1. Is BFM really the only independent station in Malaysia?
There are 3 main radio groups in Malaysia, owned by public companies (Astro, Media Prima and Star Group). Two of them are controlled by political parties (Media Prima is believed to be linked to the ruling party UMNO and Star Group is owned by the Malaysian Chinese Assocation, the third largest party in the Narisan Nasional coalition).
Astro is controlled by Ananda Krishnan, a private individual. So I guess technically, Astro is independent too. However, in popular parlance, the “independent” moniker has been attached to media that has an independent voice (i.e. not necessarily pro-establishment) , for that we are labelled by Malaysians as to be the only independent radio station in Malaysia.
2. How much of Malaysia do you cover at present?
Our coverage extends to Greater Kuala Lumpur including the city of KL, Selangor, and part of Seremban and Melaka.
3. There have been difficulties extending your coverage to other areas like Penang and Johor. Do you think this will happen?
FM frequencies are limited in Penang and Johor. We have not been able to persuade the frequency assignment team of our regulator, from a technical point of view, to issue us a Penang frequency, despite us having a national radio licence.
4. When you started BFM five years ago, what gap in the market were you looking to fill?
I noticed that working professionals were tiring of trivial conversations on radio at the time, many were switching off and listening to podcasts from overseas e.g. NPR. via iPods (at the time). So I knew there was a hunger for substantive conversation on air. All that remained was to choose the focus of the station as I was not a believer in a general talk station (indeed, an early Astro station, Talk Radio, was withdrawn from the market in 90s). I selected business content as a focus – there were successful models in print – I thought it would work for radio as well.
5. Does the station achieve a large audience (do you get surveyed by Nielsen)?
We don’t get surveyed by Nielsen because we chose not to participate. We have fundamental disagreement with the methodology as applied to our target audience. Surveys are done via diaries distributed to homes between the times of 8am to 6pm. Err, most of our target audience of working professionals are by definition at work at the times when the Nielsen folks come by. Even at the weekend, our audience are too time-poor to spend time filling up radio diaries.
We believe we command a large audience of at least 250,000 listeners in Greater KL. As it is, our followers on Twitter already number more than 50,000, and our listener base should be a multiple of that.
6. Why do you think the station works?
We do not dumb down our on-air conversations as we believe our listeners are more worldly and savvy than most media believe them to be.
7. Most other commercial stations are music driven. So would you say Radio Televisyen Malaysia (RTM), the public broadcaster, is your main competitor and how to do you compete with such a large organisation?
I’m not sure if RTM is a competitor as it is not in the business content space. However, I cannot define what space they’re in, as I think they do not know the answer to that themselves, other than a media platform for the government. And we all know from other industries, being well-resourced is not a determinant of market success. Indeed, with a lot of money at our disposal, we could do some pretty stupid things.
8. Do you see growth opportunities by launching other stations or do you think you will get bought up by a bigger player?
I don’t think there are sufficient FM frequencies to launch other stations. But I would obviously love to, there are a few more formats that I would like to introduce. So growth in radio is likely to be more opportunistic.
However, our efforts are now focused on the digital space, not merely online streaming (a very, very small opportunity) but in the area of podcasts (more than 6,000 BFM podcasts are downloaded or streamed everyday), online video (please see our BFMvdo channel on Youtube), our iPad/iPhone podcast app and our website.
We also have a digital tablet magazine called The B-Side which is available on Apple Newsstand and Google Play. We are developing advertising capabilities on all these platforms.
On the radio side, I would like too see if we can expand outside Malaysia to other ASEAN/South Asian markets,but given that the radio media is a sensitive area for governments, this is necessarily on an opportunistic basis.
9. What excites you about the future of radio? Digital terrestrial (like DAB), streaming or something else?
I am excited that in most new cars, the car dashboard has included a media player that can access any online stream in the world. This allows us to get around the scarcity of FM frequencies to offer new “radio” stations, potentially to a global audience, or at least to sub-segments of the global audience.
10. Malaysian business newspaper The Edge recently took a minority stake. How do you think that investment in BFM will show up on air? Do you see lots of opportunities for working together?
There is no grand plan for an operational tie-up between The Edge and BFM. We will look at opportunities to work together as they arise.