It's all about changes in ownership. It seems that there's a couple of things going on with Virgin Radio... now the brand and the station are two separate things: Richard Branson launched Virgin Radio but later on sold the station but kept the rights to the Virgin brand. Now the present station owners are selling it on and as part of the contract Branson doesn't have to let the new owners license the Virgin branding. There's two possible explanations for this: one is that Branson wants to reclaim the brand for himself and re-launch Virgin Radio as a digital-only station (there's space on DAB that can be purchased), the other is something about a non-compete clause: the new owners of 1215AM and the london FM station are apparently Indian, and a competing Indian media company has rights to Virgin Radio in India...
As is common with radio and TV branding - we might get leaks but generally we'll hear about it come the day they want to switch. If there's a format change though... we'll get to hear about it because unlike the US, the format is in the broadcast license in the UK and if you want a change in the format you have to re-negotiate your license with OFCOM. In any case OFCOM doesn't generally support a radical format change and it's highly unlikely to switch to a all-talk format (there's TalkSport 1053/1089 for that), even if the AM frequency is better suited to speech than music. So there's highly likely still to be music on 1215AM for some years yet.
Mark.
