Planet Rock live

Planet Rock is a national British rock station broadcasting on DAB and online, built on classic rock, blues rock and the guitar music that mainstream radio largely stopped playing. It occupies a specific gap. British commercial radio consolidated heavily around pop and adult contemporary formats, which left a large and loyal rock audience without a national station. Planet Rock addressed that directly, and its listeners are notably older and more engaged than the industry average — the sort of audience that buys albums and goes to festivals rather than sampling singles. The station has a place in British broadcasting history for an unusual reason: when its owners proposed closing it in 2008, a listener campaign backed by well-known musicians led to it being sold rather than shut. That episode, along with the comparable campaign that saved BBC 6 Music two years later, demonstrated something the industry had underestimated — specialist music radio can command a fiercely committed audience even when the numbers look modest against mainstream pop. Programming leans on the established rock catalogue, with presenter-led shows and regular specialist strands rather than continuous playlisted music, and several presenters are musicians themselves. The live stream plays on this page, free and with nothing to install.