Zane Lowe discusses the future of radio

In a new interview, Zane Lowe has spoken about the future of radio. The long-standing BBC Radio 1 DJ moved to Apple earlier this year, to host a show on their Beats 1 platform.

“It’s changed a lot from what it meant to me in 2014,” Lowe told The Fader. “[Radio is] an important voice for a community to talk about things that are relevant to that city or that town or even to a country. When we started Beats 1, the first question we asked ourselves was: what is our voice and how does it relate to the entire world? When you take away the idea of
talking about the local news or the local weather or whatever at either end of a song, you get to focus on what I think doesn’t get a lot of attention in the wake of those things, which is music.”

“For me, what’s really important is that we drive the right new music stories and messages mixed in with the right artist shows so that people realize how exciting music is,” he added. “I think that there’s a lot of ways for us to help an artist tell their story: a new artist could get a premiere, or even do their own radio shows.”

Read DIY’s look at the rise of Spring King, with word from Zane Lowe about Beats1’s role in the whole thing.