The Long View | Blocking Radio 3 abroad is a catastrophe for UK music

It’s lucky for me that Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera Festen, to which I’m listening as I write this, was broadcast on 22 March. A few months later, and the chances are I wouldn’t have been able to hear Radio 3’s transmission of this important new work set in Denmark, where I live. Soon the BBC’s decision to remove international access to BBC Sounds will come into force. Only Radio 4 will be available to listen to via BBC.com, the commercial site that will serve as the portal for listeners outside the UK.

This is a disaster, and one the corporation is trying to dress up as good news for listeners (it is not) while obscuring any actually useful information with opaque tech-speak (they can’t even tell us exactly when BBC Sounds will stop working outside Britain, preferring the romantic ‘in Spring’). If you can decipher any of the BBC’s own communiqués on the change you might glean that podcasts originating from BBC radio will be available on BBC.com. Will that include packaged material from Radio 3? I can’t envisage a universe in which Live in Concert, Choral Evensong, Record Review and countless others will be prioritised in that process.

Chatrooms and social media advise listeners abroad that Radio 3 will still be internationally available via the (paid-for) third-party platform TuneIn. I must be a luddite, because after half an hour of trying my hand on TuneIn – which steers me towards Radio 2 as the UK’s classical music station – I still haven’t found a way of catching-up on previously broadcast Radio 3 material. So it seems we’ll be winding the clock back to the days when you had to listen to programmes at the exact time they were broadcast, going against just about every trend in media consumption. In a different time zone and with complex family logistics to grapple with, it will be impossible for me to hear programmes I have listened to for 30 years.

One last resort is a VPN that can trick your devices into believing you’re listening from inside the UK when in fact you are not. But VPNs are incorrigibly temperamental and can play havoc with other geographically dependent interactions on your devices. They are also notorious for inadvertently blocking content from the BBC.

But you know what? This has nothing to do with my personal disappointment and inconvenience. It has everything to do with another colossal blow to UK classical music’s international standing. Right now, Radio 3 is big outside its home nation: respected for its quality and loved for its breadth while managing to be concurrently admired for its international outlook and treasured for its linguistic accessibility. It operates big soft-power levers via its broadcasting of the Proms and provides a shop window for UK musicians and New Generation Artists who work globally.

Apparently, none of that fits with the new objectives of the BBC’s commercially minded overlords, who justify these changes with the insular promise to provide ‘better value for our UK listeners’. I must admit, I didn’t realise the quality of the broadcasts dropped the more foreigners were listening.

As a classical music station, Radio 3 embodies that clichéd but persistently truthful idea that music crosses boundaries. The station celebrates its partnerships in Europe, particularly with the European Broadcasting Union with which it joins forces to broadcast live from around the continent (for how long?). We get to hear each other distinctive musical traditions (like Choral Evensong) and we get to hear important premieres (like Festen).

To those who claim BBC services should not be available to those who don’t pay for them: you have missed the point entirely. The BBC’s motto is ‘Nation Shall Speak Peace Unto Nation’ – a most beautiful assemblage of words that not only enshrines a noble idea but also reflects the corporation’s status as Britain’s greatest brand ambassador. Public Service Broadcasting is not about satisfying a market craving and is an infinitely bigger concept than the exchange of services for money.

The more the BBC resembles a subscription service, the more non-commercial programming like classical music will be on borrowed time – along with in-depth journalism, sports, live national events and the rest of the stuff that Netflix and their ilk would never do and could never do. And the further the BBC moves away from its promise to speak peace from nation to nation, the more of a hollow husk it will resemble.