Classic FM (UK)

• 1. Introduction

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  Classic FM launched at 06:00 on Monday the 7th of September 1992, and the very first piece of music it broadcast was Zadok the Priest by George Frideric Handel. Presenter Nick Bailey was at the microphone for that opening programme, and within moments a new kind of radio had arrived in Britain. For the previous quarter century, if you wanted classical music on national radio, your only option was the BBC. Now there was a commercial alternative. The questions this raises are worth sitting with: how did a group of entrepreneurial radio executives, a former theatre impresario, and a Time Warner executive persuade the British government to hand them a national licence? What does it mean to build a playlist from more than 50,000 pieces? And how does a station that began with birdsong test transmissions grow into something that four and a half million people tune in to every week?

• 2. The Road to a Licence

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  Ralph Bernard, CEO of GWR Group, and the company's programme director Michael Bukht had been quietly running a trial on AM frequencies in Wiltshire and Bristol. They were testing whether a regular drive-time programme of popular classical music could find an audience, and it could. That local experiment became the seed of a national ambition. Meanwhile, Brian Brolly, who had previously been CEO of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group, had arrived at the same idea independently in 1990. His consortium ran into funding trouble, and GWR approached Brolly's group; the two merged their efforts. The combined bid needed a financial backer capable of credibility on a national scale. Brolly had already brought the concept to Rick Senat, described in the source as the long-serving head of business affairs in London for Warner Bros. and at the time also the owner of Hammer Films. Warner Bros. passed initially. Senat then took the project to Tom McGrath, the President of Time Warner International Broadcasting and a former classical musician and conductor himself. McGrath said yes. There was, however, a legal constraint: UK law at the time prohibited any single overseas entity from holding more than a 25% interest. The Radio Authority granted an exemption, on the condition that a UK citizen or corporation held the larger share of the consortium. With that regulatory hurdle cleared, the formal tender was submitted, the licence was won, and two months of test transmissions began using a recording of birdsong before the station went live.

• 3. Building the Playlist

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  Robin Ray spent the first few years of Classic FM's life doing something that had never been attempted at this scale for classical music. He compiled a list of more than 50,000 pieces and rated every one of them for popular appeal. That ranked catalogue became the foundation of the Classic FM playlist. Turning such a vast library into a workable broadcast schedule required software. RCS Inc., a company based in the United States, had built a tool called Selector that commercial pop stations used for rotation. Ray and others adapted it for classical use, adding far more fields and categories to handle the particular complexity of the repertoire. The rules for rotating 50,000 tracks are substantially more intricate than those for a pop chart. A symphony might run for forty minutes; a nocturne for three. Pieces share composers, eras, moods, and tempos in ways that a pop playlist engine was never designed to track. The adapted software had to account for all of it. The first track ever to pass through the finished system in an officially broadcast capacity was, fittingly, the same Handel piece that opened the station on launch day: Zadok the Priest.

• 4. The Hall of Fame

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  Since 1996, Classic FM has broadcast an annual listener poll called the Hall of Fame across the four days of Easter weekend, counting down the 300 most popular pieces of classical music as voted by the audience. For the first several years, the top position belonged to Max Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1. It held that place until 2001, when Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 took over. Mozart's Clarinet Concerto claimed the summit in 2006. Then Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending moved to number one and stayed there from 2007 through 2010. Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 returned in 2011 and remained in the top spot in 2012 and 2013. The Lark Ascending reclaimed first place in 2014 and held it through 2017. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture broke that run in 2018, pushing Rachmaninov's concerto to second and Vaughan Williams's piece to third. In 2019, The Lark Ascending came back to number one once more, with Rachmaninoff's concerto in second and Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations in third. Listeners voted The Lark Ascending to the top position again in both 2020 and 2021. The consistent competition between two or three pieces at the summit suggests that the station's audience has particular and durable loyalties, returning year after year to the same works.

• 5. Composers in Residence

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  In 2004, Classic FM named composer Joby Talbot as its first composer in residence. The arrangement was specific: Talbot composed one new piece each month for the duration of his residency, each scored for up to five instruments. The twelve resulting compositions were premiered on the station and were eventually released together on a CD called Once Around the Sun on the 23rd of May 2005. Patrick Hawes succeeded Talbot in 2006, and his residency produced the piano album Towards the Light. Howard Goodall, a composer also known as a television presenter, joined as composer in residence in May 2008. Goodall also presented a programme of his own on the station, Howard Goodall on..., which began on the 7th of June 2008. Debbie Wiseman was named to the role in 2015. Her first album commissioned for Classic FM was The Musical Zodiac, released the following year. Wiseman later became a regular occasional presenter for the station as well, illustrating how the residency programme can deepen the relationship between a composer and the institution beyond a single commissioned year.

• 6. High Score and Video Game Music

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  In April and May 2017, Classic FM broadcast High Score, billed as the first series on UK radio dedicated entirely to video game music. According to the station's own website, it became the most popular programme on Listen Again in Classic FM's 25-year history up to that point. The series was presented by composer Jessica Curry. The show's reception demonstrated that the audience for orchestral music had expanded well beyond the concert hall and the film score. Video game soundtracks had found a listener base willing to vote with their streaming habits, and the numbers were striking enough that the station cited the programme as a benchmark in its own history. The spin-off stations announced in September 2024 include Classic FM Movies, a station devoted to film soundtracks, suggesting that the appetite for screen music first revealed by High Score has continued to shape the network's thinking.

• 7. Beyond the Airwaves

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  Classic FM became the first radio station to operate as an internet service provider in 1999, offering free dial-up access, web hosting, and classicfm.net email addresses through a service called Classic Freenet. That experiment ran until the late 2000s. The station also published a monthly magazine, Classic FM Magazine, and released a series of CDs, including two volumes of Classic FM Music for Babies. On the 25th of December 2006, Classic FM opened theJazz, a dedicated jazz station; it closed in March 2008. Classic FM's podcast, Case Notes, which presents stories from the history of classical music, won Best True Crime Podcast at the British Podcast Awards in 2019. The Classic FM Foundation, a grant-giving charity supporting music education and music therapy across the UK, was founded in 2006 under the name Classic FM Music Makers and was renamed in 2010. Singer Hayley Westenra serves as an ambassador for the foundation. On the 9th of September 2024, it was announced that Classic FM would receive two automated spin-off stations, launched three days later on the 12th of September 2024, each running without presenters around the clock.