DAB is the radio of the future, except for GCAP Monday, February 11, 2008

Whilst not a substitute for those on the move, the increasing role of broadband for radio stations is evident in Gcap announcement that it is withdrawing from DAB radio, with the closure of its two national DAB stations and the sale of its interest in Digital One, the transmission “multiplex”, to its partner Arqiva for a "nominal" sum on which it was losing £3m pa. It is also abandoning its Xfm stations in Scotland, Manchester and South Wales.

According to the announcement by the Gcap CEO, Fru Hazlitt, the consumer uptake of digital radio had been slow and the costs of broadcasting on DAB had been too high. For context, this restructure comes against the backdrop of a hostile approach for Gcapmedia by Global Radio.

GCap claims it now has 1.7m broadband listeners as well an audience of 15m for its FM stations. Unlike DAB which requires access to physical infrastructure in the geographic locations one wishes to operate, "radio" via broadband can be transmitted globally for no incremental cost over providing it to one's traditional local audience via broadband. Oddly enough, I remember friends in the radio industry telling me how hard it had been convincing radio executives to make the investment in putting output over the internet - they simply didn't see there being any take-up in broadband, since anyone sitting at a PC all day was surely working, perhaps forgetting that radio in the workplace was not an uncommon phenomena.

However, if one judges the ipod/mp3/pc as a competitor for traditional radio in listening hours, then streamed radio over broadband supplemented by podcasts makes sense. Of course, broadband delivered radio also opens up listeners to a choice of global radio stations rather than the former geographically restricted choice - check out Winamp or Windows Media Player radio sections for evidence.

At first glance, this is a setback for DAB albeit Channel 4 still seems to have aspirations in that space. It will take away some content that might have enticed more people to switch to DAB. However, it may also compel Offcom, the regulator, to make the licence arrangement more enticing if there is to be choice in the sector and thereby bring in more new entrants with different formats.

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Anywhere FM is a slick online music player Tuesday, September 04, 2007

As a consequence of involvement with one of our ventures, I have been exposed to lots of music sites lately. One with a really slick and stylish player is Anywhere FM. Funded by Y-Combinator, and headquartered in San Francisco you can upload your music collection to their site and then play it anywhere through their online player.

Similar to other services, you can also discover new music via friends or site recommendations. They also offer free music to registered users. To date they have over 3million tracks stored on their service.

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Stay tuned for an excellent online radio site Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Tun3r is a really clever online radio station tuner. Simply move the dial across the radio station thumbnails to select a station or name the genre you're looking for and allow Tun3r to highlight relevant thumbnails for you to listen into.

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Video didn't kill the radio star - we were all in a London Bar last night. Friday, March 23, 2007

Back in my University days at Loughborough, I was involved in Student Radio and "Ents" (the society that staged music events). Both were enormous fun and taught you a huge amount about running a business as both were commercial ventures in their own right. Personally I'm far more willing to hire an graduate that did student radio that one that claimed membership of the "Entrepreneurs Society". Usually the latter group wanted membership on the CV and did visit to businesses, whereas the former group actually got involved in a business. Of course, there is some personal bias/allegiance here in similar fashion to any alumni relationship but I believe that this one has genuine merit.

Funnily enough, doing student radio often was often considered incredibly geeky albeit some of the beautiful people did it as prep for their TV careers (you'll know which camp I was in).

So it was a great delight to attend the Alumni of Student Radio Association ("ASRA") which met for a social gathering in London last night. I only stumbled on this group by accident whilst recently researching the story on online music royalties which are subject to some change right now in the USA as I recently wrote about.

It turns out it has 500 or so members and there were about 100 there last night drawn from many UK universities, with graduates of various ages present (ok, I was probably in the oldest 10%) . Many lived outside London, with some people having travelled down from Scotland, the Midlands, Norfolk and Somerset to attend.

As it happens I didn't know a single person. But I did know that they all had been involved in Student Radio.

I had an excellent evening and by the end of the evening I had met some absolutely fascinating people doing great things, most of whom operate in a sector I don't spend much time in, namely broadcast media. Some of the people I met included

- Sam Potts, who's at Warner Brothers Records (ex Edinburgh Radio) promoting artists
- Person who must remain nameless, who is working on Radio 2 and who most recently sprang to fame with the 31Days project, which was a journalistic insight in 21st century dating. Every day for 31 days between Jan 14 - Feb 14 she had to undertake a different means of finding a date. She even auctioned herself off on ebay and got a winning bid of £210 for her to be a dinner date!
- Ian Gardner, who is a Sky TV presenter
- Nick Prater who works at Radio Monitor
- Will Jackson who is one of the Radio Regulators at Offcom
- Ed Nell, who is ex Lufbra, and hosts the morning show on Beacon Radio in the Black Country (my old home radio station!). After spending the evening in London, he had to drive back to Wolverhampton ready for his show this morning at 9am. As someone that did a few shows with a hangover and deprived of sleep, it was easy to predict it would be a tough morning for him. Sure enough, he pinged me an email about 11am confirming as much.
- Matt Deegan, who is at Gcapmedia in their strategy group and who is spending much time on interactive projects
- Alistair Wilson (no relation) who is at the Dept of Constitutional Affairs but still does community radio
- The producer of the UK Chart Show
- John, the deputy programme Controller for Beacon Radio who was also ex Lufbra.

It turned out there were about 10 ex Lufbra Campus Radio ("LCR - blasting out loud and proud") in the room stretching back to the late eighties (Me!). We were able to swap stories about the times we'd each had in the studios and I learnt about the fabulous new studios that were recently built at a cost of £1m and which put many commercial stations to shame!

Great people, with interesting stories. But two things really stood out for me. Firstly, many of the attendees were in senior positions in broadcast media or related businesses as a direct consequence of their student activities. Secondly, these people understand about the battle their industry is in and are in the front line of remaining relevant to their audience.

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Online radio can be a costly exercise. Sunday, March 04, 2007

Fred Wilson has a post here about Internet Radio Royalties, as they operate in the US.

The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has announced its decision on Internet radio royalty rates, rejecting all of the arguments made by Webcasters and instead adopting the "per play" rate proposal put forth by SoundExchange(a digital music fee collection body created by the RIAA).

RAIN has learned the rates that the Board has decided on, effective retroactively through the beginning of 2006. They are as follows:

2006 $.0008 per performance
2007 $.0011 per performance
2008 $.0014 per performance
2009 $.0018 per performance
2010 $.0019 per performance

A "performance" is defined as the streaming of one song to one listener; thus a station that has an average audience of 500 listeners racks up 500 "performances" for each song it plays.

In the UK, each time a piece of music is played to an audience, a royalty payment is due. There are three main bodies that are responsible for collecting royalty fees from radio stations and apportioning the money to their member. They are as follows:

Most music radio stations own a 'blanket' licence, that allows them to play whatever music they wish, in return for an annual licence fee (based on audience size and revenue). Broadcast radio rates are up to 5.25% of net advertising revenues. An exception to this is Student Radio which gets a separate licence deal.

To allow the likes of PRS to apportion the revenue, PRS ask each station to return a detailed summary on what was broadcast, via a series of random "sampling periods", where all music played including jingles, advert music, and even the presenter singing, gets logged and returned to PRS for analysis

These arrangements affect online music services like last.fm, pandora and others. Obviously, depending on your service, pay per play could quickly result in a sizeable bill being run up, independent of any revenues you may generate. It is this that could have a material affect on online radio service.

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