I won’t lie – I don’t listen to popular radio. Once I got my MP3 player, that’s all she wrote – no more radio unless it was talk radio. And once we moved to SC last summer I didn’t even have talk radio to listen to. So about the only radio I hear now is five minutes of Christian radio when I go out at lunchtime during the workweek. So I freely admit that I’m completely out of it when it comes to modern radio.
Having said that, I loved two radio stations in particular in Scotland. One was XFM Scotland which played the same 30 songs over and over, but they were good songs by bands like Fall Out Boy, Kaiser Chiefs, The Killers, Snow Patrol, Gossip, Arctic Monkeys, The Fratellis, and Good Charlotte.
The other station was BBC2 Radio, which had a fun afternoon dj crew and also played some interesting music – including having an old ELO song on their Top 10 list!! Slightly more downkey, this station played the likes of Scissor Sisters, James Morrison, Mika, Joss Stone, Tiny Dancers, and The Fray.
The weird thing about radio over there is that the stations use SEVERAL spaces on the dials. XFM uses 105.7 – 106.1, where as BBC2 uses 88.9 through about 92.5. I found that very strange and Brits coming here probably think we’re nuts for having literally DOZENS of radio stations across the complete dial (they have MAYBE six in any given area).
In any event, we were grateful to have those two stations in particular, since my MP3 player couldn’t be played over there in the car (I only have a cassette tape adapter, not a CD player adapter). And my iTunes account is grateful since I’ll be downloading songs from all of those above listed artists to add to my collection.
BBC3 (Classical) has their own magazine which I can get here in the States.