netherlands	20	163	30	8+	1	(1)	n/a		110.2
Portugal	7	318	301	4	n/a		n/a		8.0
Spain	10	1,800	500	n/a	n/a		24,600		240.5
Sweden	4	410	n/a	n/a	1	(2)	n/a		31.5
United Kingdom	8	226	195	4	0	(4)	n/a		322.8
() The figures in brackets are for foreign stations available by cable or satellite; (#) includes TV revenues*

In many countries the remaining national channels of the publicly-owned broadcasting companies provide employment opportunities for musicians. Most have symphony orchestras or big bands. In the UK, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) spends about 36 million ECU's on classical music performances. While some national popular music stations like Radiomafia in Finland also commission live performances, the majority of music played on European radio is from commercial recordings.

Most music stations follow a specific format and feature only one style of music. The formats with the greatest number of stations are Top 40 which plays current pop hits and Adult Contemporary, pop and rock music aimed at the 25-45 age group. In most continental European countries there are stations which play only popular music in the national language and in France there is a legally enforceable quota of 40% for the amount of Francophone music to be broadcast. The Danish national channel P3 has a voluntary 30% quota for Danish music.

The final column of table 5.1 shows that the advertising revenues of European radio stations was over 2.5 billion ECU's in 1995. In addition, the state-owned broadcasters in all EU countries receive licence fees or government subsidies. The revenues of the German public radio and television stations from this source was 4.8 billion ECU's in 1994 while the British Broadcasting Corporation received over 2 billion ECU's.

Table 5.2 provides information on the amount of time spent by European Union citizens listening to radio or watching television. Only in Portugal and France does the population spend more time with television than radio. In countries where comparative figures for music radio and all radio are available, music radio had the majority of listening time in Greece and Finland while it had slightly less than half in Austria.

Table 5.2:	Radio listening and television viewing (minutes per day) 1994-'95 (sources: EMO, FT Management Reports)
	LTI*	LTI Music	VTI** TV
Austria	173	83	140
Belgium	278	n/a	n/a
Denmark	175	n/a	n/a
Finland	230	167	150
France	145	n/a	180
Germany	167	n/a	n/a
Greece	210	150	210
Ireland	200	n/a	186
Italy	171	n/a	n/a
Netherlands	180	n/a	160
Portugal	200	n/a	240
Spain	110	n/a	n/a
Sweden	112	n/a	n/a
United Kingdom	177	n/a	156
() LTI or Listening Time per Individual per day in minutes; (*) VTI or Viewing Time per Individual per day in minutes

Music television. The numbers of television channels given in table 5.1 include national terrestrial stations only. However the numbers of television channels available in Europe has increased greatly with the growing numbers of households able to receive programmes through cable networks or satellite dishes. In many European cities over 20 different channels are available. These include foreign terrestrial channels as well as those available only by cable or satellite.

Among the many new specialist channels have been a number of music television stations. The largest part of their programming is made up by the music videos produced by the record industry to accompany new recordings by pop and rock artists. However, there is also some classical music and jazz programming.

The most widely available of these music stations is the US-owned MTV Europe. This is now available in over 50 million European homes. Since its launch in 1987, MTV Europe has added a second channel, VH-1, available at present in Germany and the UK.

MTV has been criticized for the large amount of Anglo-American music in its programming. The company has recently changed its policy to provide separate programming for the different "regions" of Europe. These three new programmes, for Northern, Central and Southern Europe, have their own regional play lists but MTV says that this does not necessarily mean there will be more European music in its shows. Instead, "artists will be selected on the basis of their popularity and potential in a given market, rather than their country of origin." [40]

The arrival of MTV inspired the launch of competing channels in several European countries. Most of these offer a greater proportion of European Union produced music videos than does MTV. The French-based MCM network is also available in other European and African countries. France also has Muzzik, a jazz and classical music cable channel. In Germany, the VIVA group, backed by several large record companies, has two channels on cable networks. In the Netherlands, MTV and the Dutch-owned Music Factory each have a 1% share of the television audience. Other music television channels include VideoMusic (Italy) and ZTV (Sweden).

Notes

40. MTV Europe, News Release, 13 August, 1996.