Recently in Radio Category

Here's an interesting question related to the Ross/Brand affair. Yes, I know I said I was bored of the whole thing, but this is genuinely interesting.

Did Russell Brand actually cost Radio 2 listeners when he was on-air with them? (Or perhaps more reasonably, did he cost them listening hours, when regular Radio 2 listeners just tuned out until his show had finished?)

This starts from a piece in the BBC Trust report. It notes that Brand's Saturday night 9-11pm show "attracted an average audience of around 400,000 listeners. Their average age was 50 and more than 40% were over 55. Just over half were women."

Looking at the RAJAR data for the most recent show, I see that Russell Brand reaches 382,000 listeners - close enough to the 400,000 the BBC quotes. The report states that the average age was 50, although I make the mean age (from reach with a base of adults 15+) to be 52. This is interesting because the mean age of the station overall is actually 50.

So Russell Brand's listeners were slightly older than the station average! I'd suggest that this comes of the scheduling of his show. Overall, 37.9% of Radio 2's audience (based on reach, base - adults 15+) is aged under 45, but for Brand's show this falls to 35.2%.

Put simply, younger people are more likely to be out at that time.

This explains to a large extent, the numbers that then follow in the report:

"The programme was made available on the BBC iPlayer for seven days after broadcast. The edition of 18 October 2008 received 33,000 requests from UK-based users and a total of 44,000 around the world. It was also made available as a podcast for seven days from Monday 20 October and was downloaded 130,000 times in the UK and a total of 168,000 times around the world."

It's fair to assume that these podcast and iPlayer listeners are younger than average. Let's assume their average age was 30. That'd mean that the overall average age of Brand's listeners would still be relatively high at 45. It's worth noting that Brand's weekly podcast was second only to Radio 4's Friday Night Comedy.

You might be sitting there thinking - well that's not that old (Ross is 48 after all). But a mean is only the average. A very significant proportion of those listeners are likely to be 45 or older. As the Trust report notes, over 40% of the RAJAR live listeners were over 55.

But let's return to that 400,000 - or 382,000 anyway. How does the same 9pm-11pm slot do between Monday and Sunday? (I've put shows in brackets, but Radio 2's schedule does change fairly regularly, so I've listed programmes from the start of September which will be included in these RAJAR Q3 2008 figures).

Monday: 655,000 (Radcliffe & Maconie/Big Band Special/Jamie Cullum)
Tuesday: 643,000 (Radcliffe & Maconie/Nigel Ogden/Various)
Wednesday: 573,000 (Radcliffe & Maconie/Trevor Nelson's Soul Show)
Thursday: 559,000 (Radcliffe & Maconie/Mark Lamarr Reggae)
Friday: 509,000 (Friday Night is Music Night/Various/The Weekend w/Claudia Winkleman)
Saturday: 382,000 (Russell Brand)
Sunday: 511,000 (Russell Davies/Malcolm Laycock)

So clearly Saturday night is Radio 2's lowest night of the week for that time-slot - by a significant margin.

But hang-on. Is that Brand's fault, or is it just because Saturdays are a poor night for radio listening in general because we're all out, or watching X-Factor/Casualty or entertaining or whatever?

Brand joined Radio 2 in November 2006. So let's choose Q3 2006 - covering the period just before Brand started at Radio 2. Sadly, I don't have listings for who precisely was on the station at that time, but nonetheless, I do have the numbers:

Monday: 636,000
Tuesday: 600,000
Wednesday: 581,000
Thursday: 581,000
Friday: 491,000
Saturday: 358,000
Sunday: 586,000

So poor Saturdays aren't Brand's fault. There are simply fewer listeners to be had on a Saturday night at that time compared with any other day of the week.

But the average age back then for a Saturday night was 56.

I think that this, in the end, is the most important thing. While the difference between 52 and 56 might not seem all that great - shifting average ages by even a single year is actually very hard to do. This is particularly the case with a large station with a loyal audience.

An older listener who doesn't want to hear speech (Radio 4/Five Live/talkSPORT) or classical music (Radio 3/Classic FM) only really has Radio 2 aimed at them on a national scale. Certainly there are services like Smooth or even Magic that also target that audience to a certain extent. But nobody else does it quite so well.

So why not serve that audience with something they want at 9pm on a Saturday night rather than desperately trying to attract a younger audience?

Now Radio 2 would probably fairly point out that Russell was bringing new listeners to its station. But I still wonder if he wasn't better suited to 6Music whose average audience age of 35 is closer to Brand's - he's 33? Or maybe even Radio 1 (average age... er, 33 - base: adults 15+)?

You shouldn't solely concern yourselves with demographics of course. Older performers can be perfectly well be appreciated by younger viewers and listeners (witness all the crooners who find a new lease of life when they perform at Glastonbury), but let's not forget the service remit of Radio 2:

"The remit of Radio 2 is to be a distinctive, mixed music and speech service, targeted at a broad audience, appealing to all age groups over 35."

If I'm aged 70, and don't want to listen to classical music, then Radio 2 remains the service for me.

Perhaps when the BBC next looks at its statements of policy, it should take account of the older audience to a greater extent. There are already more pensioners than there are under-16s, and the fastest growing age-group in the UK is 80+! This age-group has grown from 2.8% of the population to 4.5% of the population in the last 25 years. Sadly, pensioners have little spare income, which don't make them an attractive audience for most commercial radio operators (witness the decline of Saga Radio which attempted to target 50+). So it's almost certainly going to need to be the BBC which picks up the slack and reaches out to this growing audience.

This morning, the BBC Trust rejected plans for a local BBC video news service.

Concurrently, Ofcom published the results of its Market Impact Assessment and concluded that the plans would have had a significant negative impact on commercial news providers.

The BBC proposal would have seen it producing more localised news which would be delivered on demand either via fixed or mobile internet. The BBC's aim was to provide another layer of depth to its current local and regional services which often stretch significantly. For example, if you sit in North Norfolk, the local news will also cover goings on in Watford.

Most commercial news providers were utterly opposed to the plans for understandable reasons. Local newspapers have suffered enormously as they've seen their advertising revenues fall. Traditionally much of their cash came from classified ads, and lucrative property and jobs ads. Yet all of these have - to one extent or another - moved over to the internet. As a result, they have less money to invest in news gathering and we're seeing redundancies, and closures. The one thing they have going for them is their ultra-local news. And they didn't want to see the BBC getting their hands on that.

Meanwhile, local commercial radio operators were similarly opposed to the BBC's plans. As well as their on-air local news provision, the more forward thinking operators have been investing in online local news provision as the newspaper groups have. They want their sites to become the local news portals for a given region. If successful, they're in a strong place to develop new online revenues (seemingly the only area of the UK media landscape that is showing growth).

They make good points, and I think the BBC Trust and Ofcom are probably right. But I think we also need to think forward a little. As newspapers suffer, so their newsrooms are shrinking. Fewer reporters mean that news is harder to come by. As Nick Davies pointed out in his excellent book Flat Earth News, with a retrenchment in journalists, comes a retrenchment in journalism. No longer does either a local newspaper or local news agency have a regular person sitting in the local courts or council chambers all the time.

And we're seeing some local radio news operations being cut back - either by creating news "hubs" for a group of local services, or by even removing the one advantage local radio stations have over other broadcasters, and removing local news at certain times of the day altogether.

Can we really get all our local news online? I'm not sure we can.

If there aren't any decent primary news gatherers - i.e. local news reporters on the ground - then everybody will be republishing the same Press Association copy. And that's not enough. Like elsewhere in an open society, competition is important for news providers too.

I honestly don't know what the answer is, but as budgets are squeezed, plurality of news providers remains important. If we all rely on one source - something that we're getting closer and closer to - then we become less open. Without the concern that your competitor is going to scoop you, a reporter isn't as incentivised to work harder and dig deeper. Who's going to look hard into more difficult stories?

Perhaps beyond that danger is nobody at all covering the news. Local newspapers will have closed down. Local radio will cover things at a very superficial level perhaps having one or two people in the newsroom (including the newsreader). And local television won't really exist and the likes of ITV offers the same "local" news for everyone between Carlisle and Newcastle.

As ever, these are my own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

A story in Marketing magazine leads me to the Asda site where it has launched a series of own brand electrical items.

These include an Asda DAB digital radio that sells, online at least, for the princely sum of £24.47.

A DAB radio for under twenty-five quid is fine by me, and thankfully, the set comes without any obvious signs of "Asda" branding.

But what I really love in the description. This radio comes with a "Gyro signal DAB module". Ooh. Impressive. I was looking for a radio with one of those!

Even more amusing is the fact that the tuner runs to "2 decimal places." So no longer do I need to listen to Absolute Radio on 105.8 FM when I can listen to it on 105.80 FM!

(NB. Yes, I know having this level of accuracy is useful on things like multi-band shortwave sets, but I don't see it as a feature to be promoted on a bog-standard radio).

It might have cost attendees (or their companies) cold hard cash to attend, but the audio from this year's Radio at the Edge is now available as a series of downloads as well as a summary podcast.

Entertainingly, the one session that isn't available is the Collings and Herrin podcast which they've deemed "uncompliant"!

Happily, this is available via their own podcast - it's number 37a.

Apologies upfront for the rawness of this text. I'll tidy it up later.

To Radio at the Edge (where there's some free WiFi), to hear about the latest goings on in the audio world.

After introductions from James Cridland, and an opening from Nick Wallis, a familiar face - to me at least - Clive Dickens, presented the changes that have been made as Virgin Radio changed to Absolute Radio.

This included the Google Trends information as well as details about our ongoing advertising campaign.

Finally, Clive talked about Open Mic, a new initiative to talk to the Absolute audience about what the station is doing right, and what it's doing wrong.

DAB - Dead and Buried?

James Ashton of the Sunday Times introduced the session reading out a series of stats about the state of play with digital radio in a basically very factual manner including set sales, and recent things that have happened with Channel 4 Radio and the question over what Global will do with Digital One.

Tony Moretta of the DRDB opened things up with a "defence" of DAB radio - one in three households have a device, with 14m people listening a week. And these people listen to more services.

He confronted what he called urban myths noting that it was the "only" way to hear stereo Absolute outside London (not strictly true if you listen via TV or online, but very important, certainly). He said that 88% of people rated audio quality as good to excellent. "DAB doesn't work in cars" - well it doesn't if you don't have an in-car DAB, he pointed out.

He also said that the internet isn't the future of radio; it'll be part of the ecology, but DAB will be the mainstay. The iPlayer's great, but it won't work in the car, walking around or even in the kitchen.

He concluded that it was very healthy at the moment, and he urged people to focus on things that will appeal to a wide variety of products. Add in colour screens, EPGs, PVR functionality, and WiFi.

Paul Fairburn of Smooth said that GMG weren't "rabid enthusiasts." They'd see how it went, although they saw the costs as very high. He said that they were on all the usual platforms - and indeed they may withdraw from the odd one if the costs didn't add up. But they'd be stupid to drop DAB. 8.5% of his listening comes from DAB. He talked about cars being important, but while screens might be nice, he didn't want to have to stump up to pay for additional "bits."

There were a couple of references to some "machinations" within the digital radio industry - and he wouldn't say what platforms they would come off. The emaill had gone out however...

Mark Friend at the BBC referenced a recent fall in listening off a high in 2004. He said that we can't just rely on internet or similar. He said that contrary to what some people seem to think, the BBC doesn't deliberately degrade its signal online [who's suggesting that?]. There have to be a wide choice of devices and wide choice of listening options.

Multicast and WiMax will be critical in the future, but key is the cost. The killer at the moment, he said, was analogue and digital dual cost. He asked, rhetorically, whether we should pull out of DAB as Finland did, but referred to all the sets in the market. Universality is key to the BBC and DAB is part of that.

He said that a switch off of the national networks on FM was part of a possible future and that the BBC is working with the DRWG to determine whether and when national networks might be moved across.

Ashton asked if the BBC could lead the "Freeview moment" for radio. But Friend said that it had been a unique case, and he wasn't sure what it actually meant in terms of radio.

He said that the BBC's share of digital listening was the same as analogue listening. [That's not quite true - particularly for DAB where it's more like 65% of the market compared with 57% of analogue listening. I think that commercial radio is strong in the digital realm in spite of this].

Peter Davies of Ofcom also addressed the "Freeview moment" and pointed out that there were only 600,000 ITV Digital/OnDigital devices when Freeview launched. DAB's much further down the path. He talked about new launches of digital radio internationally - and acknowledged that different tehnologies were being adopted in places like France and Germany. But these differences didn't matter, because the overall standard that had now been agreed allowed for this.

He said that the DRWG was very important with everyone sitting down at the same table. But DAB has problems structurally, with cost, and the downturn of the commercial radio market. He said that restructuring talks were ongoing and nearing a conclusion, although Channel 4 radio had obviously changed things during the process.

Ashton asked if licencing D2 was a mistake. Davies replied that it had been driven by the market, with everyone except Gcap being keen on it.

Handing back digital licences is tricky, with most analogue stations having taken 12 year rollovers. If a station hands back its digital licence they'd probably lose their analogue licence. He said it would be unfair not to enforce those rules even if lots of people did it at the same time. It'd be unfair on other stations who hadn't adopted DAB.

He said that there were probably structural issues as to where and how services were placed with national stations being carried on local muxes but that perhaps that left local muxes short of services. The picture is not quite how it might at first appear.

He was asked about the possibility of a hybrid national/local multiplex. He said that it wasn't wasy as at the moment nationally you can't offer local advertising opt outs on the national mux because it's a single frequency network. So quite how the restructure might work is not straightforward.

Darryl Pomicter of Ressen Design talked about internet radio from a prepared statement about the strengths of internet radio.

There was then something of a discussion about various numbers - particularly in relation to downloads.

There was a strongly made point from the audience about how the two real reasons for many still being in DAB is the 12 year rollover and the profits accruing from owning multiplexes.

Peter Davies refused to be drawn further, but said that stations didn't have to get into DAB when they had. It was however, argued that the picture had been different five years ago.

Nick Piggott asked about what the costs for IP radio delivery would be. Mark Friend said that he'd not looked at it in cost terms. Peter Davies said that DAB was cheaper nationally than FM, but that the problem was dual broadcasting.

Paul Fairburn said that last time he'd looked at the numbers, it was vastly more costly to reach everyone with a stream than using broadcast technology. Pomicter said that it was more a complementary medium.

Tony Moretta said that we shouldn't hold out hopes on WiMax which will need the infrastructure of mobile phone networks, and few would be investing in that kind of technology.

From the audience, Matt Degan said it was great if you had an FM licence, but hours generate cash, and of all the platforms, hours come digital radio. He said that we should look at some of the Asian services that know their markets very well to make them work.

A commenter said that if you actually look at the more niche services like 6Music, Planet Rock or even Five Live Sports Extra, the numbers at the peak were relatively small and they could use IP as a cost effective alternative.

Mark Friend said that if you didn't use DAB then even fewer would listen to it.

Bits, Bytes and Boats - Kelly Shepherd
BBC World Service Future Media

Shepherd began her presentation with a number of stats: 183m listeners and a combined 13m users per week for the website of the BBC World Service.

They decided last year that they should put audio at the heart of their redesign. This was done by creating a community to help carry out redesign. It was relaunched in December 2007 and removed many of the feeds that the previous site had been a mish mash of.

Currently they offer podcasts of 35 programmes - predominantly in English. They've had a podcast offering since 2005.

[Like Absolute] the BBC WS realises that iTunes is an important place to get podcasts.

An important part of the offering is mobile. All the sites either are, or will be available in mobile form. There is also a JAVA application for updates available in several languages.

And like other parts of the BBC they're embedding video into their sites. Arabic has already had a huge impact in the first few weeks. Persian is next up.

The language video content is now also available on YouTube in their own channels.

The audience also wants to know about the presenters and the site has individual video introductions to them all.

Shepherd said that the title of her presentation in part refers to a project based around a Bangladesh river journey looking at climate change, but using blogs, inertactive maps, Twitter and so on.

The BBC WS sites also have user generated elements. There are messageboards in a variety of language, and they even offer virtual keyboards to let people use languages in internet cafes.

There is also a "global conversation" in multi-lingual debates. People have been able to submit audio and video using services like Odeo to capture it. These elements have in turn ended up in programmes.

The BBC WS sees it as important to change as the audience changes.

Getting Intimate with the Audience

Fi Glover's chaired this session with Iain Lee (Absolute Radio), Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC) and Dan Heaf (C4).

Iain began by getting upset (!) when Rory started using Twitter from the stage.

Fi wanted to know what the "hot ticket-est" stuff that Heaf was doing now that he couldn't have done five years ago. He said that it was using data that's now available, and what it now meant to be someone's "friend".

Rory said that it was all working, but said that he didn't think he was working. He's been blogging and putting videos on YouTube. He said that he's been Twittering like mad. He then get out a piece of paper (!) with things that people had said in response to a question that he'd earlier asked the Twitter audience.

But is it a good use of his time to "broadcast" to his thousand followers instead of talking to many millions on the Today programme.

Iain Lee said that he still thought it was worth talking to his audience online rather than using a broadcast on the radio.

Heaf thought that if you have a large audience, you should make sure that you don't give a disproportionate amount of your time to a tiny subset of your audience.

The discussion moved on to paid-for options for podcasts, with discussions around Danny Baker's podcast. Iain Lee mentioned that only Ricky Gervais had made it work although Stephen Fry was moving that way. He said that if he charged for Shindiggery then he'd only get about 10 subscriptions and they'd share it with their friends anyway.

Heaf thought that a Russell Brand podcast might do quite well just now.

Rory says that you have to be cautious with online information. He suggested that you start by disbelieving it, and then see if you can verify it. The BBC also has problems with impartiality. If someone's on Facebook should they talk about their feelings towards political figures.

Iain Lee spoke about how he's learnt his lessons about what you can and can't say on-air, and he can be looser online. He said that you can try stuff that might not work on the radio and if you fall flat on your face, then so be it. It's not "better", it's "different".

Heaf thought that there aren't enough people in the UK creating their own content and we should do more to encourage them.

Fi Glover wondered if there wasn't an element of the emperor's new clothes about it all. Do a small number of people have disproportionate impact? Cellan-Jones said that you have to be wary of that, and there are special interest groups that can try to bias you.

Asked whether it changes the way you listen, most said no. Most people listening to a phone in can't be bothered to text or email in. Lee says that he'll happily shout at an idiot like Jon Gaunt, but he won't bother phoning in.

Heaf said that, for example Twitter, was more about content discovery than what someone else had for breakfast.

UGC, says Cellan-Jones, is a long way in, with the phone-in programme on the radio being the best and most mature example. Perhaps, he thought, there'll be less one-size fits all stuff, but he wasn't sure that there'll be much more in the way of getting more stuff online.

It can be useful for chasing down case studies. But there is a fightback from some staff asking whether they should be using it all the time. Should someone's mobile phone photo be used ahead of a professional image of the same thing.

Heaf thought that the rise of on-demand media is going to change the nature of editorial and also the distribution mechanism.

Glover wondered if this was a generational thing. Most of the audience had grown up like this, but with on-demand media, younger listeners might expect things very differently. Heaf thought that while you might want live news in the morning, the daytime could be very different.

Lee thought that radio stations will be primarily radio stations. He said that Tommy Boyd was trying to set up a radio station that was all pre-recorded for self-scheduling. He said that he listens to a lot of radio on-demand, but not necessarily live. But he thought that there'll still be people who want live programmimng.

Glover wandered if Lee downloaded things he didn't like. He said that he tried stuff and would give it a chance. He talked about people who phoned up and said that they didn't like him. He asked why they listened?

In response to a question Cellan-Jones said that there was a certain crisis of confidence when people spent too much time looking at the most read items e.g. man marries goat.

Are Rory's followers ambassadors to his audience? Definitely. He said he uses at a sounding board and a resource. But it is a promotional mechanism. He'll advertise forthcoming stories and get instant feedback when they air. But it's "dangerously seductive."

Glover wondered about the time constraints on him. He said that it is very time consuming - he spent a lot of the weekend on this.

A respondent wondered about Fi's own stuff - with Facebook profiles and blogs for Saturday Live. Glover said that they'd responded to a specific need. The blog has been less successful but Facebook has worked really well some of it down to the nature of the programme and to "feel the love when we weren't on air."

A question from the audience asked about reaching hard-to-reach audiences using these technologies. Heaf thought that some of these tools offered the single most useful mechanism to allow feedback, but are these organisations listening and engaging.

There was something of a discussion about the Brand/Ross affair, and the difficulty in responding to it, and the level of what would be appropriate.

- Lunch -

Death by a Thousand Cuts: More Choice = More Noise

Nick Wallis chaired this session about personlised music, with representatives of the BBC, Sony (not SonyBMG any longer) We7 and last.fm.

Jonoas Woost of last.fm which, of course, is all about personalisation. He explained how last.fm works and scrobbles your music to determine what you might want to listen to.

Frederico Bolza of Sony has a job discovering how to stay relevant in the new world. He said that his job was to find artists and then to get the music to them. Last.fm, We7 and the radio are all channels for them to get their music out to listeners.

He said that 90% of their revenue comes from the sale of recorded music with most of the remainder coming via PPL from radio. These new areas don't yet pay very much.

"Choice doesn't necessarily help you find things." Discovery is important. Without it, you're left with infinite choice you have no choice..

Steve Purdham of We7, which launches tomorrow, said that it can be like a needle in a haystack. He said that having found something in particular, people then get lazy and want to go back to the radio model. So you get into the recommendation phase via either friends, automated systems or radio producers. He said that We7 were trying to harness those choices. He said that he had to offer something that was better than the pirate options.

When asked how it was better than last.fm, Purdham said that it was a different model. It was up to the consumer to determine what the preferred model of consuming music would be.

Woost said that there were still lots of different methods of delivering music.

We7 works on an audio advertising basis, whereas Joost relies on display advertising. Both sites sell music too via third parties or otherwise.

Chris Kimber of the BBCpointed out that most people still find out about new music via the linear radio. "John Peel was a filter," as is Zane Lowe. It's how to filter this music perhaps using useful web apps. He said that the BBC wanted to be able to tell you more about what you've just heard on air. Until now, you've had to go hunting around the web, and he saw that as crazy. Similarly, if you discover someone online, what programmes should the consumer listen to in order to hear more?

Kimber's worried about staying ahead of the curve. He felt that they've fallen behind it to some extent - there's no personalisation currently.

The currency is still the artist said Bolzo; that's the starting point. The band is the brand. "Don't wait as long as we did" - he said that Sony was slow. He said that the old model was broken - and the bigger part of the challenge now was the mindset and how it can work. Technology wasn't the real problem. He said until now, it's still easier to do the usual radio plugging. Bolzo sees all these technologies as complementary. He'd love the ability to press a button to feed back what the audience thought of a track.

Kimber said that the Now Playing info was easy if you're limited to 300 tracks played on hard disk. 57% of Radio 3 output is non-standard CDs, so without employing people to type in details live, it can be hard to provide up to date information all the time.

Purdham said that radio has to get onto the conveyer belt sooner rather than later. You should be able to get more information about any track you hear online or on the radio immediately. Technology allows us to do that now he said.

Purdham: "We've been doing this for 18 months and we have no idea how we're going to make money out of it."

He said that we don't yet know how large the pie is.

Wallis wanted to know how radio stations were going to get a cut of it. He wondered if Apple hadn't already walked away with it. Purdham said that in some cases it could be easy, but that didn't work on the tube.

Woost wasn't sure what the battle actually was. What pie is commercial radio wanting a slice of he wondered. Where is the Zane Lowe of commercial radio, he wanted to know. He said commercial radio had to take risks.

"I don't trust a single commercial radio station in this country," he said.

Bolza pointed out that the last.fm application was one of the most successful applications on the iPhone.

Kimber pointed out that there was no point to the BBC doing a last.fm type thing. "Zane Lowe is going to give you something that the wisdom of the crowds isn't."

He thought that there was a big opportunity here for doing something more mainstream. Most music discovery services are still quite "geeky." The BBC would be targeting that mainstream.

Wallis wanted to know about futurology. What was going to happen to that great live moment when you know that 4m are listening. Kimber thought not - we'd have both. There are still going to be times when you just want to put the radio on. And there's the boredom aspect that means on demand services don't offer - serendipity.

In the future listeners will listen to on demand and live services thought Kimber. He also said that programmes will have to be broken up so that someone can get, say, everything about the Killers.

Purdham says that they have to chase the fans' desires and "feed" people as they want to be. Technology will make this easier. It all comes back to the consumer he thought.

Wallis wondered how music might suffer from all this as a result. Are all bands going to sound the same - losing regional identities. Bolza said that you can't hold it back. He said that record companies have to work harder and be more attentive. A fan's attention has to be earned and deserved. Fans will go wherever the hell they want.

Woost saw more of the same in the future as they're a media company. At the moment, their audience is still quite geeky but is changing. Amazon is mainstream and that's what they need to be. But the social context of last.fm is important.

There was a question from the audience about the use of the data. Everyone was concerned about privacy issues.

Another questioner wondered about competition from mobile operators such as Nokia's Comes With Music initiative. Perhaps it'll compete with us, thought Woost, but he wasn't too worried seemingly. The audience can already get it free. Kimber thought that 1m tracks on a mobile phone was scary. Bolza said that it was to do with the editorial controls and filters.

Matt Wells at The Guardian wanted to know about the BBC's personalisation plans. Kimber said that it was about using experts in their fields to provide recommendations. He said that he didn't see the option to listen to specific tracks on demand being on the BBC's roadmap. He said that it wasn't about the BBC offering that track. Purdham pointed out that the links could come out of the BBC elsewhere.

Visualising Radio - John Ousby of the BBC and Robin Pembroke of Global

John Ousby began by presenting something that was remarkably similar to a presentation I saw him give at The Digital Radio Show last week.

But it's a good presentation with demonstrations of TV, online and radio visualisations. He demonstrated a recent experiement the BBC recently had with Scott Mills being webcast from his flat.

He also ran through various other experiments with different BBC networks including Adam and Joe on 6 Music and Radio 4 as well as user generated animations.

He then did a live demo of Radio 1's Band in Your Hand. And it worked - well worth trying yourself if you have a Windows PC and a webcam.

Ousby reminded us of the Lobster - a mobile that was available via Virgin Mobile that for a while allowed you to listen to radio (and watch TV - but few did) on a mobile using DAB.

He talked about the opportunities from Slideshow on DAB devices, as well as what's available on DTT and cable.

Finally he showed us a possible way of pulling in and displaying a variety of information on appropriate platforms.

Then we moved onto Robin Pembrooke's presentation - he trailed an exciting new iPhone application that we'd have to wait to see.

At a tough time for commercial radio, Pembrooke thought that some of the ideas that visualisation brings could be a "game changer."

The key information is still what's playing. He said that the last 10 played tracks on Heart's website accounted for 40% of traffic. "That might say more about Heart's website."

He highlighted some research that shows that audio and the web work well improving clickthroughs. And of course commercial radio is able to monetise those clickthroughs.

But of course commercial radio doesn't have the resources of the BBC. It can be labour intensive (although he pointed out that Chill's data was excellent), but the can also be bandwidth intensive. And it can make things more memorable than we might wish (we saw a still from YouTube of Brand/Ross).

And of course, users don't always want to see everything visualised.

He pointed out that mobile streaming isn't scalable and that it kills battery life. He hopes that DAB will be paired in a slightly more elegant way than currently.

The Pure Evoke - I didn't win one in the draw - is mentioned and the congratulated.

"Black and yellow is a step forward."

But it's still a clunky interface.

"Audience = £" read a big slide.

Pembroke then move onto his new iPhone App. Previously they'd been the first to offer streaming, and now offered additional functionality with now playing, news etc and commercial opportunities.

It looks quite smart and allows tagging to come back to the information at a later date. This allows them to buy the track via information and allow commercial opportunities to link through to advertisers' websites.

Overall commercial radio can't afford the "specials" but there are options for visualisation.

The Chief TwiT Speaks - Leo Laporte

Possibly the most technically challenging thing ever attempted at a Radio Academy event was the session with Leo Laporte session via Skype. Needless to say, all wasn't smooth immediately, but eventually we got online.

Leo began by letting us know who he is and where he comes from.

TwiT reaches 175,000 - 250,000 downloads a week by unique IP addresses. He mentioned the various other shows he produces. Co-hosts get paid and then there's advertising co-op money. In total 470k a month in reach in the US and 50 hours a month.

He said that the advertising was all US only. Although the companies are usually global, they're not able to monetise a third of t he audience as it's outside the US.

Then he spoke about the video service he's launched. They've got as high as 10,000 simultaneous people watching live. Last night's TwiT was 5,000.

He said that it's all relatively cheap with the bandwidth being the most expensive with various dedicated lines for them.

The downloads are the hardest part with 4-5TB of data downloaded a day, but nearly all the revenue would go towards this if they weren't able to do deals. That could be as much as $40,000 a month otherwise.

So far, Laporte says that advertisers are fairly conservative. At first they charged around $35 cpm but it's now closer to $70 cpm. This is big premium over radio which is at around $5-10 cpm (cpt).

Although the prices are high, they're maintaining good usage. They're now earning between $500 and $15,000 an episode in revenues. They know that a downturn is coming. But they know that they're reaching the right audience. And with costs so low, they can continue on, and by the time advertisers are back, audiences will have grown and they'll be in a good place.

He sees NPR as some of the biggest competition at this point. He sees more mainstream media coming into the market. As a result he sees smaller players falling by the wayside.

Asked about how the video is able to make money - Laporte replied that it had grown audiences by about 10%. He said that it also increased the engagement of that audience.

"Our audience take pride [in taking down] any site we mention."

He says that so far they've not charged extra for video. But they've tried product placement. He gave the example of an energy drink which they drank on the show. They've also tried selling clothing.

He pointed out that he has explain the metrics to a lot of advertisers and education is important.

Asked about whether he'd give up his regular radio gig, he said that he wasn't going to give it up as it allowed cross-promotion, and in any case was his primary source of income.

When asked whether or not it would work in other subject areas with non-tech areas, he thought they could. It was all about providing content that was otherwise unavialble.

Finally, when asked about the future of radio in the US, it was clear that it probably isn't HD. He says when asked this by radio executives he gets out his iPhone and demos one of the apps on it from radio operators.

Newspapers are a real challenge; radio less so.

He sees radio over IP as offering a challenge to terrestrial. It won't necessarily takeover. Radio has to create a community, and that's more than request lines and phone-ins.

Overall, it's a competitive challenge and radio could come out better in the end.

Collings and Herrin

I'm not sure it's worth me blogging this, as it's obviously going to be a podcast (as is much of the rest of the day). So I'll leave it there. A very good day. And Ben's asked me to say that his session was best. Where's my fiver?

Finding poor journlism in the Sunday papers isn't really hard, but The Observer had this story in yesterday's paper. It begins:

Media regulator Ofcom warned BBC bosses about lax editorial procedures on Russell Brand's BBC 6 Music show over a year ago, it emerged last night. In a ruling published 15 months ago, it criticised the corporation for failing to follow its own editorial procedures and allowing Brand to broadcast a quiz won by a member of his production team posing as a listener to the digital radio station. [My emphasis]

Hang on. Nothing "emerged last night". Basically, this story seems to have come about by someone Googling the Ofcom website in the hunt for material on Russell Brand or Jonathan Ross.

What The Observer has simply dug up is the small matter of all the competition faking has now been fully [un]covered over the last 18 months. This didn't so much "emerge" as hit newspaper front and inside pages a year or so ago now. This isn't new news. Every single interested reader already knows about this.

At the end of July this year, the BBC was fined £400,000 by Ofcom including £17,500 for the Russell Brand show. At the time, the show was still being made by the BBC and not Brand's independent production company. And I'd hazard a guess that the producer was different at the time (it referred to an incident that took place in April 2006 when Brand was still on 6 Music).

Let me re-iterate: this fine or the details behind it didn't emerge last night. It was published on 31 July this year - three full months ago. Note to Observer journos: Ofcom has a free mailing list. They'll email you this stuff as it comes out. I highly recommend it. Alternatively, they could have read all the coverage at the time.

I'm pretty sure that I didn't accidentally pick up the Mail on Sunday yesterday in place of The Observer (there wasn't a free Cliff Richard CD after all), so quite why The Observer is publishing such lazy journalism as this inexplicable.

This was an entirely different kind of breach, and as can be seen from the list and the extensive press reports we've had over the last eighteen months, it affected everything from Blue Peter to Jo Whiley to Children in Need.

Look, I know that editorial floors around the country are desperately trying to keep the Brand/Ross story alive. Our fearless investigators will undoubtedly be attending every gig Brand performs at for the next six months, and burlesque troops around the capital will have more fans than usual at the stage door. But I buy a quality Sunday to find out - you know - important stuff going on in the world, not warmed up stuff that everyone else reported three months ago.

Perhaps someone out there can answer me this:

Is there a DAB/FM/Internet Radio out there that can also record to SD card (or hard disk, I guess)?

The closest I can find are Pure's Evoke Flow and the Roberts Stream 202 neither of which appear to be able to make timed recordings.

On the other hand, there are also DAB devices with SD Card slots, but no WiFi radio built in. Any thoughts? Is such a device just around the corner?

I'm loathe to return to this subject because it has been done to death everywhere now. But I think a few key things have come out.

1. The two presenters were exceptionally juvenile doing what they did and should have known better.

2. Although they were employed to push boundaries, they are well aware of where to stop. They have to (and to be fair, they have) accept some level of responsibility. They are not children.

3. The BBC was way too slow in responding and getting proper, in person responses and apologies made. They should have known better that in a 24/7 news environment, every day brings a new paper, every hour a new bulletin on rolling news channels. "Get your retaliation in first" someone once said. If the BBC had got in first with fully fledged apologies, there'd be nothing to attack them about.

4. The BBC has lost a very good radio controller.

5. Blaming it on producers alone is still not enough. Of course at time of writing, I don't know who the "senior" individual was that passed the programme as fit for transmission, but if you're a producer working for a big-name talent, saying "no" to them can be next to impossible. And if you do say no, you might find yourself shifted off their show, and possibly out of work, because the talent complains that they don't get on with you.

6. The suspension of Ross is very likely to affect others with the cancellation of various shows probably meaning various freelances will no longer have a gig. As well as staff members of his production company, many of the technical crew - camera operators and so on - are employed on a freelance basis. Let's be a bit creative, and get someone else to present Film 2008 next week rather than just cancelling it altogether.

React fast, and react smart. Not doing that cost BBC1 its controller, and now Radio 2 its controller as well.

So the Ross/Brand things has blown up out of all proportion. Seriously. The scale of the media frenzy is in no way proportional to what actually happened. When I wrote about this the other day, I did so in a way that discussed something that would be of interest to people who read Media Guardian.

Reporting the number of complaints that the BBC or Ofcom or whoever has received is facile and meaningless. It only invites comments about why those people aren't complaining about more important things.

If you want to find worse things that are happening in broadcasting in the UK, I suggest that you subscribe to Ofcom's Broadcast Bulletins. They send around a neat weekly email which runs through them. This week, they fined a TV station £15,000 for broadcasting some guy who claimed that his homeopathic remedy cured cancer. That's outrageous.

It's clear that the likes of Sky and the Mail are egging on the debate in a massive way, but frankly that's irrelevant. Similarly irrelevant are the media aspirations of Sachs' grand-daughter. Anybody who says otherwise is on a dangerous road towards the "she was asking for it with those clothes on" type defence of attacks on women. And Sachs' age is also irrelevant.

Sky News' coverage would lead you to perhaps not realise what's going on elsewhere in the world right now. The Congo, US interest rates, umm, David Tennant quitting Doctor Who. That sort of thing. I'm surprised they don't have the Sky Copter up hovering over Brand's house. This is on a scale not seen since Maddie went missing. Just to be clear, the coverage of that was abhorrent and unnecessary too.

It's clear now, that both Ross and Brand have realised they've done wrong and are sincerely sorry. Brand's quit his show - which frankly was wrong for Radio 2 anyway, and curiously placed on a Saturday night at the precise time that many of his prospective listeners would not be around (Prior to Humphrey Lyttleton's death, his 11pm Monday jazz programme got a bigger audience than Brand's 9pm Saturday show).

Of course Brand still has his stand-up, his new C4 series, a new hardback book, a new paperback book, the odd presenting gig and a burgeoning film career. He won't be destitute.

So where to now? Well Ross will be off the TV and radio for a while. A producer will be fired. I doubt anyone senior at Radio 2 will have to walk. Everyone at the BBC will have to attend some new course like they did for running competitions. And that'll be that.

It's fair to say that this has been poorly handled by the BBC. As soon as someone senior had listened back to what went out - ie. last week, before most of the press got into the game - they should have carried out their suspensions and investigations. Leaving things to drag on this week has helped nobody.

And I really don't understand why politicians - beyond perhaps, those at the DCMS - or anyone else really, are getting involved. They really ought to be asking why ITV is no longer providing a proper local news service, and is getting rid of all its PSB remit. Serious issues.

I do despair of our media sometimes and the ignorant coverage we get. I really do.

In the last couple of days we've heard plenty about a "prank" that Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross played on actor Andrew Sachs a couple of weeks ago on Brand's Radio 2 Saturday evening programme. As part of a pre-recorded show, when Sachs didn't answer his phone for a pre-arranged interview, Brand (new book - Articles Of Faith) and studio guest Ross (new book - Why Do I Say These Things?) made what can only be said to be insulting comments to Sachs' answerphone about his granddaughter.

For whatever reason, it took a while before the story reached the dizzying heights of the Mail. Brand "apologised" on his show the following Saturday (just gone), although tore into the Mail for its support of fascists during the thirties.

Now the BBC has formally apologised to the 78 year-old Sachs.

The whole incident really does leave a nasty taste in the mouth and is only the latest in a series of "stunts" where highly paid DJs have used their microphones to malicious ends. Up until now, none of them has been publicly chastised. They're big stars, after all, and they're unlikely to face fines that a commercial station might.

It would be unwise to get into any legal ramifications of this particular case, although it's notable that Sachs is probably quite reliant on the BBC for much of his voice and radio work.

This reminds me of a dark period of Chris Evans' history when he worked on Radio 1. He spent a week broadcasting from Scotland, and in an especially petulant episode he mocked Moray Firth's Tich McCooey, mocking the DJs salary compared to that of his own team. The details are to be found in the excellent book about Radio 1 of the period - The Nation's Favourite by Simon Garfield (Did I lend you my copy? I can't find it). The whole episode left a nasty taste in the mouth.

More recently, we've had Chris Moyles escape censure for using the word "gay" in a derogatory manner. Seemingly, because kids use it in the playground, it was harmless. Playgrounds are full of unpleasant racist and homophobic language. That doesn't mean that it's OK to use it on-air.

And in a less well reported episode, that Sony award winning doyen of 6 Music, George Lamb, acted like a school bully after legendary Kinks frontman Ray Davies decided that he didn't want to get involved in a specious "interview" - sample questions "what's your favourite vowel." When Davies thought better of the interview and tried to use the excuse of a poor line to get out of the interview, refusing to continue it when called back, Lamb used it as an excuse to blast Davies and make feeble jokes at the man's expense.

In all these incidents, we've got people irresponsibly making use of their fame and audience to brow-beat others into submission. Just because they think that the radio equivalent of kids playing knock down ginger is funny, doesn't mean that it is, or is fair.

But is it funny?

Well that really isn't the point. If I pour paint on you, some people might find it funny. You might not enjoy it. Particularly if you weren't a willing participant in my "pour red paint over you" stunt. So even if I promise to replace your clothes after the event, you shouldn't have to put up with my juvenile prank.

In the Brand/Ross incident, the programme wasn't live and therefore someone thought it was OK to transmit it. The BBC is promising an inquiry.

But will any of the DJs responsible have their knuckles rapped in a meaningful way? Ross is the BBC's highest paid entertainer, and Brand is the up and coming star. Moyles is the leading light of Radio 1 and has avoided censure, and I've not heard a thing about Lamb getting told off.

What I really hope that it's not just the "editorial" figure who approved this that gets the blame. It's the easiest thing in the world to blame some producer. Should they accept some blame? Absolutely. But when you're handling your network's top talent, it's not as simple as that. We've seen producers get fired before over some of the faked competitions. But they're not the only ones responsible. Presenters must also take responsibility, and it doesn't matter how feted they might be.

Will DJs be fined or suspended for a meaningful period? Will Brand or Ross make a proper sincere apology without concerning themselves with the political views of a paper seventy years ago (I detest the Mail as much as the next person, but that's irrelevant in this instance)? Next time Radio 1 tackles bullying will they have a leg to stand on if DJs on a sister network are getting away with precisely that?

The real shame is that they're both reasonably talented individuals. Ross can and does make good documentaries. Film 200x is well worth watching. Ross's radio programme can be funny. I must admit I find his chat show persona wearing. The nadir was surely his cringeworthy "interview" with Gwyneth Paltrow earlier this year. It really didn't come across as funny in the slightest, and while Ross went down in my estimation following that episode Paltrow's professionalism increased my respect for her.

Brand meanwhile is someone who had previously left me cold. I admit that I was beginning to warm to him slightly, but this episode has has significantly decreased that.

I expect to see some firm and appropriate action - something beyond just a producer being reprimanded. And some sincere apologies.

So finally, on Friday, came the news that Channel 4 was pulling the plug on its radio operation.

Let's revisit a little history. Commercial Radio has been broadcast nationally in UK on Digital One since 2002. But of late, the platform has struggled to be filled with the ten or so services it needs to fully utilise the bandwidth it has available. At the time of writing, it just has digital simulcasts of the three national commercial analogue stations, as well as Planet Rock. Several test channels and a Birdsong channel make up the rest of the multiplex.

The other national DAB multiplex is that belonging to the BBC, carrying simulcasts of its five core services as well as the World Service, BBC Asian Network and several digital only services including 1Xtra, 6Music and BBC Radio 7.

It was into this world that Ofcom decided to offer a second national commercial multiplex. It must be said that Digital One did have more services on it at the time, but there was enormous disapproval from GCap who believed that Digital One had been guaranteed the sole national DAB slot.

Ofcom put the slot out for tender and two groups responded: NGW and Channel 4 Radio. From the outset, Channel 4 looked the likelier winner, with the company itself offering three services: the flagship Channel 4 Radio, which was popularly called C4's competitor to BBC Radio 4; the youth E4 Radio; and the more adult Pure 4 Radio. It's safe to assume that the latter two of these were music driven.

Other suppliers would make up the rest of the multiplex, with UTV offering Talk Radio, SMG offering Virgin Radio Viva, and other operators providing Sky News Radio, Original, Disney, Sunrise and Closer. Beyond that, a selection of podcasts from a diverse list would be made available.

When the licence was awarded in July 2007, the multiplex was supposed to be on air within a year - or at least one of the channels should be. But there was the small matter of building an entire network of transmitters. Channel 4 was keen that the network should largely be in place by launch, but this was at the same time as the two main UK tranmission companies were merging, and DTT switchover was occcuring.

As it became obvious that no contract had been awarded, conditions were getting tougher. On a corporate level, Channel 4 was keen to get its hands on a top-slice of BBC licence funding. Indeed, Ofcom has readily admitted recently that Channel 4 has a significant funding shortfall. Meanwhile over at GCap, as the group struggled to avoid an inevitable takeover by Global, Fru Hazlitt announced a massive pullout from DAB. The costs were too high, and the rewards weren't there.

That meant the closure of services like theJazz, which had only been on-air for a little over a year, as well as other national DAB services like Core and Life.

So now we were in a position where Channel 4 was short of cash, and still hadn't launched its new radio service despite time having run out. The country (and indeed the world) was heading into a recession, with the resultant bleak advertising outlook. Finally, current incumbant, Digital One was half empty. Anyone who wanted to get on DAB nationally could - if they could afford it.

Fairly early on, it was obvious that things were never going to be quite how they'd first been described. Radio 4 costs £100m a year. No service - however it's funded can afford that. No service could even get close. Indeed that figure is low because things like news is at a lower than true cost because resources are shared across the BBC.

The reality of Channel 4 Radio was that it'd have been closer to Five Live without the sport. An upmarket talk station with a flagship breakfast show perhaps.

Then there were the problems of other partners falling out including the loss of Sky News Radio and Virgin Radio Viva.

The likeliest solution seemed to be some kind of agreement between Global (with its shareholding in Digital One following its takeover of GCap) and Channel 4. With a multiplex half empty, there seemed to surely be a case for the two sitting down. Channel 4 might have perhaps launched E4 Radio (perhaps branding it T4?), and maybe one other, while the other spaces would be filled with Global brands.

The difficulty with that plan is that Channel 4 wanted to be the gatekeeper of a multiplex as the formula would mean that their services would be funded by fees received from other suppliers. This plan would leave Channel 4 as perhaps a partner in Digital One (and some attendant costs in becoming that), and only partially receiving fees from services the multiplex carried. Even these would be limited as the majority of new services would surely come from the shareholders themselves. Then we have to examine Global's plans. With the Heart brand being rolled out across the country, it perhaps no longer makes sense having Heart carried nationally on DAB.

Every local service that will become Heart in the next 12 to 18 months is also carried on a local multiplex. This is a result of incentives put in place to get stations to adopt DAB. By going onto local or regional multiplexes, their analogue licences were extended by 12 years. The alternative was having to rebid for your licence at the end of its period. Most stations took the decision to stump up the cash for DAB in return for that guaranteed additional period.

It was only later that owners began to complain about this cost. And it's the reason that GCap, for all its harrumphing about DAB earlier this year, didn't pull out of local DAB. If they had, many licences would have been up for auction.

So Global doesn't want to put Heart on Digital One. What about Choice or Galaxy? Well they also exist in various guises around the country on local multiplexes. And it's not always worth pulling them off those services because they're probably contracted to keep there, and in any case Global has interests in many of those local DAB multiplexes.

So now we're in a position where Channel 4 has decided at a board level not to pursue DAB. That's a tragedy for all those who've recently joined the company as it began ramping up its staff in advance of a launch. But the big question is what does it mean for the future of DAB?

Against this background, we've also had the Digital Radio Working Group sitting all this year. They're due to report in November or December.

DAB is not dead, as there are a significant number of stations on other multiplexes. In London, where there are three multiplexes, all are jammed full with more stations wanting to get on. It's certainly true that minorities are being especially well-served with stations targeting many religious and ethnic groups.

Local and regional services have to stay on DAB for the time being, because of their licences. But it would be better if they wanted to be there.

The costs are not to be knocked; where once you just had to pay for your AM and FM transmission, you now have to find cash for DAB, the internet, and perhaps Sky, Freeview and Cable as well.

I think the big question must surely be with Digital One. There are services that I'm sure would love to gain carriage on the multiplex, but the costs are astronomical. Recent launches like NME Radio and the new Jazz FM have not found places on the multiplex, and one would imagine that it's because of cost. Planet Rock has just signed a three year deal, but it's still not clear whether the new owner Malcolm Bluemel is treating this as a plaything or a real standalone business. The costs that they must be paying for their DAB carriage alone are horrendous, and it's those that mean new entrants can't make their spreadsheets balance. They're staying off the platform.

Now if I was running an airline, and my planes were half empty because the costs are too high, it'd make sense for me to cut those costs to get my fill levels up. That's exactly what happens in that and other industries. But Arqiva has traditionally maintained its high prices and seems not to care whether or not the multiplex is filled. Perhaps that's just my perception.

That's despite the fact that the entire industry will be stronger with a vibrant range of services available to consumers. They'll buy more sets and there'll be more demand.

The Freeview model has been interesting, but for that to work, we need a strong range of services to be carried on Digital One. We're now entering the critical fourth quarter of the year, when more DAB sets are sold than at any other time.

There are national brands on DAB, but they're still largely transmitted via a network of local DAB multiplexes. The reason for it happening that way is not logic, but the needs of local analogue services to have the licences extended. Perhaps now's the time for rethinking and replanning the whole of DAB. As localness deserts ILR, very few stations are truly local any more - certainly not the ten or so that fill a local digital multiplex.

In the end, I don't have an overall solution, but I do know that we're going to have to behave with flexibility if we're going to come out of this with a strong proposition going forward. What's clear is that this isn't a technology issue; nobody really cares whether we use DAB, DAB+, DRM or some new standard. But we do need a strong digital radio. New services trying innovative things is what's going to keep the industry strong. Up until now, listening has held up across most demographics. However there are worrying trends among younger audiences. And while they shouldn't be the be all and end all, new developments in the technology are what's going to be most important in years to come.

The opportunity's still there.

As always, everything here represents my own opinions on not those of my employer.

Click through to Flickr for the full size image.

Right - lots of good news on the Ed Reardon front.

First of all, this coming Monday (6th October) sees the return of Ed Reardon with a new series on Radio 4 at 11.30am. I would imagine that we've got another six epsiodes in this new series. Let's hope so anyway.

So set your alarms, tape recorders, iPlayers or whatever.

"The Last Miaow. By Christopher Douglas and Andrew Nickolds. Ed has rekindled his relationship with fellow author Mary Potter and they are in a record-breaking second month of partnership 'bliss'. Elgar, however, is none too pleased."

Second, I meant to say that the first series of Ed Reardon is now, finally, available to buy on CD. It comes on three CDs with two episodes apiece.

And series two is coming out on 13th November.

Over the last few years, I've tried to look at lots of different ways to turn audio into text - ideally cheaply or even freely.

Working for a radio station, even one that largely plays out music, being able to search audio to find when a presenter said or mentioned something would be incredibly useful.

I've seen a very expensive product tested a couple of times which has been pretty fitful in working well - and even though one radio group did buy it one stage, it's never been fully utilised. There are also services like Blinkx that seem to do a pretty good job in a controlled environment.

A regular example seems to be based around the BBC News channel. The transcription of what presenters are saying is remarkably accurate - even for far flung place names. But systems can be pointed towards the BBC News website for appropriate names and words to help those trickier phrases.

So it was interesting to see two different takes on this problem in the last week or so. First of all Andy Baio has published details of how he went about getting an interview he'd conducted transcribed so that he could place it on his website. Essentially he chopped the interview into small nuggets, and then used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to get transcriptions of what was said. He's very happy with the outcome.

A couple of years ago, Virgin Radio tried something very similar with our "Snoop Log." Everytime a DJ opens a fader, we record what he or she is saying. That's put into a database alongside details of track listings and adverts so that we have a record of what was played out. If we could also get hold of a transcription of what was said, we'd have a fully indexable database of our output.

DJ links tend to be pretty short - often well under a minute. So the individual "chunks" are ready made. It's easy to transcode them to mp3 or whatever would be appropriate. The difficulty comes from the song titles and artists. If you live in India and English is perhaps a second language, then the exact spelling of "The Kings of Leon" might be tricky for you.

The test wasn't a success. Now it might be that we didn't offer enough cash to get better quality translators, or perhaps if we'd embedded the audio in a Flash player, that might have helped. One way or another - we didn't take it forward.

There are other transcription services that ride on the back of the Amazon Mechanical Turk and cost more than the DIY option. But then they offer higher quality output. It's a question of cost for a commercial radio station versus value of the output. It's certainly something to revisit.

The other fascinating development has come from Google and its "Gaudi" service which has just launched. Initially concentrating on political speeches, the service allows you to search for words within those speeches and jump to the correct part of the video.

Now obviously from a radio perspective, this could be done just as easily with an audio only stream.

But I'd still love to know to what extent the service is only using audio. It's quite clear that pretty much every political speech is captured in text form in one place or another. That's what allows talented souls to put together videos of politicians "singing along" to songs like "Never Gonna Give You Up." So is Google using text alongside video/audio to pattern match?

Anyway, it's promising, and surely in time, we'll truly be able to search audio.

So David Lloyd is leaving Virgin (soon to be Absolute) Radio today, and in the time honoured fashion, we made a leaving video.

The video was edited to a couple of copyright songs - It's Getting Better by Mama Cass and We've Only Just Begun by The Carpenters.

I uploaded the video to YouTube.

Now I'm obviously breaking rules here. Those aren't my songs to go sharing. YouTube has a "Content Identification Program" which obviously looked at the audio at recognised it as being owned by "UMG" (I take this to be Universal Music Group). Before the video had even been processed, an email had pinged back to me informing me of this.

Yet UMG's policy is to allow the audio to remain up, but in return it has to feature advertising on that YouTube page, and allow the owner access to the logs of that title.

What a sensible proposal. Now I'm aware that at some time in the future they might change their mind and pull "my" video. But that does seem to be a relatively forward thinking way of doing things. And it's not often that you can say that about record companies.

Anyway, that's alll a long way around of giving me a reason to embed the video here.

(Video shot largely by Paul Sylvester and edited by me. It could be better in places, but it's still quite fun I think, and it worked a treat).

As Oldham's Revolution changes format, owner and breakfast show host, Steve Penk tells anyone unhappy with the changes to try Xfm:

"What I don't want to deal with every day is a bunch of wining whingeing moaning morons clogging up my voicemail because we no longer play alternative music."

They'd be your listeners Steve. Good luck with your next RAJAR!

As Oldham's Revolution changes format, owner and breakfast show host, Steve Penk tells anyone unhappy with the changes to try Xfm:

"What I don't want to deal with every day is a bunch of wining whingeing moaning morons clogging up my voicemail because we no longer play alternative music."

They'd be your listeners Steve. Good luck with your next RAJAR!

• It's all getting very lively over at my "other place".
• Radio 3 has some interesting new drama coming this autumn. Of course, it's always easier to think "I must listen to that three adaptation of the Duchess of Malfi," than actually sit down and listen to it.
• Radio 4's new season sounds intriguing. I'm less interested in ex-Eastenders' actors joining The Archers than I am listener to a 20 hour adaptation of the Le Carré Smiley novels and the SF season.

As the Setanta issue rumbles on with no terrestrial highlights likely to be available for a terrestrial service for the Croatia away game for England on Wednesday, I've just had a scary thought.

Essentially Setanta purchased both live coverage and highlights of the fixture. But they've declined to sell on those highlight rights. The radio rights were sold separately and the match will be on BBC Radio Five Live (I don't think that Talksport is also covering it, but I'm happy to be corrected).

The radio rights are obviously significantly cheaper than television rights. But what's to stop Setanta buying up those rights as well? Is there any reason they could buy them and not use them? Or perhaps just put the "radio" out on their own subscription TV channel to show that they're using them.

That'd incur even more wrath of the fans, but they could do it. Of course we might see the return of the old Talksport trick of reporting what's going on from a television.

Just a thought!

There's a widely reported story today about a report examining how alcohol is covered in the media. In particular the perceived glamourisation of excessive drinking by radio DJs such as Chris Moyles.

You can read coverage at the BBC News site, and in all the papers (here are links to the story in The Guardian and the Telegraph).

An interesting and worthwhile story? Undoubtedly. But the critic in me would quite like to see the full report. It's not that I don't trust the reporters the papers and news organisations allocated to the story, but, err, I don't always. For example, Chris Moyles is repeatedly mentioned but there's no mention of, say, Christian O'Connell or Johnny Vaughan. Now that might be because they're exemplary models of restraint who don't glamourise excessive drinking. Or it might be because the report didn't cover them. Yet we read that "Commercial radio stations were worse offenders than the BBC."

In fact, according to the Telegraph's piece:

The study focused on BBC Radio 1, BBC 1Xtra, Kiss 101 broadcasting to the South West and Wales, Key 103 for Greater Manchester, Galaxy Birmingham and Kerrang! Radio for the West Midlands.

But that fact doesn't appear in most of the reports. That's why I wanted to read the full document. I know that what actually has happened is that a press release for the report has been sent out, and most stories are probably generated from that. The report's author Professor Norma Daykin will have been available for interview, and that'll differentiate the reports. Finally, the report itself may have been sent to journalists, but how many do you really think read it all the way through?

That's why I'd like to read it for myself. The BBC site doesn't include it, and neither do stories at the other papers' sites I've looked at. The research was carried out at the University of the West of England, but their website reveals no obvious links. The research was funded by the Department of Health, but again I had no luck finding it online there. It's part of the Know Your Limits campaign conducted in association with the Home Office. No luck there at either or the two websites I found - your guess is as good as mine as to why there are two.

The report is being presented o the British Sociological Association in Brighton, I read, but once again, an online search is fruitless aside from an abstract (P12 of this Word document).

The reason I want to see the report is that it's important to understand how much audio was listened to over what period (e.g. Was it carried out over the Christmas period? Answer: Yes - from December to February according to the Telegraph piece, but then they had a medical reporter rather than a media reporter cover the story). I've mentioned the issue regarding stations monitored and they've obviously concentrated on youth orientated services. But they ignored Scotland and Northern Ireland which might have thrown up different results for example.

The internet allows us to be able to present primary material and given that this research was state-funded, it should be easily available for us all to download and read. It shouldn't just be kept to attendees of academic conferences, and published in expensive journals or online in locked academic databases.

Radio Pop was something I first saw at last year's Radio At The Edge conference.

It describes itself as "social radio listening." Once logged in (and it uses Open ID - which might be good if it was ever made clear to the broader public how it should be used), you start listening to a BBC radio channel and the system logs your listening by network and by show and you get presented with a nice set of charts.

Then you add a few friends, and you can see what they're listening too as well.

Future iterations will include tracks so that you can actually specify pieces of music and highlight them for your friends. Strangely, I think the delay in the implementation of that is less to do with technology than some quaint internal rules.

As well as monitoring your own listening and that of your friends, you can also see what everyone across the system is listening too.

I can get a nice badge for my blog, but because I'm trying to keep things clean, I'm going to just put it in here.

I've just been listening to a very strange jazz rendition of Bowie's 'Life On Mars' on Late Junction (the new schedule for The Geoff Show means that I won't have to choose between these two now). Robert Sandall's presenting a rather fabulous programme of cover versions. Sandall was a co-presenter of Mixing It, once broadcast on Radio 3, but now to be found under the guise of Where's The Skill In That on Resonance FM. Because I liked it a lot, I gave it a "Pop".

The "Pop" records the date and time so that, iPlayer willing, I can go and listen to what my friend enjoyed so much about the show.

The charting is exceptionally fine and it all looks wonderful.

At the moment, the player is a little basic, and because it can only monitor listening via its own player rather than the BBC's rather more fully functional player, there's no opportunity to measure on-demand listening. That's particularly a shame because that's how I listen to most of my BBC radio online.

I suppose the only other problem is that I have to keep making my friends over and over everytime I sign up for something. Once for Facebook, again for Flickr, then again for Twitter, Pounce, YouTube etc. While I might want to keep my "professional" Linked In colleagues well clear of my Facebook profile (I've got nothing to hide - honest), for the most part I just want to maintain one list of friends. But that's a separate issue.

Still it's a fine development worth watching. I seem to remember that when it was presented at the conference last year, there was talk of other - commercial - stations being able to get involved. The fact that the URL sits apart from the BBC makes it interesting. Maybe it's something that Absolute Radio could get involved in?

• I've always liked DJ Andy Kershaw, so it's tragic to read about his recent problems with both the law and his broken relationship in an interview in today's Independent.
• I can't say I'm exactly in tears at the news that Wippit has shut down. Just ask Danny Baker what he thinks about them.
• Albion has blogged about the re-branding of Virgin Radio as Absolute Radio. Worth a read. You're already reading Onegoldensquare right?
• I don't quite understand why the Inland Revenue's Working Tax Credit radio ad employs Rhys Thomas playing essentially his Gary Bellamy- DJ character from the excellent Down The Line. We're supposed to be taking it seriously, so having the faux naif Bellamy asking the questions to determine your eligibility for the credit misses the point a little. Have a listen below.

There's an entertaining blog on Media Guardian that compares the route that my employers have taken in rebranding Virgin Radio as Absolute Radio compared with the route taken by Revolution in Oldham:

For years the station bucked the trend of better music mixes and instead served up alternative indie and rock, making presenters out of local musical icons...

But then a fortnight ago, without any prior announcement, the station's music policy changed beyond recognition. The curious sounds of credible bands you'd never heard of dispersed into the Mancunian ether, replaced overnight by perennial favourites James Blunt, the Bee Gees and Take That. No explanation. Big gaps everywhere. Lots of adverts. Ace of Base.

Bizarrely, the clearly furious presenters were still allowed to go on air. Upon playing Elton John's I'm Still Standing, one presenter commented angrily: "No, this isn't ironic." It was to be his last comment on the matter; non-stop music followed.

[UPDATE] Steve Penk bought the station!

That could explain a lot!

Last night I was sitting at home tinkering with this blog (it will have its five-year overhaul soon), when my brother called me to say that there was someone from Virgin Radio on Dragons' Den. I flipped on the TV and saw that the person being called "Christian" was Robin Banks, a DJ who used to work here and who I know a little. He's since spent quite a lot of time at Kiss 100, and more recently joined Leicester Sound. You might also know his voice if you ever watch Mythbusters in the UK as he re-voices them in an English accent.

I rewound the Sky+ as I'd been recording the show anyway and watched the full segment. Rachel and Christian were pitching for cash for their business - the Tiny Box Company.

The editing of Dragons' Den has to be good to keep us in suspense, although it has to be said that as last contestants on, the chances were that they'd do a deal. One of the problems with the format is that sometimes it's just a little too formulaic.

Their business was for the manufacture of recycled cardboard gift boxes - the sort of item you might get jewellry packaged in. From an external point of view, on several levels the company seemed to be a bit of a non-starter. The idea was unpatentable - indeed there must be hundreds or even thousands of packaging companies. They hadn't sold all that many, although they had a couple of decent clients. So it was surprising that in relatively short time, three of the dragons had dropped out.

Then something strange happened. I'd have expected that, however well the pair came across, the last two dragons would surely give them short shrift. But Theo wanted to know about their backgrounds. Christian said he'd worked in radio... on-air. He namechecked Kiss and Virgin, and talked about broadcasting in general. But then he'd gone into rehab after which he'd met his business partner. Rachel had a good business background but some kind of illness had struck her causing the loss of both her job and home.

Theo announced that he thought that there might have been some kind of broadcasting background to Christian. How? Theo doesn't strike me as someone who listens to a lot of Kiss, although his kids might. Maybe he used to listen to the Robin Banks evening show on Virgin? But even then, it might have been hard to tie together a familiar radio voice with a face in a different environment.

Could the producers have suggested that asking about the entrepreneaurs' backgrounds would be an "interesting" thing to do? In this case, it livened up an otherwise so-so pitch, and in the end, both Theo and Peter pitched in together for £60,000 to back the firm.

It made me think. I know that television is an artifice, and on something like Dragons' Den, producers will see fit to ensure that a few mad inventions are put in front of the dragons as well as more investable business enterprises. But are the dragons being fed details? Unless they've got an uncanny ability to dig into people (and they are shrood investors so they weren't bprn yesterday), they do seem to have an unerring ability to find out the more interesting backgrounds.

How many times have you seen a pitch going seemingly quite well before a leftfield question - something that might not otherwise be asked - knock the pitch off-course. Perhaps there are hidden debts, or some kind of technical issue. On other occassions they'll suddenly probe deeply about forthcoming orders, and a contestant will eventually admit that - yes - they have had conversations with Tesco, suddenly making them very investible.

I suppose that I'd naiively expected that the nature of the "Den" with strict rules about not contacting dragons in advance, and the nature of filming meaning that many more ideas passed through the den than made it to air, might mean that the series was slightly more honest.

But in this instance, I think it's pretty clear that the dragons were "directed" a little. I wish Christian/Robin and Rachel all the best with their business, but I'm just left a little

Martin Kelner's been penning some very honest pieces about radio over the last few months, and today's is as true as any of them.

Talking about Kenny Everett is possibly a little hackneyed - sorry if that sounds heretical. But in essence, what he says is true. It seems to be TV personalities only who get shows. It's always nice to see a radio talent shine through.

What a lot of things have been happening in the radio world in the last week or so:

• The Global takeover of GCap has finally been given the all clear by the OFT, with the full text of their decision being published. Many of the programming savings have already been made, but it's now the turn of the respective former Global and GCap sales teams to feel the pain.
• Xfm in Scotland is rebranding as Galaxy this autumn.
• GCap is shutting down some AM services in Devon and Cornwall.
• And Lisa Snowdon is going to permamently replace Denise Van Outen who decided that the Capital breakfast show with Johnny Vaughan was a gig too far.

The Global moves aren't too surprising, but morale won't exactly be high over at Leicester Square just now. Meanwhile I suppose that the slow death of the Xfm brand isn't too surprising either. They've sold the South Wales station which was only won last year and still had significant local obligations. That now just leaves the mothership service in London and Xfm in Manchester. There already is a Galaxy service in Manchester so rebranding Xfm there isn't an option.

But what about London? Well popular opinion suggests that Choice is more likely to fall under the Galaxy brand.

Last week Alex Zane was suspended from his own show for a week for playing a song of dubious taste. A cynic might suggest that this is either being done because news is scarce in late August days and it's guaranteed to get coverage, or that Zane is paid more than anybody else at the station and they're looking for ways to get rid of him. Obviously these ideas are utterly without foundation and I'm sure that it's just diligent management doing its job. I mean - we're all waiting for the James Whale v Talksport case.

Lisa Snowdon probably isn't a bad sparring partner for Johnny Vaughan. We went through a phase at Virgin Radio a few years ago where we had a slot regularly filled by what some impolitely called "tarts"; you know, people more frequently seen on the front of Loaded or FHM than heard.

Now it wouldn't fair to include Lisa Snowdon quite within that group even if a Google Image search reveals a fair amount of modelling. She actually held down her programme for a few months, and was much more natural than most of the rest.

But is that enough to make the pairing a viable long-term show to take on the rest of the capital's breakfast shows? While I think most people were suspicious of Jamie Theakston when he started, he's proved himself to be a radio talent over time. But the rest of London's breakfast shows are radio DJs first and foremost.

Capital still does have the largest commercial breakfast show in London (whatever Neil Fox and Media Guardian might say) if we compare shows on the basis of their actual show hours. Fox finishes at 9am while Vaughan goes on until 10am - that makes the difference.

Here's an ad that I'm 99.999% certain that you haven't seen.

It's a Russ and Jono ad for Virgin Radio that was never actually aired. This is a rough cut without final graphics or sound, but it still gives you a good idea of what they were trying to do.

Today there are over seven million DAB digital radios in use in the UK, although it's future still has a few question marks hanging over it rightly or wrongly. But it's fascinating to go back and see how the system was first launched.

So amongst some of the videos I've recently been going through at Virgin Radio, I was interested to find the following.

The first is a BBC TV News report covering the BBC's launch of services to actually listen to. Edward Stourton tells us that the first radios won't be available for a couple of years when they'll cost £700. And there's a cracking shot of a group of people on a coach all listening via headphones to the service in this report from Torin Douglas.

Ironically, the main technical advantage that's given in this report over FM, is the ability to listen to DAB in the car, when in reality that's the main obstacle that's still to be overcome with in-car radios still relatively rare, and audio cutting out in a more irritating fashion than FM does.

It's also interesting to hear that the cost of DAB was a worry for commercial radio from the very start with Virgin Radio's own David Campbell concerned about costs.

A couple of years later and consumer DAB sets were very nearly ready. So Tomorrow's World covered DAB in this report. The sounds a bit poor, I'm afraid, as the VHS tape it was captured from was pretty poor and quite possibly a second generation tape.

It's probably best to gloss over references to "CD quality", but again there are lots of references to the poor quality of FM on the move. And I wonder where you can get one of those DAB Renault Espaces?

Sadly we never have reached the point where we can choose between five different football commentaries, but then the rights holders probably preclude that to an extent (in TV of course we have interactive Olympics on the BBC, and Sky offering nearly every Champions' League game).

And we've still got a way to go before we see screens like those demoed by Peter Snow at the end of Jez Nelson's report.

In the run-up to Virgin Radio rebranding as... - well, we'll have to wait and see what precisely it becomes - I've been digging through the vaults to see what old TV ads I could find.

Here's the first second ad which ran sometime after the launch of FM in 1995 featuring Russ and Jono. There where lots of very subtly different versions depending on whether it was the 1215AM or 105.8FM frequency that was relevant to viewers, the amount being given away (£10,000, £15,000 or £20,000), and whether the prospective listener should tune in on "Monday" or "tomorrow morning."

Anyway, without further ado, here are three variants to give you a flavour.

I wrote a little piece for the One Golden Square blog on RAJAR last week which it's worth directing you to.

I'd also suggest you read Martin Kelner in today's Guardian.

I see from today's Broadcast that ITV2 has commissioned "FM" a 6 x 30 minute sitcom about a "neurotic indie DJ" who works at Skin FM. The sitcom will apparently feature real bands and current tracks which is quite an interesting idea - if you think about it, with the exception of trails, sports montages and the radio left on in various pubs and cafés in the soaps, contermporary music is fairly missing from mainstream TV (OK - there's been Glastonbury, T in the Park and Later..., but that's still a limited amount).

Anyway, we'll probably have to wait until next year to see the fruits of this labour, but I wonder if it can be as good as other sitcoms set in radio stations. There was Frasier of course which is fairly peerless as a sitcom. Then there was The Lenny Henry Show from 87/88 which was set in a pirate radio station somewhere in South London and also featured Gina McKee. I know there's WKRP in Cincinatti which always seemed to be on late at night when I was younger, but I can't say I really watched it (and from all accounts the DVDs are a shadow of the real show since nearly all the music has had to have been replaced for copyright reasons).

But I think Kit Curran, the self proclaimed "king of the airwaves" must be my favourite. Starring Denis "Wedge" Lawson, there were two series of it. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me (and much internet searching is unclear on the matter), the first series was broadcast on ITV, while the second series ended up on Channel 4. Anyway, given some of the rubbish that's being released on DVD these days, it must surely get a release one day.

Here's a remarkable story from Wired. It refers to ongoing talks in the US where the record industry is trying to make the radio industry pay royalties to singers and musicians. Unlike the UK, where both songer writers and the performing artists separately get paid by radio stations, in the US only the songwriters get paid. Performers are unpaid on the basis that radio station airplay is giving them free publicity to sell their product.

And so one side or another has been posting tins of herring ("red herring" - geddit?), a dictionary, and a set of digital downloads (including "Take the Money and Run" by the Steve Miller Band and "A Change Would Do You Good" by Sheryl Crow).

Thanks to my employer's new owners' blog, I should also point you to this report commissioned by the National Association of Broadcasters who look after radio stations' interests. It attempts to put an actual value on the cumulative sales that radio stations generate. It concludes that between 14% and 23% of music sales can be directly attributed to radio, and that any change in the status quo might disrupt this income stream (approx $1.5 to $2.3 billion annually).

"If a new performance fee were enacted, stations could reduce the amount of music airplay, change formats and even cease to operate, resulting in the loss of much of this promotional benefit."

I'm not entirely sure I buy that given that most of the rest of the Western world pays performers. Some of those US stations must really be struggling if they'd close down ahead of paying a small percentage of their income to the performers whose work their entire livelihood is based on!

What other industry doesn't pay for the main constituent of its business? If I want to make a film based on a Stephen King novel, I don't just say to King - don't ask me for any cash, but think of all those additional book sales you'll get when my film comes out!

If you're at all interested in the future of radio in this country - then you might w