The Guardian has a fairly in-depth interview with Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper this morning, with a couple of interesting headlines.

The first is that Cooper wants Radio 1 to become "the Netflix of music radio":

“I want Radio 1 to be the Netflix of music radio,” he says, trundling out the catchy soundbite to back his latest plan: taking a leaf out of the hugely successful US streaming service’s book by making programmes available on demand.

But... the programmes already are available on demand, aren't they?

Turns out these are different programmes:

He is starting out with 25 hours of on-demand “phone-first” content, such as a weekly “Top 10 most-played tracks of the week” programme, but intends to seriously ramp up the hours next year. “In this job, you’ve got to keep across what young audiences are doing. They want content on whatever device they are using, increasingly the phone, when they want it, and that is the key for us to stay relevant and stay young.”

There's a few problems with this - if people aren't listening to Radio 1, why would they give a raspberry tuppence about listening to a programme which plays the 'most played' tracks? "Hey kids, those programmes you're ignoring? Want to listen to the sort of music they're playing that isn't encouraging you to listen to them?"

More importantly, if you were looking for a Netflix for music radio, you might think that's a space that Spotify are already in.

And Radio 1 as Netflix would only work if Netflix concerned itself solely with, say, romcoms and slasher flicks. If you're looking for something akin to Netflix, you'd need something that covers a range of styles and genres. Something like, ooh, iPlayer Radio.

To be fair, though, Cooper has had some degree of success at extending Radio 1 as a brand beyond radio - a large swathe of its audience never tune in on DAB or FM. On YouTube, Radio 1 is thriving, or at least doing as well as Zoella.

Then there's the Grimshaw question:

Meanwhile, shouldn’t he be more worried about Nick Grimshaw? Earlier this year, the station’s breakfast show audience reached its lowest level in more than 13 years. Grimshaw, who took over the coveted gig from Chris Moyles, is about to become older than the station’s average listener. After four years of trying, is his use-by date looming?

“I’m not operating Logan’s Run,” quips Cooper, referring to the 1976 sci-fi film where people get systematically vaporised when they turn 30. “Grimmy was asked to do a job and it was a difficult job. Chris’s job was to build the biggest audience he could, the most successful breakfast show Radio 1 ever had. The BBC Trust asked me to get Radio 1 younger so I brought in Nick to do that. Grimmy has come in and he is the No 1 youth presenter in the UK. He is knocking it out of the ballpark when it comes to connecting with young audiences on a daily basis.”

Is he the "number one youth presenter in the UK", though? If he is, why has he settled so comfortably into the X Factor Home for The Formerly Influential?

But then, the 46 year-old Cooper isn't going to willingly suggest the route to a younger audience is through a perpetually younger team, is he?

You would have hoped that the BBC would have enough tech savvy to avoid a 'ticket sale fail', but...

Two hours ago they put their Liverpool 1Xtra tickets on sale:

🚨🚨🚨#1xtraLive tickets are now ON SALE to see @Stormzy1 @duttypaul &more

Don't miss out ➡️ https://t.co/hRGbBipRws pic.twitter.com/aLw6Wdc8Qy

— BBC Radio 1Xtra (@1Xtra) September 5, 2016

And the system fell over almost instantly:

We are currently having a few technical issues with the #1xtraLive ticket website. We are working to solve the problem as quickly as we can!

— BBC Radio 1Xtra (@1Xtra) September 5, 2016

So they pulled the sale:

⚠️ Due to this we are suspending sales until the issue has been fully resolved. We'll let you know when the tickets are available again 2/2

— BBC Radio 1Xtra (@1Xtra) September 5, 2016

Trouble is... they'd already been on sale sort-of long enough to cause problems:

@1Xtra if money has been taken out of my bank does that mean I already have my tickets ?

— clare (@ClareW25) September 5, 2016

And that really needed a clear answer. But all it got was this:

@ClareW25 We can't tell you how sorry we are for these issues 😥 We'll have answers tomorrow when #1xtraLive tickets will be back on sale

— BBC Radio 1Xtra (@1Xtra) September 5, 2016

- which doesn't really answer the 'you have taken my money, have I got tickets' question.

And, unsurprisingly, people are pissed off with not just the flop, but the lack of any real clarity about what's going on:

@1Xtra how you going to put them back on sale when people don't even have the tickets and have basically been robbed 😂

— Gem (@Gemhickey) September 5, 2016

The BBC is struggling to keep an audience with younger people. This isn't the way to build that trust.

It's interesting to note that the Mercury has reached a point where it's not got a sponsor as such, any more, and is "in association with BBC Music". It's a fair enough way to spend a small slice of licence fee (probably a better return on investment than the BBC Music Awards) but must be strange that the second highest profile music award in the UK can't attract an above the line sponsor.

Anyway, this year's winner is Benjamin Clementine's At Least For Now. It might be coincidence, but a lot of the BBC Four coverage found space to celebrate the 'curse of the Mercury' winners - Speech Debelle, Roni Size, Ms Dynamite - and in a way that challenged the 'last seen leaving the ceremony with a cheque for £20k, and disappeared' narrative. Perhaps a partnership with a cultural organisation like the BBC rather than the marketing department of a bank is allowing the Mercury to at last be comfortable about not caring about sales, and focus on the value of the recordings.

Benjamin was so warm in his victory, too - first inviting all the other shortlisted artists on stage; then dedicating his win to the victims of the Paris Attacks, before being overcome with emotion. Genuinely, you feel that the prize couldn't have gone to a nicer man.

Earlier this week Tony "Memorial" Hall made a speech about the future of the BBC where he promised all sorts of entertaining, educational and informative things to come, for all the world like a man whose funding wasn't being choked off by George Osborne.

Amongst the ideas was a music streaming service which would, somehow, offer the last 50,000 tracks played by the BBC for licence fee payers to dip into somehow, and for some reason.

Clearly, Hall was just making up ideas which sound lovely, like news for North Korea and something something Royal Shakespeare Company probably on iPlayer or whatever. Nothing seemed that well thought through, least of all the music streaming.

But this hasn't stopped the BPI from running forward to demand to know the precise financial details of the half-formed idea. Billboard reports:

U.K. music industry body BPI expressed some worries about the plans. “The starting point for some of the BBC’s suggestions, around how such a service might work, involved launching such a service but paying no money for it," CEO Geoff Taylor said, according to music business strategy and information company Music Ally. "I just don’t think that’s viable."

He added: "There will have to be a sensible deal behind it if it is going to happen.”

I wonder if Geoff Taylor was ever asked out on a date:

- Hey, Geoffrey, I...
- Geoff
- Sorry?
- I prefer Geoff. It's funkier.
- Uh... right. Well, I was wondering if you'd like to go to the cinema with me sometime, maybe to...
- I insist you tell me now how you propose we fund the raising of any children which might result as actions set in train following this proposed event
- What... I...
- Tell me now, or there will be no cinema dates.
- I... uh... how about we make musicians sign punitive contracts which takes huge fees off them for services, one of which could be funding a self-important lobby group that can pretend it speaks for "music" as if it was a democratic body, which you could run for a huge salary?
- Hmm. Good plan. I'll pick you up at seven on Saturday, and we can go see The Goonies.

Tony Hall hasn't yet addressed BPI concerns, but has been heard muttering about "why shouldn't chickens be connected to a creative journalistic nexus?"

It's great that Tom Watson is such a strong supporter of 6Music, but his calls for the BBC to move the network to FM, booting Radio 3 to digital only, are flawed:

Watson said: “It does strike me if the Radio 3 audience continues to diminish and 6 Music continues to grow its audience, the BBC should seriously consider it, they must put it on their agenda.

“6 Music is a huge success story for the BBC. They tried to close it down and its audience doubled, they now have more listeners digitally than Radio 3 has got on both digital and the FM network.

“On those terms 6 Music should be knocking at the door for that FM slot and they would have an even bigger audience [on FM]. There are a lot of discriminating music listeners out there, they have built a very powerful brand and a strong offer. They only way they are going to expand is getting an FM slot and I think it’s worth the BBC considering.”

Maybe worth considering, but much more worth rejecting.

Part of the original reason for the existence of 6Music was to help drive digital listening - something that it's done rather well. Moving it across to analogue wouldn't really help with that.

Given there's a hope that the FM and AM radiospace can be handed over to other services in the not-too-distant future, any tenancy on FM would be short-lived anyway.

The idea that 6 can only grow by transferring to FM is flawed, given that it's still growing its audience on digital.

And then there's the question of what would happen to Radio 3 if it shifted to digital-only. It already has a fragile audience; even if you generously assume that half its listeners transfer across to find it - and that we can put up with the resultant drone of audiophiles complaining about sound quality on DAB forever - that low level of audience would appear to be incompatible with the current level of funding Radio 3 receives. So while Tom Watson might say he's not calling for Radio 3 to be closed down, that would effectively be the effect of moving it across before we're at the stage of analogue radio switch-off. (How it will thrive after that, of course, is another question.)

That Glastonbury is a moment that brings everyone together thing in full. pic.twitter.com/G7sOHTkfTv

— Jon Bounds (@bounder) June 28, 2014

There's always room for more music awards shows, right? Because there's an unlimited pool of talent just waiting to do the 'and the winner is...' shuffle. There are simply too many days that don't have lifetime achievement awards being handed to Cliff Richard, are there not.

So, thank god for the BBC, bravely plugging that gap with a new music awards show, celebrating music.

It's a totally new concept, pulling together Chris Evans from BBC One's teatime magazine show The One Show and presenters from BBC Radio to create a unique experience.

Here's some footage from the pilot:

The great thing about the World Cup being in Brazil is the massive range of options this offers the BBC for choosing a theme tune.

Who have they gone with? Seu Jorge? Nação Zumbi? Maria Rita?

Oh, man, I bet they've gone with Maria Rita. Imagine kicking off every Match of the Day with this:

But it's so difficult to choose. So many great local artists. So many distinctive local genres and sub-genres. How do you choose one to drench your Brazilian soccer coverage in a sense of place?

What have you chosen, BBC?

Stevie Wonder's song Another Star will provide the theme tune for the BBC's Fifa World Cup coverage.

The song, with its Latin American vibe, will be used as the opening sequence for all of the BBC's World Cup programmes for Brazil 2014.

Ah, yes. How better to get a "Latin American vibe" than by approaching someone from Michigan?

I suppose Brazil only has itself to blame. If just one of its artists had ever produced a single track which sounded even half-way as Latin American, they'd probably have been in with a shot of providing a tune for the event.

Perhaps it's elaborate social commentary from BBC Sport, reflecting how the World Cup has seen Brazilians shoved aside to make room for multinational brands to make money off of soccer.

The BBC is keen to stress the sort-of-historic significance of 'man licences track to broadcaster':

It is the first time the musician, 64, has given his approval for one of his songs to be used in this way.

Perhaps that's true, but this is the man who supplied the entire soundtrack for The Woman In Red, so let's not pretend opening with a Wonder song is automatically a blessing for all involved.

It's now a fixed point in the summer season; newspapers who dislike the BBC getting all overheated about how it takes people to do broadcasting of a music festival.

Because this is a year divisible by two and not four, that means the comparison must be made with the World Cup of Soccer, which is going to happen in the next week or so:

BBC sends 300 staff to cover Glastonbury Festival - that’s 28 more than its Brazil World Cup crew

This compares to 272 who are heading to Brazil for the World Cup

I'm sure the Daily Mail will, elsewhere on its website, be clearing space amongst the upskirt shots of teenage girls to complain about the number of BBC staff covering the World Cup as well, but for now that's the comparison they want to go for.

How can it be, then, that it takes a larger number of people to cover a number of stages running simultaneously for about a dozen channels across TV, radio and digital, than it does to cover a football event where the match coverage is provided by somebody else and which plays out languidly over the course of what feels like an entire month?

Oh, hang on. The question has answered itself, hasn't it?

We'll see you back here next year for "the BBC has more people covering Glastonbury than turned up for the defenestration of Nick Clegg".

For a comparison with the Radio One playlist-by-social-media-stats approach, it's worth reading what happened when Saga magazine met Jeff Smith, head of music at Radio 2, last month.

Radio 2's approach is a little different:

The sound of the station is defined and refined on a weekly basis at its crucial ‘playlist’ meeting every Wednesday. Here the producers of the station’s daytime shows pitch about 20 new songs from a list of around 70. In turn, each is assigned to the A (15-20 plays a week), B (7-10 plays) or C (2-5 plays) list.

Each DJ’s show producer has an input. Exceptions can be made: for example, if a particular musician is a guest on a show, then more of their music will be played. But, in the main, Jeff and his team decide on 99% of what is played on Radio 2 during the daytime.

That's not so very different to what happens at Radio 1. But the basis for decision making? That is:

While Radio 1 increasingly looks to social media and online popularity (YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter) to help to decide which new acts to back, Jeff says Radio 2’s choices still stem from gut instinct. ‘We don’t need to have that sort of data to deliver what we’re doing,’ he says. ‘We don’t do any formal audience research.’

Radio 2’s audience is not rigidly segmented into ‘buckets’ in the way that most demographic-based audience research tends to be (55-64 over here, 65-74 over there and so on).

Understanding the audience, and knowing what works for them, rather than using YouTube views? Why, that's a recipe for, erm, ever-growing and happy listenership.

There's something a little worrying about the report in The Observer which watches a Radio One playlist meeting. Can you spot it, I wonder?

A snatch of each song blares through speakers before Ergatoudis lists the artist's YouTube views, Soundcloud hits, Shazam ratings, Twitter followers and Facebook likes. "[Indie foursome] Wolf Alice's Moaning Lisa Smile video has had 15,000 views on YouTube and they've got 11,000 followers on Twitter," Ergatoudis tells the room. "James, you want to go first?"

There's a lot of this - records being weighed on how many Twitter followers the band has; the number of times a YouTube video has been played by man or machine; and so on.

A snatch of music, a bellyful of statistics. Surely that's the wrong way round? Surely Radio One should be playlisting music based on the track itself, rather than because it's already popular elsewhere? If YouTube views are the new chart, then this is like the playlist meeting in 1993 choosing records based on what Bruno Brookes had read out on the Top 40 the previous Saturday.

The Observer's Nadia Khomami asks Radio One's George Ergatoudis about this point:

It's faintly depressing to hear bands referred to as "brands" with their worth determined by online data. Stats is business talk. It isn't creative, it isn't art, it's box-ticking. It's playing people the kind of music that they're already listening to. Harding says, though, that there are exceptions to this rule. "There have been moments where we've been tempted to completely go against data. Clean Bandit have had the biggest single of the year so far and we booked them for a live lounge in January last year, purely on the basis that we had a feeling they were doing something special. They didn't have very much in terms of stats. And it took a year of us playing a sequence of singles for people to jump on to them - a lot of people think Rather Be was their first single but actually it was their fourth that we playlisted on Radio 1."

That this is an exception, rather than a rule, is something of a problem. Because if Radio One is basically deciding what to play using a 'what's already popular' formula, you might wonder why its target audience would bother tuning in.

"Hey, kids, listen to the radio - we've got all the songs you liked a fortnight ago, right here."

It's not the most exciting proposition, is it?

"Radio One: In YouTube's statistical integrity we trust."

Isn't Radio One's job to build the talent, rather than count the numbers?

Hey, you know what? Kids today! They're buying cassettes like they're coming back into fashion.

That's what the BBC say, anyway:

One in 10 young people has bought a music cassette tape in the last month, a new survey done to coincide with Record Store Day suggests.

The research suggests that physical formats are still more popular than digital downloads.

In the last year, 57% of the people surveyed had bought a CD, while 39% had purchased an MP3 download.

In the last month.

There's just over four million 20-24 year olds in the UK, so that would imply 400,000 cassettes sold each month just to that proportion of the 18-24 year old age group. Let's be generous and assume 18 & 19 year olds bought no cassettes at all, and that for the other 11 months of the year, none of this age group bought any cassettes.

How does this figure fit with cassette sales?

Well, we know that in 2013, album sales on media other than CD, vinyl or digital download accounted for just 73,000 sales. That's cassettes, but also box sets of vinyl, DVD Audio and other strange beasts. But let's pretend that it's all tape, shall we?

Ah, but for singles, the figure for 'others' is six million or so. Could that be where all these cassette purchases are hidden?

Probably not - the other figure for 2012 was nearly four and a half million, and we know just 604 of those were cassingles. Even if we - again generously - assume a 100-fold increase in cassette single sales between 2012 and 2013, that's 60,400 sales.

So, even on the most generous and lax granting of licence, and over-estimating like we're Nigel Farage putting in his office running costs, we make that 133,000 cassettes sold in 2013.

So, for the Record Store Day figures to hold up, we're going to have to believe that a thin sliver of the national demographic suddenly bought four times as many tapes in March 2014 as the entire population in the whole of 2013 on the loosest possible reading of the figures.

In other words: this is absolute tock-widdle, and the BBC should be ashamed of running it as fact. But not as ashamed as Record Store Day should be of putting out such ramtwaddle.

After all...

If 1 in 10 "young people" bought a cassette last year, Record Store Day wouldn't exist. If you believe that survey you are a prize chump.

— Hugh Platt (@HughDoVoodoo) April 16, 2014

Stirring news in the battle for our BBC from the new Radio Times:

The BBC has a new champion in the form of a glamorous full-throated female lead singer of a majorly successful Welsh rock band from the 1990s.

I'm presuming this is Ann from Ectogram we're talking about here? Oh, hang on, no:

Cerys Matthews, solo artist and former lead singer of the band Catatonia today told RadioTimes.com that the British public needs to stand up for the BBC – or risk losing it.

“We all need to defend the BBC,” she said at today’s launch of a raft of new arts programmes.

“We should all see it as our BBC. We need to remind everybody that we all own it.”

Obviously, being employed by 6Music means she's not totally unbiased, but Cerys Matthews is right.

Eliza Doolittle turned up to do a tune or two for Chris Evans, and ended up changing some of the words. The Christian Post is outraged:

Doolittle had to change her lyrics from "Sometimes I wish I was Jesus, I'd get my Air Max on and run across the sea for you" to 'Sometimes I wish it was easy to get my Air Max on and run across the sea for you."

"It was weird because I'm not being blasphemous, I just meant 'I wish I could run across water and see you,' but maybe wishing for the power of God was blasphemous enough for them," Doolittle told the Daily Mail in a recent interview over the issue.

It's not clear why this has suddenly become a thing - the show was on at the end of November last year, but never one to object to an unlikely resurrection, an ex-Archbish has piled in:

Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has spoken out against the radio network's decision, saying he is "totally appalled" over the incident. "I'm not surprised the BBC is behind this because their attitude tends to be to dumb down the Christian message."

Is it worth pointing out that the same programme featured - as Chris Evans' show does every day - a couple of minutes of spiritual reflection in the Pause For Thought slot? Probably not.

Is it even worth asking Carey to explain why removing a lyric that hooks one of the miracles held sacred by Christians to a pair of expensive plimsoles in the context of a weak love song is "dumbing down" a Christian message, while including that lyric in the song, presumably, isn't?

And, naturally, it turns out it was Doolittle's label which pushed for the lyric change. Perhaps Carey was just taking the Mail's story on faith alone?

(Side note: Interesting that the Christian Post seems to be unaware that Carey is no longer head of the Church off England.)

With BBC Three the latest service from the corporation to be led to the knackers' yard, there's a little campaign growing to close Radio 3 instead, on the basis that it has a smaller audience and is pretty expensive, too.

Is that fair?

Well, BBC Three costs £121.7million a year; BBC Radio 3, £54.3million. So if you're looking for a cost-saving measure, the TV station potentially saves more.

And if you take into account that Radio 3 has to support orchestras and the Proms out of its budget, while BBC Three is spending a chunk buying not-as-good-as-King-Of-The-Hill American cartoons, you might start to look at the value for money proposition here slightly differently. (I know, it's unfair to put the Late Junction sessions up against Seth MacFarlane and ask 'where would YOU spend the money', but that's pretty much what the 'close Radio 3 instead' campaign is doing already.)

Ah, but Radio 3 is enjoyed by far fewer people than BBC Three. (Judging by letters to Feedback and the Radio Times, Radio 3 might not actually be enjoyed by anyone.)

So, who is more expensively serviced?

Radio 3's annual £54.3m is spent pleasing an audience 2.2 million. That's £24.60 a person.

BBC Three's annual £121.7m brings delight to 13.2million. That's £9.21 a person.

On this measure, BBC Three is much, much cheaper.

Okay, classical music heads, I can hear you murmuring that a large chunk of that BBC Three audience is just tuning in for the EastEnders repeat.

And that 13.2million suggests that a portion of the audience tuning in are from outside the slice of 'young people who otherwise would be having sex or doing computer games or doing computer games in which they pretend to be having sex' that the channle is supposedly targeting.

But, on the broad measure of happy person per pound, BBC Three is much better value than Radio 3.

Game over?

Not quite. Because a Radio 3 listener listens for six hours and 25 minutes a week; a BBC Three viewer only watches for one hour 47 minutes every week.

Multiply this up over the course of a year, and you get BBC Three costing 0.17p per minute of audience engagement.

BBC Radio 3 costs 0.12p per minute of audience engagement.

In other words, the two channels, arguably at different ends of the BBC waterfront cost roughly the same, and it's peanuts, but depending on when you want to stop doing division you could argue that either is more expensive.

[Sources: About the BBC audience information, January-March 2013; BBC Annual Report expenditure 2013]

TeamRock, one of the 793 digital rock radio stations currently plying their trade, has done a deal with the BBC to do a rerun of Tommy Vance's last-ever Friday rock show from Radio One.

That's interesting, but this is even more tantalising:

John Moran, BBC Radio Head of Business Affairs, said: “We are pleased to be working with TeamRock to begin to unlock the BBC radio archive for further broadcast through new partnerships with commercial radio. The digital rebroadcast of this programme shows how gems from the archive can still reach new audiences.”

There hangs the possibility of other shows being dusted down and rebroadcast. And you know what eight-letter name that means, don't you?

Mark Page.

No, hang on:

John Peel.

Those sessions you neglected to tape in the 80s and 90s, and Marc Riley has yet to rebroadcast? Time to send nice letters to Absolute Radio...

The BBC - presumably sensing it was sailing towards a rerun of the U2 at the BBC disaster - has suddenly got cold feet over Gary Barlow Day.

The day's original plans have been scaled back. These included numerous appearances across Radio 2, along with Gary's face being superimposed on BBC One's swimming hippos; a special edition of Bake Off where contestants had to create cakes shaped like Gary Barlow; Gary dancing in the background of the News At Six; the entire BBC website having every word changed to GARY for ten minutes; Gary doing the travel for BBC Lincolnshire and Barlow running up and down the stairs at New Broadcasting House wearing the skin of Lord Reith.

Now, showing some restraint, the day will instead consist of Jason Orange doing Ken Bruce's popmaster with one question having the answer "Gary Barlow".

You'd think that, after his time spent as musical egg Ludwig on children's television, Charles Moore would understand the charts a bit better than he appeared to on last night's Question Time.

Actually, it was something of a surprise to see Moore on Question Time at all, given the fuss he made about not believing he should pay for a TV licence.

The convicted criminal Moore was appearing on a current affairs programme which, rapidly, had changed its location to Thatcher's Finchley and reformatted itself as a Thatcher special; on a channel which on Monday had cleared what felt like seventeen hours of prime time for a soft obituary which nobody watched, and is planning lavish coverage of her funeral. Naturally, then, Moore saw nothing but hate coming from the BBC.

As an example, he referred to the Ding Dong erm, ding dong, which - shortly after saying that vile people were being "bigged up every day" (really) he described this way:

I heard today a ludicrous thing on the PM programme. They're trying to get... basically the BBC is trying to get this Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead um, up to the top of the charts...

Hang about. The BBC are trying to do this? How, exactly?

... by going on and on and on about whether it should be banned and all this nonesense.

He then went into a strange sidebar on how Thatcher is Dorothy.

So, in Moore's view, merely having a debate about if the song should or shouldn't be played if it makes the Top 40 is "trying to get this up to the top of the charts."

On which basis, this will make him furious:

If only Charles Moore knew people at the Telegraph, he could remonstrate with them for trying to get Ding Dong to the top of the charts by going on and on and on about whether it should be banned.

Anger over at Radio 2, where plans by management to score all DJs out of ten has sparked a revolt:

The proposal proved short-lived – DJs were said to have treated it with disdain, with one station insider describing it as "astonishing it was suggested at all".

"It's reducing the whole thing to numbers," said another BBC source. "The idea that you can measure the success of a programme by a series of integers, it feels as if you are being treated like a child.

"The things that really matter aren't measurable. A presenter could hit all their numbers and still have a dull programme. Or they could miss all the targets but be making great radio."

Good god, if you start to rate DJs out of ten, where would that craziness lead? You might start to try and decide what the best record in the nation is by comparing the number of sales, drawing up some sort of chart. It'd never work.

Today, the BBC Sound Of 2013 poll names Haim the Sound of 2013, the annual list compiled by asking "tastemakers" which bandwagon it's best to jump upon.

The NME is patting itself on the back, too:

Well done to this weeks's coverstars Haim for getting the BBC Sound Of 2013 @haimtheband @babyhaim

— NME Radar (@NME_Radar) January 4, 2013

Yes, Haim are on the front of the NME. What a pity the magazine didn't have the confidence to just give them the cover on their own, but felt they needed to be boosted by the presence of the Palma Violets.

It'd also be more impressive if the NME had given Haim their cover before all the - ahem - tastemakers of the land had tipped them. Or, indeed, not waited until weeks after the Guardian had stuck the band on the front of the Guide.

If only NME could have claimed to have put them on the front back in 2012, eh?