All washed up
Ofcom Content Sampling Report - Ocean FM (PDF)
From time to time representatives from Ofcom 'sample' the content of a radio or TV station in order to see if the station in question is fulfilling its remit, and from the 18th to 20th October 2007 it was the turn of GCap's Ocean FM (covering the South Hampshire region) to be put under the spotlight to see if it was living up to the terms of its radio licence.
Ocean FM is regarded by GCap as being one of its 'heritage' stations hence avoiding the fate of being sold off with unwanted "later acquisitions" not so long ago. Prior to that there was a proposal to rebrand Ocean as Century given their similar music format, but GCap had a change of heart and later decided to offload the Century stations to the Guardian Media Group.
During the Ofcom sampling period, Ocean FM ticked the boxes when it came to locally-derived content (unsurprising given the station's importance) and in terms of local news and speech/music ratios which were comfortably exceeded (again no surprise there). However Ocean came spectacularly unstuck when it came to its basic music remit.
Ofcom said that Ocean FM?s music format has to be ?predominantly (up to 70%) current a/c [Adult Contemporary] tracks and those from the previous twelve months, along with a spread of a/c hits from across the years?, but over the three days "an average of just 9.5% of the tracks aired by Ocean were either current tracks or tracks drawn from the past 12 months".
Whoops.
Therefore Ofcom concluded that "Ocean is in clear breach of its Format, and a Yellow Card warning has been issued. If we find that these issues have been addressed when we monitor the station again, then the Yellow Card will be lifted". So Ocean FM listeners can expect to hear a lot more from James Blunt's current album very shortly...
