Countdown

The build-up to the official launch of BBC Sounds app, set for the end of this month, has started. Director of Radio and Education James Purnell has been briefing the i. “The proposition is going to be radio/music/podcasts – no-one else in the market will have that width. It will be encouraging people to listen without limits."

“It’s personalised enough that it’s suggesting the right stuff without being spooky [or] keeping people in their filter bubble.”

“The BBC has a particular focus at the moment on under-35s. Older audiences use us (the BBC as a whole) for 20-30 hours a week. Younger users… use us for eight hours a week. That’s been going down and we want to increase the value that they get from their licence fee.” Purnell says that for this generation “the market norm has been set as streaming” and that the BBC is a “challenger” brand, facing rivals with “deep pockets”.

“My job is…to make sure that radio is healthy in 10, 20, 50 and 100 years. The challenge for the BBC is can we modernise quickly enough so that we can serve young people just as well as we have previous generations.”