£29.5m and planned to rebrand the station as Heart 106, to go with 100.7 Heart FM in the West Midlands as the area matched that of the ITV Central region and would make it more attractive to advertisers. Heart 106 was launched on 29 August 2005. A further, more subtle rebrand was applied in September 2006 which saw the dropping of the frequencies from station names across the Heart Network. On 25 June 2007, Chrysalis announced the sale of Heart, along with its sister stations The Arrow, LBC and Galaxy, for £170 million to Global Radio. Following Global's takeover of GCap Media, the Office of Fair Trading again ordered Global to sell off Heart and four other Midlands stations - BRMB, Mercia FM, Wyvern FM and Beacon Radio. In May 2009, the stations were sold to Orion Media, a company backed by Lloyds Development Capital and Phil Riley. Gem 106 On 9 November 2010, Orion Media announced that Heart 106 would be relaunched and renamed as 'Gem 106' on 1 January 2011. Under the rebrand, the station ended its franchise agreement with Global Radio which allowed it to use the Heart identity and carry networked programming from London. Gem 106 was launched at midnight on Saturday 1 January 2011 with a special programme presented by Orion's director of programming and marketing David Lloyd. The GEM name stands for 'Great East Midlands', the name created and used from 1988 onwards for GEM-AM (later Classic Gold GEM) an AM (medium wave), 'solid gold' secondary service of Radio Trent. The majority of the station's programming is locally produced and broadcast from Nottingham. As of March 2016, Gem refreshed their imaging and jingle package using a custom package from Wisebuddah, to which the '106' was dropped from the name. On 6 May 2016, the station's owners, Orion, announced they had been bought by Bauer for an undisclosed fee, reportedly between £40 and £50 million. As of August 2016, Gem is aligned with the Hits Radio network, using its generic on-air imaging package. The station retains its own regional programming throughout the day. In July 2019, Gem began taking overnight programming from the Hits Radio Network in Manchester on Sunday - Thursday nights before gradually expanding to evening and off-peak output. In April 2022, Bauer announced that all local programming on Gem outside the weekday breakfast show would be replaced by networked Hits Radio programming.