'That was the Black Eyed Peas, and that was especially for Deb and Dave in Norwich. If you'd like a track, if you're celebrating something, let me know," the DJ says breezily as the last notes of I Gotta Feeling play out. Then it's into an ad for Warburtons bread, followed by Girls Aloud's Something Kinda Ooooh, played at the request of Jon and Claire, "who are currently freezing their bits off!"
You wouldn't know it from the surroundings – a studio in Leeds just big enough to accommodate one DJ and two chairs – but this is the home of Britain's biggest radio station. And if you shop at Asda, you're one of its listeners. Asda FM broadcasts to 18 million shoppers and 167,500 staff every week (as well as around 1,000 other people who tune in online in places as far afield as Texas to hear what's playing in the canned vegetables aisle). At 43 years old, Vicky Locklin is far from a household name, but as she approaches the end of her 11am–3pm shift, she's being heard by an audience most commercial stations would give their transmitters for.
A text from a listener pings on to her computer screen. "Can you play Jason Daroolo [sic] as it's my 18th," it requests. Locklin leans toward her microphone and does a crisp link. "In-store, online, this is Asda FM. How are you? How's the weather near you? It's been a bit grim …" Another song – not Derulo – purrs out of the speakers, and Locklin sits back, relaxed but mindful that several million people are out there, possibly humming along as they push their trolleys.
Asda FM is the biggest, but it's far from the only player in this parallel radio universe. Debenhams, Ikea, the Lloyds pharmacy chain and Morrisons supermarkets are among the 30 or so retailers to have in-house stations; Virgin Megastore did until it closed and the now-defunct Topshop Radio is almost legendary (its studio was in the chain's Oxford Circus shop, where DJs were compelled to work in full view of bemused shoppers). These stations are staffed by radio professionals, and run along the lines of real stations: a major player in "retail radio", as the industry is known, is former Radio 1 presenter Bruno Brookes, who runs a company that sets up stations for retail customers, providing a package that includes everything from DJs to music. He did not respond to a request for an interview, but his website explains the advantages of having an in-store operation: "Live Radio will fundamentally communicate the here and the now of your brand. It will bring your retail environment to life. Customers feel they are part of an ever-evolving environment learning more about your products and services whilst listening to fresh topical content."
Brookes is not the only prominent name associated with retail radio. James Merritt of Kiss 100 and Xfm's drivetime voice, Ian Camfield, both started at Virgin Megastore Radio (VMR), and plenty of other DJs got their first breaks in retail radio. Camfield sees his six years at VMR as "a stepping stone. It was very professionally run and was a great thing to do in terms of the experience you got and the reputation it had in the industry. It was a window into the real radio world."
The word "professional" recurs often in discussions about retail radio, because the industry is too lucrative to be entrusted to amateurs. The total budgets of in-house stations run into millions, according to Chris Wilcox of Middlesex-based Pel Music & Media, which runs Debenhams FM. "It's a massive industry, but a lot of people don't know it exists," Wilcox says. "They walk into a retailer and think the staff have just plugged their iPod in. Retailers spend quite a bit of time trying to get the music right." His company offers not just tailored playlists but presenters who are appropriate for the brand – one of Pel's services is providing "regional/specialist voices".
By the same token, Locklin's unpretentious cheeriness accords with Asda's populist image. Her soft Harrogate accent and natural effervescence – imagine a toned-down Davina McCall – helps listeners relate to her. "I am the typical Asda customer," she says, though if you saw her in the supermarket, her sleek blond bob and smart-casual style would distinguish her from the chain's core customers.
The Asda FM staff list reads like a real station's: there's a head of music, as well as producers and half a dozen presenters, all of whom, like Locklin, have years of radio experience. The head of music is Nick Bewes, a former commercial radio DJ, who chairs weekly playlist meetings at which around 40 songs, including new releases, are chosen for rotation from a library of 10,000 tracks. "Record companies treat us the same way as they do commercial stations – they send us the prereleases," says station manager Jenni Crowther.
Keen to take advantage of the massive promotional opportunity a huge supermarket chain affords, labels also send family-friendly artists on meet-and-greet visits to Asda's headquarters just outside central Leeds (the Asda FM offices are a mile or so away, near the city's railway station), and the artists are primed that this isn't a piece of promo they can shrug off without a care. "We did an interview with Cliff Richard and you couldn't get him off the phone," Crowther remembers, with a slightly wicked smile. Sian Horner, the station's publicist, adds: "And [2007 X Factor winner] Leon Jackson came and did a song. His track stopped in the middle and he looked petrified."
Asda FM prides itself on occasionally scooping real-world stations by being the first to play some hot pop track. "We were playing Gnarls Barkley's Crazy a couple of weeks before Radio 1 because [Bewes] heard it and thought it was great. We can turn things around really quickly and get a song on radio the next day," Crowther says. "Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly [aka Sam Duckworth] said he knew he'd made it when he heard his song playing in Asda."
And, of course, if customers enjoyed Get Cape or Gnarls Barkley, they could buy the CDs right in the store. Along with other supermarket chains, Asda has become a large-scale CD retailer, selling around 15m albums a year, though specialist record shops have been hugely critical of the supermarkets for their aggressive pricing, and for stealing customers who never return to the specialist shops. "We've got a different market," Horner contends. "The best thing about supermarkets is that people feel they can get everything under one roof, including CDs. But if I wanted something like Dolly Parton, I'd still go to a specialist store."
It's a fairly unusual high street shop that doesn't play any music, nowadays. There's a wide range of sounds in the average shopping arcade, including dance-pop at the women's clothing chain New Look, soft rock by big-name veterans at Starbucks, and "soundalike" pop hits at Superdrug. (There's still an industry that produces rerecorded versions of current hits using unknown session singers for the use of retailers such as Superdrug, because soundalike tracks are exempt from the royalty fee the shop would have to pay if it aired the original tunes. It's exactly the same logic that lay behind the Top of the Pops compilation albums in the 1970s.) Most of it, though, is simply CDs or MP3s played through the shop PA. Setting up a radio station is far more complicated. So what's in it for those who do?
"It's a big fat subliminal advert for your brand," says Key 103's Sam Walker, who was once a producer at RBS, a production company that provided radio programming for Bhs and the now defunct Granada motorway services chain. "Radio is intimate – it sits on your shoulder and it's a little voice in your ear. The thinking is that it has the same effect in a shop. Your customer comes in and you know what sort of house they've got, how many kids they have, where they like to go on holiday and what kind of music they like." At Granada, she laughs, the staff were subjected to Granada FM round the clock, and "got sick of the same old records going around, so they turned it off at night and put drum'n'bass on".
Asda FM forestalls similar rebellion by tailoring its output according to the time of day. In the morning, it plays mainstream pop, it's Disney-style stuff after school, when kids are dragged into the shop by parents, and at night – get a load of this – shoppers are treated to urban music. "We play UK dubstep, hip-hop, the stuff Annie Mac plays," says Crowther. "Something like [Dizzee Rascal's] Bonkers would be on on Friday or Saturday night, when people are more relaxed, and late night it's uplifting tunes. The overnight staff say music is really important to them, so you wouldn't play [downbeat music like] Coldplay."
The playlist is strictly vetted, sometimes in unexpected ways. Lily Allen's LDN was only aired after the word "Tesco" was excised, while Rihanna's Russian Roulette didn't make the list because the lyric employs suicide as a metaphor ("It's not a responsible message for children"). Staff frequently talk to shoppers to find out what they want to hear; the grim but unsurprising news is that The X Factor is "massive" for their customers. "So anyone who's been on it – Alexandra Burke, Whitney Houston … we try to reflect what people want to hear. We don't get negative reactions to songs because we don't play stuff that would offend," says Bewes.
The element that personalises the music, though, is the DJ. But who sets out to become an in-store DJ? Surely most aspiring presenters see a job at the BBC or a commercial station, or even a pirate, as the big goal. Isn't there something a bit poignant about abandoning those 1Xtra ambitions for a gig where you'll be making announcements like "That was Leona Lewis, and today in our cookware department we're giving away a free vegetable peeler to the first 25 customers" (that's a sentence that really has been broadcast on Debenhams FM)?
Locklin scoffs. "This has exactly the same standards and ways of working, and I use the same production values I'd use for a show anywhere." Of course, she would say that.
Ian Camfield, though – as befits a rock jock – is a touch snooty about supermarket radio. "There's a whole world of difference between a music station and a supermarket one. If I'm in Asda, I know the sales messages between the Spandau Ballet and Europe songs they're probably playing will be pretty blatant, whereas at Virgin it was done in a cool way."
Maybe the supermarkets are blatant in their sales pitches; but given that everything inside those temperature-controlled sheds is calculated to induce shoppers to part with their money, that's hardly a surprise. And compared to the sickly baking smells that are piped into some shops, or to the special offers aimed at kids who then pester their parents, or the promotions that can only be offered by forcing farmers to sell their goods for less than they cost to produce, the messages on in-store radio hardly seem like an evil. And once in a while, when you see a miserable-looking group of shoppers stand a little straighter, start to smile to themselves, or silently mouth along to the words of Dancing Queen, you might think in-store radio actually, occasionally, does some good.