The digital radio station was only saved from the axe by a listeners' campaign but reaches its 10th birthday in top form

BBC 6 Music which faced the axe two years ago celebrates its 10th anniversary on Sunday, and will mark the decade next Friday with an event at London's Southbank Centre.

The celebration which features Laura Marling, Public Image Limited, De La Soul and Blur's Graham Coxon, finds the digital radio station in relatively rude health, its listener figures put at nearly 1.5m, double what it was achieving in February 2010, when the BBC proposed to close the station, a decision that was revoked by the trust five months later.

Indeed, so successful was the campaign to save it – which involved protests by listeners and the arrival at the BBC of a deputation from the British Phonographic Industry headed by the former EMI boss Tony Wadsworth – that some felt the closure had been manufactured as a publicity stunt.

"A lot of people think it wasn't going to close, but it really was," says Lauren Laverne, whose mid-morning show broke the news of the reprieve, playing Lambchop's Up With People to celebrate. "It was a horrible time. I don't think any of us thought we'd be reprieved. My producer did, but he's the world's most ridiculous optimist. I was sure that was it."

Even so, there is a sense that the threat of closure was the best thing that happened to 6 Music, and not merely because it raised awareness of its existence among a public who seem to have liked what they heard and stuck around.

Its controller Bob Shennan says it galvanised a station with a turbulent and muddled history: as presenter Stuart Maconie notes wryly, "there's nothing like the threat of imminent closure to focus the mind".

Launched with the vague and spirit-sapping remit of "archive and album tracks", it struggled to find an identity and a listenership.

"Nobody knew what it was or where it was. It was a step into the unknown," says Gideon Coe, a 6 Music DJ since the launch, who remembers presenters having to be given digital radios so that they could listen to the station they worked for. "You'd hear some people going, it's a station that falls between Radio 1 and Radio 2 and other people going, no, that's not what it is at all. There was confusion and the figures were pitifully low."

In an attempt to snare more female listeners, the former controller Lesley Douglas appointed TV presenter George Lamb as mid-morning DJ – the comic Viz subsequently ran a cartoon strip comparing Lamb to a character called Terry Fuckwitt, whose brain had been removed and replaced with a piece of dog excrement – with Douglas stoked further controversy by claiming that women would enjoy Lamb's show because of his "less intellectual approach".

Today, devotees would claim that the Southbank line-up barely scratches the surface of 6 Music's eclecticism, particularly with the spirit ofMaconie's Freak Zone, a bold attempt to subject Sunday teatime listeners to what Maconie describes as "records no other radio show would play – free jazz, prog rock, electronica, novelty records, soundtracks".

It's the kind of show that would have been lost, Maconie thinks, had the station closed, despite the BBC commission's belief that 6 Music was occupying territory that commercial radio stations were already covering:. "You could put it out as a podcast, or have me broadcasting it pirate-radio style from the top of a tower block, but I don't know," he said.

Instead its combination of affable presenting and wildly esoteric music seems to be spreading.

Over the course of last Sunday, 6 Music's DJs played tracks by dubstep auteur Skream, Black Sabbath, Basic Channel, King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band, the Muppets, a "dark ambient" track by Crosswinds called From The Bogs Of Aughiska, Roland Kirk, the Monkees and a group of traditional musicians from the Solomon Islands remixed by dub producer Manasseh.

"There's something to be said for things that aren't commercial, that are about protecting the integrity of the artistic landscape," says Laverne. "That sounds pretentious – you'd never throw that into a link on the radio – but it's a sentiment behind what we do. Because we don't have to do it to the satisfaction of a sponsor and an advertiser, we have more freedom."

But for all the increased listenership and eclectic output, 6 Music's continued existence is not something greeted with untrammelled delight.

"It's spoonfeeding a generation that don't need spoonfeeding. They can go out and find it on the internet," offers one industry figure, who feels the BBC's money would be better spent on the World Service than "satisfying the cravings of middle-aged music fans".

"There was a time when there was very little broadcast media, when John Peel was the only route to a certain type of music.

"Now, you can find an infinite amount of music on the internet and radio stations around the world. I don't think it's specialist enough to make it necessary."

Although you could possibly apply the same argument about the internet to every music-based radio station, there remains a perception that 6 Music caters primarily to a certain kind of male listener in their late 30s, a state of affairs perhaps compounded by the number of Britpop-era pop stars on the presenters' roster: Cerys Matthews, Jarvis Cocker, Laverne, Fun Lovin' Criminals' Huey Morgan.

It's perhaps worth noting that every 6 Music presenter contacted for this piece felt it necessary to dispel that view, without prompting. "I think some people think it's all indie guitar music which it isn't," offers Maconie.

Those who protested about its closure, he says, "were different kind of people to the ones everyone had thought.

It wasn't just a few blokey music obsessives sitting atop teetering piles of old Sounds and Melody Makers from the 70s and 80s. There were a lot of women. There were a lot of ordinary people who just wanted something a bit different from their music and their presenters."

Certainly, everyone concerned seems buoyant about 6 Music's future: the jazz and dance DJ Gilles Peterson is about to join "broadcasting during daylight hours", notes Shennan, "which I'm sure will come as a shock to his system".

Coe said: "It's got to square the circle between being adventurous and esoteric and appealing to enough listeners to justify its existence.

"But if 6 Music didn't exist, a lot of music would be lost. Not just new stuff, old things as well. I can't see anyone else playing Container Drivers by the Fall."