Andrew Eaton: The Prompt

AS SATIRICAL website The Daily Mash put it last week: "The closure of the BBC's 6 Music has enraged thousands of people who insist it is the sort of thing they would probably have liked if they had ever got round to listening to it. Would-be fans are now urging the corporation to grant a reprieve to the digital station, which probably featured lots of new bands or something."

There is some truth in this observation, despite the noisy protests throughout the past week by DJs, record labels and high-profile musicians from Lily Allen to Radiohead. The BBC, according to one report, spent 100 million on the two digital stations it is now intending to close, 6 Music and the Asian Network; yet 6 Music had just 700,000 listeners at the end of last year (a record for the station, but still niche compared with the BBC's other output), while the Asian Network finished 2009 with its lowest listening figures since 2002.

Tim Davie, the BBC's director of audio and music, said on Thursday that the decision was not about abandoning the BBC's commitment to supporting the kind of music these stations play, but about "looking at other ways to find it a bigger audience". It would be easy to scoff at these fine words, but I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

I am, after all, one of those people who love the idea of 6 Music – partly, I admit, because it has played my own band's music quite a lot – but don't actually get round to listening to it that often.

There is, certainly, a strong argument to be made for a radio station whose DJs are free to champion music that is commercial but doesn't have the major label marketing clout to get into the top 40 – and, potentially, help that music begin to climb a ladder towards Radio One or elsewhere. On the other hand we're still talking, for the most part, about pop songs by pop bands – more eccentric, subversive and experimental than the Radio One playlist, maybe, but still essentially pop music. This is not music that is going to wither away, or go unchampioned, if 6 Music does not support it, as thousands of online radio stations, podcasts, and blogs will testify.

Pop music, at the end of the day, needs to survive in a market. And if a pop music station doesn't have enough listeners, perhaps that means it is not working effectively as a pop music station and that it's time to try something else. I'll be interested to find out what Tim Davie thinks that something else is.

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, March 7, 2010