Pirate Radio in the USA Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The US blogosphere is in uproar about the notion that US radio stations should be paying artists for playing their music on air. Provision for royalties is to be considered by a U.S. House subcommittee could vote as early as tomorrow according to Wired.

You may think the notion that radio should pay for playing music is crazy, but the US is perhaps the exception in not doing so. It's been established practice in the UK for many years that radio pays for playing the music, regardless of the benefits the artist enjoys from having their product played to a large audience.

Clearly both sides benefit from the arrangement of music being played on radio [fills airtime with content that listeners want and musicians get their product publicised]- what is at issue is who should be paying who and in what proportion to the overall benefits received.

Oddities in the UK arrangements abound - if you want to advertise an album on radio then the artist pays the station but if radio features an album then they pay. If a concert is promoted by way of competitions with tickets as the prize, then a barter deal is often done such that the station get free tickets in exchange for promotion. Why should sanity get in the way here?

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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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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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