This week, Heat Radio has relaunched using an advertising free format. Instead it’s using sponsorship to earn revenue. In this respect it’s similar to stations like Virgin Radio Xtreme which launched with Sony PSP for the first six months.
Heat magazine isn’t exactly regular reading for me. I’m not, and indeed, have never been in its target demographic. But I thought I’d give it a try. A wraparound on trade magazine Media Week advertised a trade competition at the URL heatradio.com. I clicked through, but all I could find was the said competition. At least it’ll let me click through to hear the station though won’t it? Not easily, no.
It was all very strange: heatradio.com is a great URL, so it’s odd that they’re not using it for consumer purposes rather than trade ones. I won’t draw too much attention to their schedule which suggests that 2am follows 1pm.
Instead you have to click through to heatworld.com. Now while this might be the regular Heat destination website, it still should be all a little more seamless. Heatworld, incidentally has to be launched as a seperate window or tab, which means pop-up blockers can get in the way.
Then there’s another strange thing. The top story on Heatworld is one that’s been doing the rounds in the radio industry following an appearance on Holy Moly a couple of days ago. The wrong file was played out for the news, and listeners instead heard the newsreader degenerate into lots of swearing as she realised her script wasn’t all there. As it’s unlikely that some punter was recording the output of a digital radio station like Heat, you can only imagine that the audio came from someone within EMAP radio (Heat’s owners) itself. Heatworld links to a YouTube “video” of this audio.
This couldn’t have been a first week “stunt” could it?
But I’m still trying to hear Heat Radio.
A tab at the top links to www2.heatradio.com – a very different site to www.heatradio.com which is odd because usually the inclusion of numbers just refers to a series of servers serving the same code up. Again, it launches in another window.
Still no audio though. Now you have to launch the radio player – another window – with the curious URL www.whatson.com/heat/. The player is a little large for my liking, and effectively works as a player for the whole of EMAP radio. The link to buy songs directly on iTunes via Tradedoubler (that’s how they earn some cash from the transaction), is neat, but it all feels a little cumbersome.
As for the actual output? Well it’s not really my thing as I say, so I don’t think I’ll be listening too much…