For the last 50 years music radio has basically been a shop window for the music industry to advertise and promote its products – and our new friday night show NowPlaying@6Music reperesents a small step away from that model.  All the tunes we’re playing on the show are sourced from public conversations with our listeners and what’s happening out there in the big wide world of the blogosphere. Not from the promotional activities of record companies.

For the first time ever, I’ve actually had to ask pluggers to take me off their mailing lists because we can no longer “just slip in” some latest release or other as a favour to them or anybody else: the audience really is in the driving seat. Instead of us choosing the music that gets broadcast, our job is simply to “reflect the online conversation about music, on air.”

As we saw when they saved the station last year, the 6 Music audience is genuinely special, and this show is a brilliant chance to get to know them better. In the past eight weeks listeners and bloggers have introduced me to a fuckton of great music – new and old – that I never even knew existed.