History
On July 12, 2004 GMG Radio relaunched ejazz.fm, a dedicated jazz website. In January 2005 it launched a service, named Hear It, Buy It, Burn It, to permit users to legally download music from its station's websites. In February 2005, Myers announced that they have scrapped plans to launch Channel M Radio, a 24-hour news and talk station for Manchester due to commercial viability issues. In March 2005, the Guardian Media Group rejected a £115 million bid from the Chrysalis Group for the GMG Radio division. In June 2005 London station 102.2 Jazz FM was rebranded to 102.2 Smooth FM after disappointing RAJAR figures. At the same time, ejazz.fm was renamed to jazzfm.com and initially appeared on DAB in Yorkshire, South Wales and the Severn Estuary and on Sky Digital. On October 18, 2006, it was announced that GMG Radio had bought the two Century branded stations from Gcap Media. The Century brand was originally launched by Myers and Simons in North East England in 1994, whilst they were at Border Television.
In August 2006 GMG sold its share in Rolling News channel DNN. The five regional stations on DAB were then closed down by Chrysalis to be replaced by LBC. On December 18, 2006, it was announced that GMG Radio had bought the four Saga Radio branded stations. GMG rebranded the Saga stations along with its existing Smooth FM stations in March 2007 to Smooth Radio. On October 6, 2008 jazzfm.com was relaunched as Jazz FM across a number of DAB multiplexes in the UK, using space on local and regional multiplexes from existing GMG Radio stations as well as launching on digital television platforms. In November 2008 GMG was awarded with the last analogue licence in the UK (covering north and mid Wales). They intend to operate the licence using the Real Radio (Wales) format basing its studios in Wrexham. On December 18, 2008, it was announced that Century Radio was to be re-branded as Real Radio on March 30, 2009.
In April 2009, the Jazz FM name and branding owned by GMG since 2002 were bought by the chief executive of the since formed Jazz FM Investments Ltd, Richard Wheatly. Jazz FM transitioned from GMG's local and regional DAB slots to a single slot on the Digital One national DAB ensemble bought by Jazz FM Investments Ltd in 2011.
GMG radio announced that out of peak time hours news would be shared by news hubs. As a result there is one in Glasgow, one in London and the largest which is Century Radio headquarters in Manchester, headed by James Rea. Manchester broadcast a "Sky News" type bulletin, in which all GMG Radio stations in northern England Opt in on the hour.
On 25 June 2012 it was announced Global Radio (the owner of stations such as Capital and Heart) had bought GMG Radio, however the former will continue to operate separately until a regulatory review is carried out, Real Radio is thought to integrate into Heart.
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