Save RNZ Concert

On February 5, 2020, Radio New Zealand management stunned its music team with a plan to radically change RNZ Concert, the organisation’s fine music network. The proposal was brutal: Concert’s FM transmission network would be taken over for a new youth-oriented project; Concert would be accessible only through streaming or an AM network shared with Parliament; all members of Concert’s highly-skilled staff including on-air presenters and producers of recorded programmes redundant; the on-air offering a 24/7 computer-generated playlist with no human curation and no presenters to introduce or inform the audience about the music.

Within hours, consternation spread throughout the arts and music community and Concert’s devoted audience. Two petitions garnered tens of thousands of signatories and a Facebook group called Save RNZ Concert gained over thirteen thousand members. Prominent New Zealand musicians, composers, arts professionals and politicians at home and overseas weighed in on Twitter and in the mainstream media in protest. Within days, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Adern, who is also the Arts Minister, offered a solution to the FM network aspect of the proposal, making available a separate frequency for the proposed youth-oriented network, and the RNZ Board announced the next day that Concert would keep the FM transmission network already allocated to it in legislation.

The Save RNZ Concert campaign members do not believe the issue is resolved. The Concert staff team is still in limbo with respect to job security, no future plan for the network has been developed, consultation with arts and other stakeholders has been proposed but not yet undertaken. So the campaign to secure a bright and well-resourced future for the network continues. Meanwhile, the audience for RNZ Concert grew substantially over the period which included the campaign.

I contributed an opinion piece about RNZ Concert to the NZ Listener which was published in the issue dated February 22, 2020.