Masti Radio - Ofcom Licensing

Monitoring Summary Key 103
As Manchester’s ‘heritage’ local commercial station you’d expect Key 103 to feature
prominently in overall listening across the city. In terms of Asian listeners our two
audience studies showed that although the station did reasonably well it is less popular
than Galaxy, though it is still one of relatively few ‘mainstream’ stations to attract an
audience of reasonable proportions. The preference for Galaxy among Asian (and
Black) listeners is probably due to a preference for Black music styles (especially R’n’B)
to mainstream western pop or rock.
We monitored Key 103 for a 12 hour weekday daytime period (0600-1800) on
Wednesday 2 nd February 2005 (the spreadsheet log is Confidential Appendix CA9).
Apart from a competition to win a holiday in Hong Kong to celebrate Chinese New Year
there was no speech content of specific interest to any of Masti Radio’s ethnic target
groups.
Advertising accounted for 22% of total output, news/speech/jingles/promos for 26% and
music for 52%. Music and speech are broken down below. For simplicity we have put
mainstream Western Pop and Rock into one category.
Music category % of Music played
Pop/Rock 79.6%
R’n’B 10.9%
Dance 9.5%
Key 103 therefore plays less R’n’B than Masti Radio proposes to do (20% comprising a
mix of Asian and Western styles). But it has more Dance and vast amounts more
(Western) Pop/Rock. Masti Radio will have no Rock and a 5% proportion category which
includes both Dance and Western Pop alongside other fringe interest styles from the
point of view of our target audience.
Speech Category % of Speech
News and Sport 15.6%
Programme Speech 73.8%
(incl. links, travel etc)
Recorded Branding 10.6%
(promos/jingles/idents)
News was presented in ‘home mix’ style throughout, with overall content weighted
slightly in favour of local stories if you include those about local sport, which largely
concerned Manchester United and Manchester City on the day we monitored.
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