Abstract
This article aims to study how private European radio is becoming commercially international through the expansion of radio brands beyond their national market. It is the first ever analysis of the expansion strategies of radio groups across Europe, including their footprint in each market in which they operate, from the political economy of cultural industries. The article maps the main radio groups in Europe, analyses cross-national champions in depth and establishes three main types. This study shows that, thanks to the possibilities of a deregulated market, strengthening the role of the brand and the format, and the agreements with other groups, broadcasting radio has overcome the obstacles that, historically, hindered its cross-border expansion.
Introduction: Understanding the European context
European radio is essentially a dual system based on a mix of public and commercial stations, enriched with some 2400 community (or free) radio stations, but it was not always like that. As Hilmes (2004: iii) states, in Europe, radio was born as a ‘national public institution’, unlike the United States, where the idea of ‘localism’ was of greater importance. The concept of public service always played a central role in Europe and was the absolute protagonist of the airwaves for years, especially after the Second World War.
The public monopoly system prevailed until the deregulation starting from the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s and 1990s, which allowed the emergence of commercial radio stations. For instance, the first commercial radio stations were launched in the United Kingdom in 1973 (Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), 2017), and in Italy in 1977; in France, commercial radio and TV were allowed in 1981, 1 and local commercial radio stations were allowed in Switzerland in 1983 (Badillo and Bourgeois, 2016). First commercial local radio stations began broadcasting in Finland in 1985; national commercial radio was allowed in Iceland in 1986 and advertising was allowed in community and local radio in 1988 in Denmark and Norway (national, in 1993) (Hujanen and Jauert, 1998). Sweden allowed commercial local radio in 1993, and Austria in 1995.
This coexistence is not proving easy; hence, it is relevant to monitor the concentration of these private groups across Europe (European Broadcasting Union (EBU), 2018a, 2018b). Commercial radio is the dominant source for European radio listeners nowadays. According to EBU (2019), there are 7134 commercial FM services in Europe, 2 a figure that represents 61.8% of all FM services available in this region. This share is even higher on digital terrestrial radio, where two thirds of stations are commercial (1133) (EBU, 2020b). The average private radio market share in 2019 among European citizens was 60.1% (EBU, 2020a, based on 28 European markets). Advertising investment in radio was €6495 billion in 2018, representing a 5.2% of the total advertising investment in media (124,799 billion) (WARC, 2019).
Radio is the most trusted media at European Union level (EBU, 2020c), with an offer of more than 12,000 different radio programmes (private, public and others, like community or student radio stations), an average daily listening of 2 hours 23 minutes per day and an average weekly reach of 85.1% of European citizens (EBU, 2020a, based on 25 markets).
Besides, we should also add the complexity of the radio system in each country, with cases, among others, such as the three-layer structure of the medium in Spain, with 1201 public offers, including national, regional and local stations, due to the huge number of municipal stations in operation, or Bosnia-Herzegovina, with 61 of a total of 64 public radio stations being municipal. Regional and/or local services are also quite important in France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden or the United Kingdom (EBU, 2019). There are also diverse procedures to allocate radio licences across this region.
Radio, as a cultural industry representative of the flow culture (Bonet and Arboledas, 2011; Fernández Quijada, 2007; Flichy, 1980; Hesmondhalgh, 2002; Miège et al., 1986), conveys symbolic contents with a function of ideological and social reproduction. Consequently, each cultural product carries a national seal. In its origin, the European approach to the radio model, unlike the United States, responded to a ‘strong tradition of defending national languages, the much smaller territorial expanses, and the experience of public services in other sectors’ (Faraone, 2011: 192). For their part, commercial radio stations focused on competing in their national markets in the first decades of their existence, but their growth and expertise have supported a growing trend towards expansion beyond their national borders.
The aim of this article is to study the strategies of the internationalization of operations of the main European private radio groups, including their footprint in each market in which they operate. Our analysis relies on the political economy of cultural industries (Bonet, 2017), a theoretical perspective that does not often analyse radio as an object of study (Hendy, 2000).
Deregulation, groups and internationalization: The perfect storm
Unlike the United States, in Europe deregulation is part of the fall of public monopolies and a greater presence of private companies. Talking about deregulation in this framework does not automatically translate into a misunderstanding of the role that national states should play. European regional, cultural and linguistic particularities are quite determinant, and therefore deregulation does not have a single model in Europe. The European process of deregulation especially affected audiovisual, which did not include radio, a medium that was considered ‘minor’ (Lewis, 2000).
We should add to this context of complexity and variety the difficulty in defining the term group. What are its limits? When can we use the term group, macro-group or mega-group? Defining it can be confusing ‘due to the complexities of ownership and the existence of “groups within groups”’ (European Audiovisual Observatory, 2016: 12), but there are some patterns that can be detected: it consists of a set of independent companies that constitute an economic unit and whose forms of relationship are variable; one of them usually represents the group (not necessarily the strongest, it may be the best known by the public, the oldest one or one with a powerful brand image); the group can act as a single actor; a group (and each of its constituent companies) can apply various growth strategies and it is increasingly difficult to determine its limits. Another obstacle is the lack or the difficulty to collect enough data (Hanretty, 2014). In the case at hand, we will analyse whether they can be considered a group by themselves or they are just a powerful division of a bigger multimedia communication group.
To form a group, the conglomerates apply different strategies, some of which are not due to any previous planning but rather to mere opportunity. In this work, we understand strategy to mean a set of actions that make up a plan whose goal is to achieve certain objectives. The strategies exist from when they are adopted by someone within a period of time (short, medium and long term). Guillou (1985) pointed out that whoever makes the decision to apply a strategy should ask, ‘Where do we want to go? What are we at present? (identity), What are we capable of? (potential)’, to which two axes can be added: the specialization/diversification strategy, and geographical implementation (whether or not national borders are to be overcome).
Growing from inside and/or growing out
The first decision for a communication group that wants to grow is to choose between external growth and internal growth or even a combination of both types. External growth is generated through different formulas such as mergers, acquisitions, shareholding, all kinds of alliances, but the purpose is the same: to grow on the basis of already existing companies; the more established and stronger the company, the better the result that is expected. External growth allows not only the acquisition of a company, but also of its experience, its talent, its know-how and its market, translated not only into all kinds of audiences but also into commercial revenues and customers. With internal growth, the company must grow from within, create potentialities, implying higher fixed costs and more time to mature and consolidate the facilities, means and jobs. Internal growth may be typically cheaper, but results are more uncertain and typically longer term.
More of the same and/or something different
With other types of decisions, the company or group can grow by increasing the production it already has (specialization) or it can grow by entering activities, markets and products that were not its own until then, thus leaving its basic trade (diversification).
Crossing borders
Growth, as a business strategy, seeks to accumulate and concentrate. In the case of radio, if the national regulation allows the network transmission, economies of scale are achieved by being able to centralize production in one or a few stations and to use the rest as simple signal repeaters. If the regulation does not allow or limits network transmission, the accumulation of radio frequencies seeks to add audiences under the same brand, to be as effective as possible, in terms of cumulative reach offered to advertisers (Cridland, 2019). Obviously, wanting to add as many frequencies as possible occurs when the geographical scope of the frequency is not nationwide, and here is where deregulation comes into play.
The growth of a group may involve crossing the borders of the country in which the parent company is located, typically when critical dimension is reached, even dominant position in the national market, and further growth proves difficult due to competition regulation or lack of opportunities for growth in a highly oligopolistic national market. This process receives different names, often used as synonyms: internationalization, trans-nationalization, multi-nationalization, globalization, universalization, cross-nationalization. According to Möller et al. (2019), there are three basic types of motivations for media companies to go beyond their borders: economic, organizational and socio-political motivations, the economic one being the most relevant. The basic idea behind it is that the growth demanded by capital leads to the saturation of national markets and the need to expand beyond the geographical and administrative borders (Fernández-Quijada, 2009). When groups operate nationwide, they operate in a well-known market, whereas becoming international means opening a brand-new market and/or competing in an unknown terrain.
Methodology
Since our objective was to study the strategies of internationalization of the main European private radio groups, the first task was to identify these radio groups, for which the following steps were taken:
Mapping the number and typology of radio services across 48 European countries. In this analysis, radio service means each different programme offer. It is not about the number of frequencies nor radio studios, but the offer in terms of kinds of programming. For instance, NRJ, Chérie, Nostalgie and Rire & Chansons are the four services run by the NRJ Group, irrespective of the number of studios (the physical place where the offer is broadcast) or frequencies it owns.
As a second step, information on the ownership of each radio offer was collected. By doing this, the main commercial groups competing in those countries were unveiled. With the help of the websites of the regulatory bodies of each country, as well as academic and trade journals, radio groups or groups in which radio was an important part of the business were identified.
To choose the specific sample for our study, the next step was to map radio groups in Europe, making a list with the programme offer from commercial radios in those groups having a greater amount of frequencies (basically but not exclusively on FM), and therefore a greater presence in the territory.
The last step was to select those groups in which the radio business had presence beyond the borders of their country of origin, that is, identifying their markets of operation and their market power in each of them.
This analysis basically focuses on the radio broadcast through analogue and digital frequencies of the radio spectrum, since Internet radio, despite being an important part of their business strategy, does not yet have the same traction among audiences and robustness of advertising investment. For a study of the strategies, the authors have referred to previous studies in which the strategies were defined, as well as their application to different cultural industries (Bonet and Arboledas, 2011; Fernández Quijada, 2007).
In the following sections, the analysis describes the strategies of these groups with constant references to the multiple factors influencing them (legal, business, language, etc.), given the complexity of the radio industry.
Analysis and results: Group typology
Once the mapping was completed, the first result of the analysis allowed the authors to propose a typology of radio groups, including those that would be part of the sample analysed in greater detail. The typology is as follows:
National champions with some international footprint. This category includes incumbent radio groups in their national market, such as the following: (a) PRISA in Spain, which also has activities in Andorra, Latin America and Portugal (although in September 2020, it approved the sale of its stake in its Portuguese subsidiary Media Capital, pending approval by the competition authorities); (b) Communicorp in Ireland, also with presence in the United Kingdom, sold its Finnish radio stations in 2012 to Sanoma (Grönlund and Björkroth, 2017); Latvian radio station in 2015 to Cinamon Holding (RTÉ, 2015) and Bulgarian radio stations in June 2018 to its local management team (Communicorp Media, 2018); (c) French group Lagardère Active, which was part of the second type in this categorization until it sold its radio assets in Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia to Czech Media Invest in April 2018. Since then, its presence outside France has been limited to four radio brands in Germany (and some other stations in Africa); (d) Czech Media Invest (CMI) itself, whose footprint became more international after acquiring Lagardère radio assets in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Romania (April 2018),
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and a small stake (4%) in ProSiebenSat.1 Media (October 2019); (e) Belgian group DPG Media (formerly Medialaan-De Persgroep), with radio brands in Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark; (f) Another relevant national champion is the Nordic Entertainment Group (NENT Group), which arose from the merger between part of Swedish MTG (Modern Times Group) and the Danish telecommunications group TDC. This group, when it was still MTG, sold its Baltic radio stations in 2017 to Providence Equity Partners, and currently it is a digital entertainment group based in Sweden. Already as the NENT Group, and despite being limited to radio stations in Sweden and Norway, its radio brands are among the most numerous and important in those two countries (Nordic Entertainment Group, 2018).
Cross-national champions. This category includes those radio groups that we will analyse in greater detail because (a) they own very well-known international radio brands; (b) their radio brands keep a steadily strong position in the market and (c) their international footprint reaches five or more countries (the previous analysis showed that it is more frequent to find occasional programme alliances o purchases among only two or three countries). As we will see in the following sections, they represent almost all the strategies we mentioned above. They are Bauer Media, NRJ, and RTL (Bertelsmann Group).
Franchise Radio. Although companies such as NRJ use franchising as a way to weave alliances and do business, in this section we include those radios that work exclusively with the franchised brand; that is, they do not own radio stations. The paradigmatic case is Virgin Radio that was created in the United Kingdom in 1993 and became Absolute Radio in 2008. In the United Kingdom, the brand Virgin Radio was relaunched in 2016 and is currently managed by Wireless Group. In fact, Virgin Group manages the brand, but it is run by a different group, depending on the country: Mediaset in Italy, Lagardère Active in France, Czech Media Invest in Romania and Radio Medien in Switzerland. The brand is also present in Canada, India, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Oman and Turkey.
Analysis of the sample: Cross-national champions
The next step in our project was to analyse in depth the radio groups of the sample, the cross-national champions, whose baseline data can be seen in Table 1. As this is quite a dynamic sector, the analysis of the strategies intends to transcend names and figures that tend to vary quite often.
Cross-national radio groups.
Source: Based on Bain, 2020; European Broadcasting Union (EBU), 2020a; NRJ, 2020; RTL, 2020 and the websites of the groups.
The list of brands includes only the main one, not what is frequently called ‘extensions’. For instance, Magic and Kiss are the main brands, and Magic Chill and Kisstory are extensions.
Footprint does not mean it is the owner; sometimes, the company only has some stake in it. For instance, Bauer Media in German Radio Hamburg or RTL group in Spanish radio stations.
In Table 1, we have included other activities of the group, but we should add that in the case of Bauer Media, we are referring to the parent company, while in the other two cases, they are companies belonging to RTL and NRJ. Bauer Radio is often considered just a UK-based division. This, in part, is due to the way these companies have grown. However, it is not very relevant whether or not we call them a group (we can do so in all three cases, based on the amount of radio stations and international presence); the interesting aspect is to know what influence radio has within the group. For instance, in NRJ, 61% of revenues came from the radio medium. This was just 4.1% in the case of RTL, while no data were available for Bauer.
Bauer Group
The company was created in 1875 from a print shop for business cards, in the city of Hamburg (Germany). Starting from that, the founder did not take long to introduce magazines to his business, and this was the first product to be internationalized at the beginning of the 1980s, when the company launched a magazine in the US market. Radio would come in the 1970s on acquiring shares in Radio Hamburg and, in the 2000s, with the purchase of the Polish radio station network Broker FM and Emap’s UK radio stations. Currently, the strength of the group regarding radio lies in the UK and Nordic stations. Bauer has its most international brands among those in the United Kingdom. Bauer Media UK has continued adding stations in recent years, including the purchase of the Scandinavian SBS Discovery in 2015, followed by the UK regional group Orion Media in 2016 and then, in 2019, in February the purchase of the local Wireless Group stations in England and Wales, the analogue stations and two digital services of the Celador group, and the analogue stations of Lincs FM Group; and in March of the same year the acquisition of the UKRD group stations. From mid-2015 to mid-2019, Bauer acquired almost 100 radio stations (licences, not brands), mostly in the United Kingdom. 4
As regards television, Bauer is one of the main shareholders of the German TV channel RTL II, and in the United Kingdom, it deals with music TV channels, associated with its main radio brands Kerrang!, Kiss and Magic. In fact, the former was created in the early 1980s as a magazine specialized in music, becoming radio in 2000 and television in 2001. This is an example of diversification within the original national market, not replicated in foreign markets. Only in the United Kingdom, Bauer radio stations reach over 19.6 million adults weekly (RAJAR, 2020). Currently, its footprint spreads from Germany to the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Poland and Slovakia.
Bauer is one of the leaders in terms of DAB radio in the United Kingdom and Norway and owns RadioPlay, a digital audio content platform for the Nordic countries.
RTL Group
This radio took its first steps in Luxembourg in the 1920s and 1930s, but with the important collaboration of France. In 1931, the Société Luxembourgeoise d’Études Radiophoniques (SLER) founded the Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Radiodiffusion (CLR), which became CLT (Compagnie Luxembourgeoise de Télédiffusion) in 1954 (RTL, 2018). It was the only European private company holding a monopoly in the radio sector. The original Radio Luxembourg in France was relabelled RTL in 1966 and, in 1982, RTL Télé Luxembourg became RTL Télévision. In those years of early deregulation, in 1984 RTL Plus television was launched in Germany in partnership with UFA (Bertelsmann group), with which it ended up merging in 1997, creating CLT-UFA. Finally, in 2000, RTL group arose from the merger of CLT-UFA and Pearson Television. One year later, Bertelsmann became its main shareholder (RTL, 2018). Its entire history is full of acquisitions, mergers and expansion, as well as ventures that did not prosper. It has also disposed of some radio companies or shares, such as when it sold its stake in the Portuguese group Media Capital to the Spanish group PRISA in 2007, its 70% in the Greek Alpha Media Group to the entrepreneur Dimitris Contominas or its 7.5% in the Russian National Media Group in 2013.
Its main radio brands are RTL, Radio Contact and the Spanish network Onda Cero Radio (it has a minority stake in Atresmedia group, which owns Onda Cero Radio, Melodía FM, and Europa FM networks). RTL being the most cross-national brand, it broadcasts in Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands. RTL Group broadcasts in DAB in Germany (Antenne Bayern, Radio Hamburg, Radio Brocken, Radio Ton, Rock Antenne, Hamburg Zwei) and the French-speaking community in Belgium (Radio Contact), while in France it was awarded three national digital licences (RTL, RTL2 and Fun Radio) in March 2019.
NRJ
NRJ is a French group born from radio. It is clearly an exception to the general European trend to grow from the publishing industry towards audio (radio) and video (television) and is also the youngest of these three groups. Jean-Paul Baudecroux, its current chief executive officer, founded NRJ in 1981, Chérie FM in 1987 and Rire & Chansons in 1990, and bought Nostalgie in 1998. Seven years later, in 2005, the free-to-air television channel NRJ12 was created, followed by Cherie 25, another music TV channel, in 2012. The company also has a stake in the pay-TV NRJ Hits (NRJ, 2019). Despite its presence in the French television market, the strength of the group lies in audio. NRJ Group operates the four brands mentioned above, as well as more than 240 Internet-only streams, and is diversified towards the organization of events and other productions. In addition, one of its business activities is trademark licencing agreements. In its distribution division, it owns French network operator TowerCast and its Finnish subsidiary Telemast Nordic. In France, the group has about 890 radio licences, 68 of which are operated by franchises (NRJ, 2019). NRJ Group broadcasts via DAB in Austria, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. In March 2019, it was granted four digital national licences in France, one for each brand. NRJ is its most internationalized brand (it is called Energy in non-Francophone countries) and is present in 12 European countries, plus Morocco, Lebanon, Egypt and Mauritius. It is followed by Nostalgie, which broadcasts in Finland, the Netherlands, Lebanon, Egypt and Ivory Coast. Chérie and Rire & Chansons are available only in France. NRJ crosses borders in two ways (NRJ, 2020): directly exploiting frequencies alone or in association (in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland) and through brand licence agreements (Bulgaria and Russia, in addition to other countries outside Europe).
Discussion and conclusions
The three groups analysed in this article, RTL, NRJ and Bauer, are family-run businesses. Two of them (NRJ and RTL) arose from radio; however, NRJ is a multimedia group created from the radio medium, while RTL, once it had expanded its horizons, became part of a larger group, Bertelsmann. Both Bauer and Bertelsmann could perfectly well exemplify the tendency in which many European groups developed at the beginning of the deregulation process: priority investment in publishing, and progressive redeployment towards audio and video. Although Bauer’s leading radio force lies in the United Kingdom, the cross-national radio scene we have analysed is based in France and Germany. If we look at the European markets in which these groups are present, we see that they only overlap in one, Germany. RTL and NRJ compete in France, and Bauer and NRJ are present in Finland, Norway and Sweden. The United Kingdom is the great domain of Bauer; none of the other two groups can be found there.
Bauer and Bertelsmann are classic examples of external growth, and a group developing from the publishing industry to audio (radio) and video (television), combining horizontal and vertical concentration. The former is perfectly exemplified by the purchase of stations in the United Kingdom and the Nordic countries. Bauer only applies the internal growth strategy in the case of DAB, requesting the corresponding licences. When entering markets with a long analogue radio tradition (FM, AM), with already established competitors and strong public radio networks, the option has always been to purchase, that is, external growth. In addition, as mentioned, in recent years, Bauer has already acquired existing networks, not just individual radio stations. This considerable growth had set alarm bells ringing in the United Kingdom and was examined by the Competition and Markets Authority, resulting nevertheless in the approval of all the acquisitions. 5 This level of concentration is the result of applying economies of scale and implies a considerable loss of local content.
RTL (CLT, at the time) was an example of a company with a fundamentally national or regional role, whose strength lay in the knowledge of its market and the experience acquired over a long time (Richeri, 1990). This allowed the group to establish partnerships with other groups, until it joined Bertelsmann, precisely because Bertelsmann applied the same external growth strategy. However, and with the exception of the small share it has in Spanish radio, RTL is still a regional group, which means a European area of influence that moves between the French and the German languages. NRJ never formed part of the classifications and categorizations of many scholars, being a ‘radio only’ group.
This extreme form of external growth is what enables the internationalization of these groups. However, when dealing with a non-linear process like this, staying among the leaders is not easy and some groups might cease to be in top positions in a matter of months. This is especially true in terms of their expansion operations towards Eastern and Southern Europe. Except for RTL’s small stake in Spanish radio, these groups move further North or, in other words, are not present in Southern Europe and their footprint in the East is minimal or they are even withdrawing from this area. As mentioned, Lagardère Active sold its radio assets in Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia and initiated a ‘strategic refocus’ process ‘around the two priority divisions, Lagardère Publishing and Lagardère Travel Retail’ (Lagardère, 2018). In fact, it also speculated on the possibility that sooner or later it would sell its stations in France. We also saw that one of the most transnational groups for years, the Irish Communicorp, has been selling or trying to sell its assets in Eastern Europe for some time, to the extent that it does not even advertise on its corporate website that it is present in other markets. In Bulgaria and Russia, NRJ does not own stations, but works with licence agreements. Furthermore, Bauer has a brand in Slovakia and three in Poland, but the real power is its presence in the UK and the Nordic belt. Without excluding economic problems, the truth is that Eastern Europe does not offer the minimum legal guarantees that every company seeks and, therefore, after a period of deregulation in which these markets were opened up to the rest of Europe and the world, the political events in recent years have make them unstable markets (bne IntelliNews, 2018; Dobek-Ostrowska, 2019).
Finally, strictly speaking, NRJ is the only radio group, created from radio and that remains as such, without being part of a larger group. Its strength is the result of a combination of internal growth, external growth and a strong specialization in audio management (although multimedia diversification started years ago), thanks to the analogue (and now also digital) radio licences that it has obtained, but also in a particular and more conservative way to external growth: the expansion of the brand through licencing agreements. The company has a long tradition in this, since the first station in Paris began broadcasting in the early 1980s, and other stations in France adopted the name and format: ‘This was initially done through franchising arrangements, with the Paris station providing programming advice and technical assistance in return for a share of the stations’ advertising revenue’ (Kuhn, 1995: 103).
NRJ Group also serves to exemplify the extent to which the concentration of the radio market does not only depend on the offer of a few groups, but also on the collaboration agreements between them. For example,
(a) Belgium: NRJ (Flanders) and Nostalgie (Flanders and Wallonia) are co-owned by the Corelio group (through Mediahuis, the international media group in which it is the majority shareholder);
(b) Sweden: one national FM network is owned by NENT, one by Bauer, and one by NRJ in partnership with Bauer;
(c) Norway: with the NENT Group;
(d) German-speaking Switzerland: NRJ operates with local press group Ringier; and
(e) Finland: NRJ Group operates in partnership with Bauer, which is responsible for the sales and marketing activities, ‘but the radio business of NRJ and Radio Nostalgia is not owned by the company’ (Mäki-Kokkila, 2018: 8). This collaboration was renewed, and the press release made it very clear that the content of the NRJ and Nostalgia stations (the way Nostalgie radio is named in Finland) is left to the owner group, but Bauer takes care of sales and considers NRJ and Nostalgia part of its network portfolio.
Partnerships are not only limited to the field of advertising and marketing management but are also technological. For example, in Norway, in 2015, the national DAB network was funded by the public network NRK and private groups MTG and Bauer.
Regarding diversification and/or specialization strategies, we could apply them to both the programme offer and the company. Applied to the company, all groups have chosen diversification by including other activities (see Table 1) although, in the case of Bauer, the greatest business diversification derives from the German parent company, with Bauer Radio being an audio management specialist; this includes both radio and the management of advertising and marketing of their stations and those of other companies. Since it does not depend on a larger group, we could say that the most genuine diversification is that of NRJ Group, which revolves around audio, but also includes television, real estate or information technologies.
If, on the contrary, we refer to the programme offer, we would say that the specialization of NRJ and Bauer is music radio, and that of RTL talk-radio. Given its oral nature, radio has traditionally been considered as a difficult medium to internationalize. However, and despite local language and local music quotas, formats, brands and shared ownership have overcome the traditional reasons that prevented radio from crossing borders: the multiple languages spoken in Europe and the traditional consideration of radio as a national business, with no harmonized regulation at European level. Certainly, there are factors that have made certain cultural goods more international: dubbing, translations, versions. However, the more ideological the product is, the more complex it is to make it global, especially if it is associated with the idea of ‘local’. This is the case, for example, of news products, which is why the daily press, or genres, such as the news, are those that retain a more national character and can offer greater resistance. Despite this, there are some enablers, and at times, internationalization occurs indirectly through advertising, news agencies, countdown music programmes or fiction formats. Format is one of the most useful enablers because it refers to a standardization process, which is what makes it possible to convert that content into an easily marketable product (Vincent, 2013). Language is not a barrier for some radio groups; this is not the case anymore because, and thanks to deregulation, market opportunities prevail.
Although adapted to the local content and style up to a point, what is exported, whether through buying stations or licencing the brand, is not only a music format; it is also a label, a way to present the music and combine it with news or service information, the way in which they will relate to their audiences and how they will sell that content and that image. Internet radio and streams allow them to expand the scope and to offer a more varied and direct interaction with the audience and ways to advertise that go beyond the simple radio spot. All these groups have long-standing experience in advertising sales and marketing and have taken the first steps to consolidate data management and programmatic advertising companies.
That brings us back to the relevance of the brand. It remains to be seen what Bauer will do with all the stations acquired in recent months, but what is certain is that it has changed their names. Rebranding is essential if a company wants a brand to be truly cross-national. For example, when Bauer Media bought Discovery’s radio stations in Norway, it ‘relaunched Radio 1 under the name Kiss at the DAB network’ (Haugen and Lien, 2016: 14). In Denmark, it replaced The Voice with Kiss. The rebranding is even easier since the offer can be diversified based on the technology, that is, as in this last example, the name of the station can be changed in FM but maintaining the original name in DAB or online stream. This technological diversification also makes it easier to cross borders and internationalize the brand. As we saw in the ‘Methodology’ section, Virgin Radio would be the best example of marketing based exclusively on the brand, and how to expand without having to buy a station or apply for a licence. In this case, this has been possible because the brand had been growing and consolidating for years.
Deregulation, the fall of public monopolies and the appearance of the private sector were the first step for a European dual system to develop in a favourable context, in which commercial radio stations could start the application of strategies specific to other sectors, within and outside media, such as external or internal growth, diversification or internationalization.
Thanks to the possibilities of a deregulated market, strengthening the role of the brand and the format and the agreements and partnership with other groups, broadcasting radio has overcome the obstacles that, historically, hindered its cross-border expansion.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The data gathered for this article and the insights generated were part of a research project funded by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).
