New logos: DR Radio

Denmark's state broadcaster is called DR, an abbreviation that once stood for "Danmarks Radio". It maintains a strong position on the Danish TV market, and dominates radio listening in the country. A decade ago, DR started investing heavily in digital radio, starting up a bunch of new radio channels, most of them dedicated to specific musical genres. At its height, DR operated over two dozen radio channels, including a bunch of web-only channels. Most of them were "jukebox channels" that broadcast music non-stop without any radio hosts.

This year, DR has implemented a new radio strategy which will see the company focus on ten more permanent radio channels that will be mostly presenter-led. Several factors contributed to this change. In the beginning, DR had all the bandwidth on digital radio for themselves, but some of it was later claimed by commercial broadcasters. DR also wanted to have channels that were strong, broad, clearly defined and presenter-led.

Furthermore, one of the corporation's four licenses for national FM radio was expiring, and the centre-right government didn't want to extend it, instead preferring to give it to a new private current affairs network. This would mean that DR's talk-based current affairs network P1 and the classical music network P2 would have to share one FM frequency. They would however continue as separate channels on digital radio.

Until now, DR's four national FM networks have been DR P1, DR P2, DR P3 and DR P4, where the letter 'P' has historically meant 'programme'. The digital networks have mostly had descriptive names like "DR Jazz", "DR Rock" and "DR Hit", but with the new strategy, most of them will also have the letter P and a digit in their names. DR P5, aimed at older listeners, was launched back in November 2009. DR P6 Beat, with alternative music for the youth, came on April 11, the contemporary pop music station DR P7 Mix followed on June 6, the suite will be completed on September 12, when DR's jazz station DR Jazz becomes DR P8 Jazz. Two channels are excempt from the P-number scheme, the kids channel DR Ramasjang (a radio extension of a brand already used on television) and the youth channel DR Mama.

With the new strategy comes a new set of logos for all radio networks. DR has long used a simple template from which all radio channel logos are derived. The previous one was implemented in December 2006 and early 2007 as part of another reorganisation.
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