Recently in Radio Category

Further proof that BBC Four is the best channel in the UK comes through a series of excellent programmes that have been on-air this week:

- Storyville had YouTube Hero: The Winnebego Man starting briefly with the stories on people who made it "big" on YouTube, but highlighting the story of Jack Rebney who shot to fame via an outtakes tape from an "industrial film" (i.e. corporate film) detailing the features of said range of camper vans. It's really worth watching.

- Upgrade Me with Simon Armitage is a timely repeat of a documentary from a year ago in which the poet and gadget fan examines why we feel the need to upgrade all the time. It's not a perfect film, but I found it worthwhile after my little piece the other day, and coming on the day that Apple releases its new range of music products (of which more anon).

- I'll happily watch just about anything on climbing or mountaineering. At the weekend we had the excellent Great Climb on BBC Two Scotland (watchable via Sky) and BBC HD. Watch the sequence about 23 minutes in. And then BBC Four tonight had The Eiger: Wall of Death.

- More or Less is back on Radio 4. If you're not already, you should be subscribing to their podcast.

- I enjoyed Legacy on Radio 7 but must admit that I've not played the accompanying game yet. It's getting a repeat on BBC Radio Scotland very shortly so hopefully episode 1 will be back online to listen to via iPlayer.

- It wasn't the greatest MacTaggart lecture ever, but I think Mark Thompson had some relevant points to make about Sky's investment in UK production.

- I was a little underwhelmed by Apple's announcement today. My favourite iPod is the Classic. It's the only one with enough capacity for my needs, yet Steve Jobs seemingly neglected to mention it despite saying the entire range was getting an overhaul. If it gets discontinued, then I'll have to look for a new portable music manufacturer. I'm not at all sure about the new look Nano which seems to be a step back to the horrible looking third generation device and not actually usable in the hand. The Touch is fine (although Apple still seems to limit FM radio to the Nano), and the Shuffle becomes usable again (if mostly pointless without a screen). But Apple has again concentrated only on the US with Apple TV. Not only does $99 = £99 in Apple world, but there's no TV programming available. Now if they'd got iPlayer, 4OD, ITVplayer, Sky Player and LoveFilm on the device, they'd have people falling over themselves to buy one. Internet on the TV is the future of TV - not 3D. But Apple has missed in a trick in beating Canvas to the punch. If I was Sony, Samsung, LG or Panasonic, I'd be rushing to get my £99 device into the marketplace which does all these things even if it's just these things. The jury's out on iTunes 10 because while it's a sophisticated piece of software, changing icons isn't the same as a ground up rewrite which I believe this software is in dire need of.

There have been a few reports, publications and press releases recently that are worth highlighting.

The BBC has published its latest monthly iPlayer Performance Pack detailing results for July 2010. I always find this is worth a read.

It's interesting to note that requests for BBC iPlayer dipped a bit during both June and July. While the weather is almost certainly a contributing factor (and we're obviously not all into watching programmes on our laptops in the garden), this was during the period of the World Cup which ate up much of the primetime schedule. Even when ITV was showing games, the BBC tended to counter with repeats and non-essential programming.

The slide on page 11 of the report makes for interesting reading too. It details average weekly use of the iPlayer. It breaks out radio, TV, and users of both. So in the week of 26 July, 4.3m users (or more particularly, "user agents") used the TV functionality, while 1.3m used radio. 0.4m used both. That means an awful lot of people are using TV but not using radio - 9% in fact. Whereas around 31% of radio users also use TV. Seeing how that 9% changes over a longer period will be something to watch out for.

That said, people who listen to radio listen for much longer than television. In July radio users averaged 184 minutes, whereas TV users average just 69 minutes.

Top Gear continues to be the most popular show with episode 3 of the most recent series getting 1.273m requests. This was the episode that clashed with the World Cup Final...

I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue is the most popular radio programme with three episodes filling up the top three places each getting about 100,000 plays. I'm always surprised how many people listen to Chris Moyles on the iPlayer, since it's surely a show you need to listen to live? Yet it fills half the top 20 places.

The other notable radio performer was the World Cup quarterfinal between the Netherlands and Brazil. Because it took place in the afternoon, 69,000 people heard it streaming online.

There's plenty more to look at in the report.

Deloitte has commissioned another report into TV to accompany the Mediaguardian Edinburgh Television Festival. Perspectives on Television in Words and Numbers is well worth a read as there's lots to digest.

The headlines from this research centered around the fact that 86% of viewers watching pre-recorded programmes on PVRs always skip through the ads. Interestingly, this made the press release, but not the final report.

Instead the report digs deeper into how people used and trusted different media during the election, with television easily winning out. As other reports have also made clear, we've not yet really had our "internet" election.

The report goes into greater detail about television on demand, with a growing number of respondents claiming that this is important - significantly so amongst 18-24 year olds, the majority of whom consider this important. (As an aside, why does Sky still consider giving me access to the Sky Player an extra I should consider myself lucky to have? For the last couple of summers they've provided access to Sky Sports, for which I pay a subscription. And now I should consider myself fortunate to have it until the end year.)

The report shows that relatively few people are using their laptops, netbooks or smartphones to comment contemporaneously with live broadcasts of TV shows. Yet, this is surely only going to rise. Using Twitter or Facebook to comment on live shows like the X-Factor only makes them more unmissable to those who like those shows (In the case of X Factor, that absolutely does not include me. Indeed, I'm thankful that Tweetdeck has a filter option that lets users remove Tweets with certain keywords).

While the TV advertising is demonstrated has having the most impact, it's got to be worrying that as PVR ownership increases, fewer of those ads are going to be seen. Which brings us onto...

Product placement! While this is something of a step into the unknown for UK broadcasters, we're familiar with the very obvious branding in films (what action film doesn't partner with a mobile handset provider these days?) and imported TV like 24's Cisco kit and American Idol's blurred Coke glasses. The report quotes some American research that suggests recall can increase by 20% through product placement.

The BPI announced that music revenues were up 2.3% in 2009. That's right up! The BPI puts this increase down to innovation in the digital world and finding new revenue streams.

If you look at the full release, you'll see that although the overall revenue from Trade Income has increased by 1.4%, it's secondary revenues that have increased the most at 6.6%. Of that secondary revenues, "more than a third" of it comes from broadcasting and performance revenues (PPL announced pretty decent results earlier in the year).

While the development of new revenue streams is to be admired, it's interesting that even in these tougher times, revenues continue to rise in the music industry.

Finally, there's the big one. Ofcom's annual Communication Market Report. Weighing in at well over 350 pages, it's a canter through all areas of the media. I'll just pull a few points from the radio section and highlight them here.

Ofcom noted that while commercial radio's revenues have fallen 22% over the last five years, BBC Radio expenditure has risen by 26%. And despite the overall number of listeners increasing over the last five years reaching an all time high, the amount of time spent listening has diminished with commercial radio being especially badly hit over the last five years.

Those numbers would suggest that during a period when radio revenues decreased, perhaps less was invested in programming with a resultant fall in listening. I think it's arguable that radio is investing more in programming now - albeit not necessarily at a local level.

It's worth noting that in reporting podcast listening based on MIDAS results, Ofcom hasn't taken into account methodological changes in the most recent MIDAS survey. This results in a dip in podcast listening if you look at the numbers Ofcom shows in their chart (Fig 3.4 on p193). You only have to look at the reported podcast listening numbers from stations like Absolute Radio and the BBC to see that this isn't the case.

Fig 3.5 in the Ofcom report shows that 16-24s remain an audience for radio to be concerned about, with only 32% of listening time spent on live radio in this age group compared with 69% for all adults (Source: Ofcom research, June 2010).

Fig 3.36 (P223) is worth noting. It highlights just how well commercial radio does in Scotland, whereas BBC Local/National radio in Northern Ireland is especially strong.

While 66% of people have now heard of DAB, only 17% of people said that they intended to buy one in the next 12 months. It's going to take a few more cheaper radios (like the announcement of a new sub-£40 Pure radio yesterday) to actually get them to commit though.

Satisfaction is amazingly high - both with the choice of stations, and what's carried on them. 93% of people are satisfied with thier station selection and 94% are satisfied with what's carried on them.

There's a lot in here, even if much of it has previously been reported. It's definitely worth a browse.

Yesterday I went to the press launch of Pure Digital's latest offering: Flow Songs Beta.

Essentially, it allows listeners to a number of Pure's internet radios (usually with FM and DAB built in), to identify and buy any track they hear played on their radios. The way it works is that when you're listening to a track you're interested in you press a button on the radio. At this point, the song is effectively "Shazamed" and the details of the track are presented to you along with the price. You can then complete your purchase and buy the song.

Once purchased, the song remains "in the cloud", and you can stream it from Pure's Lounge direct to your radio. You can also visit the Pure Lounge website and download the song you've bought in mp3 format, to place on whatever devices you like.

It seems to work pretty well - at least with Western tracks that are in Shazam's database, and 7digital's library (they're effectively retailing the music for Pure). At the presentation we were told it opened up the music of 15,000 streaming radio stations, which I'm not certain will prove to be the case - there's a lot of obscure music out there.

But it's a neat workaround stations either providing inaccurate "now playing" information, or not putting out any information at all. It also lets you identify and buy music from FM, internet and DAB stations.

Pure is using the strapline "Hear it. Buy it. Love it" to describe this service. This may ring a few bells with anyone who remembers a GWR texting initiative that had the strapline "Hear it, buy it, burn it" and also allowed you to purchase music you heard on the radio. Then there was the technology from UBC called Cliq. The fact that these services no longer exist, does suggest that they weren't glorious successes.

To be fair, that service only worked on certain stations, and was more complex. Using audio tagging via the services of Shazam is a clever workaround. But I'm not convinced that this is going to be quite the big thing that Pure thinks it'll be.

For starters, it's only in relatively expensive internet connected devices. And consumers have many different ways to buy music these days. Pure's not really winning over many radio stations with this technology. Although a listener is able to easily buy a track they've heard on the radio, there's nothing in it for the radio station. So I don't think many stations will be promoting this service. On the other hand, if you visit a commercial station like Absolute Radio or Classic FM, that publishes its full tracklisting on its website, the station can earn money via affiliate links with whichever music site they've done deals with. Although broadcast rules from Ofcom can limit how these services can be promoted, there's a belief that rules will soon be lifted to an extent allowing explicit calls to buy tracks via station websites.

But it's a useful bit of technology, and time will tell how much it's adopted by consumers.

One thing that came up, and I find really curious, is the legality of streaming tracks you've bought. Seemingly, even though I've purhcased a track, there may be issues about me streaming my tracks via devices like internet radios. There are plenty of applications that let you conncet to your music library remotely - streaming your home iTunes music at work for example. The suggestion is that this might not be legal! I'd like to learn more about this curio. I should add that Pure strenuously pointed out that they respect intellectual property, but this might be a PRS for Music/PPL issue. We'll see.

These are my opinions and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer. Mind you, I did attend the press event in working hours...

Updated to correct previous technologies.

It's that time of year again when up and down the land, radio stations learn how many listeners they have, and therefore how well they're doing. I always like to think of them as the equivalent of getting your exam results.

There'll be lots of coverage of RAJAR in the usual places: Media Guardian and Radio Today. There'll be a little bit in some of the trade press - but probably not a great deal (Broadcast magazine, for example, barely prints any radio news of any description, yet they'll keep you up to date about what programmes Sky Real Lives has commissioned).

So what are the big stories this time around?

I suspect that 6 Music is going to get another bit of publicity. When Q1 data was released, the station was still on the chopping block, and it had seen a surge in listenership as its possible demise led to people discovering it. The initial threat came a good half way through the last measurement period, and since RAJAR figures tend to be quoted on a weekly basis, the average for the quarter included a lot of the station's regular listening prior to the threat of closure. In other words, it was almost inconceivable 6 Music's figures wouldn't increase again.

This is borne out by the reach of the station increasing by a further 17% this quarter to nearly 1.2m listeners a week. Even more remarkable is the station's 31% increase in listening hours. It now has 10.270m hours a week. To put that in perspective, Radio 3, a national FM service has 10.477m hours a week. That's a remarkably large number for a digital only service. It also means that it has become a very important service in driving digital listening, accounting for 4% of all digital radio listening.

Whether these numbers can be sustained is a separate question, and I'd hazzard a guess they might drop a little next time. But time will tell.

Incidentally, that doesn't mean that I want anything untoward to happen to Radio 3, a cultural icon of this country.

For the second quarter in a row, more people are listening to the radio than ever before. I think I'd better say that again because it's not a boast that many media can make: more people are listening to the radio every week than ever before.

46.8m adults are listening to the radio each week, and overall listening time has also increased compared to both the previous quarter and the previous year. That's despite there being more alternatives for someone to listen to something other than radio than ever before. I mentioned previously that Tim Davies had revealed on the Radio Academy podcast that the latest BBC Eartime research reported that 82% of all listening of any sort was to radio (i.e. including listening to our own music, or other online services).

6 Music aside, this has actually been a good quarter for commercial radio. Nearly all the major groups have seen decent increases in listening. Global's listening hours have increased by 3.5%, while Bauer's have increased by 3.5%. I should report that overall listening to the Absolute Radio network of services has increased by 4.5% (and to the main service by 6.5%), and that's before our most recent launch - Absolute Radio 90s - has even been measured.

Overall this means that the BBC's share of the all radio pie has fallen a little from 57% to 55% and commercial radio has grown a bit from 41% to 43%. I should point out that commercial radio tends to serve some audiences much better than others. So in London, commercial radio has a 52% share of listening to the BBC's 45%. And amongst 15-44 year olds, commercial radio's share is 53% to the BBC's 44% because, let's face it, there are few commercial services for older listeners.

Getting into some individual stations, Chris Evans might be a little disappointed that his listening has fallen back a bit. It's probably not a surprise, as his first quarter figures were incredibly impressive. But then lots of people trialled the show, and it received an enormous publicity push at the start of the year. He's now fallen 8% to around 8.8m people a week. And Radio 2's overall listenership has fallen by about 6%. However, it remains easily the most listened to station in the country though.

Elsewhere nationally, Radio 1 has had a quiet quarter, Radio 3 has seen some falls, but Radio 4 and Five Live have both seen increases. Talksport also registered some growth, and like Five Live, probably benefited from the World Cup, much of which was in this period that ended on June 27. Classic FM has also seen some growth.

In London, there'll be the usual fighting and crowing about who's number one in London. The reality - rarely heard - is that Radio 4 is the biggest station in London. But you can't buy ads on that, so the biggest commercial station does matter. Last time around Magic held the crown in terms of the overall number of listeners, and Capital was the most listened to station. But it's all change this time around.

Heart has had a great quarter in London with a 16% increase in reach, and a 10% increase in hours. That powers it to the number one place in terms of reach. But Magic has also done exceptionally well and has increased its listening hours by 12% placing it as the most listened to commercial station in London.

Indeed Bauer has done very well in London all around, since Kiss is now the second largest commercial station in terms of hours, followed by Heart, LBC 97.3 and then Capital.

The reason that Capital does relatively poorly compared to the other stations in hours (although it maintains a decent reach), can be seen in the average number of hours listened to by each listener. Although this measure is a very "dirty" number, not taking into account heavy listeners and light listeners, it does reveal that the average Capital listener spends 5.6 hrs a week with the station, while the average Magic listener spends 6.8 hrs a week with the station. Heart, incidentally, is at an even lower average hours than Capital, at just 5.0 hrs a week, which is very odd. Assuming the station can hang on to the listeners it has, it really should be able to increase the number of hours spent listening to a number closer to 6.0 than 5.0, and in doing so, significantly increase its overall hours.

Stations that really superserve their listeners are Radio 2 with 11.9 hrs a week per listener, and LBC 97.3 with 11.4 hrs a week per listener. Absolute Radio's listeners are actually very loyal spending 7.4 hours per week with the station, and 6 Music is achieving 8.6 hrs a week.

Other stories to notice are Planet Rock, which achieved its highest ever listenership with 718,000 per week, although its listening hours fell back a bit this quarter. NME Radio achieved its best audience to date with a 12% increase in reach and a staggering 134% increase in hours. Sadly, during the survey period, it was struggling and has come off the national DAB multiplex as it was temporarily closed down. Since then, Town & Country has stepped in to restart the station and bring back presenters. Whether it'll return to national DAB is unclear, although these numbers do suggest a demand for the service. And the BBC Asian Network, which remains under threat of closure, seems to have rallied its listening with a 22% increase in reach, a 35% increase in hours.

At breakfast in London, Chris Moyles is holding Johnny and Lisa at bay by the narrowest of margins. But the biggest increase has come from Kiss, where Rickie and Melvin have seen their audience grow 38% on the previous quarter. (Again, I've not included the phenomenally popular Radio 4 in the mix here).

One key measure that's always of interest is digital listening, and it continues to increase, rising to 24.6% from 24.0% last quarter. In other words, nearly one in every four hours of listening to the radio is done via a digital device. That 24.6% is made up of 15.8% DAB, 4.1% digital TV, 2.9% internet, 1.8% unattributed - listeners who were unable to say what device they were using.

Commercial radio's digital listening stands at 24.4%, exactly the same figure as the BBC. (I should note that while commercial has seen a slight increase in listening share, the BBC has seen a slight fall in listening share from 24.6%. It seems likely that this is just a data blip, or an outlier data point. But I'm sure certain people will pounce on the number as some kind of failure, which would be very unfair). For commercial radio, that represents 1.5% increase on the last quarter.

Individual stations' digital listening is subject to those services publishing their own numbers, or granting others the right to publish them. However Absolute Radio is always happy to publish its numbers. Overall Absolute Radio is now achieving 32.5% of its listening via a digital platform. For its national service (so excluding people in London listening on FM), this rises to 54.4%. And for the entire network of services including the digital only Absolute Classic Rock and Absolute 80s, it's at 45.7%. While I can't quote other services' numbers, I can say that these are well ahead of most - but not all.

No doubt there'll be much more to come, and I've concentrated on the national and London areas, utterly ignoring some undoubtedly interesting regional pictures.

I will finally note, however, that Ofcom today allowed Smooth in both the northwest, and London, to finally remove "jazz" (and other specifically named music types) from its format requirement. This is the station that has at least twice in its life, been called Jazz FM. Latterly jazz was only played out overnight. Smooth is morphing into a fully national station in October, and this approval was expected. Jazz does continue in a digital form, with the Jazz FM brand living on. For the record, Jazz FM's reach dipped very slightly by 1.7%, but its hours increased by 5.3% compared with last quarter.

[UPDATE] Hadn't noticed that Five Live's reach is at an all time high for that station. And I should mention that Talksport is only just below its all time high reach.

Note: The source for all this data is RAJAR/Ipsos MORI/RSMB.

And as ever, these are my opinions and not necessarily those of my employer. That said, I wouldn't have access to these figures without being an Absolute Radio employee. And much of what I've written here is based upon work carried out for Absolute Radio. Why don't you visit Onegoldensquare.com and read our RAJAR release?

The latest Radio Academy podcast - the last of the series indeed - is about to be published by producer Heather Davies. It features, Trevor Dann talking to Global's Nick Piggott, the BBC's Chris Kimber and myself about radio five years hence.

I'm sure that, as Nick wisely said at the podcast's start, a large proportion of what we said will probably turn out to be complete nonsense and not happen like that at all. But that's one of the dangers of attempting to be media seers.

Before going on the podcast, I sat down and wrote some notes about things that might happen. Such is the way of these things, I only managed to talk about a couple of them. But since I put the notes together, I thought that I might as well publish them so I can be proved wrong in 2015.

BBC
- The current Charter runs until the end of 2016. So by 2015 we'll be a long way down the road of renewal. I suspect that the licence fee will at least be flattened and perhaps reduced. That doesn't mean that I'd welcome a massive reduction of BBC services as James suggested recently. Indeed such a move seems very doubtful indeed. The one service a Tory government is not going to play with is surely their members' favourite radio station - Radio 4. Similarly, they'd play with Radio 3 at their peril. In the podcast, Trevor suggested that James identified the wrong service and it should be Radio 2. That's an interesting idea - especially as Radio 2 was previously regional.
- Local is where there might be changes. But as commercial radio becomes a larger series of quasi networks, removing BBC Local radio would be very damaging. The decline of local newspapers could leave us with some big holes in local news reporting.
- Chris Moyles won't be on breakfast on Radio 1. He's 36 now and has just renewed for another 12 months. Will this be his last year on breakfast? Who knows.
- Radio 1 and 2 will continue to be under pressure from commercial sector and have to work ever harder to provide PSB commitments.

Commercial Radio
- There is a really interesting and important Broadcasting Code review at the moment, which could fundamentally change how commercial radio sounds. If the most flexible option put forward by Ofcom is adopted, then it's even possible for spot-airtime as we understand it to dissappear. It won't of course. At least not on most stations because spot-airtime is relatively easy to manage inexpensively. But it really is worth having a look at the very last page of Ofcom's 110 page document to realise how extreme this could be.
- I'd predict at least one significant commercial service operating on a new hybrid model that involved a more intergrated commercial funding route. That means operating without commercial breaks.
- Note that these rules could also (re-?) introduce a form of "payola" into commercial radio. Stations would be allowed to include take payment to adjust their playlists. At this point, listeners' trust in radio stations will become more crucial. What is and isn't a service prepared to do? And how will listeners respond?

Digital
- By 2015, there'll be a much clearer picture of where DAB and digital radio in general is. We've seen a couple of stronger brands going on D1 currently including Absolute 80s and shortly, Smooth. DAB set sales and broadband (both fixed and mobile) will dictate the digital pace.
- A more controversial idea is that Radio 1 and Radio 2 go DAB only in the same way that BBC2 has led the way going digital in switchover, and before that, when it launched in colour to push colour TV. Radio needs the same.
- The biggest challenge facing commercial radio is to drive up CPTs or cost per thousands. Especially digital CPTs that have been hitherto sold at a discount. The new IPA cross media research, TouchPoints, released last week revealed that radio accounts for 14% of the media day but only gets 4% of revenue, whereas press accounts for 7% of the media day, but 37% of revenues. Radio is terribly underpriced. Advertisers need to appreciate what a bargain they're getting!

Online
- Key here is to drive upwards from its current 2.9%, the amount of listening that takes place online. Mobile apps will continue to become ever more important, with additional functionality meaning that they compete with aggregator and third party pieces of software.
- But there will still be really serious issues over bandwidth. The Government's proposed "2 Mbps for all" minimum has been kicked into the long grass of 2015 because nobody can afford to do it. And mobile operators are already struggling under the weight of data usage. Despite what London-dwellers might believe, most of the population does not use an iPhone, Blackberry or Android device. But as prices fall, more will get these. Will the networks cope?

Competitors
- Spotify/Last.fm/mFlow/"Insert new undreamt of serveice here" - these are potentially the biggest concerns of radio. Tim Davie revealed a couple of topline stats from the BBC's latest Eartime research on the last Radio Talk, and they show that it's young people that are adopting these services the most. According to Tim, 82% of all "share of ear" (ie. listening to any kind of media, including YouTube videos) is to radio, which is a fantastic number. That includes listening to your own music on iPod or CD. But it falls to "about 60% among younger audiences." Radio can sometimes be very short-termist, but these are our next listeners.
- While that might seem to be of most concern to stations like Kiss and Radio 1, it's a problem for all of us, because if people get out of the habit of listening to the radio when they're young, they may never listen again.
- Radio needs to re-energise its youth listeners. I'm concerned that networked evening shows have removed a bit of the community appeal that can gather together groups of listeners locally. Radio can be very social - like a good pub or bar where you can "hang out." But that socialness can be dissipated by running only on a national basis. With large numbers of listeners, you can't easily reflect the local music scene or hear regular correspondents that comes from with a slightly more initimate appeal.
-Of course this is an opportunity for non-group local services.

Podcasts
- Monetising them! We're in the hands of Apple here, and they need to add the ability to buy podcasts rather than just get them free. They have the whip hand. Podcasts still aren't really mainstream, although they're moving in the right direction. More devices are gaining access to them, but this still needs simplifying. And it should be up to the producer whether or not they want to monetise them. (BTW: Just because the ability to monetise podcasts is there, it doesn't mean that everyone will charge. Some will attempt it, and others will stay free.)
- And I'd love to see more BBC programming - once its slipped beyond the free iPlayer window - being available to buy.

--

On a seperate note, David Hepworth's piece on a different model for speech radio is worth a read, as are the comments (and not because I've just contributed).

As ever, these are my own views and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer. That said, on the podcast, I was speaking as a representitive of said employer, Absolute Radio...

In 2006, the IPA launched a new research survey called TouchPoints. It was a radical new look at measuring media usage across different types of media rather than each industry looking at their own world. The idea was to make it easy for advertisers to plan across different types of media.

They also measured the results with some innovative new digital diary devices - effectively PDAs with bespoke software.

Yesterday, the third iteration of this survey was launched, and in London there was a very useful presentation acting as something of a primer for new users, as well as updating subscribers with details of the new additions to the survey.

There's a useful press release that highlights a few topline findings, although it must be said that the real value of the data really comes from delving deep into the data and discovering the media usage patterns of different types of individuals. Nonetheless, some of those topline findings are well worth highlighting here.

I'll look at some of the multimedia findings with a bit of a radio slant on them.

TouchPoints picture of the media day is always useful even if there are some issues to be confronted. Here is how TouchPoints sees media usage during the day.

Source: TouchPoints 3/IPA

Because the methodology used is different to that used by bespoke media measurement systems, so the numbers that TouchPoints give us are also different. So while Touchpoints says that radio is listened to for 2.1 hours (2 hrs 6 mins) per day, RAJAR tells us the number is 3.1 hours a day on average.

The biggest issue I have with this number - and it's one that a speaker at the launch event pointed out - is that Out of Home (or Posters to you or me) seems disproportionately large. The methodology to get a time is very different. So it's probably not really directly comparable.

Otherwise the ratios feel right to me. And one of the things that this chart doesn't show, but which TouchPoints can dig into, is the use of different media simultaneously. Most obviously, that means using the internet while watching TV or listening to the radio. Indeed another TouchPoints finding is the while dekstop PC ownership between TouchPoints 2 (carried out a couple of years ago) and TouchPoints 3 has remained flat at 51%, laptop ownership has sky-rocketed jumping from 38% to 58%. And those laptops aren't tethered to a particular room in the house - that's especially not the case when you discover that 36% of homes have WiFi networks (up from 13% previously).

One of the most useful charts that TouchPoints is able to provide is this one displaying the Media Day:

Source: TouchPoints 3/IPA. Base: All Media use per day.

While TV remains dominant, radio really is still an extraordinarily strong medium even with the continued growth of the internet.

Source: TouchPoints 3/IPA

This chart, showing media usage on an average day, shows that radio remains the dominent medium until the early afternoon, and remains very competitive right through until drivetime.

And this chart shows how radio (and the internet) achieve broad reach and volume, and are competitive with TV.

Source: TouchPoints 3/IPA and the AA/Warc Expenditure Report 2010. Base: Time and revenue calculated as a % of total internet, press, radio and TV only. Cinema, OOH and DM time not available.

Thinkbox, the organisation who represent TV, put together this chart using data from TouchPoints 3 along with AA expenditure by media. It compares the percentage of advertising revenue each medium takes compared with the amount of the media day that the audience consume that media.

Proportionately, radio is the big loser here, with vastly reduced expenditure in comparison with the significant cut through it achieves through the day. But that's also an opportunity. For a relatively small amount of cash, advertisers can achieve significant impact.

Furthermore, some of that internet time is being spent on radio and other media. But it's radio that has the most to gain from the internet according to TouchPoints 3 figures. It contributes an additional 24 minutes compared with 15 minutes gained by TV and 16 minutes for newspapers. That effectively removes 55 minutes from "pure" internet activities not related to an "old" media type.

There's lots more worth reading in the full launch presentation available from the IPA's website.

Note that this is cross posted from the Absolute Radio Onegoldensquare.com blog. I wouldn't have access to these figures otherwise! And a hat-tip to Matt Deegan for suggesting looking at iPhone only figures in relation to radio apps.

Yesterday RAJAR published the topline findings (PDF) from the latest MIDAS research. MIDAS - for the uninitiated - stands for Measurement of Internet Delivered Audio Services, and this is the sixth time that RAJAR has carried out this research.

It doesn't reveal specific facts and figures on a station by station basis, but it does provide a really clear overall picture of how radio internet-based services are evolving and being used. Notably, it includes podcasts and listen-again style services, and for the first time with this release, detail about the take-up of mobile phone apps.

RAJAR has highlighted that 20% of smartphone users on the survey have downloaded a radio app. That in itself is a great result, but not all smartphones are the same. While Blackberry, Nokia and latterly, Android have all shown enormous growth in recent years, the most mature "marketplace" or "store" to download apps is that of the iPhone family, including iPod Touch and now iPad. What's clear is that iPhone users are using data services more than other mobile users (although we're well aware that this may change).

If we examine the MIDAS data a bit deeper, it shows that 20% rises to 46% amongst iPhone users. In other words, nearly one in two iPhone users who've listened to the radio via the internet at some time, have downloaded a radio app. This is obviously fantastic news.

Here at Absolute Radio, we know the popularity of our apps because we can measure directly the number of hours that are listened to via mobile phones, and as our stats show, that number of hours continues to increase.

The RAJAR press release also highlighted the fact that 31% of listeners claim to have ever listened to radio via the internet, and 15% of listeners have ever downloaded a podcast, with half of current users listening at least once a week.

Digging a bit deeper into the data reveals a few more facts.

The number of people who listen daily or weekly to the internet has increased over the last couple of years.

Base: Those who ever listen to the radio via the internet.

And for the most part, people are multi-tasking when they're listening online.

Base: Those who ever listen to the radio via the internet.

With more people having access to the net, on more computers, radio listening - which is a very complementary to many internet-based activities - it's not surprisingly on the increase. We look forward to imminent launch of Radioplayer which will hopefully drive this listening further.

Awareness of WiFi radios continues to grow with 15% of people having heard of them. Of those who are aware of them, 13.2% own one. As we see more smart devices like the Pure Flow family of radios, this should continue to grow.

15.1% of all people listen to podcasts (Note: This figure can't be compared with previous MIDAS releases due to methodology changes).

19.6% of people who listen to podcasts do so every day, a number that has grown quite significantly over time as podcasting has become more established.

Comedy remains the most popular type of podcast to listen to (which will come as relief to Frank, David, Dave, Christian, Geoff and Iain) followed by music and then TV and film.

On average, podcast subscribers subscribe to 4.8 different podcasts, with 35-54s listening to the most: 5.57

But mean numbers can be a little misleading. Some people listen to an awful lot of podcasts, and there's a long tail effect in evidence. One respondent claimed to subscribe to 51 podcasts, and another subscribed to 99 (I'd poo-poo such figures, but I've just had a look at my own iTunes podcast subscriptions...).

As the popularity of podcasts grows, commercial radio stations have to continue to look at ways of monetising them. One question that's always asked is based around people downloading but not listening to podcasts. After all, podcasting software such as iTunes will automatically download podcasts.

76.4% of people listen to half or more of the podcasts they download, with 25.0% of people diligently listening to every single podcast they download.

And once people start listening they tend to listen to the whole episode. 85.9% of people listen to most or all of every episode they start to listen to.

What's more, people are happy to listen to older podcasts, with 82.6% of podcast listeners saying that they listen to episodes that are over a week old.

69.1% of podcast listeners listen on their computer while 64.9% listen on a portable mp3 player such as an iPod. 17.0% listen via their mobile phone.

Predominantly, people listen to podcasts at home, although listening while travelling is popular with a combined 44.6% of people listening as they travel.

Finally, 36.0% of people have started listening to radio programmes that they didn't previously hear as a result of listening to a podcast.

Awareness of personalised online radio services continues to grow. It would be a complacent radio industry that didn't acknowledge the growth and popularity of services such as Spotify and Last.fm. 41.9% of people are aware of such services, although that figure is very biased towards younger listeners.

That's really only a subset of the data, but gives you a flavour of how people are using the internet to listen to the radio.

Adam

Note on sample: The RAJAR Measurement of Internet Delivered Audio Services (MIDAS 6) was conducted during June 2010 by Ipsos MORI. The sample comprised RAJAR respondents drawn from the main RAJAR survey who had claimed to listen to the radio via the internet, or downloaded podcasts, or listened to the radio via their mobile phone. The survey findings are based on 1,083 respondents.

As mentioned yesterday, Ed Vaizey, the new Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, has today given a speech at a London conference outlining the new government's support for digital radio, and launching an action plan.

How his speech has been been interpreted depends on where you read about it. At Media Guardian the headline is "Ed Vaizey's praise for digital radio stops short of switch-off date" whereas the BBC initially referred to the action plan as a "setback" before amending their headline to "Changes to digital radio dependent on listener numbers".

I think that in the end, both of these headlines ended up accurate reflections of what Vaizey said and what the action plan says.

It's natural that radio should have been an outlet for this announcement, and Vaizey did the rounds of BBC Radio this morning appearing on Today and Five Live's Breakfast. The discussion was a little off-beam on today, with Grant Goddard the radio consultant getting a little bogged down in the technical history of DAB. Ben Budworth, who used to run OneWord, is fairly embittered about the whole thing which I think is a shame. OneWord's failure was probably a combination of coming too soon, and poorly executed programming with 80 part adaptations of Oliver Twist demanding far too much of the audience.

Goddard is right in arguing that DAB growth has to be consumer led. But I think the cost issue is misleading with early Freeview boxes easily costing more than DAB radio sets. He says that the average listener can get 12 services, and therefore perhaps unlike Freeview, where viewers may only have had 5 services previously, the demand for the new services isn't there. I don't believe that's the case. The average listener has five BBC national services and then - depending very much where they live - a selection of local and national commercial services. But that selection won't include any classic rock, jazz, urban, alternative or any one of a dozen other radio formats. I'd direct anyone who believes listeners already have enough choice to the music TV section of Sky where dozens of channels fight it out with their own distinct mixes of music genres.

On Today, Vaizey tried to make clear that actually what he's saying does not differ in any degree with what the last Government said. Instead, he's been putting together a structure that's required to get digital radio "off the ground".

The 2015 date isn't set in stone, but as Vaizey said, it's useful for there to be a target to move towards. But it's driven by the listener.

The Action Plan lays out five key objectives: consumer choice, quality, affordability, accessibility and awareness. I think they're all legitimate areas to be addressed.

I'm particularly interested in seeing new digital only services and information delivered via radio in innovative ways. I'm currently in the market for a radio that will record programmes in advance - ideally via an EPG. This is effectively the technology that has seen DVRs take-off in the TV world. Sky+ led the way, but inexpensive Freeview boxes are readily available, often with additional functionality like DVD burners. It's disappointing that there are relatively few DAB radios with SD card (or HD) recording functionality, and those that do exist are relatively expensive. Wifi radios still haven't hit the mainstream either, and you only have to look at the success of things the BBC iPlayer on consumer devices like the PlayStation 3 or Nintendo Wii to realise that the ability to listen again directly from your radio, or to record programmes and listen back at your convenience later - perhaps on your mp3 player - is really valuable functionality.

Coverage is also a critical area that needs addressing, while affordability and especially in-car issues still need to be addressed.

I'm also pleased to see that Ofcom will be publishing an annual review of the digital radio market with its first report being published in Q3 2010. Ofcom has long published a quarterly digital television market update, and if anything, an annual report isn't frequent enought. I'd like to see some new research to supplement the data that already exists in the marketplace. One shortcoming of the radio industry to date has been to rely too much on slivers of data garnered from other research - be it consumer questionnaires bundled with sets to over-reliance on RAJAR.

For example, nobody is really in a position to say which digital TV platforms perform best. Sky has the largest selection, but Freeview is more likely to be available on second and third TV sets in households.

Looking at replanning some aspects of DAB is also essential, including both local and regional multiplexes. Given some of the changes we've seen in ILR licences with the forthcoming Heart super-stations, and the move to Digital One of Smooth, as well as the significant number of FM services for whom DAB is not currently an option, there is potentially a smarter way to do things.

Also speaking at the Intellect conference was Tim Davie, BBC Director of Audio and Music. He outlined the BBC's measures to support digital radio.This is activity that supports the Digital Radio Action Plan.

The BBC will roll out an additional 61 transmitters to take in-home coverage of DAB from 85% to 92%. This measure will also increase motorway coverage of DAB to about 93% of the motorway network.

London is getting a particular boost with four extra transmitters to match the BBC's FM coverage, reaching 99% from today's 89%.

There are other measures including the relaunch of Radio 7 as Radio 4 Extra, using BBC expertise to help the industry including after-market DAB radios, and funding the marketing of all digital radio platforms.

Finally, there's the forthcoming launch of the Radioplayer - "a single online console that will offer all UK radio in one place."

I think that these are great moves, although I think that in medium term the BBC needs to do more to drive digital. It will need to include plans to migrate some of their most popular services across to digital to drive take-up.

The conflation of "DAB" and "digital radio" is a major issue here. It's often confused, but in both announcements today, it's clear that the term "digital radio" means more than just DAB. I mention this only because some seem perversely keen to believe that digital radio only means DAB and not internet listening. Both Ed Vaizey and the BBC make that clear in today's announcements.

In summary, there really wasn't anything that new today, aside from giving digital radio a bit of impetus. It's now down to station groups and manufacturers to take up the cause and give consumers a reason to want to go digital.

(As an aside, the Daily Express, published by pornographer and sometime Nazi-impersonator Richard Desmond, today followed up yesterday's Mail with an inaccurate story about radio being switched off. Frankly, the horrificly homophobic cover offends me to a far greater extent, and the paper has such low editorial values, that I'm not going to dwell any further on it.)

Other reading:

Matt Deegan's writing a series of pieces on digital upgrade. Here's part 1, and here's part 2.

James Cridland has some interesting thoughts on a Government-mandated switchover, although I'm not sure I agree with them fully (I've commented on his site).

These views are mine, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

I'm going to do something here that's very dangerous. I'm going to conflate two separate stories into one. But follow me through. They are two separate stories, but there are commonalities and themes that run through them.

Today's Daily Mail (listen to Monday's I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue for more details on what this paper's readers expect) they published an article claiming that motorists must replace their radios at a cost of £300 or "buy special 'conversion' kits that must be attached to the windscreen, often alongside Satnavs, which could also cost more than £100."

This comes ahead of a speech that is to be given by Ed Vaizey at a conference in London tomorrow where it's expected that he'll continue with the previous government's plans regarding the change to digital. Interestingly, Intellect the company putting on tomorrow's conference, is the trade body representing precisely those businesses and manufacturers who will be building those digital radio devices.

The Digital Economy Act was passed during the "wash up" period of the last Parliament, and one of the things it allows for is a change to a digital broadcasting platform, much as TV has been changing.

Cue lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth as commentators (some might say "naysayers") talk about the low level of digital listening (it's currently at 24.0% of all radio listening) and the fact that we're not ready to upgrade. Others will say that the technology being adopted out of date.

I've been through many of these arguments before, and feel free to peruse this blog to see my rebuttal of many of these points.

Returning to the Mail's claims today - the £300 figure seems to come from Halfords. And it's true that the popular motoring store does seem to only stock a single after-market DAB radio which is priced that highly. But DAB radios are available for well under £200 at Argos for example. And the industry is well aware of the issues surrounding car audio. These prices will drop. Major manufacturers will fit DAB radios as standard - some already are in certain lines.

The £100 "converter" price is confusing as the primary device in this market is the Pure Highway - priced at well under one hundred pounds. It's £80 at Argos and can be had cheaper online. I believe that you can look towards Sat Navs having DAB functionality added to them in the fullness of time. We're already seeing Freeview added to the devices, allowing a form of digital radio listening to be experienced in car.

In the meantime, some commentators (yup - pretty much the same ones), have read more into the BBC Trust's interim report on the BBC Strategic Review than perhaps is actually there:

There are big challenges ahead for digital radio too, although the direction of future change is much less clear. The BBC's newer stations were designed in part to drive digital take up. By 2010, we can see that take up of DAB radio has been slower than expected ten years ago and the BBC's digital-only stations have not achieved the audiences or impact that was then expected, although the intention behind the Digital Economy Act was to provide new impetus. The BBC is already committed to playing a role in leading the UK radio industry to a fully digital future. A question remains about what that means in the longer term and what the potential is for internet-based radio platforms to evolve. If DAB is to be the future, the BBC can only be one player, alongside Government and the commercial industry, in deciding what the strategy should be for the future shape of investment in both infrastructure and services.

I don't see that as them saying that DAB is "flop."

I think that's probably a fair assessment. Can more be done with DAB? Yes. Should we be looking at internet-based platforms? Of course. But a variety of formats for audio delivery is going to remain critical. Broadband penetration has largely stalled with the remainder either unable to get broadband at an acceptable cost or digitally disenfranchised perhaps on the basis of cost. An over-the-air solution is critical. And unfortunately the mobile networks are teetering with the current mobile data requirements. In their rush to sell us smartphones, their networks - especially in urban areas - aren't built up enought to sustain the data levels that a push to more streaming media consumption would require. Hence the curtailment of unlimited data plans.

Nonetheless, the UK Radio Player is around the corner and should at least get the paltry 2.9% of listening that's currently attributable to internet listening up a bit. Whatever the merits of IP distribution, broadcast listening is much more popular, especially amongst those homes who do have a decent broadband connection and are currently underutilising it for radio delivery.

Let me head off on a tangent for a moment, before I meet you at the pass. (Note to self: do not mix your metaphors like that.)

In today's Evening Standard, Anne McElvoy takes a look at the BBC Trust's report, and brings up the same ridiculous idea of selling Radio 1 and Radio 2 to a commercial operator as we've had before from various otherwise quite sensible people.

I've said this before and will say again: this makes no sense.

In the first instance, it's most often the case that the commentator making the suggestion does not listen to either service. In the commercial sector we always have our "issues" with the BBC, but I think most will admit that in things like their news provision and their support for new music, there are few commercial competitors. There are genuine public service aspects to the stations. Indeed, there should be more.

Earlier in the week I linked to this document and pointed interested readers at page 33. It's the financials from the BBC's Annual Report and Accounts. It reveals the cost of Radio 1 at £43.8m and Radio 2 at £52.5m. There is not a commercial station in this country spending anywhere remotely close to that on programming. I've no doubt some costs could always be cut in those figures, but it's not just going on Jonathan Ross's Radio 2 salary.

A quick look at the Radio 2 schedule reveals regular documentaries, specialist programmes on folk, jazz, big band, soul, country, organ music, big bands, brass bands, and much more. Those things can be expensive to do. Friday Night might well be Music Night, but it sure ain't cheap.

Furthermore, let's look at the figures.

According to the Radio Advertising Bureau, commercial radio made £514.9m in the 12 months ending Q1 2010.

RAJAR shows that commercial radio has a total of 418m hours per week. Radios 1 and 2 between them have a total of 270m hours between them - 65% of what commercial radio has.

Hours are important because they dictate how much money a station can make.

It's hard to imagine a similar scenario in another world, but what we're looking at here is something akin to a medium sized town that only has small local food shops, most of whom have been actively prevented from expanding, suddenly being subjected to the arrival of both Sainsburys and Tesco. As people who live in small (and big) towns know well - the impact would be devastating.

So if Radios 1 and 2 became commercial, they'd immediately add nearly two thirds to the available inventory. And the advertising "cake" of £514.9m would have to be split very thinly among the current services. That's a monumental market intervention. It wouldn't so much upset the market as destroy it.

Agencies would be basically forced into paying what Radios 1 and 2 wanted to charge - think of ITV in the "old" days.

The inevitable result would be dozens and quite probably hundreds of stations immediately going out of business. (Putting this into context - there are only something over 300 commercial stations in the UK).

The advertising would flood into the only two popular music FM bands available. And listeners would have much less choice as the dial emptied of viable competitors.

Furthermore, even if stiff financial requirements were imposed on buyers - for example, the need to switch to digital being added to the licence - the costs would mean that listeners would have an inferior service. Profits would need to be returned to shareholders. Less money would be spent on output. And in general, we'd have a worse selection of services available.

There is simply no way selling off those services makes sense.

Instead, the need for a BBC digital strategy has never been stronger. Those two services should be used to drive digital listening. As that increases, manufacturers would develop those cheap radios that Daily Mail readers are crying out for. And the medium would end up in a much stronger position as we emerge into a digital future.

As always, these are my views, and aren't necessarily shared by my employer.

Well - "the case has not been made" for closing it down. So reads one of the lines of the BBC Trust's Interim conclusions.

In other words, 6 Music has been saved.

On Twitter, the excitement is already palpable.

Now though, the station faces the future. How many of its newly found audience will stay with it? I confidently expect the audience to increase again at the next RAJAR, if for no other reason than the fact that 6 Music's impending closure was only announced partway through Q1.

But will those listeners all stay with the station? And more to the point, will the station continue to grow? If it were to become too big, then as I mentioned in a previous entry, it would become troublesome to the commercial sector.

The BBC Trust does recognise this:

We recognise that any proposal to close a BBC service is unlikely to be popular with those who use it. However, we do need to consider the question of whether the future growth of the service would significantly impact the market. We note that throughout the period of our consultation we have received no evidence from the commercial radio sector to suggest that 6 Music presents any kind of threat either now or in the future so long as it remains true to its distinctive remit. We also note the strong view expressed by many in the music industry that 6 Music plays a very valuable role in the cultural life of the UK that would not be easily replaced and that would not be filled by the commercial sector.

Personally, I believe that this was the right decision. I'm pretty unconvinced that the commercial sector is able to do exactly what the BBC can do. We can certainly make a go of it, and I think my own employer's services like Absolute Xtreme, and latterly Dabbl, make an interesting case. But Xfm is not the station it once was, and NME Radio closed down just as the BBC's Strategy Review consultation closed.

Of key importance to me is one of the factors that the BBC Trust has highlighted. It says that the review "has been helpful in highlighting the need for a further review of the BBC's digital strategy."

6 Music is one those services that has driven listeners - or potential listeners - to buy DAB radios, or to discover new ways of listening online or through their digital televisions. It's those kinds of services that digital radio needs to build its future.

We're now underway in the digital "upgrade" or "switchover". Whatever the terminology, it means that listeners need some benefit in adopting digital radio.

I make no bones about it. My employer has launched Absolute 80s nationally following a successful December launch in the London area, and Absolute Radio 90s has just launched in London. In the meantime, despite the sadness that will follow with the inevitable job losses, Smooth has boldly decided that its future is national and it too is joining that Digital One national platform.

New services like these will persuade people to buy digital radios, and the BBC is going to have to look at how it plans to migrate its audience onto digital.

I know that this won't be popular with some people. But digital is vital for our medium's future and there's no avoiding that reality. Contrary to popular belief, nobody's saying that FM will be closed down at some point. If listeners don't decide they want to go digital, and sets are not bought, then it won't happen. So the radio industry - and particularly the BBC - has to provide the reasons for people to make that switch.

6 Music aside, Five Live is a great case in point. The other day I highlighted "BBC Tennis", but on Saturday, it went one further. At 3pm on Saturday, the BBC was broadcasting Wimbledon on Sports Extra, World Cup football on Five Live, cricket on "Radio 4 LW" (which is also a DAB channel) and later the Tour de France online. If listeners want to hear something, then they will seek out the means to do so.

The Radio Player is imminent with a new easy to use mechanism to allow listening to radio via the internet (Only 2.9% of all radio listening is via the internet - a terribly disappointing amount).

Apps on mobile phones are now common ways to listen to the radio (although sadly the mobile networks can't keep up and are putting an end to "unlimited" data plans which prevents a certain amount of listening via 3G).

Saving 6 Music is one key way to help build radio's digital future.

It is worth mentioning that Asian Network's future does not look so rosy. And those 25% cuts in online were inevitable.

Lost amid the noise surrounding 6 Music's survival is the fact that the BBC publishes its Annual Report and Accounts today. This is always worth a read, although my favourite page is undoubtedly p33 in this document.

There you'll learn that the wonderful BBC Four costs £74.0m while BBC Three costs £118.6m. Now if the BBC really wanted to make some savings in an area that's already well served by the commercial sector...

As ever, these are my views, and they do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

You're a news and sport radio station.

It's reached the stage in the World Cup where final group games take place simultaneously and you've promised listeners that you'll cover all the matches.

It's Wimbledon fortnight and Andy Murray has his opening match.

There's an emergency Budget taking place in the Commons.

[UPDATE] And an England v Australia one-day fixture.

How do you cover all this? Ordinarily Five Live's "sister" service, Five Live Sports Extra would suffice. But this week, there's just too much happening. So you play around with your DAB multiplex, and you conjour up a new service: BBC Tennis.

The BBC really does cover Wimbledon well. Last night when I got in, I had the choice of six live games on satellite (Freeview viewers get slightly fewer). And then there's the HD TV coverage.

For the technically minded, this service has the effect of knocking Radio 4 down to 80k mono. In other words, it occupies the space used by Parliament and the Daily Service during other Radio 4 opt-outs.

Incidentally, I believe Talksport uses DAB and AM to offer listeners a choice of either game during these final stages, although I've not been able to confirm that on their website. As digital platforms become more popular, this is going to become a harder decision to make. If loyal listeners have purchased DAB sets, then they might be disappointed to have to dig out an AM radio to hear an England game when the less popular fixture has been put on the digital platform.

I did notice that Talksport is not carrying streaming coverage of their games however, which surprised me since Five Live is. This is almost certainly due to Talksport's ability to geo-IP block since their rights almost certainly only extend to the UK. [UPDATE] This is due to the additional fees FIFA wanted to allow streaming rights (See comments below).

One way or another, you're spoilt for choice with sport on the radio.

I really like radio drama, although I'll freely admit that I don't get to hear enough of it. So the piece in today's Guardian made for interesting reading.

It highlights the fact that Radio 4 is losing the Friday Play, and the strain in general that radio drama finds itself under.

What can radio drama to become more popular? Here are the things I'd do:

1. Podcasting. The Guardian piece mentions that something else might happen, but this is the most obvious thing to do. The Archers is podcast but no other drama is, despite the fact that a "play of the week" or something similar would be enormously popular, barely any radio drama is made available to download to an mp3 player. You only have to look at iTunes' podcasting charts to see how much Radio 4 programming populates the charts. Listening to a play on the way to work would be popular with lots of listeners.

   I believe the BBC is a little nervous about this area as it's specifically not allowed to podcast audiobooks, which effectively means the Book at Bedtime. But the reality is that unless it's a major franchise that BBC Worldwide thinks deserves a CD release, such as the Smiley series, once broadcast plays just end up deep in an archive somewhere.

2. Plays on iTunes. One of the main problems with radio plays being made available to download is music rights. The Archers has little to no incidental music, but other radio play use much more music. This becomes problematic for licencing and it inevitably costs money to licence. Deals also have to be struck with Equity for paying actors. But if plays were made available to buy on iTunes, then both of these problems could be overcome. In the same way that I'm able to buy Doctor Who episodes on iTunes a week after broadcast, the same could be done to radio plays. Listen to them free via the iPlayer for the first week, and thereafter buy them on iTunes, Audible, Amazon or anywhere else.

   The actual costs of running this should be pretty cheap. The digital files already exist - it's just a bit of admininstration, and ensuring that original contracts take this kind of reuse into account. While I wouldn't expect too many bestsellers beyond the likely candidates, the long tail effect would certainly occur, and a new revenue stream would be opened up.

   Currently, the only "easy" way to listen to a radio play on an iPod or similar is to record it at time of broadcast using something like a DAB radio with SD recording functionality, "ripping" an iPlayer stream (which involves listening in real-time anyway, thus defeating the purpose to a large extent), or downloading from less-than-legal sources online.

3. Radio Drama on Radio 1. Once upon a time, Radio 1 did a bit of radio drama. Hard to believe but true! For example, Dirk Maggs - recently responsible for new Hitchhikers' adaptations - made versions of Superman and Batman that were broadcast on Radio 1 in a short episodic format. And in 1996, Radio 1 broadcast Independence Day UK presented in a style not dissimilar to Orson Welles' War of the Worlds. It featured then Radio 1 DJ, Nicky Campbell, and Patrick Moore.

   Of course, today such an obvious promotional film tie-in would be impossible. It's a little like giving an hour's free advertising to the film release on Radio 1. But while a few Torchwood spin-off radio plays have aired on Radio 4, it's not hard to imagine that a version of them, or perhaps something like Being Human, could air on Radio 1. As well as increasing the public service delivery of Radio 1 (I'm not going to get all "commercial radio" on Radio 1 and bemoan the station too much), it would serve as an introduction to new drama listeners. There's no reason that radio shouldn't be listened to by the young.

4. Make Award Winners Available. In the recent Sony Radio Academy Awards, the gold, silver and bronze drama winners were People Snogging in Public Places, The Day That Lehman Died, and The Loop. As it happens, I heard both the silver and bronze winners around the time of broadcast - although neither live. Yet, if you fancy listening to these award winners now, you can't - with one exception. The Loop was last broadcast in November, and People Snogging in Public Places was broadcast in September.

   The good news is that The Day That Lehman Died is available to listen. That's because it was commissioned by the BBC World Service, and much of their programming is available well beyond the regular BBC 7-day iPlayer window.

   Unless the BBC repeats them, there is no possibility of hearing two of these award-winning plays - possibly ever again! And this is despite award winners being one of the few times that radio drama gets some publicity.

The growth in popularity of audiobooks shows that radio is still a wonderful medium for telling stories. And it's only really the BBC that can make or commission dramas (Yes - there was OneWord, although I'm not sure that they ever commissioned drama. Certainly LBC once did - back in the 80s, via their legal correspondent I believe. But aside from a handful of one-offs, that's about it).

So can we please allow listeners to hear plays in the manner that they'd like to - on their own terms?

A few things that caught my eye this week:

By far the best World Cup package surrounding the games must have been the package that aired after the Italy v Paraguay game. It was all about the footballers of Robben Island.

While they were locked up by the apartheid regime, football was one of the few outlets that prisoners had, although they were heavily punished before they were allowed to play. It's really worth a few minutes of your time to watch before expiring from the iPlayer on Monday evening.

Later this evening, there's a South African made docudrama based around the same story.

The President of France and his lovely wife were in London today visiting Broadcasting House to celebrate the 70th anniversary of General de Gaulle speaking to France from the BBC after the country had been occupied. Those speeches effectively brought about the French resistance. Newsnight produced a marvellous piece detailing the full story.

There are plenty of good football podcasts out there: Danny Baker's going great guns in South Africa, while Alan Davies is back in the UK essentially shifting the emphasis of his Arsenal podcast onto the national team. For more serious fare there's the Guardian's World Cup Daily which is nice and pithy, while I also like ITV's football podcast mostly presented by Ned Boulting. And finally the iTunes chart topping Baddiel and Skinner are out in South Africa with daily podcasts for my employer which are well worth a listen.

The major football podcast I've not listened to is the BBC's World Cup Daily which is made up of highlights of the previous 24 hours. Interestingly, the BBC has turned Five Live Sports Extra into a rolling repeat of this service when it's not broadcasting other sporting coverage (we've had Ascot this week, there are some rugby tests, and Wimbledon starts on Monday). Ordinarily, during "dead air" it just runs a generic loop highlighting upcoming coverage. It's now a bit more like those loops you find under the red button on TV.

Good news if you're a fan on 80s music - Absolute 80s, which only launched in London at the end of 2009 - is going national from 10am this morning on digital radio.

If you can hear stations on the D1 multiplex (i.e. Absolute Radio, Talksport, Classic FM etc), then you should be able to hear Absolute 80s.

As I mentioned in yesterday's RAJAR analysis, Absolute 80s had a great digital launch and has already superseded some of its digital competition in its first RAJAR book. So the station will probably be well received across the country.

And if you're thinking: "But what about that space in London where Absolute 80s is currently broadcast?" Coming soon: Absolute Radio 90s...

Read more here.

Disclaimer: This is the company I work for, and I've been involved in getting the station launched on D1. But I think it'll prove to be a very popular station.

In an experimental change, RAJAR brought forward the release time of this quarter's RAJAR to midnight tonight. But I've been out, so I'm an hour or so later than Matt's sterling summary of RAJAR which is pretty comprehensive.

There are two big stories that are going to get all the coverage in the papers later today... Well I say that, but the Cameron/Clegg government is probably going to fill most of the Home News pages leaving little room for incidentals like RAJAR. But should radio make a mark, there are two big stories:

1. Chris Evans has grown his audience by 1.1m.

2. BBC 6 Music has recorded its best results ever - by a massive margin.

The first story is interesting because there had been so-called leaks appearing in the Sunday papers (well the Sunday Times anyway) suggesting that Evans' audience would increase by 10%. In fact, that turned out to underestimate the true figures. On a like for like basis (bear in mind that Evans extended his show by half an hour eating into Sarah Kennedy before him) his audience increased by 1.1m or 13.1% on the previous quarter. What's more, that's a 17.6% increase on the previous year.

Anyone who was at the Sonys where he was presenting, saw Evans in a fairly "up" mode, and the unpublished monthly data that the BBC (and other broadcasters) receives had probably hinted at this.

One interesting note is that while Radio 2's overall average age did rise slightly to 51.0 from 50.7 (a marginal increase to be fair, and probably not statistically significant), the average age of Evans' show did decrease from 52.6 to 50.9. That's something that will begin to concern commercial competitors to Evans. Nobody wants to see Radio 2 getting younger - including the BBC to be fair.

But undoubtedly it's a great result for one of our most talented broadcasters.

On Twitter, the 6 Music story started much earlier. I'm not sure how wise it is for broadcasters who have a vested interest in a station (and indeed a show on a station) to hint at stories they've heard - whatever the source - prior to the figures being released. But one way or another by about 6pm this evening, a Twitter search for "6Music" showed lots of excitement about the station's figures.

In fact, we didn't need to wait until 8am later today to find out the story. The station has had a rise in reach and hours through the stratosphere, putting on very close to 47% in reach - which means just over 1m listeners per week, up from just under 700,000 previously.

What's more interesting, although will be less widely reported, is that listening hours more than doubled. In some respects you'd expect reach to have gone up given the enormous amount of coverage the "Save 6 Music" campaign has achieved. If nothing else, people who perhaps hadn't previously discovered the station, have now found it. I say that the hours result is surprising because "trial" of a station is one thing: you look around - listen for a bit - and then perhaps don't tune in again. But hours reflects the volume of listening, and it's there that the figures are really impressive.

What this will mean for the station is hard to say. The BBC Trust consultation closes in just less than two weeks, and rumour has it that they've had a staggering response. But will this growth in audience help the station? Or might it hinder things as commercial competitors begin to feel the pain (more anon)?

Those are the two stories you'll probably read about, but what else is there?

Well RAJAR helpfully pointed out that the overall number of people who listen to radio has increased to a new record high - 46.5m people listening every week. And all radio listening returned to over one billion hours. Last quarter it dipped for the first time in a long time below that amount. It's a testament to the medium that despite the many other things seeking our attention, radio remains so important and so relevant to so many people.

That's undoubtedly fantastic news for a medium which is never at the forefront of people's perceptions. Radio's often just there.

Digital listening has massively increased. We all know that there are a lot of digital "naysayers", and sometimes there are some valid points to be made. But just as most other media have gone digital, so radio's digital growth continues. There was something of a "blip" - a statistical aberration, if you will - last quarter, when digital listening actually fell from 21.1% to 20.9%. Statistically, this wasn't a significant decrease, but it got reported in some quarters as though listeners were rejecting digital radio as a platform.

The post Christmas period has historically always shown increases, and this quarter is no different. Think of all those DAB radios gift recipients unwrapped! Of all the radio listened to each week, 24.0% is now via a digital platform - significantly up on that 20.9%. Both commercial radio and the BBC saw increases in their digital listening shares achieving 22.9% and 24.6% respecitively.

Does the radio industry still have a way to go until we reach the 50% suggested by Lord Carter in 2009's Digital Britain report? Certainly. But this is a significant leap forward, and is terrific growth. Set against a backdrop of DAB radios continuing to become cheaper (Sainsburys is currently selling DAB radio alarm clocks for just £9.99) and before the UK RadioPlayer has launched (which should drive online listening), this is a superb result. Nearly 35% of homes now have a DAB radio too.

I should at this point mention one of my employer's stations - Absolute 80s. This only launched at the end of 2009, and this quarter had its first set of figures. They are stunning. It already reaches well over a quarter of a million people and delivers 1.4m hours a week. To put this in perspective, it's more than NME Radio and Q Radio, and delivers nearly as many listening hours as Heat. All of these are stations that have been around much more than three months.

Remember that this is a station that so far is only available on DAB in London! And to say that it has had a modest marketing budget is unfair on the word modest. It's success to date has been totally based on discovery.

Perhaps its success isn't too surprising given the success of TV series like Ashes to Ashes, and one look at the compilation album charts will highlight the demand for eighties music.

What else is there to say? Quite a lot.

Absolute 80s contributed to a solid overall impression on the Absolute Radio Network of stations which showed an increase in reach and hours (although the main service did see small declines. Perhaps some of our listeners moved across to 80s?).

That's not a bad result set against an overall disappointing picture for commercial radio. All of the four biggest commercial radio groups saw falls in market share (i.e. listening hours) against a successful BBC set of figures.

Indeed Evans helped BBC Radio 2 to what I believe is Radio 2's biggest ever reach figure. And while Evans is stealing all the limelight, it's worth noting that Radio 1 has also had a great set of numbers with Chris Moyles also getting a great breakfast result, and leading Radio 1 to reporting its biggest reach since at least 1999 and possibly ever as well! (I don't have the paper figures to hand to check right back to the start of RAJAR).

With all five of the BBC's main networks reporting increases in reach, and many of them reporting increases in listening hours too, it's not perhaps surprising that the BBC's lead over commercial radio increased to 56.5% compared with commercial radio's 41.3% (No - they don't add up to 100%. The difference is non-RAJAR radio listening). That's something that will concern commercial operators.

It's also interesting to note that while 6 Music has obviously received an enormous boost via the threat of its closure, the same isn't true of the Asian Network. It saw decreases in both reach and hours. While I imagine 6 Music's future isn't completely determined yet, you must imagine that the Asian Network's future has been.

In London, there's a great merry-go-round happening. Look forward later this morning to hearing top-of-hour jingles from both Captial and Magic, each claiming to be the city's biggest music service. This is because more people listen to Capital, but people spend more time with Magic. Rumours that this is because Magic listeners fall asleep listening to the station are not fair...

Capital's reach is a real storming number, since in one fell-swoop, it overtook three other competitors to reach top spot. I rather suspect that we're going to continue to see lots of changes in London listening figures each quarter, because there's no overall trend really happening.

Global will also be pleased with Classic FM's results which show decent increases in both reach and hours. UTV will be less happy with Talksport which sees a 5.1% dip in reach but a much more significant 20.0% drop in hours. Quite why that might be is difficult to say, since as far as I'm aware, programming has remained consistent. But they did have a good previous quarter, so perhaps there's something of a statistical correction happening.

Planet Rock is probably still celebrating its Sony Radio Academy Award as digital station of the year (more on these awards in the next couple of days - I'm still catching up). And they've now received a record number of listening hours, which is great news for the station.

Do feel free to ask questions in the comments. I'll try to help where I can.

Disclaimer: I work for Absolute Radio and these are my views, and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer. I'm also on the RAJAR Technical Management Group, but I don't really think that comes into play here. That all said, if it wasn't for all of that, I probably wouldn't be able to write this. I certainly wouldn't have full access to the figures. And this piece is based on something I wrote for my employer internally earlier yesterday.

Chris Morris on the launch of Virgin 1215 from back in 1993.

I'm looking forward to see Morris' new film Four Lions next week.

Richard Bacon hosted an Election Special on 6 Music on Friday discussing how each party might approach the music industry.

John Wittingdale was on the programme for the Conservatives, and while I wouldn't suggest that what he said on the programme would affect my vote, I did enjoy this bit:

I've not been into Fopp for ages so it was very interesting to see their default till message.

I listened to this on the way into work this morning, and it's a great little documentary about the art of re-mastering.

Mohr-Pietsch talks to a number of different people who've been through the re-mastering process, and talks about the pros, and perhaps not so much, the cons. This is one of those instances where listening to a compressed mp3 of the programme perhaps hides the subtlties of the audio examples that are given.

It was wonderful to hear the piece where a telephone rang somewhere between the control room and a recording orchestra. In the original vinyl recording it would never have been picked up, but once the audio is cleaned up - there it is.

The editor of Music Week accepts that sometimes there are a few too many "remasters" appearing. Those bands that re-release their back catalogue every year or two are the guilt culprits here. It's one thing to repackage the audio with additional tracks, alternate versions and B-sides, but it was refreshing to hear the person who re-mastered The Who more than once admit that his later tinkering probably wasn't necessary.

There's a separate argument to be had about loudness in some of these masters. Simply making certain elements louder "because you can" possibly doesn't give the best listening experience.

I'd have also liked to hear more about the differences in types of re-masters - albeit that the programme opened with the clear statement that re-mastering means different things to different producers. The Beatles re-masters, for example, have been rebuilt from the ground up to a much larger degree than tracks where a bit of decrackling and pop-removal has taken place.

But overall, it's well worth a listen! (And at time of writing, you still have the better part of six days to hear it).

At the weekend I was idly watching some television with the netbook on my lap (something that happens a bit too much) when out of the corner of my eye I noticed Johnny and Lisa on a TV ad.

I looked up, keen to see what the new Capital Radio TV ad would look like. Except, it wasn't an ad for Capital. The absence of Capital branding around the studio and on the microphones was the first giveaway.

In fact it was an ad for Belvita Breakfast, a new breakfast biscuit from Kraft Foods (click through to see the ad in the absence of a YouTube version).

Now far be it from me to critique the creative merits of the ad. And at least they don't pretend to be talking on the radio - a big Ofcom no-no according to the current Broadcasting Code. You'd be in breach of all sorts of things - not least undue prominance.

I do think it's interesting that a current major breakfast show is being replicated in a debranded version for an advertiser.

At least they've used real DJs. There are those "so bad they're good" Halifax adverts.

I'm not sure if anyone who made these ads had a clue about anything, but aside from Ofcom considerations, Halifax's station has to be the most overstaffed service in existance. The Today Programme won't have as many people working for it as are hanging around in the back of the Halifax's radio station. (Broadcasting to who incidentally? Perhaps they should play this out in branches. That'd quickly drive custom elsewhere.)

I don't feel quite as strongly about these ads as Nik Goodman does, but they're undoubtedly appalling.

One more?

Wow!

Look - allow me a little leeway as I get quite excited about something that is completely related to where I work. But Absolute Radio has just received an outstanding 12 Sony Radio Academy Award nominations this evening - 11 of which are for our main service, while the other is for Absolute Radio Classic Rock as a Digital Station of the Year nominee.

To put that in context, it's more than any commercial radio station has ever received for the Sony Awards in their entire history.

Absolute Radio is up against BBC Radio Five Live and TalkSPORT for UK Station of the Year. Christian is up for a total of four awards. Geoff gets two nominations for his work on Absolute Blur and the Elbow Story. Frank Skinner is nominated, as are our production and imaging team. Absolute Radio Classic Rock is up for Digital Station of the Year against Planet Rock and Five Live Sports Extra. There are also nominations for Max Dickins as a rising star and Jo Russell's Sunday Sinners competition

Every year, someone describes the Sonys as the "Oscars" of the radio industry, but I think that devalues them - and in any case, Oscar nominees have more marketing behind them than the parties standing for the forthcoming general election. These nominations come from our peers and even if it does sound sickening to hear me say it, I'm proud to work for a group of stations like those in the Absolute Radio network.

Check out all of the nominees here. Now if only it was possible to hear on-demand, some of the nominated radio...

There's only one episode of Party to go, but listen in to part three before Wednesday.

I'll always listen or watch any programme based on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and this week that meant listening to Archive on 4: Sculptress of Sound - The Lost World of Delia Derbyshire. In some respects it's always Derbyshire who's the focus of these kinds of documentaries. But I really don't care and just love to bask in the sounds.

I'm something of a sucker for maps of every kind, so I've listened to the first three episodes of a ten part series that ran everyday last week and continues this week: On the Map.

The first episode is no longer on iPlayer, and there are only a few hours to listen to the second, but curiously the first episode featured Bill Drummond, once of The KLF (no - I still don't believe he really set fire to a million pounds). He's always been fascinated by maps and currently he's walking the London Cake Circle - a circle he's drawn on a map. He bakes a cake and then finds a home somewhere on the circle where he can deliver it!

What was really interesting about this episode was the detail of people who've worked for the Ordnance Survey and left their marks on maps. A good example is below.

If you look just above the word Blackgang and below Blackgang Chime, you'll see the word "Bill" inscribed into the cliff detail. That's the name of the man who first created that part of the map for Ordnance Survey.

Seemingly there are other examples which can be found if you spend time looking for them! (Of course Slartibartfast did the same thing in Norway). Other episodes I've heard so far consider the A-Z, maps used for driving like various AA maps, as well as the curse of the satnav.

As for TV - Sunday's are just too good at the moment. Currently BBC2 has the killer combination of Tropic of Cancer followed by Wonders of the Solar System on Sunday nights. And yesterday also saw the latest in Paul Merton's ongoing series about early cinema (with a repeat of his early Hitchcock programme also on over the weekend).

And OK. I'm still persevering with FlashForward, if only because it's fun working out which British actors will attempt an American accent and which will stick with a British one. And Ricky Jay had a short but noticeable cameo. But I'm not sure for how long. Fewer flashbacks please

Today comes news that the BBC has had to delay its mobile phone applications until the BBC Trust has taken a close look at what it's doing. That obviously includes iPhone apps, but other operating systems are available, and the BBC was developing for them too.

The announcement that the BBC was developing applications came in February when Eric Huggers, the BBC's Director of Future Media & Technology, made the announcement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The first application for BBC News had been expected next month.

A lot of newspapers in particular had been enormously unhappy at the move. In particular the Newspaper Publishers' Association (who don't seem to have a website of their own), had complained to the BBC Trust.

Well it has come to pass that despite the fact that most mobile applications - and almost certainly the BBC's News app - are just fancy front ends to news stories already available in browsers, everyone was kicking up a fuss.

Also complaining were third-party developers who'd made available a range of applications - many of which were paid for - which directly used BBC news stories and streams.

In Media Guardian's podcast a couple of weeks ago, Emily Bell and Matt Wells got particularly upset at the prospect of a BBC News application. While admitting that they were in competition with the BBC with their own Guardian app which is paid for (and very good it is too), I'm not sure that I agree that this stacks up. Why shouldn't the BBC be able to put an application "wrapper" around something you can already see on mobile phones.

To some extent many applications are pointless wrappers of web editorial. Taken to a logical extreme, we're all going to end up with mobile devices with hundreds of applications each working with a single website, a bit like you might have a long list of bookmarks in your browser.

Certainly you can do some clever stuff with applications - perhaps using location based information to provide relevant data, as well as the push side of things (As an aside, the BBC Breaking News Twitter feed is one of the few I let send me a direct text to my mobile because unlike most organisations, they use it fairly sparingly. Sky News' Twitter account "breaks" just about every story that comes down the wires, and as such is less useful. The Guardian's Twitter news feed similarly pumps out too many stories a day.).

The BBC has for years made a mobile version of its news website available to mobile devices. Should this be allowed?

There are always going to be applications that simply use the RSS feeds of sites like BBC News to power them, and there's little that can be done to stop their creation. Indeed, if you look beyond the iPhone platform, anyone can write anything they like for platforms like Android and there's very little anyone can do to stop them.

It's an artificial distinction. And those kinds of distinctions just don't work on the web.

From a user's point of view, a delay in making available a BBC iPlayer application is not a good thing. Consumers are expecting and even demanding that programmes are made available via mobile devices. Whether or not the mobile networks can cope with widescale video and audio streaming usage like this is a separate - but important - question.

In the end, it was probably foollish to believe that the BBC Trust wouldn't need to put its oar in before these applications saw the light of day, but its viewers and listeners who will lose out. The idea that mobile is an area the BBC shouldn't be in will be utterly absurd in even 12 months' time. That's if it isn't already.

These are my own views, and they do not necessarily reflect those of my employer, not that we're really in the mobile news application game.

A couple of quick recommendations. You've only got a day left to listen to part 1 of Party, adapted by Tom Basden from his own play which has only just finished a run in the West End following its debut in last year's Edinburgh Festival.

A group of middle class - and not especially bright - people meet to form a new political party, firm up some of their ideals and even come up with a name.

It's a fantastic listen and laugh out loud funny.

Less amusing is Geoengineering the Climate. This programme looked at the various methods that are being proposed to engineer our way out of climate change. These involve such ideas as dumping vast quantities of elements such as iron in the ocean to filling the skies with sulphur to block sunlight. A fascinating subject that is not the science fiction that it perhaps sounds.

Here's a turn up for the books - me talking about something on the radio that you have more than one day to listen to!

Vincent Price and The Horror of The English Blood Beast is an excellent play based around the making of Witchfinder General in 1967.

If you've never seen Witchfinder General, then after listening to this, you'll almost certainly want to (indeed it's a shame that BBC2 or BBC4 didn't schedule a screening of the film in parallel with this play). Vincent Price crossed the Atlantic to play the title role of Matthew Hopkins, who genuinely was the Witchfinder General in the 17th century during the period of the English Civil War.

The play is set against the making of the film as the audaciously talented director Michael Reeves battled with Price who at the time was a waning force having relied on a series of hackneyed performances in cheap US films.

Nickolas Grace plays Price with gusto as he arrives on an East Anglian set and slowly begins to realise that he's going to have to do something a bit different to his usual autopilot persona. And Kenneth Cranham is excellent as the sleazy Soho producer, Tony Tenser, who's having to deal with his artistic and bull-headed director, his problematical star, and the sleazy expectations of the people he's pre-sold the film to. In real life, as well as things like London in the Raw (recently released on DVD by the BFI in their Flipside series), Tenser worked on two of my favourite early Polanski films, Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac.

The film was to be Matthew Reeves' last, and it's a shame that he didn't live on to make many more films.

Matthew Broughton has obviously done a fair amount of research in writing this piece. Anyway - go away and spend an hour with this terrific play.

When you've listened to it, you really will want to get the excellent DVD which is very reasonably priced, although at time of writing it seems to be proving very popular.

(This photo has nothing to do with the concert, but I took it down the road from the BBC's Maida Vale studios).

I'd never been to the BBC's Maida Vale studios. But this evening I was off to them to see the BBC Concert Orchestra playing the world premiere of Jonny Greenwood's new piece as Composer-in-Association (not Residence as the notes claimed) - Doghouse.

A deluge of rain gave a nice soaking to the hundred and fifty or so people queuing outside the studios just before we were let in.

There was a full programme recorded live with a Radio 3 presenter - Sara Mohr-Pietsch - introducing pieces or back announcing them as we heard them. Conducting was Robert Ziegler who I think has worked a little with Greenwood on this.

The selection of other music we heard was eclectic to say the least. It's probably a fair reflection of the kind of music that the BBC Concert Orchestra plays regularly. So we heard some 40s and 50s pieces with their soaring strings from films of that period. But we jumped around quite a lot. So we heard Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo, a piece from Angelo Badalamenti's Blue Velvet, an extract from the score to Limelight, apparently composed by Charlie Chaplin himself, and a piece featuring extracts from Frank Waxman's score to Rebecca. There were also pieces by Robert Farnon and Angela Morley.

Before Doghouse, Mohr-Pietsch interviewed Greenwood and Ziegler about the genesis of the piece, and its meaning. Then we heard the 20 minute or so piece which I felt was somewhat different to the other pieces we'd heard. Trying to describe it here would be difficult, but if you're familiar with Popcorn Superhet Receiver, which would become part of the awesome soundtrack to There Will Be Blood, will give you an idea. This is more challenging fare. Indeed it seems that this piece will inform the soundtrack to a forthcoming Japanese film, Norwegian Wood, based on the novel by Murakami.

Anyway, in a couple of weeks, you'll be able to hear as it's broadcast on Afternoon on 3 on Friday 19 March at 2pm.

What's been most interesting so far, following the news that the BBC might be shutting down, has been the reaction in the "Twittersphere" and online in general.

There were lots of callers on Victoria Derbyshire's programme this morning, with Martin Kelner and John Myers also making appearances (there's feedback throughout, but Kelner and Myers are on at about 1 hour 26 minutes in).

But it's on Twitter that there's really been a reaction. Here are the trending topics on Twitter as of a few minutes ago.

OK - that's in media-luvvy London. What about the UK overall?

And worldwide:

(To be fair, this is before most of the US has woken up. Still a strong showing though.)

The comments are coming in thick and fast.

The Facebook group is going great guns:

And you can add a Twibbon to your avatar:

Then there are all the comments on the various news sites, blogs and forums.

Is all this too much for a station that fewer than 700,000 people listen to on a weekly basis? (Still nearly 200,000 more than The Times sells, as has been pointed out on Twitter, referring to The Times' editorial that said the BBC is closing "a few radio stations that no one has ever listened to.")

Maybe. But almost certainly not. That's the point. It's loved by those who listen. Yes - there's a feeling that if as many people who are already missing it, actually listened to the station, then it wouldn't be facing this threat. In the same way that if as many people who said they missed John Peel after his untimely death actually listened to him on Radio 1, then he wouldn't have been shunted into the small hours.

But any station would kill for such loyal and vocal listeners. How many other stations could genuinely garner such an outpouring?

[Note: As ever, these are my opinions, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.]

What's been most interesting so far, following the news that the BBC might be shutting down, has been the reaction in the "Twittersphere" and online in general.

There were lots of callers on Victoria Derbyshire's programme this morning, with Martin Kelner and John Myers also making appearances (there's feedback throughout, but Kelner and Myers are on at about 1 hour 26 minutes in).

But it's on Twitter that there's really been a reaction. Here are the trending topics on Twitter as of a few minutes ago.

OK - that's in media-luvvy London. What about the UK overall?

And worldwide:

(To be fair, this is before most of the US has woken up. Still a strong showing though.)

The comments are coming in thick and fast.

The Facebook group is going great guns:

And you can add a Twibbon to your avatar:

Then there are all the comments on the various news sites, blogs and forums.

Is all this too much for a station that fewer than 700,000 people listen to on a weekly basis? (Still nearly 200,000 more than The Times sells, as has been pointed out on Twitter, referring to The Times' editorial that said the BBC is closing "a few radio stations that no one has ever listened to.")

Maybe. But almost certainly not. That's the point. It's loved by those who listen. Yes - there's a feeling that if as many people who are already missing it, actually listened to the station, then it wouldn't be facing this threat. In the same way that if as many people who said they missed John Peel after his untimely death actually listened to him on Radio 1, then he wouldn't have been shunted into the small hours.

But any station would kill for such loyal and vocal listeners. How many other stations could genuinely garner such an outpouring?

[Note: As ever, these are my opinions, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.]

Again, I'm going to recommend something that's just about to drop off the iPlayer. But if you have 90 minutes free before tomorrow afternoon, you could do a great deal worse than listen to David Hare's terrific adaptation of Craig Murray's memoir.

Murray, you will recall, was "our man in Tashkent" - British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. But he was also a loose canon in terms of how the Foreign Office saw him.

The book was excellent, and this version from Hare was a great listen. David Tennant played Murray, who certainly lived life to the full, despite his failings. The play has a strong narration, but it's delivered believably by Tennant, and I was gripped, even though I knew the overall outcome.

Murray's rambunctious blog is always worth a read.

Friday's Times is reporting that BBC 6Music and the Asian Network are to be closed under the BBC's major strategic review.

As well as this, there's likely to be cuts to other expenditure particularly on the web as well as cuts to imported programming, BBC Blast, BBC Switch, and sports expenditure.

If this proves to be the case, then I believe it's a sad day for several reasons. First of all, it's a sad day for people who will inevitably lose their jobs, if this report from Patrick Foster turns out to be accurate.

It's also a sad day for digital radio. While there will be (and indeed - to an extent - are) commercial replacements for some of what the Asian Network offers, that's not necessarily the case for 6Music which, while serving a niche, provides a much needed reason for people to buy digital radios.

Shouldn't I be happy working for a service that crosses over to some extent with 6Music? Not at all. The very existence of that service lead people to to discover digital radio and thus the ability to discover other services. One less major brand is never a good thing. Perhaps there'll be opportunities for services like Xfm or NME, but I'm really not sure.

Without new additional services, getting to a digital radio future is harder to accomplish. What's odd here is that arguably Asian Network failed to work with disappointing audiences. But 6Music is much loved by its loyal listeners. It's in an odd position of not having enough listeners, and having low awareness. Yet if it was more popular, commercial services might be much more concerned about it. Is 6Music expensive to run? Yes - almost certainly too expensive. Programming cuts were almost certainly called for. And they're never easy to achieve while maintaining quality.

The Times piece suggests that following service reviews of Radio 1 and Radio 2, this leaves 30-50s free to commercial radio. I'm not entirely sure it's as simple as that. Demographics is only part of it. Will the average 6Music listener immediately depart to a commercial station? Some will. Others will head off to Spotify and their iPod playlists.

Yet all in all, when the pros and cons are weighed up, I still think that this is bad piece of news for the whole radio industry.

Still it's not exactly joined up thinking, with the news coming just days after the BBC Trust's service review reported what 6Music needed to do in the future.

The next question is what actually fills that space? Will the BBC sub-let that capacity to two (or more) commercial services, will other music service expand their bit-rates to fill the capacity? Or will it lie fallow. It's probably too early to say. But what if they undercut D1's pricing!

As for other areas of cuts suggested in the piece? Well there are a few oddities. Does the BBC often outbid commercial operators for imported programming? I know it's often said to be the case, but aside from Heroes, Mad Men and Damages, I struggle to think of much else the BBC shows that originates in the US. And don't get me started on claims about The Wire - a series first shown on a commercial channel years ago.

The US networks and sports rights holders will also hate BBC cost cutting as costs will fall.

I did laugh at the idea that ITV will serve the "teenage" market. Aside from teenagers enjoying X-Factor as much as anyone else, I'm not sure what else they're watching on the channel.

I'm very concerned about the BBC shutting "half its website." Which half is that? The good stuff? The stuff we've paid for from our licence fees? Certainly not the news.

One thing that's clear is that, if true (and we do need to wait for the BBC's confirmation of this), it is poor news management from the BBC. Twitter is already alive with people who work for 6Music wondering how long they have jobs. That's never the way you want to hear about important news.

[UPDATE] I've only just seen The Times' nasty and spiteful editorial. Entitled "Big, bloated and cunning" it seems to love all the usual things like Planet Earth and Life on Mars. Yet these plans "constitute an evasive and artful strategy designed to keep the next government from intervening, while in reality changing very little."

Wow. We shouldn't forget that's coming from a direct competitor of the BBC's in Rupert Murdoch. Seemingly the BBC would just be closing "a few radio stations that no one has ever listened to and websites that few have ever visited."

The Times thinks the BBC should be giving cash back to licence payers. I'll remember that next time my Sky bill goes up.

Amongst other things it once again brings up the selling off of Radio 1: "If the BBC were serious about reform it would consider selling Radio 1 and getting out of the pop music business, which is hardly ill served by others."

Can I just re-iterate to anyone from The Times who might be remotely interested. The sale of Radio 1 would devastate commercial radio closing down dozens of stations. The commercial radio industry does not want to see Radio 1 privatised. Nobody would be able to compete, and vast quantities of commercial revenue would flow to that service leaving others uneconomical.

The BBC is seemingly "the most powerful lobbying and effective organisation in Britain".

And there was me thinking that might be Rupert Murdoch...

[Note: That these are my personal views, and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer]

Amy MacDonald played a set in London's Hard Rock Café for Absolute Radio earlier this evening. The set, promoting a new album, was great and should be going out on-air next Monday.

In the meantime, even though I wasn't right at the front, I'm pretty happy with some of the photos I took. As well as the above shot, there's more here.

The dust has settled a little bit on the last RAJAR figures were released.

But there were a number of stories surrounding RAJAR much like this one, highlighting the fact that the overall level of digital listening fell from 21.1% in Q3 2009 to 20.9% in Q4 2009.

That 0.2% drop was clearly disappointing, but perhaps not altogether surprising given that the margins of error in RAJAR clearly see even obvious trends occassionally shift backwards.

To put this in context, here's the all digital listening figure since it first started being measured with the RAJAR Q2 2007 release:

Source: RAJAR

(NB. If anyone can tell me how to get a Google chart to include data values on the top of bars, then that'd be wonderful. Just comment below).

Broadly speaking it's an upward trend. Yes, it's flattened a little of late, but we also know that in Q4 2009 we passed 10m DAB sets in the market overall, so we can probably expect to see an increase in all digital listening in Q1 2010 when that data becomes available in May. As the chart shows, there have previously been significant jumps between Q4 and Q1 following those Christmas sales.

But we can also see that in Q4 2008 there was a 0.4% decrease from 18.7% to 18.3%. The figure then jumped up 1.8% to 20.1% in Q1 2009.

I make no secret that I work for a station that is very happy to see its digital listening increase substantially over the past couple of years. An AM-only music service is not going to have a long future in the 21st century.

Absolute Radio's National service (i.e. excluding the FM London signal) has now reached 54.0%. Again there's been the odd quarter where there have been decreases, but one data point is not a trend.

Source: RAJAR

None of this can disguise that overall fall in digital listening. Noted DAB sceptic, Grant Goddard, highlighted the fall in listening to digital only stations. He claims that "the UK radio industry's strategy for its digital stations is in tatters." He admits that there were no specific strategic shifts - no stations closing, and no notable format changes. Instead he claims that this "the result of increasing public malaise about the whole DAB platform and the radio content that is presently being offered on it (plus a little Q4 seasonality)."

But is that the whole story? I'd say not.

One of the less reported figures from this quarter's RAJAR is that overall recorded listening fell - quite a lot, falling 2.1% to just below 1 billion hours a week. That's very nearly 21m hours less listening a week, or about the amount of listening the Real Radio Network or Talksport achieves in a week. Whether or not that fall is the beginning of a trend or not is not something we know yet, but I suspect that it's just a blip. It's only a couple of quarters, after all, since we saw the biggest ever recorded audience for radio.

Yet despite that fall, DAB listening actually increased between Q3 and Q4 2009 (Digital radio, lest we forget is not identical to DAB radio. DAB is one element of digital radio, albeit the major one).

Source: RAJAR

That's right: there's more listening to DAB now than there has ever been and that's in spite of there being fewer hours overall spent listening to radio.

Source: RAJAR

Clearly other forms of digital listening have decreased along with analogue listening. But these results would certainly seem to contradict claims of an "increasing public malaise about the whole DAB platform."

People are actually spending longer listening to DAB radio; again it's at a record high.

Source: RAJAR

Do we need better and more digital radio stations to continue to drive DAB uptake?

Certainly.

I'd never argue otherwise. But there are a few out there. Jazz FM had some good reach figures this quarter, even if its hours showed a decrease. NME showed a very good increase in listening hours, and these numbers include barely any listening via the national commercial DAB multiplex with NME only arriving on Digital One at the end of the quarter. Planet Rock continues to do very well with nearly five million hours all attributable to digital platforms. BBC 6Music has just achieved its largest ever reach figure with just short of 700,000 listeners, and the BBC Trust has just challenged it to increase those numbers (more on those findings to follow!). And Absolute 80s launched at the end of 2009. Although there won't be any RAJAR figures for this service until May, it has been well received from what we can tell internally in terms of streaming.

Goddard published a chart similar to this:

Source: RAJAR

It shows digital listening for a number of services since Q1 2003. While I certainly haven't included every digital only service on this chart, I've included all those that Goddard included as well as some of the BBC's services.

There's one over-riding service here that seems to be having a disproportionate impact on the numbers: The Hits. This is a service that shared its name with a sister TV channel, until the TV channel was renamed and relaunched as 4Music during Q3 2008. What's more The Hits was one of only two music television services that were available on Freeview - surely the bedroom TV choice of many a 15-24? When 4Music launched in August 2008, listening for The Hits started to decline. And that decline has continued.

Can I prove that the two are related? No.

Could I definitively demonstrate that respondents completing RAJAR diaries were recording listening to a radio station when in fact they watching a music television channel? Absolutely not.

But what I can do is show you a chart without The Hits to see what impact it has on the overall picture.

Source: RAJAR

I think this presents a bit of a more positive story for digital only service providers.

Clearly there have been some dips in the most recent data, but there's still an overall trend. And as Goddard himself noted, there wasn't anything in particular in the fourth quarter of last year that would affect listening, so let's see what Q1 2010 data brings before we write off digital services completely.

Radio operators obviously do need to offer strong services as an incentive to speed up the migration of listening to digital platforms. Nobody's ever pretended this would be an easy journey, meeting an overall 50% level of digital listening remains a serious challenge. But let's not conflate digital radio and DAB radio. And let's not let a bad story get in the way of the facts shall we?

[Disclaimer: These are my opinions and not necessarily those of my employer.]

Most of my thoughts on RAJAR today are published on the One Golden Square blog. So I won't bother repeating them here.

I needed a photo to illustrate RAJAR on the blog, so I took the one above. Although RAJAR's mostly electronic these days, printing a copy of the summary PDF is still useful.

But of course I've previously taken a very similar RAJAR photo. And wouldn't you know it? The Radio Four Blog used it to illustrate its piece about that station's RAJAR figures using the Creative Commons licence I apply to nearly every photo I place on Flickr.

Note to self: must think of some different illustrative photos of RAJAR.

[I'd put a disclaimer on this post, about these being my thoughts and not those of my employer, but that's a bit redundant in this instance. And in any case, the thoughts published on the One Golden Square blog, do actually reflect those of my employer.]

What's the best length for a podcast?

That's a bit like asking, "How long is a piece of string?"

The recent RAJAR MIDAS data showed a wide range of opinions:

What this shows is that there's no consensus. I listen to podcasts that can vary between a couple of minutes and nearly two hours. So I tend towards the belief that it really does depend on the podcast.

At Absolute Radio, none of our podcasts lasts over an hour. That's because we're a music station, and once you removed that (and advertising) from a programme, no matter how much the DJ speaks, the show isn't going to be all that long.

But what if you're a speech station? Five Live have recently started effectively podcasting the entirety of two different programmes, each running for two hours. Danny Baker's podcast began back in September when his new Saturday morning show started, while the Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo podcast began a couple of weeks ago when their new Friday show began.

In both cases, the BBC has decided to break the programme up into two parts. But there's a problem with this.

By default, iTunes only downloads the most recent podcast available. If you subscribe to, say, a daily podcast, but only run iTunes a couple of times a week, then it'll only download the most recent edition. With the BBC putting out two podcasts in swift succession for Danny Baker and Kermode/Mayo, most people will only automatically download the second "hour" of each programme.

I noticed as a listener this week that Simon Mayo has started suggesting that you "adjust your podcast settings" if you're only getting one podcast.

The problem with that is that it's incredibly unintuitive in iTunes, the most popular podcasting software by a long way, for users to do this.

You might start by looking at in Edit > Preferences menu, or Advanced. But you'll look in vain. Right hand clicking on a podcast won't help. Nor will attaching your iPod and trying to navigate via that.

No. You have to use the Settings button at the foot of the page, uncheck the Use Default Settings check-box, and choose Download all from the dropdown (You can also just adjust your overall defaults to change iTunes behaviour for all your podcasts).

iTunes is a fairly awful piece of software. It's bloatware, and much of it is completely unintuitive. I had to use Google to discover this functionality. No wonder that nobody's in a rush to explain exactly what to do.

Somebody at the BBC has almost certainly noticed that their programmes' second parts are downloaded far more than their part ones. But I'd attack the problem another way, and simply offer a single download. Yes - that probably means 30-45 MB instead of 20MB per podcast. But does that make much difference? Yes - I know the chart above shows that nobody wants 1 hr plus podcasts, but lots of your audience only getting half the programme is not a good solution.

The earthquake that the people of Haiti experienced nearly a week ago now was horrific, and it's wonderful that at time of writing the appeal launched by the Disasters Emergency Committee has reached over £23 million.

Following the Asian tsunami on Boxing Day 2004, UK Radio Aid was a telethon of sorts that took place a few weeks later to raise money from the listeners of UK commercial radio. Most stations in the country took the programming from London, and according to the event's Wikipedia page, more than £3 million was raised.

This morning, following suggestions from various people on Twitter, Radio Today published an opinion piece asking whether it was perhaps time for UK commercial radio to run UK Radio Aid 2.

The piece was written by Justin Kings, a radio consultant. He followed the piece up with an update to say that UK Radio Aid 2 would not be happening.

A polite email from Global's Group News Director and PD of LBC, Jonathan Richards detailed why he felt that it wasn't right at this time. Richards pointed out that Global was running DEC advertisements across its network of stations and that this was helping the DEC's overall success in raising money. Given that Global is such a large part of commercial radio, its participation in a second telethon would have been essential.

Of course Global isn't the only group running the advertisements. Since the advertisements were recorded at the end of last week, most of commercial radio seems to be playing them - voiced by John Hurt. Many stations are also running web advertising. The same is true for most other commercial media outlets who are giving up space and airtime.

I must admit that I agree with Richards and believe that while UK Radio Aid may have had an impact at the time, we wouldn't be repeating it for entirely the right reasons.

It's no secret that I have very mixed feelings about telethons in general. I suppose that I'm happy to put my misgivings to one side if I felt that they make a difference. I think that some of the major television telethons do make that difference. But they're events that tread a very fine line; and sometimes they overstep that line coming across as crass and self-congratulatory.

There was undoubtedly an element of that in 2005 UK Radio Aid, with certain individuals perhaps being a litle bit too happy about being seen to be doing something.

Radio stations should certainly encourage their listeners to part with their cash and support the appeal. But is it really appropriate for a local station to take a service from London featuring "star names" that has little or nothing to do with that station's locality? Even in a radio world of networked centralised programming, I'm not sure that it is.

Then there are the big name guests who might not be directly promoting their latest films or CDs overtly, but are benefiting in some way in kind.

Perhaps it's the British sensibility at play here. In the US on Friday, most major broadcasters, including all the networks, will be airing a two-hour telethon backed by George Clooney. That might well get US citizens to donate when they might otherwise have not, but I'm not sure it'll make a great deal of difference to British citizens.

Again, as regular readers will know, I find plenty of other charity work unsettling and unseemly. Why do we need a charity single? Can we not just give a couple of quid to charity without stroking popstars' egos? Do I really need a badge or a ribbon to show my support? Can't we save manufacturing costs of that t-shirt and just use all my cash?

Returning to radio - many stations do excellent work for their own charities and they fit that in well with their regular output. Listeners appreciate it. UK Radio Aid last time around didn't really do that in my opinion, and stations would be better adopting their own ways to encourage listeners to give.

An aside: this disaster has taken place in January - a month in which many people find themselves short of spare cash following Christmas. Perhaps a campaign to get people to promise to donate once they've received their pay packet would be a good idea? Yes - the money is needed now. But it's also going to be needed for many months and years to come.

The big news today is that Jonathan Ross has quit his job at the BBC. Although he'll be staying on for specials and on presentational duty at things like the BAFTAs and Comic Relief, he'll be leaving his Friday Night Show, Film 2010 and Saturday morning Radio 2 show.

Leaving aside the whys and wherefores of his decision - and seemingly it was his decision - what does that mean for TV and radio?

Fortuitously, Graham Norton has just signed a new deal with the BBC, so I think we can expect to see his current Monday night show swiftly moving into the Friday night slot. Indeed having both shows on BBC1 felt like one too many shows. Yes, I know that in the US, we'd get five nights a week of this kind of fare, with NBC letting Jay Leno creep into primetime this season. But that's not really the role of BBC1.

Ross himself might end up doing his show on ITV1 - although Paul O'Grady is just about to fill that mantle. That's not to say that betwen themselves, Ross and O'Grady couldn't each do 13 week runs throughout the year. You'd anticipate that their shows would fit into Saturday nights, currently chock-filled with X-Factor, Dancing on Ice, Britain's Got Talent, I'm A Celebrity, Ant and Dec and so on (and we must remember that Big Brother's up for grabs at some point later this year too).

But I think this does leave BBC1 with the opportunity to launch a new, less comedic and more serious interview show. I was no real fan of Parkinson, but once he sailed off into the sunset, UK TV was deprived of any even vaguely serious interview shows. And with both Ross and Norton on their books, there wasn't really room for a new chat show. The last real attempt to start a new show was the desperately awful "Davina" McCall show in 2006, something everybody is still trying to forget. I'd suggest going a bit upmarket from that and getting someone who can interview well and get more from a guest.

Getting guests really shouldn't be a major issue. With only Ross or Norton to go on currently in prime time, the earlier teatime and lunchtime shows do surprisingly well with the calibre of their guests - however embarrassing it must be for your publicist to get you onto Loose Women.

So I'd suggest looking beyond the "usual suspects", and not to model the show on American chat shows (as nearly every show is) which - with the exception of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (and to an extent Craig Ferguson) are pretty awful. Yes - even Letterman.

Film 2010 is another interesting position to fill. The obvious person is Mark Kermode. BBC2 really hasn't found a home for The Culture Show, and this might be a good opportunity to use one of its better strands. It'd be nice for the programme to grow some legs and not rely on the somewhat dull star interviews conducted in Park Lane hotel suites. Another option would be Andrew Collins.

The radio position is really interesting. For a while, Saturday mornings were a real battleground. There was Adam & Joe on 6 Music, Jonathan Ross on Radio 2, Danny Baker on Five Live, and our own Frank Skinner on Absolute Radio. Now the first two have both, or will shortly, be stopping. So who fills that slot on Radio 2 from later in the year?

Matt Wells suggested Liza Tarbuck earlier today. She's been filling in for Ross in that slot, and she adds a much needed female voice to the Radio 2 roster. Remember that Radio 2 has no female presenters in primetime during the week, with Sarah Kennedy and Janice Long filling the early breakfast and overnight slots respectively. Even weekends are really limited to Zoe Ball at Saturday breakfast and Elaine Paige for Sunday lunchtimes. So Tarbuck would be a welcome fulltime addition.

Would Ross want to do any more radio work? I don't know. I think he enjoys the medium, and I remember him from his time at Virgin Radio back in 1998/9 when he first presented a radio show nationally (in particular I recall that when he sat in for Chris Evans at breakfast his was one of the funniest ever radio shows I've heard). More to the point, could anybody in radio afford him? Might there be a syndicated show in there somewhere? Or would he cause too much stress for compliance people?

Time will tell.

[More Jonathan Ross photos from his time at Virgin Radio in 1998 and 1999 can be seen here]

Disclaimer: As ever, these are personal opinions and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer. I have absolutely no knowledge of any discussions he may have had or be having with anybody in radio or elsewhere.

There's a few interesting things on TV just at the moment, but I'm going to concentrate on radio.

All this week, Melvyn Bragg is celebrating the Royal Society's 350th anniversary with four episodes of In Our Time. The first is already available to listen to as I type (and they'll stay available, which is fabulous).

I've not yet heard it, but I will be listening to Radio 4's Saturday Play: Private Lives by Noel Coward. It's got Bill Nighy in it after all - and Helena Bonham Carter!

And Thursday's Afternoon Play - The Killing of TSR2 - sounds up my street. It's the British fighter that never was.

In comedy, there's the last episode of Giles Wemmbley-Hogg Goes Off, and a new series of Just A Minute.

There's a new series of Jon Ronson On starting tomorrow evening at 11.00pm which as far as I can tell from the Radio 4 trailer, seems to feature all the people I follow on Twitter as well as Ronson himself (Victoria Coren, Charlie Brooker, and Graham Linehan).

BBC 7 has another Doctor Syn book being read fantastically by Rufus Sewell that started today - The Last of Doctor Syn.

Finally - and this is a bit late and useless to you - but Saturday saw BBC 7 broadcast the final episode of series 3 of Ben Moor's science fiction comedy Undone. I really enjoyed this, but at least with series catch-up, you can still hear all six episodes from this series on the iPlayer. But you might want to wait for the next repeat of the first series.

I was sorry to hear that Clive James has called an end to his A Point of Views now. He's writing another book and that's going to fully engage him.

And I feel that if Ed Reardon's Week was coming back for another series, it'd have been on-air now. If anyone knows, I'd love to hear from you.

So little time, but so much radio to listen to, and that doesn't even include my day job!

I've put together more than a few annotated pages of the Radio Times in the past, and of course I have the new Christmas issue by my side at all times for the next fortnight.

So I was pleased to see Steve Bowbrick at Radio 4 collecting together the highlights of some its presenters over the next couple of weeks starting today with Kirsty Young.

In a break from my regular tradition of looking at television rather than radio, and looking at a day at a time, I've complied with Radio 4's and present a list of genuine Christmas highlights:

Click on the pictures to make them more legible or read what I've said underneath them:

21 December: The Infinite Monkey Cage and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue

22 December: MR James at Christmas

25 December: A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.

26 December: Archive on 4: Doctor Who: The Lost Episodes

27 December: Desert Island Discs: David Tennant

28 December: The Unbelievable Truth

28 December: Book at Bedtime: The True Deceiver

1 Jan: New Year's Day Concert from Vienna

1 Jan: More or Less

According to a story in Media Guardian, "an estimated 5 million" people tuned in to hear who would be the Christmas number one yesterday during the various chart shows.

There are two main chart shows these days: the Radio 1 version which is considered the official chart, and the Big Top 40 chart which runs on dozens of local commercial radio stations and during which you can actually affect the top ten chart placings by buying songs during the show.

Radio has a couple of problems with listening figures for one-off shows: RAJAR only measures audiences over three month periods, and then publishes those figures at something of a delay. So even if one show achieved four times the audience of the regular show, when averaged over a thirteen (or twelve) week period, that audience surge is flattened out. This is even more the case with the Big Top 40 chart which has 6 month weighting meaning that the numbers are derived from the previous 12 weeks' performance.

So the 5 million figure is a complete (educated) guess.

To be fair, that's what John Plunkett's piece says, and the figure comes from Mark Goodier:

But Goodier estimated that the combined audience for the Radio 1 chart show - yesterday hosted by Scott Mills - and its commercial radio rival, the Big Top 40 , could have topped 5 million.

How did Goodier get to that figure? Well he might have looked at the audiences of Radio 1 and the Big Top 40 shows at that time. Between 1845 and 1900 on Sundays, Radio 1 is heard by 748,000 listeners, while the Big Top 40 chart is heard by 968,000 listeners across its network of 139 FM stations as well as various digital outlets*.

So something like 1.7m people usually hear the number one. Goodier is speculating that around 3 times as many people heard yesterday's chart.

I think that he might actually be being a little conservative. The two songs battling for the number one sold around a million copies between them. Ordinarily a number one sells much less than this (perhaps by a factor of ten if this table from Wikipedia detailing download only sales is to be believed).

In summary - nobody knows how many people listened yesterday. This is a bad time of year to do any kind of research (RAJAR takes a break for a couple of weeks), and unless somebody like the BBC has commissioned some, we'll never know.

I think that Goodier is actually being conservative given the many millions who saw Joe win X-Factor the week before, allied with the hundreds of thousands of Rage and Joe sales achieved. I'd put the figure a bit higher perhaps at around 6 or 7 million. But I have no real proof either way. So it's a fair guestimate.

* Note that I've used 6 month weighting for the Big Top 40 figures, but only 3 month weighting for Radio 1, in line with their respective RAJAR reporting periods. Source: RAJAR/Ipsos MORI/RSMB period ending September 2009.

This is a very nice little video made by Radio 1 using photos of their listeners sent in the other day (via Brainpicker on Twitter)

This afternoon in London, Terry Wogan was inducted into the Radio Academy Hall of Fame. This comes as Wogan gives up his breakfast show at the end of next week.

The great and the good (and the rest of us) were out in force to pay their respects, and all in all it was actually quite moving.

Wogan's successor, Chris Evans conducted procedings and was very moved himself. He'd been sat at the same table as Wogan throughout the preceding meal.

Also presented at the event was an award to the artist or artists who saw the most airplay in the last 12 months. This went to Take That, and Gary Barlow showed up to pick up his award.

But the main procedings were reserved for Terry. A nice video featuring the likes of Noel Edmonds, Chris Tarrent (at the filming of the celebrity episode where Evans and Wogan are to appear), Tony Blackburn and Mike Smith was played out. But then came the in-person tributes.

After Evans, we got Neil Fox from Magic who gave a nice measured speech; Christian O'Connell from Absolute Radio who gave a very funny speech, joking about the RAJAR figures; John Humphrys from the Today programme on Radio 4 who was also excellent; Alan Brazil from TalkSport who spoke very briefly for someone who works on a speech station; and Chris Moyles from Radio 1 who was a bit disappointing.

Overall a fine event that most people in room seemed to think was worthwhile.

Disclaimer: I attended this event as a guest of PRS for Music, which in part explains why I had a rather good table right at the front of the room, as they are the events key sponsors.

Yesterday's Observer had an interesting piece on Spotify that included a little more substance about whether or not Spotify is making money.

I tried to find out as much as I could about Spotify ahead of Radio at the Edge a few weeks ago, and put everything I determine into a short video.

As I said at the time, there are conflicting numbers published about Spotify which can muddy the waters a bit, but yesterday's Observer piece cuts through them as best as anybody can. The Swedish news that Lady Gaga's Poker Face only earned around £100 from Spotify in that country.

The most interesting information comes from Rob Wells at Universal who explains that although record companies have a stake in Spotify, it doesn't get better terms as a result. Moreover:

And the revenues are flowing, he stresses. In revenue terms, Spotify Sweden is now Universal Music Group International's eighth largest business partner, out of 1,400. "Watch this space. Those guys are absolutely on fire, you are going to see some amazing developments over the next three to six months."

The Saturday Play on Radio 4 this week was The Great Monkey Trial of Tennessee (available until this coming Saturday on the iPlayer), which tells the story of the Scopes Trial.

It's a good listen and well worth catching. What I can't quite work out is the play's all-star provenance. The credit is BBC Wales, but with a cast including Neil Patrick Harris and Ed Asner, this probably wasn't recorded in a studio in Cardiff.

I think it must be a special commission of an LA Theatre Works production. Ed Asner has appeared in one of their productions of this work previously, although it was a longer version of the play. But looking at the date on Audible, that production seems to date from 2006. Go back a bit, and there seems to be yet another 1994 production of this play, also featuring Ed Asner!

In the end, none of this matters. It's a terrifc listen, and quite as relevant today in a world of Creationists and scientific illiteracy.

[Sorry - wrote this a couple of days ago and neglected to put it live. So now it's no longer on the iPlayer]

It's Up For Grabs Now is a very good new podcast about Arsenal presented by Alan Davies and some of his mates. There are four episodes so far, and they're all excellent including yesterday's which deals with Thierry Henry and Ireland, the Sunderland game at the weekend, and even Spurs.

The podcast comes from a company called PlayBack Media who produce a variety of other podcasts, all with comedians or presenters. And the Arsenal one, at least, is very professionally recorded. It'll be interesting to see if they can earn some revenues and make the business pay.

They've effectively used Facebook Group pages as their home pages, which is fine, and efficiently ties in social media aspects. But when it comes to getting the podcasts I can't find a non-iTunes route. That's fine for me, but no good for my less-IT-literate friends.

[Quick Update] I note that these podcasts are being put together by Paul Myers, who I assume is the same man who was/is behind Wippit. Regular readers will know that he's had mixed fortunes in the past - notably over his dealings with Danny Baker.

Hopefully this won't end the same way as that did. Perhaps the market for paid-for podcasts like The All Day Breakfast Show was too nascent. I'll watch with interest...

--

I'm including this purely for Google purposes as it's something that really annoyed me for weeks and weeks.

Regular readers may know that I've struggled repeatedly with the Nokia Ovi store. Basically, since it launched, I'd been unable to log in.

On a PC it was fine. I've had a Nokia login for ages, and it still works. Ovi, in its previous guise as just a backup engine, had also worked. But try as I might, I couldn't log in on my phone. And downloading anything from the Ovi store involves logging in on your phone.

The solution came from here. I was trying to log in on my Nokia N82. I'm on Orange in the UK. But I repeatedly was given error messages.

It turns out that it was because I was using "Orange GPRS WAP" to connect to the internet (Why is a good question - but is based on an excellent price I get from Orange). If I change this to "Orange Internet" it works!

All that said, the Ovi store still leaves an awful lot to be desired. It's just not a friendly user experience finding anything interesting.

On Monday there was a Radio Academy event in London with Matt Wells asking the questions of BBC Radio Five Live's controller, Adrian van Klaveren.

The obvious area for questioning surrounded Five Live's forthcoming move to a new facility in Salford.

As someone who listens to an awful lot of Five Live, I'm still unconvinced, although van Klaveren put up some persuasive arguments. BBC Radio probably is too metropolitan in its outlook, with some programmes coming from outside London based on all sorts of mistaken logic.

But I wonder if it wouldn't have been smarter to move a station like Radio 2 up there? When all is said and done - and this was a theme at the interview event - it's clear that Five Live is going to have to do an awful lot of "Down the Line" interviews.

While technically these will be fine, as anyone who's ever heard a Radio 4 Today interview with someone sitting in the radio car in a remote place knows, it's never the same as having the interviewee facing you in the same room. As things stand currently, Five Live often shares major interviewees with Radio 4 - especially politicians.[UPDATE: It's probably worth noting that sometimes politicians are in other London studios - White City, Broadcasting House or Millbank and are doing "Down the Lines" - but the argument still holds]

Van Klaveren was at pains to point out that politicians do venture north and that they'll be able to interview people up there. But if a major event is taking place in parliament, then it's London where the people concerned will be found.

Partially as a result of all this, Five Live is about to see a significant scheduling shakeup as Simon Mayo heads off to Radio Two (and there's no doubt that his loss will be felt), to be replaced by Richard Bacon, who's late night programme will itself be replaced by Tony Livesey.

Gabby Logan also finds a place on the schedule in a lunchtime slot that means that Victoria Derbyshire's programme loses an hour. That in itself probably isn't a major issue, as I personally find the full-blooded phone-ins the worst aspects of Five Live. Although I've yet to be fully convinced by Logan listening to her Sunday programme.

And the recent "Rules of Chat" TV ad for Five Live does concern me. Previously the station has been about news and sport. Yes, it handles lighter stories, including entertainment news, but it was primarily news and sport. "Chat" seems to have sneaked in of late.

Logan remains an uncertain choice in my view, and the cynic in me wonders if, like the recent return of Anne Robinson to Watchdog, it's not more about getting fuller value from an expensively contracted presenter - her TV commitments having dwindled a little with the decline in quantity of live football on the BBC.

Richard Bacon is less of an issue to me, and I well remember the howls of protest that met with Simon Mayo's arrival at Five Live. They proved to be completely unfounded. But as Wells indicated, he will need to "step up" his game when he makes the move in January.

I was interested in Stephen Nolan's situation. By far the worst programme on the station, with its pointless "White v Black" arguments which tend to go along the lines of this:

Caller A: "White is definitely better than black. It's so much whiter!"

Nolan: "How can you say that when black is so dark? That makes no sense at all!"

Caller B: "No. Black is definitely better than white. The darkness of it wins everytime."

Nolan: "I can't believe you said that. White is surely the most light of the two and clearly better."

Repeat - ad nauseum.

Specious though those arguments are, they're nothing to the waste of flying Nolan across the Irish Sea to Manchester each week where his show is made and broadcast from. Nolan is a broadcaster on BBC Radio Ulster each weekday morning, and so on Friday he hops on plane to Manchester to make his weekend shows.

Having heard that "Down the Line" interviews needn't be so bad, Five Live still feels the need to make his show out of Manchester rather than Belfast even though it's technically perfectly straightforward for a predominantly phone-in show to come from pretty much anywhere. Yes - his production team are in Manchester, but there can't be that many of them, and it just seems a waste.

Van Klaveren was adamant that presenters would not be trained or flown up to Manchester and put up in hotels. If they retained homes in the South East, that was their lookout.

Interestingly, this question cropped up again in a Q&A session with him on one of the BBC's blog pages later in the week. And once again van Klaveren stoutly defended it.

An issue that I did ask him about in the open Q&A at the Radio Academy event was the scarcity of sporting journalism on the station. I still fondly remember On The Line, which started out on Five as weekly investigative standalone programme, before making a transfer to BBC Two. Unfortunately, once it was ditched by TV it never did really return, and yet it's just about the only serious sports news outlet. Much of the rest of the coverage surrounding sport is based on panel discussions - usually with ex-pros. Per se, there's nothing wrong with these, and they make entertaining listening. But taking a hard look at sporting issues and the sometimes touchy politics behind it, is something that only the BBC can really do, and there's a scarcity of that.

The only other true coverage of these kinds of issues is to be found in an occasional Panorama from the likes of Andrew Jennings who specialises in investigating bodies like the IOC and FIFA.

Even if commercial broadcasters actually wanted to seriously address some of these issues, they'd be more concerned about damaging critically important commercial relationships - it simply wouldn't happen.

I've said before that running a major global sport is the closest you can legitimately get to being an internationally recognised dictator these days - particularly in the West. Look at the people in charge of the Olympics, football (UEFA and FIFA) and Formula One. People treat them literally like visiting heads of state such is their power and influence, however "democratic" or not their sporting bodies are. Jack Warner of Trinidadian football association is the foremost of these wretched characters.

That's why we need a BBC who'll take on these bodies and not run scared. The Kennel Club is a relevant case in point, as has been coverage of greyhound racing.

Van Klaveren said that in fact this kind of coverage does exist but that perhaps it's not signposted clearly enough. Where once a programme like On The Line (which successfully spun off at least two excellent companion books by the way) would exist in its own right, today's Five Live tends towards broader programmes that are less distinguishable in the schedule.

It would be good if Five Live was able to gather together some of this journalism and house it - perhaps on the web - under a specific label.

[UPDATE: The full audio of the Radio Academy event is available either on their website, the Five Live blog, and here!]

Before I forget, and before it expires on the BBC iPlayer, you must listen to last Saturday's Archive on 4 - Radio Hollywood.

Between the mid-thirties and early-fifties, the Lux Radio Theater broadcast one hour radio adaptations of popular films of the day, employing either the original stars, or other movies stars.

We heard lots of extracts from films we're familiar with, acted slightly differently, as well as behind the scenes stories, terrific interviews with the key stars who - professional to a hilt - would always mention how good Lux products were. The whole thing was sponsored by Lever brothers who produced the Lux range of soaps and detergents.

Anyway, don't dawdle. Go away and listen.

And while you're at it, don't foget that I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue is back this week!

Here's an interesting point. With each quarter's RAJAR releases comes a report that details how stations' listening is broken down by platforms.

It's this report that tells us that 21.1% of all listening on All Radio is digital, and that for all BBC Radio it's 21.6% while for all Commercial Radio it's 20.2%.

And, because Absolute Radio is happy to let everyone know, I can also tell you that Total Absolute Radio has reached 30.5% of digital listening, while Absolute Radio National (ie. excluding FM listening in London) has achieved 51.5% of listening being via a digital platform.

But I can't tell you much more because of publishing rules surrounding RAJAR data which state that stations may not publish competitors' platform data. There are good reasons for this rule being in place, although some stations, including my own, like to trumpet this data.

Yesterday, however, Paul Donovan of The Sunday Times, published more data than I've previously seen in the public domain.

(Interesting sidenote here: I'd love to link to Donovan's piece which is well worth reading in its entirety, but either because of Rupert Murdoch's overall disdain for the internet and his disliking of giving articles away free, or because The Sunday Times simply doesn't upload everything, I've been unable to find the piece on their website. I've seen a PDF of it via my employer's clippings service, but I can't reproduce the whole piece here for obvious copyright reasosns. I've therefore embedded just the relevant paragraph.)

The only problem is that one of those figures is wrong. I'd love to tell you which figure is incorrect, but that'd be breaking the RAJAR Publication Code - and I'd best not do that. As things stand, the figures reported here don't compare like with like.

Still - full marks to Paul Donovan for tracking down and publishing those numbers which do help to give an indication of where work is going well, and work needs to be done in the digital realm.

BBC Radio Five Live's figures are particularly interesting with 34% of their listening being digital. Five Live has taken a long view on this - as explained recently at Radio at the Edge - and you'll barely hear on air that they're available on AM. Instead it's all about the digital listening mechanisms.

On the other hand, Radio 1 seems to have a way to go to persuade their audience to listen digitally.

For more on DAB - Matt Deegan has an interesting perspective from the point of view of 100% digital station (and multiplex) owner.

[Disclaimer: As well as being employed by Absolute Radio, who's views might not necessarily be the same as my own (although they're not that different in reality), I also sit on the RAJAR Technical Management Group representing commercial radio, which is in part responsible for drawing up the RAJAR publication code.]

Yesterday I was at the excellent Radio at the Edge conference 2009 (my notes are here).

My major contribution to the conference was a series of "factoid" videos introducing different sessions. If you were there and the statistics flashed by too fast, then I've put them on YouTube. My "ecelctic" music choices also saw some discussion.

Anyway - have a look. All the stats should be sourced, and there are a few numbers here which weren't previously in the public domain.

I expect that they'll also be up on the Radio Academy's excellent website where the audio from yesterday's event should also appear shortly.

But in the meantime:

Digital Listening

Youth Listening

Podcasting

Spotify

Mobile

iPods - Other MP3 players are available

Miscellaneous Interesting Facts

[Disclaimer: I work for Absolute Radio, and I was able to supply some of these figures because of who I work for. Editorially, however, I had control over what's presented here.]

[Update: Over at the Onegoldensquare blog, I've written a less detailed summary which might be easier to read]

[Update 2: The Radio Academy has now published all the video and audio from Monday on their website. Also included are the various presentations given at the event!]

Live(ish) from London's MIllbank - it's not exactly like an episode of The Thick of It.

James Cridland is our host - he's from "the future" according to the Radio Academy's Trevor Dann.

[Note that there'll be typos a-plenty in this until I get a chance to tidy it up later]

Mobile

Chris Vallance chaired the first session on mobile with Mikko Linnamaki from Spodtronic.com and Mark Rock from Audioboo.

Mikko said that while many apps have a short lifestyle, this isn't the case for radio. Once it's installed it stays on the user's phone. He said that the biggest growth was currently coming from Android with 20 or so devices coming from all the major manufacturers (except those from Finland!). A show of hands in the room suggested about 2% of users having Android phones.

But Nokia has double the number of smartphones in the market than the other players put together.

Mikko showed us the typical App Store download curve, with a massive spike at the start and then a pretty quick drop off until a very sustained lower level of downloads. He said that we need to time marketing for the period at which it's a new app. Then he showed what happened in his example when Android was added. It's the same pattern, but the base is much higher once it's fallen. Finally Nokia showed a massive spike with the launch of the Ovi store. It beats iPhone by a factor of ten. However this was only a couple of weeks ago, and the base level isn't known yet. This was all based on a live example of "I Love Radio."

He said that Ovi was difficult to use and yet it still performed really well.

N95 users "are human too" and want to listen to their radio stations!

A similar pattern was observed for "tune ins".

Jazz FM has had 78,000 downloads since 19 August 2009 across all the major platforms. They've delivered 1.65m ad impressions a month. And they're seeing 160,000 tune ins a month. This gives about 10.5 minutes average (compared to an hour on German web stations). Mikko likened this to "snacking" you're perhaps commuting.

Three weeks after launch the Jazz FM application got to the number one slot on the iTunes music applications homepage. When Apple put the application in "New and noteworthy" it suddently saw a jump from around 900 installs a day to around 2000-3000 a day.

In the US, it's very different with thousands of stations. They have aggregator applications like AOL Radio, CBS Radio and so on. The useful station names with Ks and Ws doesn't help in finding the station you want to hear. Mikko says that this really doesn't do the station managers any favours.

Mikko shares a chart showing the top 100 apps in the music section. In the US it's all about aggregators apps, whereas in the UK it's the reverse, and much more heavily in Germany and France where there are barely any aggregator applications.

In summary he believes that consumers want one button for their radio and not to have to search through hundreds of stations to find their favourite.

In the future he says, that Twitter and Facebook should be embedded, album artwork should be included, and the ability to buy from iTunes. Feedback, voting, traffic and travel are also desirable. And clearly one clear thing is to make the app run in the background while you use other functions of your phone. He also mentioned the inclusion of Audioboo in the app as a request.

Finally Mikko says that their radio apps in Germany have police speed trap data built into the radio app to alert listeners to their locations. Users can submit mobile speed traps, and this of course keeps the applications open when listeners are in the car.

The ratio between selling and buying is 1 to 400 said during Q&A. "Radio is free. It always has been and always will be. Don't sell your app - it's a waste of time." He suggested selling advertising on the apps as a better route. The ad industry isn't there just yet but it's getting there.

Then Mark Rock from Audioboo spoke to us. "User generated Radio 4" was one comment or "Twitter without typing".

Rock explained that the genesis of Audioboo came from Channel 4 Radio's failed attempt to launch a new national DAB multiplex. As well as the iPhone version, the Android version launched last week, and Nokia is due before the end of the month.

Lots of people are using it - latterly the Army being a big user - with some using a premium version (and hence them earning some cash!).

He walked us through the various elements of the product including RSS feeds, social media links and geo-location data. They have 32000 users with over 77000 clips - about 2.5k hours.

They don't push people to their own website and have about 0.6 million audio plays per month. 3000 people autopublish on Facebook and 12000 do so on Twitter.

The pro model is based on editing, moderation and publising, ad insertion and stings, and new ways of recording.

In a couple of weeks users will be able to record via their webcam microphones. Then this could be embedded into websites to give some really high quality audio feedback to radio stations.

He then gave us some lessons they'd learnt:

- your users can be your new reporters (he spoke of a Welsh gentleman who gave a new Welsh word every day for the last four months)
- the social media functionality is important
- embrace new, cheap and versatile technologies (he gave kudos to Absolute Radio!)

All in all, Audioboo sounds very exciting, with lots of developments due very soon. I can't wait to have a proper play (as a non-iPhone user).

Matt Hall from The Guardian asked Mikko about speech radio applications. He didn't have many examples, but said that German state radio had been doing very well, but most of their

Paul Kennedy wanted to know about censorship, and he said that originally they had to manually check all audio, but they work on a community basis now. A follow-up question said that it was a reality that you have to check the audio, but he said in the future there'd be a audio to speech keyword technology.

Rip It Up And Start Again

Chris Kimber (of the BBC, although these are his views) says "Yes."

He cantered through the array of "content" available in abundance, all the new devices that are now available.

Chris then talked about the BBC Share of Ear study from April 2009. Radio's share of ear is 83%, but for under 35s it's less, with 15-24s only getting 66% of their audio from radio.

If you compare the same age-group with ten years ago, they listen to 3.5 hours less than they did do.

He talked about some of the digital stations with only 4-5 hours a week of listening.

He said that listeners aren't currently dissatisfied with their current choice, so digital-only stations are complementary and not replacement services.

There's demand for interactivity, control and portability, so what's the solution? He says that we should think of a digital music service and not a linear radio station. And we need to think about quality and not quantity - that's what's going to cut-through. Chris thinks this is the reverse of what actually happens.

His manifesto:

- be famous for a small number of distinct high quality programmes
- interactive - become a platform for the listener
- utility: offer great music recommendations
- be open and social

Absolute Radio's Chris Lawson was up next. He spoke of the opportunity of digital from a revenue perspective. He said that ad revenues are decreasing, we have sample based research, and the changes in media consumption.

The opportunity is there to increase revenue, see what people are actually consuming, and be open and transparent. He said that we have to go where the audience is going.

Then talked about the creation of One Golden Square Labs, and the thinking behind it. He took us through things like the apps that Absolute Radio have done, the iTunes storefront, and creating audio and video for the website (about 3000 items so far including 100 live sessions). He pointed out that we upload much of this to YouTube too.

Comparemyradio is the (slightly contentious?) new website that tells you things like who's playing your favourite artist. He explained that it lets you compare the output of different stations.

He mentioned PopJustice's plaudit, even though it said that it proves that "good can come from evil."

He said that if we don't take control of our destiny then others might.

The it was on to Dabbl, the user-generated radio station that's been in Beta for the last few weeks. He explained that it'd be Absolute Radio's new music offering with a live music element in the evening. Finally he mentioned that Absolute 80s is launching at the start of December.

Then it was on to the UK Radio Player from Michael Hill. He talked about seams - the day to day stuff that all radio stations rely on - and nuggets - that come along once in a while.

He walked us through his daughter's day, starting with a missed opportunity to hear Capital in the morning because her radio's not up to it. She couldn't hear Capital on their App with lots of freezing. He pointed out that this was probably O2 rather than Capital's problem (she has an iPhone mind you at 15!). Later in the day there's some Radio 1, some more Capital via their app, satellite TV, and some CD music.

"Capital really do understand my daughter... it's very spooky."

He said that the Jingle Bell Ball is a great "nugget" from Capital.

But there need to be cheaper DAB sets and her phone is her life!

He then showed us the E4 prospective studios, performance areas and other things that they had in store. It was always the plan to produce short pieces that could be repurposed in lots of ways.

After hearing another E4 radio jingle, he spoke about the model, with "glanceable content" online at breakfast. "Work out where you need to be live and why."

You should work out what your nuggets are and don't do too many.

Because E4 radio was tied into the D2 distribution mechanism, they missed a trick and could easily have launched on other platforms.

A brief piece on FiveLive pointed out that it has nuggets like Mayo/Kermode, the online element of 606 and the Wimbledon things they do.

He said that AM was dying and they had to make a concerted effort to become a digital station in everything they said.

But fundamentally, he says that "No" - we don't need to change everything.

"We can become obscure and irrelevent... or [use digital] for a renaissance."

Finally Paul Campbell from Amazing Radio got a round of applause for not using PowerPoint. He also apologised for killing off Birdsong and said that Dabbl isn't first, but Amazing Radio was in letting listeners choose the music they hear.

AmazingTune.com has been around since 2005 for unsigned bands to use with an ethical payment mechanism.

You won't hear any PRS material at all on Amazing Radio, and you'd hardly hear any DJs (he referenced discussion on Digital Spy "feedback").

He said that if you hear a song on Amazing Radio then it's there because website users have put it there (hence the Dabbl critcism). He says that he's never known a reaction to a radio station like the one he's had since Amazing Radio started, and why it's so much better than other radio. He says that it's touched a nerve.

He thinks that there are probably lessons for others to learn - although not too closely (he's been cross about the BBC in today's Guardian). Ulitmately they want to continue and to expand into other areas.

In the Q&A we heard about Dabbl going 24 hours (touch wood), and that Amazing Radio is used as marketing tool trying to turn users into registered listeners. They've had internal discussions about going into RAJAR. But he's not going to be the next Simon Cowell - although he wants to be profitable within his model. Amazing Video will follow eventually. He says that they do mix genres to a "crazy extent".

Radio with Pictures

Robin Pembrooke from Global tells us that their apps which were announced at this conference last year have been downloaded 750,000 since then. And their Nokia/Symbian and Android applications are soon to come.

Last month they served as many page impressions on their Capital iPhone app as they did on their website, and Global's apps occupy 5 of the top 25 music applications on the iTunes store.

He referenced the Pure Sensia which has just hit the shops and uses WiFi and RadioDNS to sync up pictures with audio (in this instance served via DAB).

As well as other mobile platforms, he's hopeful of Canvas offering some functionality on digital TV. This will make it more complex to manage, with the same image appearing on all the various devices.

People like the apps, he says, but they're not perfect. People don't want to see lots of photos of Simon Bates - especially on larger screened devices! (Not a reflection on Simon Bates). Because commercial radio can't afford large teams, you need to work on a dynamic system.

Robin mentions the cross-industry radio player which will have space for a slideshow image. This, he hopes, will be a key way of driving people from the player to their websites.

He's keen to have an open approach to let all the various manufacturers use the same formats. Website owners learnt this years ago with common form factors for advertising.

Brett Spencer from Five Live was preceded by the BBC's visualisation of England winning the Ashes on DTV (and online) earlier in the summer! It didn't flash "England Win the Ashes" in big letters incidentally. Just a subtle "England win to regain The Ashes" at the foot of the page.

There were, however, 500,000 requests online for the feed and 900,000 on redbutton on DTV.

Five Live has a four camera setup in their main studio. So they tried an experiment with Simon Mayo's show. Brett showed us a video that demostrated what they'd done and some of the reaction to it. It's clear that it's not television, and people did appreciate it - if only to notice that Simon Mayo has a better chair than anyone else in the studio!

"If more people... listen and view it longer, it's a good idea" - SImon Mayo.

Brett explained what they were able to do, and add: including more texts and emails than could be read out. 80% of people who viewed it had not visited the website the previous week.

He thinks that it is an exciting opportunity. Some hadn't listened to Five Live before - and the new listeners tended to be younger.

"Love the visual radio - it's almost indistinguishable from actual magic" - a listener, Ben!

He finished with a clip of the incomparable Danny Baker on Saturday mornings behind the red button (140,000 people are using it so far).

A panel discussion then opened up, with Colin Crawford from Pure talking about the Sensia which is now in shops and the work that's gone into developing it. He says that it is glanceable and you can put it somewhere to suit you.

It tuns out that Colin's daughter does have a DAB radio. He says that watching her react to the product evolving has been interesting. Even the logos appearing is very popular. Again, there are some nice mentions about what Absolute Radio has been doing - especially during development around the time that V Festival was occuring offering rich imagery.

James Cridland wants to know if it's actually quite hard work to get all that imagery on screens.

Then Global demonstrated the kind of behind the scenes work that they have to do to put together the visuals behind their apps, and the feed they send to the Pure Sensia.

He says it's really useful if your station controller has the app on their phone to see what's happening. He also mentioned DJs "egos" and having a look at the app, and seeing what happens when they realise what it can do. It's only once you've seen it that people start to get ideas.

The only negative comments are when the signal drops out and that's "not technically our fault!"

Robin Pembrooke wants to know if the "mythical" FM transmitter will ever be turned on in the iPhone.

Zia from Five Live said that at first there was a little playing up to the cameras when it was introduced but the only real changes they had to make were a change to lights and asking guests if they were happy to appear on camera as well.

Global is trying to make it as automatic and dynamic as possible whereas Five Live had four people working fulltime during their experiement. This also allowed them to learn as they went and the 10th or 11th shows were very different from the first shows.

Robin says the next version that Global will be launching will be in the UK Radio Player. And following that he's hoping for Canvas to be the next big thing.

Colin says that Pure will be releasing an SDK around the middle of next year for the Sensia as well as more apps. In the meantime he'll be talking to radio stations some more. The Sensia is currently available for £249 in John Lewis you'll be pleased to learn.

A question wonders whether all of this takes us away from the listeners having control of the pictures rather than producers. Robin says that during Capital's Summertime Ball they did use photos from listeners. It's a moderation issue as much as anything.

When asked about guests saying yes or no to visualisation, Brett "persuaded" them otherwise, and they said yes. In fact it was a concern about editing the video out of context.

Spotify: Friend or Foe

Ben Perreau introduced the session starting with Nigel Pinto from Human Capital. They've produced a rough and ready piece of research which he then summarised.

60% of the radio audience is a passive listener - she's called Jane and lives in Newcastle. Radio is a friend, and she listens several times a day. She'll never use Spotify or Last.fm

The next group is based around Matt - 15% of the population - is really into his music. He's a classic rock buyer. He has his favourite radio stations. He hadn't heard of Spotify but he's interested in it. His daughter might download a few iTunes tracks but he's a bit of a technophobe.

The third type, is the young techie - John from Highgate, 23 and less than 5% - he can list Spotify's problems. He wants to interact more. Spotify has fundamentally affected his radio listening - and does so with pride.

The last group is a woman called George - about 25% of the market. She's the threat - the best of both worlds. SHe lives in North London and knows about Spotify and has used it. She's a threat because of share of eardrums. She's not technical , but she uses it while she works in place of commercial radio and Radio 2. She just likes to curate her own playlists!

If George "gets it" this could revolutionise a different tpe of person says Nigel.

Spotify is a great because "it's a simple service... it's seamlessly accepted."

You don't actually have any love for it though, which is interesting and what he says that radio has that these things - including iTunes - don't.

Nikhil Shah from Mixcloud has previously done brand consultancy, but it was his background as a DJ that led him to create Mixcloud. He said that he was frustrated about finding somewhere to host his audio. Podcasts with commercial music either don't happen or are illegal. All the file downloading sites (Rapidshare etc) weren't great. A background in maths led them to believe that there was a lot that can be done with data. They can share their music, and get recommendations.

"I am the enemy in the room" says Nikhil, because they'll be looking for advertising. They have aspirations to be on lots of platforms. But currently it's display and audio advertising.

"Radio content is very different to music... you have a curator." He says that's not the same as having four million tracks available.

Ben wonders who's in Nikhil's competitive set. Last.fm, says Nikhil, is closer to radio than the others because you can press play and get a stream, whereas Spotify is self-selected.

He says that there are lots of services licencing millions of tracks but just differentiating on price. Interesting services use social media, discovery and recommendation.

Jeff Smith from BBC R2 & 6Music was previously at Napster. Jeff says that he uses the service to dig deeper into music. At Napster they'd been trying to create the "celestial jukebox" and Spotify has to an extent done that.

But he says that it's what are added to music that differentiates radio. Radio can complement these services as people dig deeper into something they've heard on the radio.

As we've heard (in Nigel's research), people don't want to always do too much. And that's what makes the difference.

The services may converge though - Last.fm/discovery for example. When that happens, that could be the "Napster" moment for radio.

Jeff admires the technical model that Spotify's build with P2P and more recently caching of tracks.

Ben wonders about how the two can co-exist and Jeff points out that iTunes widely partners with radio stations in the US. And socially built playlists can be very involving and could work with radio.

Nigel believes that we shouldn't fight on their ground - "that'd be crackers." Spotify, he feels, hasn't developed their radio proposition. Users aren't listening by genre - that part is underdeveloped.

But this isn't for the mainstream, he says, because the mainstream "can't be arsed."

Nikhil says that we're no longer being spoon-fed like a baby. We're taking control. His question for radio is "What is your attitude to syndication?"

He says he's looking for opportunities as an entrepreneur.

Jeff says that we could explore the concept of not currating music but currating programming. That could be a great asset to have.

He says that it'll take a while before people know what these things are and to reach the mass audience. But when they do, they could be a threat

Ben wonders what the impact will be on what people will hear in the future. He speaks about Popstars and the excitement of CDs being turned around in 24 hours. Now it's instantaneous with downloads. The old 7/8 week wait is a nonsense - record companies make the music available as soon as they can. The speed is a lot faster than it used to be.

Nigel thinks that perhaps this affects Radio 1 a little more than other stations, but the trust that people have with their radio brands won't be quickly broken down. What people want from the medium doesn't actually change. A proportion will be active and dynamic - and then they'll have kids...

"Could radio have done more to get involved with Spotify earlier on?" Nigel's not sure. It's a different model. There are more Janes than Johns. Do what you're good at well, and develop from there. "Play to your strengths."

Nicky from Somethin' Else asked what happens Spotify finally gets a "trusted guide" - say a DJ like Simon Mayo? Jeff says that this would be a tremendous challenge. The older audiences will probably be safe, but the younger audiences will change.

Nikhil does point out that there's a difference between mainstream drivetime and niche long tail music.

Nick Piggott from Global wants to know about money. He thinks that Spotify must be burning through money. So they either crash and burn, they go subscription only or they force a change in music licencing. And if they do, we'll all benefit with radio services replicating Spotify's service.

Nikhil says that he thinks they have revenues of £20m per year which isn't insubstantial. Their business model - therefore is a standard freemium model.

Jeff says he's read that the record labels have a 12% (?) stake in the business. That's quite clever and could have a big effect on their business.

Ben notes that Daniel Ek of Spotify is a keynote speaker at South by Southwest in March. Could that be the US launch?

James sums up by saying that the "on button" on a radio is the "entertainment button" and Spotify hasn't got that yet.

Chris Kimber notes that The Word can create a radio station by them currating a playlist. Suddenly The Word is a radio station.

Andrew from the BBC says that radio shouldn't be so scared, and should embrace technology and confront it!

And at this point - it's a break for lunch...

Why Radio Must Go Digital

Realistic, challenging, farcical - these are some of the words that Lisa Kerr of the DRDB used to start her speech on Why Radio Must Go Digital.

She began her speech with a quote from the Digital Britain report earlier this year about why radio has to move on from an analogue world.

"Why is doing nothing not an option?" We'd be continuing to hedge our bet and back all horses, and in doing so "bleed our industry dry" - not good for commercial radio or the BBC.

Within a decade, millions would need to be spent to renew analogue distribution in any case. And our competitors are all going digital - Sky+, mobiles, online, Freeview... Everyone is a "channel hopping, choice junkie".

Everywhere look - it's going digital. So radio must do as well. And "broadcast" is vital - anything else doesn't deliver. Once you've bought a radio set there was nothing more to pay. Freeview and Freesat were necessary to deliver digital television switchover.

Broadcast is also good use of spectrum. IP "simply can't cope with the simultaenous streaming" required by that technology alone.

The entire UK broadband infrastructure could only cope with 4m of the 18m listening at 8am in the morning - and that stops any other use of the internet. Even naysayers realise this.

We could go down the route of setting a date and having "a great big game of chicken." If you read some coverage, she said, this would be what you'd take from it.

"Absolute Radio could go digital tomorrow" whereas TalkSport has a more cautious view.

But we don't have a hard and fast date. Digital Britain doesn't pretend to have all the answers - coverage isn't good enough, there aren't enough sets in cars, local multiplexes need work, clarity is needed for smaller stations, sets are too expensive. This is why Digital Radio UK is being setup.

She says that smaller stations shouldn't worry about FM becoming a second class format. The sound quality difference is small.

This reminds her of the talk twenty years ago of the launch of national commercial stations which in fact saw great growth in the industry.

Waiting to fix every single problem would require us waiting for an untennably long time. They are interdependent. Setting a target date has been important and its seen lots of manufacturer activity and car makers. And the industry is talking a great deal more too.

Until listeners can receive digital, we won't go digital, and only at that point will the date be even set.

Legislation and fixing infrastructure first, then fixing content. Then promotion, and then people will go digital. (I paraphrase here as Lisa was far more eloquent than my rapid notes!).

"Cracking and not crackling!"

[UPDATE] Here's the full text of Lisa's speech:

Radio at the Edge conference, Monday 9th November 2009
Why Radio Must Go Digital
By Lisa Kerr, Digital Radio Development Bureau & Campaign Director, Digital Radio UK
2.15pm, Lewis Media Centre, London

Thank you.

Build v Buy v Free

Next up is Bruce Mitchell from Bauer who talks through the relaunch of TotalKiss.com and what they learnt from their process.

Kiss has three stations reaching 4.8m people each week (including under 15s), and they have a TV station as well as a website and associated social media.

Bruce says that they didn't have the resource and technology of some of their competitors - it was going to be a ground up process. They started by listening to their DJs to find out what they were doing - their own blogs etc. They also spoke to their editors and their sales team. And they listened to their consumers.

"What does the web mean to a radio station?" What would stay and what would go from the old site.

There was a lot they wanted to do and a lot of people they needed to please. They had good online presence already but thought that they could do better. They were building a website for a business.

"It was going to be a very public beta."

How would they able to return control to the brand?
Minimise cost?
Deliver creativity?

Keep - It - Simple - Stupid : KISS.

This is an approach, but not necessarily the right one. It's what they did though.

They could build, buy-in, or go free.

Building is fine if you've got the resources and specific needs, but it was a risk. Buying a managed hosting solution including the Mediaspan favourite (!). But it came with long-term committment and little control over code.

So that left one route to go down: open source (there was a great visual gag involving a cartoon - I'll let Bruce tell you about it).

It kept cost down by leveraging the time of thousands of developers, and they could feed back too. They built it on PHP. Bruce then mentioned some other very good reasons for using PHP...

The engine they chose to use was Wordpress, although they didn't know how powerful it would turn out to be. It did everything they needed including a player and running several stations off one site.

It's kept up to date developed regularly. And there's a vast plug-in library as well as new elements always coming. The support is excellent and there's total flexibility.

A lot of Kiss's website is based on Wordpress. They then add extra layers of functionality on top of that.

This extends to their forthcoming iPhone app based around the Kiss Cube.

They use dozens of additional free services:

Wufoo is an instant HTML form builder. It provides lots of reporting options and allows you to use CSS. It's a quick route to getting things done.

SoundCloud is audio FTP with community attached. Listeners can upload content that can be used on-air.

UStream.TV is a live video streaming service. They used it at the Carnival for the first time. You just plugin a webcam and UStream takes care fo the rest.

DisQus is what they use for commenting. DisQus uses the Yahoo/Twitter APIs to extend comments into the web.

Yahoo Pipes is used to mash up content from across the various sites and repurpose it. (He suggest asking permision first - can't think what he means!).

The Cloud can save thousands on fixed infrastructure ("get rid of half your IT dept overnight"!).

Google provides a huge number of tools like the forthcoming (for some) Google Wave, and the free Google Analytics.

AudioBoo is totally part of their world to add extra layers both on-air and on-line.

Facebook allows engagement to be extended on their own site and changes the way they do their marketing and communications. They can target by demographic and location adding an extra layer to the sell.

Bruce then runs through the stats that show lots more users spending more time, and more visits than other stations. Only in overall visits are they not first, although they're on an upward curve.

"Your website isn't a website at all. It's radio."

In the Q&A he says that he's losing some data that could be better used. But they had to compromise to get revenue on, and initially they were technically immature which they no longer are. Next time there'll be a more intelligent site.

From The Outside Looking In

Jonathan Marks is next up from Critical Distance was next up to tell us what he's been doing working with stations - particularly in Africa.

Assumptions he makes are that fun happens at the edges, getting rid of old ideas is the problem - not new ideas, and copying doesn't work, adapting does.

Every country is different - with some embracing passionate presenters, while in Asia, it's demoted to being a "broken television."

But where he works it's the most important medium - it's community.

Golden rules apply - research the audience, being local and relevant: they're old techniques but in many places they've been forgotten.

Radio is an important segment in a larger world of audio, and it's about access and not "push." If your phone shouted at you, you'd switch it off. The ideal form of communication is the conversation afterall.

Facebook continues to expand, although Wikipedia's expansion has slowed down. Has it peaked?

The Chinese equivalent of YouTube does 3.5bn downloads a month - so they now run the Chinese language version of Hulu.

Where Jonathan works there are 200+ languages, and there's no business model for TV outside the cities, whereas radio is everywhere costing $4-5 for the best sets. It's important at times of crisis.

He says that technologies like Audioboo could be very useful, indeed some programmes should be designed to be stolen.

Local radio works by supporting local artists - sharing them via USB sticks which have become very cheap.

The growth of mobile is key! "Your SIM card is unique proof of your identity." In the Netherlands it takes 3 days to transfer money. Using a SIM card, in Ghana it takes 14 seconds.

He's helped start a media lab in Benin based on European ideas. In the Netherlands, Business News Radio is targeted to people who want to make money - entrepreneurs. They've adapted that model for Africa.

Internet cafés continue to prosper in Africa and they actually become community media hubs. And because mobile operators have to ensure their towers have power, there are opportunities for local radio stations (60% of mobile costs are trucking fuel to these towers).

Digital radios are going to take a long time to get accepted because of cost. Worldspace was a fiasco, and Sirius/XM is showing decline. Satellite radio could be useful in Africa.

Apps are going well, but WiFi radio is slightly concerning. Some of the radios don't have reliable databases that are kept up to date.

Listeners would be happy to help make some these databases better.

DRM still has no cheap receivers. A group on Yahoo map all the transmitter sites on earth - but the list of extinct sites is bigger than live sites. What will happen next?

DRM = Doesn't Really Matter (that's the radio format).

In some stories the message isn't clear. This confuses consumers. And only some will work next door in France.

RadioDNS is extremely important because it provides the back channel.

A simple interface is critical. (He demonstrates the difference between Yahoo and Google).

He's also interested in archiving audio. 80% of archives are "rotting" - don't just "chuck them in the basement." There's lots of work going into speech to text coming from universities and the open source world.

He talks about how little younger people will pay for. But they will be interested in something that starts a conversation.

He talks about an Associated Press global study from April 2008 about how people can find the stories they're interested in.

He highlights what The Daily Show is doing as something many current affairs broadcasters could do.

Australia is somewhere to watch - it's similarly sized in population to the Netherlands. 49% of Australians regard online as their preferred information resource - twice that of TV. So Australians use audio better with news reports. It's particularly interesting in very rural stations where it becomes very cross media and more than audio.

He finishes by highlighting MySociety.org (with a Ben Bradshaw page!), the theyworkforyou.com website, and fixmystreet. Journalists can use this as a resource.

Ushahidi makes sure that their audience can report back what's happening using texts. Ujima allows you to find out what's happening with NGOs in different parts of the world.

APM - African Professional Media - is a portal of relevant material collected over the years. This can add to an overall knowledge portal.

There'll always be a role for professional storytellers. Don't shout - but create conversation. The audience will react accordingly. They can answer your questions. Experiment!

(A very wide-ranging presentation you'll have noticed)

What Would Google Do?

Jonathan Gillespie from GMG was previously at Google (amongst other places), and tries to tell us what the differences - or similarities - are between radio and Google.

Google has an 80% market share and is "in a good place." Their real costs are in R&D, where radio spends very little. There's little regulation on the internet whereas radio is highly regulated.

"Google spends more money by spending less time with its customers."

Google doesn't actually produce 'content'. Jonathan had previously worked with YouTube and they didn't make any of them - just created a facility for distributing them.

Google has convincingly made the case that the last click is the most important. There's something to drive you there in the first place. We're a case-study driven industry and don't have the metrics to make the case that Google can.

Advertising is not a market - but a business model. That's bad news for us, as we've considered it a market.

We've had access; we're reaching the end of the landgrab; now it's going to be about content - that's somewhere that Google doesn't exist.

Strong but flexible brands are key then.

There might be a limit to your audience, but there's not necessarily a limit to the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

He talked about a Real Radio promotion called Radio Renegade that saw a 75% uplift in page impressions and wasn't sure that they fully monetised that uplift. This medium "still has great power."

Google has taken ownership of the journey - old media has struggled to maintain value further up the purchase chain. We need to understand the value of the journey before the till in the supermarket is reached.

Google has great scalability with an adaptive infrastructure, and it's not something radio has neither been able to do, nor perhaps needed to do. But there's a ubiquity of supply out there.

Next he talked about dMarc. While that mightn't have worked, Google has managed to automate to the nth degree.

He talked about openness - don't have a walled garden approach. Do what you do the best and link to the rest. However, companies like Moneysupermarket can buy traffic from Google and monetise it at a greater rate.

Cross promotion is important - there'll be some sense of personalisation.

Network effects: how useful a service is depends on the scale of the userbase. YouTube needs its community.

And finally there's co-creation - helping build your product.

In the Q&As Jonathan admitted not to know about Audioboo - but we're sure Tony Blackburn will fill him in.

James Cridland asked about the wealth of data - and Jonathan says that they don't use surveys. They simply don't use them - it's all about usage stats.

Richard Bacon and Tony Blackburn

I think that this is going to be hard to capture, and it might be better for you to visit the Radio Academy website to listen to the audio. But nonetheless, here goes:

Richard explains that he got his 1m+ Twitter followers via an accident of fate and ended up on the suggested user list!

Tony begins by saying that The Boat That Rocked wasn't altogether accurate.

In the old pirate days, there was contact with listeners - letters would find their way through and even the record companies - which was illegal.

Richard talks about the immediate feedback you get now. When he was on Capital drive, he got text after text asking to "bring back Foxy."

Tony thinks that some of the senior people don't really understand technology, and won't tell us about someone who told him that the internet "would never work."

We all need to keep up to date with what's happening.

Richard says that you can end up with a vocal minority - you'll get a reaction by they might not always be representative of what the audience thinks.

Tony talked about the reaction to whatever it was that Simon Cowell did on X-Factor last night - and then he and Richard talked about their respective Twitter thoughts following last night's show.

We're now moving on to talk about twins and I'm losing interest (!).

Richard explains that Twitter is more than about interactivity - it also frames what people are interested in.

Tony talked about the things he's tried with live streaming - not necessarily with permission. Managements need to think of the future.

Richard mentions the Simon Mayo experiment, and he refers back to the failed Sky One/Chris Evans show from his Virgin Radio days. But he's not sure that a presenter on their own talking into a microphone is a very visual experience.

But Tony talks about his daughter's usage of radio - or not.

Tony moves onto AudioBoo and how good it is. He says it can help you promote your radio programmes. He likes to plug the show times.

Richard asks if it makes a difference, and Tony feels it can't harm:

"There are some people who hear who believe RAJAR figures."

(RAJAR's Paul Kennedy is sitting behind me...)

TV Catchup is a great App by all accounts! Tony loves it...

There's an interesting area about what your personal views are in relation to those of the organisation you're representing. That can be difficult - particularly working in a news environment. Richard mentions issues surrounding the Jan Moir/Daily Mail piece.

There's general agreement that you can promote with Twitter, but you can't just sell. It's a line to be stepped along carefully. You have to let people into your life a little bit.

Tony thinks that a lot of this is a failure to understand what's happening. He finds it amazing that he's explaining to the management how things work. He feels he's being held back instead of saying "Yes - do it!"

Richard says that there's the flipside with stations that force their presenters onto Twitter, or write a blog. And it's easy to see people who don't want to do it. Presenters end up coming across as insincere.

Tony introduced his own daugter to Spotify - rather than vice versa! Lots of kids are just using - and we have to think of ways to get them back,

Tony - it's worth noting - is currently on four different radio stations.

Richard is talking about the "secret half hour" but won't reveal it's name in public. This has an 11,000 member Facebook group and he has a great relationship with them. They talk all day on Facebook and he constantly uses it to get things to put on the show.

Richard finds texts impersonable, but Tony loves it and gets regulars every show on Smooth Radio. What would Terry Wogan be without emails and texts?

"Basically I get the listeners to write the show," Ricard Bacon.

Tony notes that he's at the age group that advertisers apparently don't want any longer - and his son's in advertising. "We should be embracing every single listener that we have."

Why aren't younger people listening? "There's something we're doing wrong."

RAJAR "is nonsense." (He's happy to take an "up" in his Smooth figures however).

Richard points out that it's very important to advertisers. "Of course it is," says Tony.

RIchard says that this all makes the audience more sticky. Tony says that it takes time, but there's a real upside.

"Any radio station that doesn't have an application on the iPhone is mad."

(It seems that Richard isn't "particularly interested in [Jon Gaunt's] streaming." He doesn't want to see him.)

Tony mentions that he's aware that the media is monitoring what he says - and that he's representing his radio stations and doesn't want to bring them into disrepute.

Ash Elfield of Arqiva is interested in who owns the Twitter feed. Richard is very much of the opinion that he owns it although he realises that he built it via the radio station. But followers beget more followers.

Tony is of a similar opinion that he owns those social media properties. He's a disbeliever in having someone control what he does.

Trevor Dann asks how many people Richard and Tony follow. RIchard follows 125 people - friends, relatives and famous people. Tony follows 35.

It has to be more than what you have for breakfast. He talks about what Graham Linehan does putting interesting links up. A good Tweet gives you information.

Tony mentions Boris Johnson and Arnold Schwarzeneggar as being fun people, although Richard is wary of politicians' Tweets [clearly, that's not the case for Ben Bradshaw].

There are people who do too many, points out Richard. Don't do too many. Nobody unfollowed somebody for sending too few tweets [not entirely true]. Richard likens this to DVD extras.

Richard mentions that for half an hour after Michael Jackson had died he wasn't allowed to say anything on-air, but he did say it on Twitter! (BBC editorial guidelines were more cautious than TMZ on the evening - like many media outlets).

"When you revolve the same 300 records over and over again, it can become a bit tedious," says Tony being questioned about where we find new talent.

Richard references Chris Evans' autobiography and what he was able to do overnight on Piccadilly when he started out.

Tony says that there's room for jukeboxes, but there also needs to be room for the next Kenny Everett.

This is a session that's definitely worth listening to at the Radio Academy website, as I said up front.

That wraps up coverage for today. Hope that some of you got some value from this. I'll try to tidy up typos and misquotes.

I've been listening to a few fascinating bits of radio recently, most of which are no longer listenable and may never be in quite the form I heard them, but are largely available to hear in one format or another right now.

First up has got to be a short fifteen minute programme called Runaway Train detailing the events from 9 March 1987 when a Canadian train's brakes failed and was running out of control. The driver, Wesley MacDonald, was the only man on board, and he was unable to stop his goods train.

The programme incorporated actual recordings made between the driver and his controller. The calmness and professionalism is apparent, but there are no obvious solutions. The train is travelling too fast for the driver not to die if he jumped from his cabin.

People who were there at the time relate procedings, and it's like a terrible true-life short story. Google Wesley MacDonald if you want to know what happened.

(Although the programme is no longer available to Listen Again, you can find the raw audio files online).

Clive James is always worth a listen. He's recently returned to A Point of View (following Sir David Attenborough's wonderful Life Stories which are available to buy on CD). But he's also just published the latest volume of his autobiography detailing his years making television - Blaze of Obscurity. Radio 4 serialised this as its Book of the Week a couple of weeks ago, and James is a wonderful teller of (tallish?) tales surrounding this time. He talked about his various chat shows, and his introduction to Japanese gameshows. There's an abridged audiobook available, and of course in four thirteen minute episodes, that's what Radio 4 broadcast. So my decision now must be to read the full book, or listen to the three hour abridgement? Decisions, decisions.

Finally something that is currently available to Listen Again. When I visited Oxford recently, I had to visit Blackwells, the fantastic bookshop. Near the front of the shop was a display copy of a luscious new book called A Village Lost and Found. It's a collection of stereoscopic photographs taken by TR Williams in the 1850s in and around the Oxfordshire village of Hinton Waldrist.

What I didn't realise at the time was that Brian May (yes - the Queen chap - and astronomer), was the co-author with Elena Vidal. The somewhat clumsily-titled Brian May's 3-D Village tells the story of how the photos came into being, how May and Vidal were able to track down the locations of Williams' photos.

3D photography doesn't naturally lend itself to radio, but then it's not easy to do on television either (we'll see how Channel 4's 3D week fares a week on Monday). Yet this programme was a fascinating listen, and maybe I'll have to get that book now!

Open Country is also available as a podcast - but it's likely to disappear first thing Saturday morning (6 November). There's also a piece about this programme on the BBC News site.

(Thanks to EarStory for highlighting this programme)

Today sees publication of the latest RAJAR figures and there are a few things that are food for thought.

FIrst of all, it wasn't the greatest RAJAR for commercial radio which slipped back a little against a strong BBC which saw increases in share for all its national analogue networks with the exception of Radio 1.

Source: RAJAR Q3 2009

Commercial radio really does need this to return to parity.

Nationally, as well as the BBC channels mentioned, Talksport has done well with some gains quarter on quarter.

In London there's a very interesting story with Capital FM becoming the biggest station in London and this is despite losing share quarter on quarter. What's happened is that Magic has lost even more (and Heart has missed out too), leaving Capital as "London's number one" as the jingles will no doubt be informing listeners at some point today.

My own employer, Absolute Radio, has done well in London, picking up 7.6% in hours against an overall declining backdrop (the BBC is gaining in London too, where the traditional commercial lead is being whittled away).

All of this means it's going to be interesting to see what happens in Q1 next year once Chris Evans has started up on Radio 2. But that's six months away yet.

One very important measure is the percentage of listening that's being done via a digital platform - be it DAB, the internet or DTV. For all radio, it's remained at 21.1%. With commercial radio overall dipping a little at 20.2%, the BBC has helped keep the level up as it has achieved 21.6% digital overall.

Source: RAJAR Q3 2009

Does this mean that "Digital Upgrade" is not going to happen, and we're going to remain on analogue forever? Er, no. It'd be good to see those figures continue to rise, and I know that the DRDB is working hard to ensure that they do continue increasing.

We've also heard that the radio industry is working on a new way for every station to be able to be heard online. Hopefully, that will drag up the relatively lowly 2.2% listening share that the internet currently achieves.

Source: RAJAR Q3 2009

Again, my own employer, Absolute Radio, has managed to better this. Excluding our FM listening in London, 51.5% of all listening is done via a digital platform now - exceding the 50% target set by Lord Carter in his Digital Britain report four years ahead of the 2013 date suggested.

Even if we include FM listening in London, Absolute Radio is at 30.5% - well ahead of the commercial average.

DAB ownership is also up 14% year on year now with 16.6m adults living in a home with at least one DAB radio.

This next quarter is a very important one for sales of DAB radios - and now more than ever WiFi connected radios. As well as the Pure Sensia, Pure has just announced the Sensia Flow while Revo has just announced the Heritage. And Logitech has its interesting looking Squeezebox The common factor for all of is that they have internet radio. As more homes get wireless networks, these devices will become more common place.

All of this leads me to Radio at the Edge where amongst other things, Richard Bacon will be interviewing Tony Blackburn and Lisa Kerr will be telling us why Radio Must Go Digital. It's well worth the asking price, so persuade the people you need to, to let you go!

And if you're very lucky, you might see some very interesting short videos from, ahem, me...

(Note: Although I work for Absolute Radio, this piece does not necessarily represent the views of my employer. That said, it's only because my employer is happy to publish our digital platform listening figures that I can quote them here. I am unable to publish other stations' platform listening figures.)

[Updated to include DAB ownership - 8.20am]

I was in Sweden recently, presenting at Radio Days 2009, and letting a Swedish audience know what we'd been doing in the last 12 months as we morphed from Virgin Radio to Absolute Radio.

One of the things I noted was that Absolute Radio publishes its playlist online, and includes the number of plays the tracks got on both Absolute Radio and competitor stations.

After the presentation, I had a conversation with someone who expressed great surprise that we were giving out information about not only what we were playing, but how often we were playing it, as well as our competitors' plays. You see, for a long time, this has been regarded as one of the dark secrets of radio programming. Although you might think that a certain track is getting a lot of airplay, it's never been very easy for a listener to determine quite how much, and how that compares with other stations.

Radio professionals have always had access to this information though. You obviously know how much your own station plays a song, but you can also find out what your competitors are doing. At a very basic level, this might just be employing a work experience person to sit down with a pen and paper (or spreadsheet) and just jot them down as they hear them over the air. Once a song has aired on the radio, it's no longer a secret.

But companies are out there have long provided this kind of service, for a fee to radio groups. As such, it's remained out of the range of curious listeners.

Now the clever guys downstairs at work in our digital media team have launched a new product as part of the One Golden Square Labs initiative: CompareMyRadio.com allows you to see which stations are playing your favourite artists, how different stations compare, the frequency that they play tracks, the uniqueness (or similarity) between stations and so on.

Stations like Radio 2 have begun to make this kind of information very public anyway, with full tracklistings of all their programmes on their website. But others have been a little more "secretive" about it. The precise music mix of their station, they might consider to be akin to Coca-Cola's secret recipe.

It'll be interesting to see how the site develops. It's obviously very much a beta product at the moment, and there are plenty of possibilities for developing it more - not least of which include getting more services on-board. But comparing stations during different timebands would be interesting: most stations play it much safer during daytime than in their evening programming when more specialist fare is allowed.

Anyway, do go and take a look, and then give feedback at the One Golden Square blog.

[Disclaimer: This is clearly a product created by my employer, but these views are my own]

After I recently saw The Power of Yes, it became apparent that this was not the first production that David Hare had produced in this way.

In 2004, there was The Permanent Way, a National Theatre/Out of Joint co-production that carried out a similar dramatised investigation into the state of British railways following privatisation and through a spate of accidents that seemed to occur partly as a bi-product of that.

Obviously, you can't just watch plays "on-demand" unless they're one of the few that make it to DVD release. For the most part, you can only hope that the script has been published - and all of David Hare's have been by Faber and Faber, including The Permanent Way.

But I knew it was also broadcast on Radio 3, so I hunted through my old recordings (I record far more than I can hear), and what do you know - I had an mp3 copy of it!

What a fabulous play it was. I listened to it yesterday - mostly on a train as it happens as I returned from Oxford. It's another devastating indictment of mistakes both avoidable and unavoidable. And John Prescott really doesn't come out of it very well at all.

What a shame that plays like this aren't available to download at sites like iTunes? Despite being dramatised for radio by an independent production company, Catherine Bailey Limited. Searches of Amazon, iTunes and Audible don't find it. While the play may have limited life expectancy as a CD, digitising audio and then selling it on iTunes should be straightforward shouldn't it? Surely it'd unlock loads of additional revenue for the independent producers concerned?

In the meantime, my Psion Wavefinder recording dutifully kept from its 2004 broadcast will have to do me...

Here's something that links the last two entries on this blog. Following The Power of Yes yesterday, and the radio I was mentioning, I caught up with something else from the BBC World Service that I'd not previously listened to.

The Day That Lehman Died details events in the US over the weekend when the future of Lehman Brothers was decided, just ahead of the major start of the bailouts. It's well worth a listen, and happily is still available to hear.

Apologies in advance - just about everything I'm going to mention here is now beyond the iPlayer's Listen Again window.

The BBC World Service has just finished another Worldplay series, this time based on the subject of science. The last piece was called Moving Bodies by Arthur Giron and starred Alfred Molina. It was actually an edited version of a production from LA Theatreworks.

The play is all about the life of Richard Feynman, the physicist. It covers most of his life, from his time as a child with his domineering father right up until the subject which bookends the play - his work on the commission that investigated the Challenger disaster.

Feynman's story is a remarkable one, and if you ever get the chance to watch the full version of his 1981 Horizon interview you should jump at the opportunity.

Although this play is no longer available to listen to on the iPlayer, Audible.co.uk does have the full version available for download and it's on iTunes.

I first heard of Gerard Hoffnung when I was in Edinburgh on a university placement. A friend of mine there expressed surprise that I'd never heard Hoffnung's rambling story of the bricklayer (Listen to it - it's very funny. I've just ordered the full CD on the basis of that re-listening.). He lent me a cassette and that was how I learnt about the man.

If you listen to that clip of Hoffnung, you might surmise that he was a gentleman in his late fifties or early sixties. But he gave that address in 1958 when he was only 33. And he died a year later, making this year the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

Those nice people over at Speechification recently posted a link to a Twenty Minutes on Hoffnung that was broadcast during the Proms which is well worth a listen.

Then last week Radio 4 broadcast a play by Alan Stannard called Hoffnung - Drawn To Music, starring Matt Lucas and Gina McKee which was nicely observed and explored the way that Hoffnung was able to cajole respected composers into helping him put together the Hoffnung Music Festival at the Royal Festival Hall.

Elsewhere, I'm pleased that The News Quiz is back in the Radio 4 Friday Night Comedy slot and that rather awful I Guess That's Why They Call It The News has finished. Obviously Radio 4 has to experiment with new comedies, but I can fairly easily say that this was certainly a failed experiement.

Meanwhile on Mondays The Unbelievable Truth with David Mitchell is back (read his excellent Observer piece on Tracy Emin today), causing fun on Feedback.

And Dave Gorman has started his new Sunday morning show on Absolute Radio (Disclaimer: Clearly I work there).

As for TV? You are watching Spiral aren't you? If you're not, then it's available on catch-up on the iPlayer. So there's four hours of your life accounted for (or five if you read this after 10pm tonight). The Fixer just finished its second series, and given the way ITV treats drama these days - cancelling a popular programme like Kingdom for example - I'm not going to hold my breath for a third. Finally, you are watching the BBC Four Electric Revolutions season I trust. In particular, I loved Micro Men and Gameswipe.

Allow me, if you will, a work related post.

A few minutes ago saw the launch of dabbl, a new radio station from Absolute Radio. It's an exciting new station that lets listeners choose the music. And for the record, because these things are important to know, the first track played was Bon Jovi and Livin' On A Prayer.

And it's also the first project to emerge from the brand new Onegoldensquare Labs.

If you're in the UK, you can listen online, and if you live in London it's on DAB. The station runs from 7pm to 6am daily, so it's something to listen to of an evening - perhaps when you're online! Vote early and vote often. Go on. Go vote for some songs.

At the moment the choice is strictly live music with most of the tracks being exclusively available on dabbl or its sister stations. But in future it may move beyond simply offering live music.

[Disclaimer: I'm very nicely mentioned in the station's credits but had little to nothing to do with it's inception or creation]

The BBC has launched a series of neat animations promoting Just A Minute.

It's curious, though, that they chose this particular excerpt from Stephen Fry on DAB...

Nicely done, nonetheless.

(Actually, we do need to face up to reception issues, and improve coverage strength so that these issues go away).

As ever, these are my views, and don't reflect those of my employer.

Today I went along to the launch of a very interesting new radio, the Pure Sensia.

It's a DAB radio, FM radio, internet radio and media player rolled into one. But it also, interestingly allows you to use apps. And as we all know, there's nothing more exciting than apps in 2009.

I've got to say, it is a very smart looking radio, with a very nice touch screen interface. It's WiFi, so you hook it up to your network and away you go. Various radio companies, yes including Absolute Radio (as you can see in the picture above), have created slideshow elements that are delivered via the internet and can be synced up to whatever the station is playing at the time. So above you can see Christian O'Connell, but it changes to other station promotions, or pieces of information as the station likes.

The internet connectivity of the radio also means that you see station logos when choosing a radio station.

A lot of the internet connectivity is similar to what Pure has put in its Flow and subsequent radios. I've not played around with one of these, but they do seem to be the best on the market (sadly, when I upped the security on my own WiFi network to WPA2 my Bush radio stopped talking to my network).

But the apps ability is probably the most exciting. We saw an early version of the firmware with two apps currently working - a Twitter app and a weather app. Both of these were also early versions with no real ability to update your Twitter feed via the device. But it seemed to work well. The weather app looked good and will in due course have five day forecasts built in.

Forthcoming apps include news, Picasa and Facebook. At some point next year, Pure will release an SDK for other developers to build apps. Apps are actually hosted on Pure's Lounge website and it's not yet clear what they'll do about approving apps or hosting.

The radio can be angled so that the screen points in the right direction for your viewing position, and a really interesting idea is the inclusion of a tripod mount in the base. I was told that this was for wall mounting. Pure doesn't make a wall mount but a standard connector like a tripod screw means that either consumers can make one themselves, or third party manufacturers can.

Overall an impressive device. The cost, at £250 isn't cheap, but could probably be worse. This is never going to be mass market, but once the technology has matured, hopefully cheaper devices will follow. The radio pumps out some pretty decent sound which is also quite important.

Will I get one? Well I'm not sure. The design is nice, although I'd avoid the yellow one if I was you. But it is quite expensive as I say.

If they'd also built recording to SD card (or hard disk) functionality into it, then I'd be queuing up now to buy one when they come out in October, but sadly nobody seems willing to make the one device that I really really want.

But it's pretty good nonetheless.

As ever, these opinions are my personal ones, even though I was probably really only invited to the launch because my employer is supporting this device very heavily.

Here are two separate programmes that you simply must watch and listen to... for entirely different reasons.

First off, there's my current favourite radio feature on any programme anywhere at the moment. Yes, it's an Absolute Radio show and I work there, and yes, I know all the people who make it. But honestly irrespective of all that, it's just thoroughly brilliant.

Over the last few week's there's been new feature on the Geoff Hometime Show: Annabel v The Internet.

Each week Geoff sets the "technophobic" Annabel Port a challenge to see if she can do something we now take for granted by using the internet. She can't use the internet to help her succeed in her tasks. Instead of just looking up the answers online, or emailing folk, it's all down to visiting places and ringing people up.

Geoff sets the challenge on Monday, and then she reports back over the following three evenings with points either being awarded to Annabel if she's doing well, or the internet if she fails.

It's brilliant!

So far, Twitter, Skateboarding Dogs, Wikipedia, Friends Reunited, MySpace, Ebay, IMDB and, this week, World of Warcraft have been topics.

But last week Annabel had to replicate sites like Holy Moly and Popbitch. She had to come up with some celebrity gossip and let us know who's been seen where. Listen to the whole week, but if you listen to nothing else, you absolutely must listen to last Wednesday's edition when Annabel goes to, amongst other places, The Ivy.

Go and listen now.

I'll wait.

Click here and navigate to Wednesday 9 September.

Just terrific radio.

Now here's something else, also from last week, and also unmissable. But for entirely different reasons. Thanks to Emily for pointing me in the right direction, otherwise I'd have certainly missed Channel 4's 3 Minute Wonders from last week.

If you've never seen them, these are quirky little themed films made by all sorts of people that fill that bit between the Channel 4 News, and the time you turn over from Channel 4 before some property porn programme comes on.

Last week, featured a "magazine" called Super Super. Now I say "magazine", but it's not something you'll find in your local WH Smith. Indeed, I've been keeping an eye out for it all over the place following this series of programmes because I'm fascinated by it. And curiously, if you visit their website (sponsored unendingly by Adidas) there simply doesn't seem to be any way to subscribe to the magazine. Nor, in fact, does there seem to be any mention that there is a magazine. Now call me old-fashioned, but wouldn't it be a smart idea to let web-visitors, you know, buy your product. Indeed, from what I know about the magazine business, subscribers are vital because they're guaranteed revenue when news-stand sales can stand or fall on lots of things. I assume that there really is a magazine...

Four films aired: SuperStyle, SuperPeople, SuperMusic, and SuperSlinky.

I urge you to watch them all. Here they are!

SuperStyle

"The magazine's founders, Super Steve and Namalee have been hailed as cultural revolutionaries."

Who by? Their mate who made this film?

"They've inspired a whole generation with their magazines super-relentless optimism."

A whole generation? Like Pepsi? Who are these people?

Super Steve (always shot in black and white): "The world looks a lot more super now than it ever did before."

Namalee: "Do you think that people are going to start dressing more like cartoon comic book heroes in the future?"

SuperPeople

"Most of the contributors for SuperSuper are doing things themselves. They're part of the world."

Phew - at least they're not imaginary.

"I think I've found the reason why there's loads of flies in the room. I put these rotten apples into my plant pot cos I thought it might give it some nutrients..."

SuperMusic

All I can say about this is that you have to listen to Namalee's song. Has anyone signed her yet?

SuperSlinky

"Slinky" seems to spend his time in Argyle Street annoying people with a loudhailer, although it's all clearly faked. But that's OK - he was set the "task" to have "a mock fight". That'll be worth reading about!

I'm beginning to wonder if Chris Morris hasn't really been busily working on his film, and instead has sneakily brought back Nathan Barley without telling anyone, and has recast the whole programme.

Finally, a third thing I quite enjoyed this week (yes, I know this piece said two things): The Playwrite and the Grammarian, which appealed to me on a couple of levels. Still on the iPlayer as I write this and featuring cameos by Roger Bolton and Peter Donaldson.

This week saw the annual refreshing of Apple's iPod range. As always there was lots of speculation prior to the announcement about exactly what features would be included. There was lots of talk about cameras being fitted to various models, and about the long term future of the iPod Classic - the "original" iPod (this was a concern of mine as the largest Touch at 64GB doesn't come close to the Classic - now returning to a 160GB size. My Classic - sadly stolen last week - was nearly full. The extra 40GB is going to be essential to me).

What nobody saw coming was Apple's inclusion of an FM radio on the Nano. Most of Apple's competitors have long included an FM radio, and while Apple has included radios as optional extras built into their remote controls, this is the first time a radio has been natively built into the core device.

Apple being Apple, they didn't just include a radio - there's also some tagging technology better explained by Nick than me, and interestingly, something that hitherto has only been seen on DAB radios - live pause and rewind. The Nano buffers audio for about 20 minutes and you can go back and listen again.

What is interesting is that Apple is using RDS RadioText (as explained better by James). We nipped out to the Apple store at work yesterday to pick up a Nano, and it's interesting to note how few stations are really using RadioText fully.

Because few radios in the UK fully use RDS - some highend car radios have it built in, although the only radio I have that has it is a Sony tuner in my hi-fi - few stations fully utilise this technology beyond what car radios manage.

A quick tune through London stations yesterday revealed that most had a static station message. At Absolute Radio, we had been simulcasting our DAB DLS text, but as a special welcome to new Nano owners we changed it to this:

It's a shame the radio didn't make it to the Touch and the Classic. Indeed it's surprising that the camera didn't make it to the Touch either. Does Steve Jobs really think it's a gaming platform? Nokia has made that mistake with its Ngage system. But this does mean the "sexiest" iPod in the new range is actually the Nano.

But my next purchase will still be a Classic. I need that 160GB!

So the news that we all sort-of knew was going to happen anyway, has come to pass. Following a "BBC insider" having a chat with the Mail on Sunday over the weekend, El Tel has announced to his listeners that - yes - it is true. He'll soon be departing his weekday breakfast show, and will be replaced by Chris Evans who currently presents drivetime.

That leaves drive on Radio 2 free, and although at time of writing nothing's been confirmed, Mayo has been on Twitter: "You really would think I would have had the common decency to tell you what's happening wouldn't you?"

I think we can be reasonably sure that he'll take the drivetime show. He doesn't want to move to Salford where all the main 5 Live presenters will be required to broadcast from (seemingly) in a year or two's time. This, then, is the obvious move.

From my personal listening perspective, I'll be thoroughly disappointed by this. Mayo is a fine broadcaster - one of the best in the country really. And speech radio really works for him. He can move effortlessly between politics, breaking news (he was on-air for the September 11 attacks - I know as I was listening during a car journey), entertainment and books.

Indeed I'd suggest that his show is one of the best in any medium for an author to get on to promote a new book.

While I don't doubt that many of these features will follow through to Radio 2, it's a music station, and unless it takes a fantastically different path, then Mayo will do less talking, have fewer guests and will play more records. My "Daily Mayo" podcast won't be the same.

Of course there will be someone replacing Mayo, and while stalwarts of the station like Phil Williams and Richard Bacon have sat in for Mayo, perhaps the smart money should be on Mark Radcliffe?

But back to breakfast. How will a Terry Wogan audience adapt to Chris Evans? Wogan's audience of very nearly 8m comes from just 7.30 to 9.30 (compared with say, Moyles' 3.5 hours).

Evans, meanwhile has 5.4m listeners between 17.00 and 19.00. But the average age of his audience is a little younger at 49 compared with 53 for Wogan. Averages are fine, but they don't tell the whole story. Wogan currently gets 46.5% of his listeners from the 55+ age group, but interestingly 53.0% of the listening that he gets is from this age goup.

In other words, Wogan's older audience listens longer.

Compare that with Evans. 34.1% of his audience is aged 55+, but they account for just 33.8% of all listening.

In other words Evans has fewer older listeners who listen for shorter time periods.

Wogan is 71 and Evans is 43.

This means that when Evans starts on breakfast in January 2010:

- Older listeners will desert Evans who's not to their taste
- Younger listeners will start listening to Evans (possibly coming from Radio 1 or even commercial radio)
- Both of the above

Media commentator Ray Snoddy suggested on Twitter that "Replacing Wogan with Chris Evans must be part of a very cunning plan to give commercial radio a break. Beeb not going for ratings any more."

But I don't think it's as cut and dried as all that. While Radio 2 might lose listeners as older ones stop listening, they're unlikely to drift towards any commercial services; there just aren't any that really target 55+ - Smooth, Classic FM or LBC being perhaps, the exceptions.

And some commercial stations will surely lose out as younger listeners perhaps start listening to Evans again (This will probably Richard Park even angrier. He wants to roll Jamie and Harriet out across the Heart network but isn't allowed to. I'm not sure where that says to all the current Heart local breakfast DJs...).

One thing is clear from all of this: Chris Moyles' celebrations about being the longest running Radio 1 breakfast show host are being somewhat overshadowed!

As ever, these are my person views, and do not represent those of my employer.

While browsing through my DAB set in London I came across this. What could it be?

This morning saw the release of the latest RAJAR radio audience listening data.

Cue lots of press releases from lots of radio stations (You can read about Absolute Radio's audience here).

I suspect that many industry watchers will be looking at the digital listening percentage. That shows that 21.1% of all radio listening is being done via a digital platform, up from 17.9% in the equivalent period last year.

But the overall level of listening to radio remains remarkably strong. I admit that I've been concerned about radio listening remaining over 1bn hours a week - it's a psychological thing. But listening hasn't fallen below that level. It's actually grown recently - remarkable when you consider all the calls we have on our time.

And overall listening is now at a record high, with 46.3m people listening weekly.

"Ah!" you might say, "Surely that's because the population is increasing?"

Well the population is increasing, but the percentage reach - the number of people listening each week to at least some radio as a percentage of total population - continues to rise.

It's now at 90.3% - well up on a year ago, and a great overall number.

A powerful message from a powerful medium.

Here endeth the sermon on why radio is great.

So Ed Vaizey is talking about selling off Radio 1 again is he?

Obviously this makes no sense at all - and does nothing to help commercial radio. I've said this before when Peter Bazalgette suggested something similar and again when Richard Eyre said the same thing.

I won't run through the same arguments in detail again, but instead point you to Matt Deegan's well considered piece.

At a time when the commercial radio industry is struggling, creating a behemoth in our midst that would suck up much of the available revenue, at the same time damaging many other services, including lots of small businesses - a group the Conservatives surely support - while almost certainly leaving listeners with a worse service (commercial operators will need to turn a decent profit and those expensive off-peak programmes would be first to go).

Nobody wins.

I guess I'm a little curious about why Vaizey is commenting on this issue. The Sunday Times piece notes that this isn't party policy despite Vaizey being responsible for broadcasting. Recently at the Radio Festival in Nottingham, Jeremey Hunt, the Tories' Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media & Sport spoke very knowledgably on radio (Click on the Wednesday 1 July link - Hunt was first on).

I can see why someone outside the radio industry might think privatising a service like Radio 1 would be a good idea - but they might want to run the idea past a few people who work in the industry. There really aren't too many people calling for the sell-off of Radio 1 - especially not in the commercial sector.

[Update] Paul Robinson has a good piece online at Broadcast.

This is a clip from an interview I was videoing this morning...

(And at time of writing it's the most popular video on the BBC News site. Even though I'm not remotely responsible for the content of the video, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I was rather chuffed to have footage on the BBC News website that I shot!)

Today's Radio 1 reshuffle is interesting, and is obviously a clear response to the BBC Trust findings that Radio 1 was getting too old.

Off to weekends go Jo Whiley and Edith Bowman, as Fearne Cotton and Greg James fill up the gaps.

With a remit that targets 15-29 year olds, having a significant number of DJs outside that age group makes things harder. Having younger DJs is one way to help this.

That said, it'd be very ageist to suggest everyone should be under 30 on Radio 1. The station still has Pete Tong who'll be 50 next year, and Tim Westwood is already 51. They're specialist, and while the music they play is still relevant to the audience, their ages probably aren't relevant. John Peel was still on the station at 65 after all.

Overall, a good move then.

That said, I really wouldn't want to have Fearne Cotton inflicted on my worst enemey, so that should leave lots of opportunity for commercial rivals (or even Ken Bruce on Radio 2) to take advantage...

All this week Torchwood is being stripped across BBC1 at 9pm, which may or may not be a good thing. And last week, Radio 4 ran three new 45 minute "Afternoon Plays" of Torchwood (following a one-off episode last autumn surrounding Big Bang Day).

What's really interesting is that the BBC has made all three episodes available to download as mp3s for 7 days only (therefore at time of writing, there are only two available to download).

That's obviously a sensible thing to do - the Torchwood audience probably isn't a devoted Radio 4 Afternoon Play listener, and the announcements at the end of Monday and Tuesday's episodes probably mean that more people listened than would otherwise have. But it's a fascinating development in what BBC Radio allows to be downloaded.

I'm pretty sure that lots of people would like more radio drama to be available for downloading - if not free, then via outlets like iTunes. But aside from a few high-profile releases like the current George Smiley season, only sure-fire hits get the BBC Audio CD releases. They tend to be comedies or plays that are based on already popular book series.

The average Radio 4 Afternoon Play doesn't fall into either of these categories, and so, unless it does well and perhaps picks up an award somewhere down the line, very few get repeats. The tapes just gather dust in an archive somewhere (or more likely, the files sit on a fileserver somewhere).

There are obviously difficulties in doing this. Most dramas and sitcoms have incidental music - indeed sometimes it can be core to the programmes. Then there are the various rights issues with actors and writers to be considered. But the Torchwood dramas have shown that these can be overcome if the desire's there.

It's all the more surprising that Torchwood was used to try this out because it's a solidly commercial brand. All three of last week's plays are getting CD releases, and will no doubt also be available via the various (legitimate) download sites.

The BBC has made sure that the plays are only offered in 64k mono formats, meaning that if you want to hear the effects to the full you're going to need to get CD versions, but a lot of people - and kids in particular - will be more than happy with mono.

When the BBC Trust concluded its Public Value Test into the iPlayer and approved it, it also brought the BBC's then trial podcast service into full operation. But it specifically said that two areas were to be excluded: classical music and book readings.

The classical music record industry claimed that the BBC's then recent Beethoven Experience downloads, where the BBC had offered full recordings of all nine Beethoven symphonies, had impacted massively on them, meaning that nobody would be interested in buying another recorded Beethoven symphony. (Curiously, Amazon lists dozens of recordings of Beethoven symphonies released in the last couple of years).

The book readings decision was interesting. I believe that book publishers sees Radio 4 as having a very symbiotic relationship with them. If one of their titles is chosen to for the non-fiction Book of the Week slot or the fiction Book At Bedtime slot, they're normally pretty fast in slapping "As Heard on Radio 4" stickers onto the covers of stock and trying to ensure that stores know where to direct customers when they come in enquiring about something they heard earlier that day (this doesn't always work, however).

There's also the small issue that BBC Worldwide is quite a big player in the recorded book industry, having swallowed up Cover to Cover at some time previously, and often releasing unabridged versions of the significantly foreshortened extracts we hear on the radio.

But book readings being stopped from being made available as podcasts doesn't mean that plays can't be. So let's hope that in the future, many more drama (and comedy) productions are made available for download. Allowing their purchase might even see a small profit come in.

There's a nice interview with Radio 4 controller, Mark Damazer, in today's Media Guardian. You can read the online version here.

The piece has an accompanying photo, but the version on the website is a little small. It's worth having a look at the newspaper one for a few more interesting titbits!

For example, Damazer has a big file on his desk marked "Sony Radio Academy Awards 2009: Station of the Year - Under 300,000" - evidently the category he judged this year. So staff at BBC Hereford and Worcester might want to send a special something to him this Christmas (I may be wrong, but judges don't tend to shout about the categories they've judged for the Sonys).

Next to that are a couple of binders marked "RAJAR" and "Latest RAJAR". Given that we're told in the piece that "Some much-loved programmes are on the brink of having to go" wouldn't you just love to see what programmes have red underlining them?

There's a nice big copy of a book called "Legal Guidelines for BBC Staff". Perhaps this was pulled off the shelf recently when the Andy Kershaw episode of On The Ropes was stopped at the last minute?

I realise that PRs tend to come in and rearrange bookshelves for these sorts of portraits (and this one was by Eamonn McCabe no less), but other titles are fun to see.

Green Living for Dummies is interesting, and My Father: Reith of the BBC is of course there coming just after the end of this year's excellent Reith lectures. BBC Security correspondent, Frank Gardener's latest book is there too.

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman isn't a title I'm aware of: perhaps it's going to be a Classic Serial sometime soon? It was referred to during a recent Radio 3 programme Correspondence, and there was a 2002 documentary about the man on Radio 4.

Uncertain Vision is a recent examination of John Birt and Greg Dykes time at the Beeb. Curiously it sits alongside a long out of print biography of Joseph Chamberlain by one Enoch Powell.

Finally, the last book I can clearly make out is, perhaps rather appropriately, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain.

It's all rather fun isn't it?

[Updated to correct some rather embarrassing misspellings of Damazer's surname]

These are rough notes and I'll need to tidy them up at a later stage.

Jeremy Hunt, shadow DCMS representative, was first up today, and talked about the uniqueness of radio and his radio history. He's certain that radio has a good future, although he knows how badly commercial radio is faring. He notes that the BBC is spending more on radio than the entire commercial radio sector is earning.

Hunt quoted quite a lot of facts in his speech, but he spoke without notes which means he's really learnt his stuff.

Things like the internet have damaged commercial radio, but he also thinks that the regulatory regime has not helped. He talked about the three key acts surrounding radio in 1972, 1996 and 2003. He thinks that it's failed overall and we can see this by the number of licences that have been handed back to Ofcom (again, off the top of his head, he can quote the numbers handed back for the last three years).

The Birmingham, Alabama comparison is brought up: the US version has much more local television than the similarly named UK city. With newspapers closing down, he sees struggling local coverage. He also bemoans the fact that there's only one local TV station in a city - Channel M in Manchester.

He says that the reason he's against top slicing the licence fee for regional ITV because he thinks it should be going local.

A future Conservative government is wholeheartedly behind digital radio. DAB is part of this and he sees a future that might involve many technologies. He namechecked "WorldDMB Digital Profile 1" as what should be placed in all devices.

£150m is the amount he says is what he's been told needs to be spent to bring coverage up. In Surrey, where he lives, DAB coverage is patchy.

He's not happy about the idea that in 2015, we have to thrown away millions of radios. He also thinks that this could make people very angry and we really need to think about that.

Cars are also critical and he's not sure that Digital Britain went far enough. He thinks that what the French did is bold and we should look at it. But we should look at incentives for car manufacturers.

Hunt says that we also need to think very carefully about the listener and asks whether we really want to get everyone to throw away 100m radios in 2015.

If the market hasn't got to where it needs to be, should Ofcom delay switchoff, he wonders. He also thinks we might want to consider swap schemes.

But people also need to see some tangible benefits. Currently they're small, and people complain that they're hungry on batteries. He talked about surround sound, listening to full concerts or football matches, EPGs and the opportunity to download songs. He talks about Shazam and its popularity on iPhones, and wonders if that kind of functionality should be built into radios.

We need to make sure that we don't have angry listeners - something that won't be good for the industry.

He concludes that when we're mandating new technologies we don't have chaos as a result. He concludes that he hopes that's the leadership that a future Conservative government.

Nicky Campbell then interviews Hunt, and he begins by saying that it's a dream job for him and he wants it if and when the Tories get into power.

On the BBC licence fee, Hunt says that in a zero inflation world, the fee should be fixed at the moment. But they don't have any current plans for a future licence fee period since he current one runs until 2013. But a future one should include elements that take account of the economic situation.

He says that if the BBC doesn't need the digital switchover money then perhaps it should be handed back to the licence fee payer.

Hunt believes that the BBC sometimes gets into areas it perhaps shouldn't. He doesn't want to talk specifically about areas despite Campbell pushing him.

He says that we should look at the money used for imported programming: £108m. Curiously he uses the example of The Wire as a programme the BBC bid up the price for. It was broadcast on commercial TV in the UK first of course, on FX.

He also thinks the BBC needs a "reality check" on executive salaries.

Campbell points out that analogue radios will still be useful because of the tier of ultra-local services, but Hunt says that the bigger services will have moved to digital and be lost to some consumers.

On presenter salaries at the BBC, Hunt would like them transparent but Tim Davie in the audience believes that revealing them would present legal issues and would also lead to salary inflation. However he believes that there'll be a level of transparency that hasn't been available in the past. Hunt doesn't buy it and says that a top BBC presenter is building his or her brand when their in primetime. Davie says that since they don't have editorial control it's not fair on them - instead you should look at

On the question of 2015 he says that we should have a switchover date but not necessarily a switchoff date. There's a lot of work to get to a place where it's publicly acceptable. He doesn't think we're at a place where this could happen currently.

Someone asks what Hunt would do if he was running an analogue radio service that was also on digital and was losing money - what would he do? His answer would be to consider the business model and look at methods of reaching people through a multiplicity of media.

Tim Blackmore presents a session on how to win a radio award. Lorna Clarke from the BBC and Mark Story (now from RadioStory) joined him on the panel. We heard a Feargal Keane interview, some Kiss promos, some of Absolute Coldplay, and a couple of "sound fixes" from Electric Prison Radio Brixton, along with extracts of what the judges said about the awards.

An award winning entry will engage and grab you from the outset. A lot of award entries are very good, but they need to be beyond the norm.

Clarke says that the worst thing you can do is put an entry into the wrong category. Story says that you should start with something that will amaze the judges and "get the hell out of there." So don't put a full hour in, if you can get it done in twenty minutes.

Judges are not all from London we're assured, and paper parts of entries should be relevant and back up the award's audio. Other things we learnt are that judges can spot edits (if you're being naughty and making in categories where you shouldn't), and some of the details of the judging process. One final point: don't assume that the judges to your programme are familiar with it or have ever heard it before!

You Ask The Questions with Torin Douglas is the session where Festival attendees ask questions of a panel, who were Alison Hastings (BBC Trust), Stewart Purvis (Ofcom), Bob Shennan (BBC Radio 2 & 6Music) and Phil Riley (Now running LDC).

They began saying a little about what they'd heard from Jeremy Hunt earlier on. Purvis said that it is down to politicians to make regulation and that power rests with them, and not the regulators themselves. Hastings said what he'd mentioned about switchover and switchoff was inteersting, and that what he said about the public.

Shennan was concerned that equivocation that he detected might lead to slippage. And he was concerned about damaging the BBC to plaster over the troubles of commercial radio. Riley thought it was good that he has business experience, and like Hunt he was worried about some of the issues surrounding switchover.

The whole panel was impressed with his presentational style and knowledge.

The first question proper was about John Myers blistering attack on Ofcom the previous day. Purvis says that his response is more in sorrow than anger at what he heard. He says that there's far too much regulation in commercial radio, and he thinks that he has good relationships with the business. He also thinks that the Broadcasting Code review is a very positive step forward.

Riley thinks it's sometimes healthy to hear things like Myers said the previous day. Myers has considered it much more than probably anyone else in the indsutry; he wanted to express some home truths.

Next up is the question of top-slicing the BBC licence fee. Purvis said that Ofcom had identified where there was a lack of competition - particularly in local news on ITV, but that they'd not specified where the money would come from, that had been a government decision. Hastings is unsurprisingly against it, and is very uncomfortable about the process of giving licence fee money to private companies. "You mess about that at your peril."

Douglas suggests perhaps that the BBC Trust should distribute that money, but Hastings says that this isn't what the Trust was set up for. The licence fee is not a slush fund for whatever the government of the day wants.

Shennan says that it changes fundamentally the relationship between the public and the licence payer. Riley thinks that we have too much public service broadcasting in this country and that it should be just handed back to the public.

Douglas asks Bob Shennan whether it matters that he has no music radio background. Shennan says that he's had similar accusation put to him in all his previous roles and while he might not be a music expert, he knows good radio.

Asked about what he'll be doing in the role he says that there's no major issues that need addressing, and there's no underlying strategic intent.

Why isn't Jonathan Ross live now, is the next question. Shennan things the programme is very important for Radio 2 and he wants it to be watertight. Half the programmes he's done since he came back were recorded as live and commentators hadn't noticed. He says that they can get a higher calibre of guest with the new timing.

The discussion moved to taste and "standards" (no longer "decency") and we learnt that since Radio 1's remit starts at 15 the regulation for that service is different to how it might otherwise be.

Then it was on to the question about the publication of expenses and talent fees. Hastings basically reiterated what Tim Davie had said earlier in the day. Riley believes that at the top the BBC outbids commercial radio, but lower down the chain publishing all fees would allow cherry picking.

Finally the panel stopped talking about executive pay and what the panel do about BBC talent costs, and the panel was asked about what they'd do if they created a new station.

Phil Riley wanted Nick Ferrari and The Arrow, the latter of which he thinks will sadly be going. Shennan would still have liked to launch E4 radio. Hastings wants a children's radio station (Fun Kids anyone?). Finally Purvis (jokingly) said bring back birdsong.

Before the break we saw a tribute reel remembering those who've died in radio over the last year.

Paul Gambaccini gave us a brief history of popular radio from its creation until the present day. Effectively these are Gambaccini's heroes. I can't even begin to summarise it I'm afraid, but perhaps it'll show up as a Radio 4 Archive Hour soon. There was some excellent audio to accompany it.

Finally, The Media Show was recorded for broadcast as live from the Festival with Steve Hewlitt. You can listen to it later today, or via the iPlayer.

[Note: Thiese are rough notes so apologies for any typos and general bad English. I'll try to update as I go.]

Nicky Campbell kicked off proceedings as host with a few stories about his life in radio before introducing a very nice summary of radio in the last 12 months.

The first panel has Tim Davie (BBC), Andrew Harrison (RadioCentre), Stuart Taylor (GMG) and Simon Cole (UBC). Tim Davie believes that 2015 is a challenging timeframe, while Stuart Taylor highlighted the in-car issue.

Campbell wants to know what's in it for the listener, Simon Cole says that the savings from dual transmission must be reinvested in content.

Tim Davie doesn't seem himself "strapped to DAB" but he wants to see a credible portable medium aside from DAB. But he says that IP doesn't do the job yet. The last year has seen some good progress in radio. We need to be able to buy a decent digital radio for £15 and not £50.

On the question of whether the BBC should be funding the transition to digital, Davie thinks that there's some element that the BBC should pay for. He questions how much of local rollout should be paid for though!

Campbell asks about the potential of a new administration, and Davie pointed out that we'll be hearing the Tory point of view at this Festival.

Stuart Taylor points out that it's not certain that every station wants to go national. He argues for freedom in format change - radio is competing with unfettered competitors.

Davie is asked about how a post digital switchover landscape might look and Davie talks about share of listening - not share of radio. The future will have, by one means or another, almost infinite choice. Taylor thinks that a lot will change in five years with signal strengths increased and radios in cars. But the key thing is that radio is up against so many other things these days - people continue to find time to listen to radio.

Nicky Campbell draws attention to the very obvious issue that Global Radio, the UK's largest commercial radio operator, appears to have sent nobody to the Radio Festival, the UK's biggest radio conference (In fact there are one or two people here - but they're keeping quiet).

A question from the audience asks about Libby Purvess's recent Times column questioning the green credentials of digital radios. Harrison and Davie are in agreement that it's certainly something to be addressed. Harrison says that we now have a brief to take to manufacturers about precisely what kind of radios need to be brought to the market.

Glynn Jones from Digital One wants to know why advertising on digital radio services is being sold as a discount rather than a premium. Taylor agrees and says that it's been sold wrongly - as a cheap bolt on. Buyers obviously look to undermine a sales offering, but he believes it's an issue that's being addressed.

Campbell asks about the recently announced Radio Council which Harrison believes is a good thing and will allow everyone to work on the industry's issues. The joint radio player is a good example, he says.

Simon Cole says that the industry is too small to have lots of internal fighting.

Tim Davie says that we all have to huddle together for scale. He says that lots of people want to join the Radio Council, but he won't say who.

A questioner from Wales points out that it'll take six DAB transmitters to cover his single current FM transmitter in mid-Wales. He says that he turns over £18,000 per month, and it's unaffordable.

Davie says that this is why there's public money involved. Harrison suspects that in some of the nations there'll be additional help.

Torin Douglas of the BBC reports that the RNIB suggests that there needs to be a help scheme for blind people. Harrison believes that it's a bit too early to consider this. New digital sets, however, should be much easier for blind and disabled to use than analogue dial sets.

Davie points out that we're at much lower levels than television, so comparisons with the digital television switchover fund are too early.

Someone from Norway asks about getting radios, in car in particularly, in line across Euirope. Cole says that we now have the industry engaged and it's a question of getting new functionality like traffic cameras built in. Cole believes that we're at the tipping point across Europe now.

The first Spotify question comes up from somebody who makes commercials for them. Taylor says that they're not radio but they're a competitor for listening share. He suggests we question them about their pricing and sales.

Teenage Wasteland - Engaging with a Youth Audience is the title of the next session presented by Dr Anthony Cox of Sparkler.

Campbell introduced the session saying that youth audiences have declined, despite overall audiences reaching a record level. Cox points out that while reach has remained stable, listening hours have declined by 36m hours over the last five years.

Cox explored some of the other things that youths are doing (!) these days, and presented some video diaries. Radio's in there, but so is MySpace, YouTube and many other things.

He says that big brands stand out for this audience and platforms are very important for this age group. But this demographic is the least likely to buy a DAB radio - they want it online.

Richard Sambrook (sambrook.typepad.com) is the director of BBC Global News - which as he points out, is significantly, the BBC World Service.

He notes that the World Service is the biggest digital only radio service in the UK, although I should point out that you can receive it on AM in London, and it's still just about listenable on shortwave even if many European focused transmitters are turned off.

Sambrook talks about the various challenges the WS has faced over recent years changing from a didactic voice to an inclusive attitude. FM is important, especially in major cities around the world, often working with partners. The World Service is available in 154 capital cities - and have to deal with 154 regulators. There are also about 200 partners.
He says that sometimes partnerships don't work. They had to pull a service in Sri Lanka for example. But a US partnership is very successful as is one in India (although they're not allowed to broadcast news there).

In India, the audience is perceiving to be less stuffy than it once was, and is now more modern.

There've been changes with some language services increasing massively - sometimes on FM often via mobile, and sometimes online. Video streaming has also increased substantially he says.

Sambrook showed off the impressive BBC Bus for the US Election and the even more impressive BBC WS Train for the recent Indian elections. It was multi-platform and multi-lingual (and very cost efficient - everyone slept on the train).

Save Our Sounds is great new initiative that lets listeners upload audio to a map - a sonic archive.

The BBC Persian TV service launched recently and has quickly become very popular. The flagship programme runs across the web and TV - and has been well received in Iran. Recent weeks have obviously seen a huge surge in traffic with up to five video clips a minute coming into the service. It's not especially popular with the Iranian government however.

Prison Radio did staggeringly well at the recent Sony Radio Academy Awards - in particular Electric Radio Brixton. Steve Orchard began with an anecdote about being mugged en route to a Prison Radio committee meeting.

Prison Radio first launched in the US in 1938, but in the UK it really started with Feltham in 1994 following a series of teenage suicides. The Prison Radio Association was soon launched as a charity to back the service. Mick Jones and Billy Bragg were two of the first guests on the first broadcast at Brixton.

Orchard explains how low literary skills can be in prison and how the radio improves confidence and more importantly is the main source of information in the prison. Tough subjects are tackled head on - drugs, self-harm, etc.

Overall Orchard played a lot of fantastic radio segments illustrating many aspects of the service offered by the Prison Radio Association, all of it fantastic and thoroughly compelling.

This was followed by a session chaied by Richard Bacon about the power of prison radio. On stage was the governor of Brixton prison, Paul McDowell and Tis, who won a Sony Radio Academy Award for his interview with Jonathan Aitkin and is still a prisoner. He was given special dispensation to attend the Festival today.

Bacon and Tis discussed what it brings to the prisoners, and responded when challenged about why money should be spent on this ahead of other courses.

Bacon wondered about who gets on air, especially as there are plans to roll this out to all prisons across the country. McDowell said that of course he chooses who is allowed on air and who isn't. Notorious serial killers, for example, are not going to get on air.

The sessions where Governor is asked questions, he says is really no different to what the prisoners ask when he walks around the wings.

Overall a fantastic session.

Mark Oliver and Godfrey McFall from Oliver & Ohlbaum came on to deliver a presentation entitled Radio - The Fight Back Begins.

They opened with the various challenges facing the industry.

In the advertising market, the internet has obviously come along, although its still not made massive headway in display. McFall talked about London where he said that there was a four horse race in London - that puts pressure on yields. In TV there's been a 50% decline in prices in real terms over recent years meaning that it's become a threat to radio with the growth of multichannel.

Fragmentation affects the ways of reaching the most valued audiences.

In radio terms regional and digital services, according to McFall, are getting lower yields than

Disintermediation is a fantastic word if you're playing scrabble. But it's also looking at ways of connecting with an "audio consumer" in a multiplicity of ways cutting out the middle man.

O&O don't have great news for those hoping for a quick recovery from the recession.

Having seen some quite daunting challenges, Oliver addresses what the industry can do about all this. He suggests that a two year digital warning might be a little ambition given that TV got six years. Legislative changes are all encouraging however.

There are also plenty of opportunities for the consumer in terms of technology. And the new landscape can become attractive to advertisers.

Beyond spot advertising then show and station sponsorship becomes more important as well as merchandise, events, coupon schemes and competitions. Coupons are particularly good ways to show the impact of advertising on sales.

But in summary - radio needs to help itself and look beyond the well developed world of spot advertising.

The next session was Radio at the Edge (get your tickets now for the full conference in November as it'll be excellent) - with Mark Friend (BBC Audio & Music), Hugh Garry (BBC Radio 1) and Chris Lawson from Absolute Radio.

Friend started with a presentation which had some interesting facts:

75% of listening is to live radio and 25% is to on demand
94% of iPlayer time is with a listener's favourite network.
5+ m claim to download regularly
35% now listening to different radio programmes
c 90% are listening to as much or more live radio
Younger listeners prefer highlight packages

Friend explained the constraints under which the BBC was allowed to use podcasts. He also said that the iPlayer has a very long tail of listening.

For a Monday episode of The Archers people catch up very quickly - mostly witin a couple of days. The same was true of last year's Glastonbury coverage.

A chart comparing TV and radio shows very complimentary ussage of the two media via the iPlayer. Interestingly visualisation figures from Radio 1's Big Weekend mimics TV viewing in patterns rather than radio with a mid-evening peak.

Chris Lawson then talked about the Absolute Radio story so far. He said that there were 53 ways to listen to Absolute Radio, with 49% of listening being via a digital platform already outside of London. This is something that Absolute is pushing aggressively and the station is going where the audience wants us - highlighting the 120,000 YouTube plays of a Bruno video recently uploaded as well as the success of the recent Dave Gorman podcast, currently at number one in the iTunes charts.

The launch of the iAmp had 8 days of promotion on-air to drive take up. 100,000 installs were achieved over that early period. Now around 24,000 people launch the application on a weekly basis. He compared the Absolute Radio hours with BBC hours and challenged others to do the same.

Lawson noted that the default rating for iTunes is one star so don't be put off.

He also previewed the LiveAmp which will retail for 59p soon.

Gerry then came on to talk about what Radio 1 has been doing including their Shoot The Summer video. After a clip he explained that using phones was what their audience was doing already.

He also demonstrated Band In Your Hand - the clever augmented reality technology used by Radio 1. We got a live demo... And the live demo worked. Many impressed sounds came from around the audience near me.

Matt Deegan wanted to know if Absolute Radio was missing a section of the audience who weren't so digitally enabled. Lawson said that people were upgrading if not everyone was at the cutting edge. Absolute Radio wants to pull people forward. Friend said that some things were less mainstream but that's what Radio 1 audiences expected.

The first session of the afternoon was a choice of four, so I went to The Recession That Rocked Radio.

David Meliveo from Autoglass was first off. He explained how one day in 2005 Aviva bought his main competitor and they lost 25% of their business four weeks later. Their advertising was failing and they weren't getting return on investment, so they turned to radio in desperation! Radio lets you listen and talking to people about windscreens is intrinsically boring.

Radio also lets you test regionally and it's cheaper to produce. Their ads were conversational, were 60 seconds and were more friendly.

The results showed a 24% year on year on by nearly a third growth within the previous few weeks. By the end of that campaign they'd achieved 77% increases.

He has showed us a remarkable chart comparing radio investment with demand. The two were in sync and as a result they use radio all the time. Autoglass isnow the biggest brand in radio and the second biggest advertiser.

Autoglass brand awareness has increased 19% in four years.

"Radio advertising has completely changed the way we run our business."

Demand for replaement windows is seasonal so they advertised in downtimes to flatten out shifts. They have to use fully trained technicians so they can't use casual labour.

On top of all this, customer satisfaction is at an all time high.

The same formula is being used in another 18 countries. We heard some multi-lingual versions of the ads.

Meliveo in summary says "Keep the faith" - radio is in everybody's life. He says radio needs to keep investing in programming. He wants to carry on reaching even more people.

Radio is fantastic for brands driving sales and building brands - it needs to sell itself better.

Mark Middlemas from UM spoke about the importance of radio in peoples' lives yet the small amount of spend. It's been there a long time. Radio just isn't sexy but it can still drive sales.

Middlemas thinks that the brands are strong but it needs to be about more than CPTs; value is more than just price. Making more of the talent is also important - using it off-air too. And differentiation and investment in programming is vital he said.

He spoke about a deal UM did with Intel changed the way that everybody thinks about it - silos were broken down. And there are lots of accountability case studies. But there's more to be done he says. Improvements to audience measurement and RAJAR are key to the future he says.

The PR volume of radfio needs "turning up" says Middlemas - and that can leave radio behind. He highlighted a Microsoft campaign on Global using the band, The Saturdays.

He thinks that it's a challenging future which makes them very nervous - he mentioned recent pieces by both Libby Purves and Kelvin MacKenzie recently.

Julian Carter said that we had to "get real" about the current situation. More people in programming need to be clearer about the correlation between audience and cash. He talked about networking, and said that hours have increased so far as the Heart network. He questions whether networking in Scotland will work though. LDC, on the otherhand, is trying something different with Phil Riley.

Has consolidation helped? It's not clear because cannibalisation has happened and too much focus has been on share rather than competing with other industries. Global needs to be strong and profitable as the number one player.

The advertising medium needs to grow - in other countries it takes 10% not 5%. Digital and mobile need to be used more - digital should be pushed on-air. Creativity is important and the RAB is doing something. But he says that you don't hear as good ads as you used to.

Radio needs to have world class customer service, but many big clients say it's awful - RAJAR figures get spun.

Finally he says that calls to action are still most important. Branding's important, but calls to action can drive results like those of Auotglass.

Carter gave an example of B&Q advertised a one-day sale on radio but should have used different copy throughout the day.

Sue Timson, a consultant talked more about what local clients want. She said that local advertisers want many of the same things as national advertisers - they want to know about digital but not yet understand it. Your local station is showbiz however much networking it carries.

But it's not just a sales problem - that team is almost the last place it impacts on. But everyone has to play a part in commercial success.

John Myers is next up, author of the Myers Review following his three month trip around the world. Myers noted that he was in Canada when Michael Jackson died recently. In Canada they have a 40% Canadian music rule so they couldn't go to a non-stop Jackson format. In the US it was worse in many stations that are just fully voice tracked for most of the day.

Myers points out that he's speaking in a personal capacity.

Sometimes Ofcom "has about as much vision as Stevie Wonder."

Myers explained that he had six weeks to put together his review across all "stakeholders." He says that a common viewpoint of the regulator among some industry people was that respect for it was as bad as it has ever been.

Myers went back and asked some of the big questions from the start - why was local radio created the way it has been?

Revenue kept up with the number of stations through the 90s until 2004. But growth in listening stopped and declined as station numbers continued to grow. And on top of this share against the BBC fell from the mid nineties. At a point new stations were canibalising existing stations; the cake was being sliced smaller. What's more, lots of small stations were launching from the beginning of the nineties.

Myers thinks that the problem, which was clear early on, was demand led. Local MPs petitioning for a station would mean one came about. Economic surveys weren't completed to see if one could be supported. Even though people bid for them, many never would make money, and in some cases they were traded as commodities.

"Licences were awarded to the wrong people... [They] lost out to gold-diggers."

There are now too many stations in too many markets and he stated that 50 stations would go bust - he believes he's on track.

"Four reviews in four years does not mean we're good at this." Ofcom needs to think bolder and bigger than it has ever done before. Myers thinks that the industry needs to take giant leaps forward.

He said that there isn't enough local news on the radio and that it needs to be written into licences.

Ofcom: "The milk tooth regulator - where the milky bar kid's bite isn't too bad"

Myers says that local radio needs to broadcast local information. He also thinks that it's really not too hard to measure local appreciation.

Myers was vitriolic on Ofcom's regulation of local radio. Local radio is about what comes out of the speakers and not where it comes from - so co-location is a sensible way forward. Listener satisfaction can and should be measured.

Myers believes that the regulator doesn't want to do it and doesn't like it; so it wants to kill it.

He than ran through the options recently put forward by Ofcom and in summary - he didn't like them.

"I've heard of a local station recording one local bulletin in the morning and putting it out ever hour through the day."

Each of the three ideas that Ofcom proffered were rejected, often scathingly, and always with good humour.

Myers claims that he can't find proof that Ofcom monitored more than 10 stations in 2008. And not one yellow card, he thinks, has been handed out without a listener or competitor complaining.

Myers suggests we all go home tonight and complain about five different radio stations. Then do the same the next month! Complaint led regulation simply isn't good enough in his view.

If a local station is not valued by the community, then it's not a local station, he says.

"Virgin is now Absolutely gone...": Myers on the changing face of commercial radio.

Myers believes that the industry's changed and the regulator also needs to change. He stresses that this isn't a slight on the people there, but new people bring new ideas.

"Local radio is not dead - it's just been re-engineerd."

In summary then - a fantastically clear minded view of what local commercial radio is, what it could - and in his opinion - should be, and what we want from a regulator.

Nicky Campbell, doing sterling hosting duties, asked Martin Campbell from Ofcom to respond, which he did. He said that he didn't recognise what Myers reported. Myers said that this was the case and that perhaps they wouldn't necessarily feed that back to Ofcom.

On formats, Myers believes that the days of regulating on music are gone and that we should regulate on content.

Joan Warner, CEO of Commercial Radio Australia, spoke next about the launch of digital radio in Australia. In Australia, the rollout was simultaneously carried out by public and commercial operators.

She said that they learnt much from the UK like forcing stations onto low bit-rates. Receivers had to affordable from day one. She says that they sold out quickly. Instead of copying the UK model of multiplex ownership, stations get direct access to the airwaves via consortia.

In Australia in building coverage was planned for as many stations can't be heard in tower blocks. That means higher powers - 50 kW.

She noted that when FM launched in Australia in 1980 spectrum was given away free because there was a belief that nobody would buy new devices to listen to the radio...

Warner says that radio is the only industry in Australia that's promoting, on-air, the fact that advertising through a recession is a smart thing to do.

Australia, of course, has adopted DAB+ for their launch earlier this year. This means it's 2-3 times more efficient. That means everyone can get on to digital radio. Community stations will get on digital, although narrowcasters won't.

She says we can't just sit where we are and assume we'll keep the healthy audiences they currently have.

Each broadcaster is allocated space and they're free to do with it what they want - they can split it into smaller lower quality services, or offer higher bit-rate single services. Broadcasters can do what they like with the bit-rate apart from video. She says that radio is considered a free to air platform; people will buy new devices, but they won't pay for subscriptions.

The May launch saw five major markets but there's another 100 areas to go covering 40% of the Australian population. And in Australia radio wants some of the vacant TV bandwidth when TV goes digital.

She spoke about how internet radio is not the answer, being very spectrum inefficient and unable to scale easily or cheaply. The usual, very valid, issues were brought up, but she admits that it's a hobbyhorse.

New radio services have been introduced including "Pink Radio" which is a commercial offering based around a new Pink album. It'll soon be renamed Britney Radio.

So some interesting ideas to learn from.

Shelagh Fogarty joined Nicky Campbell on stage to talk about how their Sony Award winning work together. It turns out that Fogarty thinks it's useful to like your co-presenter on-air.

However, Fogarty thinks Campbell can be a "strange fish", saying that he can sometimes her what the interview's "about" at the last minute! She also talked about how they do sometimes carry out two-headed interviews where the other one will pitch in with a question.

Campbell says that Fogarty sometimes does personal emails while he's carrying out an interview! She said that they're messages to the producer.

Torin Douglas asked how they choose who does the "big interview." Over time, Fogarty says they've worked out their strengths, weaknesses and favourite areas.

A question from John Mottram was about how a damaged partnership might work. Campbell says that it's harder for them than say The Today Programme where everything's more compartmentalised. He also said that TV is very different because it's more scripted - although

Fogarty says that she doesn't like the simpering looks co-presenters give one another on breakfast television in particular.

James Cridland asked about how text messages that are read out on air are chosen. In a compliant BBC there are producers read through texts in advance. There are good reasons at times for doing this he says, when it's a particularly controversial subject. Occasionally people would smuggle things into texts that they didn't realise - Fogarty remembers the use of the word 'roasting' on one occasion.

Campbell says moving to Manchester is a fantastic opportunity, and if you say you can't go anywhere you sound dreadful. The words "down there" and "up here" when talking about somewhere like Edinburgh. Campbell reiterates that he is moving there. It's not like he's moving to Canada! Fogarty hasn't decided however... She says it's actually more about

Campbell suggests giving Fogarty an 18m pound three year contract...

That concludes day one (or two if you were here yesterday) of Radio Festival!

It's finally here - The Digital Britain report. It's Lord Stephen Carter's magnum opus, before he ups and offs.

The headlines are sure to be the levy charged on fixed lines to fund broadband, encouraging and enabling the wider take-up of broadband, and even the piracy issue. What happens to BBC licence fee money is certainly a big part of the story.

But for some of us, the key issue here is radio. Digital radio.

Digital radio gets its own chapter.

The chapter opens with a quote from the early nineteenth century Scottish writer, Thomas Carlyle: "One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or No."

This seems to be addressing the need for radio, as an industry, to stop dithering and jump into the digital soup. Or am I mixing my metaphors?

What is clear, that radio, as a relatively small industry worth £1.1bn per year (including BBC spend), needs to do something to remain essential to the vast majority of the population who continue to listen.

At the heart of our vision is the delivery of a Digital Radio Upgrade programme by the end of 2015.

So there's the date: 2015. It's not actually that far off. The plan is that the "Digital Radio Upgrade" as it's to be known (to differentiate from TV's "Digital Switchover" one supposes), will take place on a single date in that year, with at least two years' advance notice.

To enable this to take place, two key crieria need to be met by the end of 2013.

1. 50% of listening is to digital
2. national DAB coverage is comparable to FM coverage, and local DAB reaches 90% of the population and all major roads

(Note that digital obviously doesn't solely include DAB).

The Digital Britain report says that it's "our intention that the criteria should be met by the end of 2013."

An accompanying (and in the first release at least, wrongly labelled) chart shows that left to itself, we should reach 43% digital by 2013 rather than 50%. The difference will be delivered by the "Drive to Digital" effort. By switchover in 2015, the reports' authors predict that 68% of listening will be to a digital platform. Obviously at that point, we will need to get it to 100%.

Ofcom has been asked to produce a report, at least once a year, on the progress towards these criteria. I'd suggest that it might be more appropriate to report quarterly as it has done for digital television.

The Consumer Expert Group, which has helped oversee digital TV switchover, is being brought in to help facilitate all this. They'll also determine whether or not a Digital Radio Help Scheme will need to be put in place. This is akin to the scheme set up for TV to ensure that nobody is disenfranchised by the move to digital.

Within radio circles there has been an endless series of discussions about whether DAB is the right format and whether we should instead be adopting DAB+, DRM, IP or some other format. The Digital Britain report largely dismisses these discussions. It makes clear the importance of a broadcast medium over internet delivery because it offers advantages such as portability, the most financially viable, and free at the point of access amongst others.

However, the report does seek to ensure that all digital radio sets sold in the UK conform to the WorldDMB profile 1. This will mean that going forward, we'd be able to move across to other formats like DAB+ and DMB-A without requiring a new radio. Adopting a single standard like this is also easier for manufacturers meaning a single set will work across Europe - something that's not the case currently.

One pair of lines which might concern commercial radio operators is the following one:

Achieving the Digital Radio Upgrade timetable will require building a DAB infrastructure which meets the needs of broadcasters, multiplex operators and listeners. This will require a significant contribution from the commercial operators and the Government welcomes the early commitments that they have given.

The report doesn't suggest much in the way of spare cash being brought to bear to improve digital radio coverage.

However, the BBC will also be expected to contribute in line with its Charter Public Purpose.

Although most radio stations have benefited from the lower transmission charges that followed on from the untakings made by Arqiva to the Competition Commission, that didn't necessarily follow through to everyone. In particular, multiplex owners tended to be beneficiaries rather than stations broadcast on their muxes.

The BBC will be required to roll-out DAB coverage nationally to the same level as its current FM network. This needs to be achieved by the end of 2014. The national commercial multiplex, run by Digital One (D1), and shortly to fall under Arqiva's control, already matches Classic FM's coverage in overall coverage (Classic FM being the only commercial FM broadcaster), although currently the FM and DAB coverage areas don't actually match. So it's actually likely that D1's coverage area will need increasing.

The report's authors also believe that signal strength needs increasing to improve indoor coverage. This is certainly true - as many listeners will tell you. Hopefully a lot of this can be achieved "simply" by turning up the power on current transmitters (I speak as a non-engineer).

I think stations on the national commercial multiplex (my employer included) will be pleased that Digital Britain proposes that the BBC and D1 should work closely together to ensure that new transmitters put up by the BBC should benefit both puiblic and commercial multiplexes. This should result in lower costs for the commercial operator as the network is extended.

Local and regional multiplexes need work which everyone seems to understand.

Local multiplex operators will probably be pleased to learn that the BBC is likely to be required to fund significant proportions of some of their build out costs. These multiplexes will need expanding if the BBC local services (which all sit on commercial multiplexes) are to reach the current FM penetrations.

Meanwhile regional multiplexes will be replanned entirely to produce a second national multiplex. In essence, many quasi-national services are available on many different regional (and local) multiplexes. This replanning should allow regional advertising - something that the current national multiplex is unable to offer.

To encourage operators to find solutions, multiplex licences could be extended to 2030; the D1 licence currently expires at the end of 2011. Administered Incentive Pricing (AIP) would also be delayed - the dreaded spectrum pricing. We'll know for certain what's being offered in a year's time.

What's clear is that the report's authors understand that what's really needed is encouragement for less die-hard listeners to adopt digital radio.

The report suggests that we need niche services like "a dedicated jazz station" (Jazz FM is back on air), getting better value from existing content like "live coverage of Premiership football or uninterrupted coverage from music festivals" is important.

I'm not sure that any broadcaster with Premiership football is not making full use of its rights. They're not cheap after all. And I suspect that the BBC will argue that the live festival coverage is exactly what 6Music is doing at Glastonbury in a couple of weeks (My employer, of course, has just spent the weekend at the Isle of Wight Festival, including live broadcasts of Simple Minds and Stereophonics). In my experience, this is more a question of securing rights from promoters, bands and record labels. That said, you'll be hard pushed to find much live music coverage across the commercial radio dial. Aside from Absolute Radio, Classic FM is probably the other main exception.

The report suggests that it's not just new services that are required to get more listeners adopting digital, but also more services. The report suggests that these might be EPGs, slideshows, downloading music, and so on. Pause and rewind is useful, and can already be found on high-end DAB sets. And the ability to save to memory card is also built in to some sets.

But cheap sets are also needed. The report talks about sub-£20 sets within the next two years. Seemingly set manufacturers have promised this. That said, some supermarkets have already reached this pricepoint now (Although my recent Sainsburys "Red" radio has dreadful sound and I wouldn't recommend it at all. The quality of the speaker is awful).

The idea of having DAB to "FM-rebroadcasters" is an interesting one. Effectively the equivalent of Pure's Highway for the home. I guess that one device in the house could serve multiple old FM receivers. I can see a problem in family homes where people change channels...

Getting digital radio into cars and other vehicles is obviously a key issue. The Digital Britain report highlights a five point programme that involves working with manufacturers to ensure that all vehicles are sold with a "digitally enabled" radio by 2013. Unlike France, there's no suggestion that this would be legislated, although with a definitive switchover date, manufacturers would need to go digital anyway.

Other points include adopting a common logo for digital radios and the encouragement of converters like the Pure Highway in devices like Sat-Navs.

For local radio services, there are some key issues that the industry has been trying to achieve. John Myers produced a well-received report earlier this year for Digital Britain, and his recommendations are reprinted in the Digital Britain report.

Ofcom, however, didn't fully support some of the details. In particular how a local impact test might be defined. The report ploughs through some of these objections and says that Ofcom will need to agree a two-year pilot based on an output focused regulatory regime. In other words, it'll be how a radio service sounds to the listener, rather than where it's based, that will be important. The pilot will only include a limited number of stations, but should it prove satisfactory, it'll be rolled out "more widely."

The report does go on to say that it wants to produce a new tier of what it describes as "ultra-local" services which will remain on FM. In effect, the idea is to bundle smaller ILR services and community stations together, leaving the bigger players, with networked programming, on DAB. I suspect some smaller players in local radio might not be happy with some of the proposed relaxations on community services, who'll now be competitors not just for listeners but also for money. At a time when the smaller services are hurting the most - and closing down - I'm not sure that this is the news they want to hear.

Ofcom will extend licence periods for all national and local services that broadcast on DAB for up to seven more years. But if, by 2013, the Digital Upgrade timetable isn't on track, then licences will be terminated in 2015, meaning rebidding would apply.

This is obviously important news for any ILR that's close to licence expiry. And it's especially important for the national commercial radio services all of whose licences expire between 2011 and 2012. In particular Classic FM and Talksport will appreciate the additional time this gives them to migrate their audience over to digital. That national FM licence in particular would have been hard fought over, however few years the licence might have been for.

Finally, the report will allow two or more smaller stations to be put together to form a single DAB service. With the prospective replanning of local and regional multiplexes, this neatly sidesteps some of the issues of geography that are simply unworkable currently.

Overall, then, I think that this is massively encouraging for radio. There are certainly going to be issues along the way, and obviously key to all of this is getting DAB coverage improved to meet current FM coverage. In particular, that means ensuring that DAB sets work satisfactorily indoors. Anyone who has tried using a DAB set in a modern office, often acting as a massive Faraday cage, will know what I mean.

As ever, these are my own views, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

Update: I have amended or clarified a couple of small errors since first publishing this piece.

Here are a couple of nice pieces of audio from recent programmes. The first comes courtesy of Axegrinder at Press Gazette, and considers what those scary Yorkshire folk have been up to:

Bearing in mind that BBC Radio Five Live is shortly to move to Manchester, not with entirely unanimous support of everyone who works there, have a listen to this recent extract of Simon Mayo when Jason Isaacs came in a month ago:

Well they amused me anyway...

What has The Guardian done to its daily listings this week? They've got substantially worse - especially for radio.

To give you an idea what I'm talking about, here's an example of last Thursday's radio page:

And here's the equivalent page today:

The more observant may notice that it's now only half a page. We've lost the Pick of the Day column which used to highlight one or more programmes to listen out for.

We've also lost loads of stations. Previously, The Guardian had detailed and easy to read listings for Radio 3, Radio 4 and Radio 7 - arguably the three channels that needed that detail the most. Then there werer also schedules for Radio 1, Radio 2, Five Live, 6Music, Classic FM, TalkSport, 1Xtra, Asian Network, Absolute Radio, BBC London, Xfm, Capital Radio (these latter in my London edition) and the World Service. A total of 16 services.

Today's edition carries just Radio 3 and Radio 4. That's your lot. The detail for these is about the same as before, but of the other 14 services, there's no coverage.

This comes at a time when more people are listening to the radio than ever before. And a quick run of the figures shows that of people who "almost always" read The Guardian, 165,000 are Radio 1 listeners, 282,000 are Radio 2 listeners, 224,000 are Five Live listeners, 53,000 are 6Music listeners, 75,000 are Radio 7 listeners, 191,000 are Classic FM listeners, 38,000 are Absolute Radio listeners and 33,000 are Talksport listeners. That's a lot of readers who are no longer served (Source: RAJAR Q1 2009).

I'm sure that The Guardian would point you in the direction of The Guide and say there's more coverage in its Saturday listings supplement, but that wasn't as detailed as we used to get.

In fairness I should say that the loss isn't just radio's. Many digital TVservices have lost their listings too. Gone are all the TV sports channels listings (seemingly a subject so popular it deserves a daily section, but not any listings info), Comedy Central, Sky Movies Premiere, Sky Movies Indie, Sky Movies Drama, Sky Movies Comedy, Sky Movies Action Thriller, Hallmark, and GOLD. There's also no longer a daily film pick selection - perhaps unsurprising since so many film channels are no longer included.

I suspect that overall page saved is something to do with decreasing revenues and expensive newsprint, but I'm sure those savings could come from elsewhere.

[Disclaimer: Yes, I work for a commercial radio station, Absolute Radio, but I'm writing in my personal capacity here]

...or rather the Sony Radio Academy Awards as they should be known, but aren't really.

The radio "Oscars" were held last night in London. Quite why every award ceremony has to be compared to the awfulness of the Oscars is a good question. And they were held at the Grosvenor House Hotel ballroom, a room that broadly speaking, sees a similar type of ceremony practically every night of the year. Indeed, this Saturday, Radio 4 has a documntary - Getting the Gongs - exploring this very phenomenon.

But these awards are the biggest awards in UK radio, and as usual they try to tread a fineline between commercial and BBC radio so that everyone gets a fair crack of the whip. What's more, as well as being shortlisted as a nominee (and therefore having to buy a table at the ceremony), most categories award Gold, Silver and Bronze awards. The Golds are the ones that get to go up on stage, but everyone loves an award don't they?

What this means is that alongside the News & Current Affairs Award and the Drama Award, which are only ever realistically going to be won by BBC services, we get The Breakfast Show Award and the Listener Participation Award, and even The Competition Award.

The latter particularly intrigued me, since the BBC got a nomination in a year that it basically wasn't allowed to do any competitions.

My employer, Absolute Radio, had seven nominations. Careful examination of a large binder of Sony nominations and winners (kindly supplied by the Sony Awards organisation last year), revealed that only twice before had a single commercial station had so many nominations in a single year - with Kiss and Capital 95.8 equalling the achievement.

Anyway, Absolute Coldplay won Gold in the Live Event category, with Iain Lee getting a Silver award in the Listener Particpiation category, our production guys getting a Bronze in the Promo category and Tim Shaw getting a Bronze in the Entertainment Award category. That was particularly tough as Tim was up against Christian O'Connell and Geoff Lloyd in the same category. But Chris Evans won out with Adam & Joe taking silver.

Chris Evans, who hosted the awards, did well, also taking home Gold in the The Music Radio Personality of the Year award, while Adam & Joe, who were up for four awards came away with no Golds.

With a remarkable piece of prescience, Sunday Times radio journalist, Paul Donovan, wrote the following on Sunday, the day before the awards:

Radio 3 will confound history tomorrow when it is crowned UK Station of the Year for the first time in the Sony Radio Academy Awards...

It's as remarkable that Radio 3 hasn't previously won this award, as it is that Donovan was so certain that they'd carry home the trophy ahead of time. But they did, and it's well deserved.

Five Live did very well at the awards. So well indeed, that they produced the following package which aired just before the 8am news this morning. Immodest? I'll let you decide...

What I will say is that the awards were well deserved (And I do regularly listen to two of their winning programmes - the breakfast show, and of course, the peerless Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode. Someone came in and said hello on the show today).

Paul Brown received a thoroughly deserved Special Award for the tireless work he's done for radio, and commercial radio especially, over the years.

The most curious winner of the evening was Electric Radio Brixton that gained four nominations across various categories and ended up with two Golds and two Bronzes. I've not heard any of the output and it may be well deserved. On the other hand, it's not very likely that many prison radio operations would even be able to put together the entry fee for Sony Awards. I trust that it won its awards for the right reasons...

Count Arthur Strong won the comedy award - I've not really been a listener, but long time readers will probably know that my favourite Radio 4 comedy is Ed Reardon's Week, and that didn't even get a nomination.

I haven't heard any of the Drama Award nominees either, but hopefully, at least the winner, Mr Larkin's Awkward Day, will get a repeat.

I could tot up all the commercial and all the BBC awards but I'm not sure to what ends that would be. The BBC has vastly more money to spend on its output than commercial radio. That's even more the case now as the Sony Awards mention in their press release:

"Commercial radio, which has experienced a challenging 12 months..."

That said - good radio is good radio, and it can come from anywhere.

Interesting news from Five Live.

Danny Baker's going to be doing the Saturday morning show, replacing Eamonn Holmes. Meanwhile Absolute Radio's own Christian O'Connell is returning to Five Live to present an as yet un-named topical news comedy programme.

I'm glad that Danny Baker's 606 has been acknowledged for the triumph that it is, and he's getting a decent length show on the station.

Christian used to present Fighting Talk until he took over as the then host of the Virgin Radio breakfast show. At that point, Colin Murray was given the Fighting Talk gig - probably because Christian was just a bit too high profile for Five Live's controller's liking. Before him, the same had happened when Johnny Vaughan got the Capital FM breakfast show, and he also left the Fighting Talk host (although it's his production company that still produces the show).

Speaking of production companies, I thought that this was interesting:

"5 Live will invite independent production companies and in-house production areas to pitch for the opportunity to produce this show and the best ideas and formats will win out!"

Talk about an open pitch...

7am this morning saw the first RAJAR release of 2009, and with it came a pleasant surprise: overall radio listening is up. Indeed, since the current methodology was introduced, radio listening is at an all time high reaching 45.8m listeners a week with 251,000 additional listeners this quarter.

And even better news is that listening - the amount of time people actually spend listening to radio - is also up with 1.025 billion listening hours.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos MORI/RSMB

This is great news, because we all have so many more options for watching, reading and listening than we've ever had in the past. I've long been concerned that radio would fall below the 1 billion hours a week figure, but the numbers remain strong. A number's just a number, but when we could be listening to our iPods, Last.fm, or Spotify, we could playing video games, surfing the net or watching a DVD, this is powerful news for the medium.

I suppose that it'd be fair to point out that as the population continues to increase, and get older, you'd hope that listening figures increase, but irrespective of that this remains good news. The one area of concern is amongst younger listeners.

That's up 1% on the quarter in terms of listening hours, but it's down on the year. This chart shows listening over the last five years.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos MORI/RSMB

Keeping young people listening to the radio should be a major industry objective. 25+ year olds are well served by both the BBC and commercial radio. But is the industry really doing enough to get young listeners involved? Kids radio is all but non-existant, with CBeebies is on Radio 7 between the hours of 5am and 8am, and Radio 4 just killed its only childrens' show. There is just Fun Kids operating as a full service station for youngsters.

Radio 1 has grown older over the years with only really Switch specifically targeted at the younger end of its market, and even then it's not that young (The Radio Academy is discussing this next week).

20.1% of all radio listening is now via a digital platform - one in five hours. For some stations this is much higher - my own employer, Absolute Radio has now reached 50% of listening via a digital platform for its National service - i.e. amongst all listening to it excluding FM in London.

Source: RAJAR/Ipsos MORI/RSMB

That 20.1% is made up of 12.7% DAB, 3.4% DTV and 2.2% Internet (The mathematically astute will notice that doesn't add up to 20.1%. The remainer didn't specify which digital platform they were listening via).

From a commercial perspective we must be disappointed that the share of listening has slipped back in favour of the BBC. The BBC has 56.3% of listening while commercial radio has 41.6% (the difference is other listening including non-RAJAR services, and international listening, including via the internet).

Overall, with so many more distractions, it's good news that radio is still being listened to so much, by so many people.

As always, these views are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

The Home Office has been having a hard time recently - and the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, especially so.

Yesterday, they came out all guns a blazing, with a list of people "named and shamed" who are to be excluded from entering Britain.

Obviously this is by no means a list of the only people we don't want to have in the country, but it's a list that shouts loudly that Britain doesn't want undesirables visiting these shores.

What could be wrong with that?

Well for the most part, these people aren't actually rabble rousers who are likely to cause injury or harm. They're largely full of stupid ideas, but by officially blocking them from entering the country, and making a big song and dance about it, you can be sure that they now all have a 'pulpit' to shout from.

It really does no good by not letting these people come. If they're criminals under UK law, then fair enough. And if they commit crimes when they get here, then arrest and charge them. But the idiots who feature in Louise Theroux programmes are suddenly legitimised by this behavious when really we should let them come over and have a good laugh at them.

The strangest person to be named in Michael Savage - a right-wing American talk show host - who may well say objectionable things, but no more so than any number of other right-wing American talk show hosts. In the US, they have freedom of speech (although incitement to hatred is still a crime). Quite why this man has been blocked is beyond me.

The growth of right-wing talk radio in the US is an interesting aspect of the medium - something that's not happened in the UK (let's face it, that kind of radio wouldn't be legal under our laws).

An interesting book I read last year was Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio which included a chapter on Michael Savage. He's not a pleasant person, and I wouldn't want to listen to his show. But I don't think I'd bar him from entering the country. Not unless he actually had done something illegal when he'd been here.

Instead he gets the oxygen of publicity, and can take quite a high-minded view - with talk of "suing Britain."

I'd recommend reading "Shock Jocks" for an insight into this phenomena. There is a lot of partisan commercial speech radio in the US, and while much of it's ugly, their constitution allows it. Would I want that "freedom" over here? I'm not sure I would. But that doesn't mean I'd block their presenters from visiting the UK. We're bigger than that. Who knows: maybe if Savage visited the country (he's not been here for something like 25 years, and had no plans to do so), he might actually have his views altered. He's unlikely to now.

A very strange story is in today's Times. The presenter of ITV1's Tonight programme, Jonathan Maitland, writes about product placement and sponsorship on TV.

First of all, Maitland seems to confuse product placement and sponsorship. As he says, Andy Burnham seems to have ruled out product placement, although I'm not sure that any shift in thinking by Ed Richards at Ofcom will really affect the issue. If there's not a government willingness to relax the rules, then they won't find Ofcom doing so.

However, product placement is very different to sponsorship, which is I think, what Maitland's really driving at. Product placement - the placing of sponsored products within the editorial of a programme - is surely near-impossible to do with current affairs or documentary programming. It's much more likely to find take-up, should it be legalised, in drama or light entertainment programmes.

The Ofcom Broadcasting Code does of course allow the sponsorship of TV programmes. However, there are certain types of programmes for which sponsorship is forbidden:

9.1 The following may not be sponsored:

* news bulletins and news desk presentations on radio; and
* news and current affairs programmes on television.

That means Tonight.

And there's worse news. Article 10 of the European Audiovisual Media Services Directive (which basically trumps UK law), also strictly prohibits this:

4. News and current affairs programmes shall not be sponsored.

So at a European level, it wouldn't be legal for Tonight to be funded by Maitland's un-named insurance company.

In some respects, TV is limited in what it can do compared to radio. Take sponsorship credits. In television, they're sold at a discount from spot airtime despite the fact that as more homes get PVRs and we fast-forward through commercials, sponsor break-bumpers become the things to look out for. But TV is limited in what it can do:

9.12 Sponsorship credits must be clearly separated from programmes by temporal or spatial means.

9.13 Sponsorship must be clearly separated from advertising. Sponsor credits must not contain advertising messages or calls to action. In particular, credits must not encourage the purchase or rental of the products or services of the sponsor or a third party.

Unfortunately, the Television Without Frontiers directive (the forerunner to the Audiovisual Media Services Directive) puts these stipulations in. Ofcom explained it all in a recent Broadcast Bulletin that took a close look at TV sponsorships and found some to be in breach of its Broadcast Code.

For example, PC World's sponsorship of The Gadget Show was found to be in breach because it used the following phrases:

* "Any TV big or small, it's at PC World"
* "A huge range of mp3 and mp4 players at PC World"
* "A wide choice of laptops with mobile broadband at PC World"
* "Take the internet anywhere with mobile broadband at PC World"
* "Any game and console, it's at PC World"

Ofcom said:

In this case, the credits consisted of animated shots of the sponsor's products combined with promotional language to describe the extensive range available, followed by a very brief identification of the sponsorship arrangement.

Ofcom considered that the predominant focus of the credits was on the products and range available from the sponsor, with the identification of the sponsorship arrangement appearing to be secondary. The credits were therefore in breach of Rule 9.13.

Now compare and contrast with the rules for sponsorship of radio, which doesn't fall under any of the European directives mentioned above:

9.8 During longer sponsored output, credits must be broadcast as appropriate to create the degree of transparency required.

9.10 Credits must be cleared for broadcast in the same way as advertisements.

So on TV "sponsor credits must not contain advertising messages or calls to action" but on radio "credits may contain legitimate advertising messages." And there lies the difference.

Of course that works to the advantage of radio!

But after this entertaining diversion into the rules and regulations surrounding broadcast media sponsorship, let's return to Jonathan Maitland's piece. The unspoken part of this story is something that Broadcast reported this week: Tonight is facing its second major budget cut in six months. In November it had a 20% budget cut and made 12 of its 65 employees redundant. Now it has to cut a further 15% from its budget. Times are tough, and its undertstandable that Maitland believes in the programme and is perhaps fustrated that ITV can't benefit from sponsorship of the programme.

If my show had just received a cumulative 32% budget cut, then I'd be looking at new funding models.

More or Less on Radio 4

One of my favourite Radio 4 shows has returned for a new series. Do yourself a favour and subscribe to the podcast. This week we had Marcus du Sautoy talking to Charles Clarke about Perfect Numbers and Mersenne Primes. You really want to listen now don't you?

Archive on 4 - For One Night Illegally - The History of the Bootleg on Radio 4

Nothing to do with mash-ups. Instead, The Word magazine's David Hepworth on the history of illegal concert recordings and other out-takes not meant for public consumption. At a time when they were being manufactured on a large scale process this is fascinating.

Handel's Messiah on Radio 3

Umm. I've posted this a little bit too late for you to be able to hear it on iPlayer, but this EBU broadcast deserves a mention. Handel died 250 years ago this year you know!

Down The Line - Credit Crunch Special on Radio 4

I'm still not at all sure about the TV transition of this most 'radio' of radio shows, but this special is well worth a listen.

I did also give Jon Gaunt's new SunTalk show a listen, but I could never stand the guy when he was on Talksport (or BBC London for that matter), so I'm really not going to bother with this. It's an interesting model, however, and I interested by the money that News International has spent on studios. The Guardian's new building (which I'm hopefully seeing tomorrow), also has some significant radio/podcasting studios.

The other day I talked about the frustration I suffered when I tried to listen to BBC Radio Five Live on my mobile streaming via 3G.

I thought that it might be worth exploring that a little more.

Most of the news about listening to the radio via your phone is about the iPhone. Of course unlike many phones with lesser specifications, the iPhone doesn't have an FM receiver built into it, so if you want to listen to the radio with it, you're probably looking at getting an app to do the job.

Many radio broadcasters are busily bringing out feature packed applications that do more than just play the radio. Absolute Radio, my own employer, has recently released its very well received application, and the team at Global have just received a Sony Radio Academy Award nomination for the work on their Capital FM app (which is being rapidly rolled out to other stations in their portfolio).

That's all well and good, but what about the other smartphone platforms?

Getting accurate market share data for this is not easy. Some of the data is jealously guarded by various manufacturers and operators, and other data is available at a nice premium.

For the purposes of this analysis I'm using data from AdMob. They release regular reports based on the traffic they see for the mobile sites that they serve advertising for.

Their February 2009 report suggests that globally, the Symbian operating system (as used by Nokia) remains the most popular amongst smartphone users. This is followed by the iPhone OS, although traffic from the iPod Touch is excluded since, well, it's not a phone (although obviously it can be used for online apps with a WiFi network).

In the UK the two are reversed and it seems that the iPhone is the smartphone platform of choice for developers to first concentrate on. However, it should be remembered that the data is not based on device ownership however - it's based on traffic. And because Apple's devices have a usefully large screen and excellent data packages, they are likely to be used significantly more than smaller "phone-sized" devices.

To return to my original question. How could I listen to the radio, via 3G or GPRS, on my N-Series Nokia phone? I have listened to Five Live in the past and it was a hit-or-miss affair. But websites have changed since I last tried it in 2008, and I was unsuccessful this week.

A little bit of Googling revealed that Nokia does indeed have an internet radio application. But there was a problem (although I didn't discover it at first).

The first search result takes you to a Nokia site that insists that the first thing you have to do is download PC Suite. This is a bit of problem for two reasons. First, because Nokia, in its infinite wisdom, keeps releasing different "suites". And secondly, because it turns out that Internet Radio is included with more recent phones (with superior "Feature Packs" in Nokia's terminology). Unfortunately, if like me, your phone is locked to your network, and your network provider insists on tweaking the firmware (take a bow Orange), then you'll never have updated firmware made available for your phone.

When I got my N82 it came with a CD from Nokia with N Series Suite which is fine - but is different to the regular PC Suite and from the newish Ovi Suite. Ovi is the brand that Nokia will be launching for its forthcoming app store.

Unhelpfully, Nokia keeps links to all three of these alive making it hard to know which version I should be using. I'm pretty sure that it's Ovi, but Nokia does a dreadful job explaining that to the consumer. For all my moaning about new versions of iTunes everytime Apple adds a new property to some other device in its portfolio, at least it's easy to track down the correct piece of software.

But back to my radio issue. The only obvious way of installing the Internet Radio application was to install PC Suite which I didn't want to do as I'm now using Ovi. Surely the application existed on its own? It did. The problem was that searching initially led me to this old open source version that involves using Shoutcast. Adding stations is a complicated affair involving using something like Winamp to create a playlist and then export that list to your phone. Not exactly friendly. I installed it and played with it for a while, getting very frustrated.

In the end, I found the version I wanted at S60.com. This works pretty well and is a standalone app with no messing around using Shoutcast or PC applications. It lets you bookmark your favourite stations, allows you to choose quality depending on your connection (3G, GRPS or WiFi), and does a very neat fade in and fade out when changing stations. And of course, unlike a certain market leading smartphone I could mention, you can listen to the radio and do other things at the same time like sending text messages or reading email.

If the station includes the data correctly, as Absolute Radio does, you get details of the current song playing too.

So no problem then?

Well not quite. You see, while Nokia's directory includes many of the main UK commercial stations - I've mentioned Absolute, but Global's main brands like Classic FM, Capital 95.8FM, and a couple of Heart FMs are in there - there's a notable absentee. The only BBC service available is the BBC World Service (I should also mention that Bauer services aren't included, and neither is Talksport).

Now I rather suspect that unless these services aren't that bothered, the reason they're missing is to do with geo-IP blocking. Does Nokia have the functionality to allow this? The BBC wouldn't be allowed to serve much football on Five Live to Nokia phones outside the UK, and for all I know, all these radio services are streaming through a big server in Finland.

The Internet Radio application does allow you to plug in streams directly, but that rather supposes you can find the streams' details. Have a good look around the BBC website and see if you can find them. I suspect that if I had a working internet radio I might be able to find the stream details that way, but rooting around the website turns nothing up.

So if I can't get an application to play BBC radio, can I just visit their website and listen there?

Um. No.

Visiting bbc.co.uk on the Nokia cleverly sends me to their mobile website (or a version of it), and that doesn't include any listening links. I believe that the BBC is concerned that people will run up huge data bills on their mobiles listening to the radio without realising it. So to avoid all complications, I just don't see the links.

That's the reason that my N82 isn't up to date enough to (officially) run the Nokia iPlayer application. In my firmware, Realplayer, which plays the files back, doesn't refer to your application's choice of data connectivity and so even if you think you've connected on WiFi, without changing a fiddly Realplayer setting, you might end up listening via 3G - and get a big data bill to boot. Once we're all on all-you-can-eat data plans this will go away, but in the meantime, it's a bit like stepping back into 56k modem days.

Anyway, I couldn't find a listen live button on the mobile radio site. Visiting the iPlayer site presents a non-mobile friendly site, but it also doesn't think that I have Real installed despite the fact that I do, and implores me to load it before I can listen to the live stream.

So there's no way I can see of using the BBC website, on my mobile at least, to listen to a live radio stream.

I'm obviously not the only person with this problem, because someone has set up this page which works. It's just a mobile friendly page of links to RAM streams and they play fine. The only downside is that you can't use another application while listening - unlike most Nokia applications. But that's a Realplayer shortcoming.

It'd be really good if there was a nice 32k AAC+ stream publicly available to listen to via the Nokia Internet Radio application (128k AAC+ streams are being used for iPlayer, but that data rate's a little high for mobile). But in the meantime, this non-authorised workaround is the only way I can find.

In summary - radio on the Nokia really should be better, and much easier for the consumer. At the moment with the iPhone we're seeing nearly every station produce their own application which feels a little silly, albeit providing good additional functionality. Nokia's Internet Radio application is a nice start, but it really needs the support of the nation's biggest and most popular radio broadcaster. Listening to the BBC on the iPhone or Windows Media devices, is also difficult, and sites like bbcstreams.com are filling the hole currently.

15-24 listening is declining across the board, and if your station is not on the one device that you know that this age group carry and use, then it's harder to make sure the next generation keeps the radio habit.

As ever, these are my thoughts and don't represent those of my employer. And I'm not really trying to bash the BBC who are doing an excellent job in so many ways with radio. I'm just frustrated with the difficulties I had over this earlier in the week, and my attempts to work around them.

Spoon Jar Jar Spoon on Radio 4

A nice little documentary about Tommy Cooper that delved into the world of magic in London during the sixties and seventies, when there were magic shops all over the place, and clubs where magicians hung out. The late Ali Bongo was also interviewed for this.

And if you're seeing this after the iPlayer window has closed, perhaps you should check out Speechification...

ABC and the BBC Concert Orchestra on Radio 2

A live recording of last week's performance of the whole of the Lexicon of Love album. I've always had a soft spot for this album, so it was great to hear it played live in such a luscious way. (My top tip is to skip the Janice Long interview at the start).

State of Play on DVD

We're due for a spate of big screen remakes of BBC dramas and I'm not inclined to believe that the originals will be bettered. The Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck version of State of Play opens next week and it'll be interesting to see how they've managed to shrink six hours of plot heavy TV into just over two hours of cinema. I notice that Paul Abbott's name isn't on the script, although Kevin MacDonald is directing.

Anyway, the original is only a fiver at Amazon so why not go back to that first?

Coming soon: the Mel Gibson version of Edge of Darkness directed by original series director Martin Campbell, but seemingly no longer scripted by Troy Kennedy Martin.

Newswipe on BBC Four

Charlie Brooker was great on the G20 coverage. GMTV's John Stapleton practically insisting that there'd be trouble; Sky's "Skyboat" from which they could see nothing; and Ben Goldacre on MMR and the media.

But best of all:

Brooker: "Still at least they didn't try to "oomph" things up by slapping together a montage of violent looking protest material backed by I Predict A Riot by the Kaiser Chiefs."

Cue: Montage of violent looking protest material backed by I Predict A Riot by the Kaiser Chiefs.

Spiral on BBC Four

You'll probably need to get the DVDs of this unless you've already been watching. But they're worth the cash. Roll on the second series.

Finally - is it just me, or is this series of The Apprentice really disappointing? They really do seem to have removed any intelligent people from the mix this year.

It's been a big week in the biggest club football competition in the world, with Chelsea, Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal all featuring in the second leg of the quarter-final.

Last night I was returning late from the cinema and realised I was without a radio to listen to the Chelsea v Liverpool fixture. Perhaps I could listen to Five Live via the internet I thought as I stood at the bus stop. I had my phone with me, but most sports commentary is broadcast on AM, and phones only ever have FM radios. But much surfing around the BBC's mobile website (it rather insisted I use the mobile website) did not reveal a link to their audio stream in Real, the preferred format of many phones. I know it's there somewhere, but I couldn't find it. I perhaps could have visited Talksport website, but they seem to prefer Windows Media which is pretty useless on any phones except Windows Mobile.

So it was in vain hope that I switched to FM and discovered that BBC Radio London were broadcasting the game (Nik Goodman also listened - but switched to FM driven by the broadcaster itself!). That got me home until I could watch the second half on ITV1 - and what an outstanding game it was!

Anyway, on to tonight's games, with Manchester United out in Porto while I was at Arsenal watching them play Villarreal. Now I often like to listen to radio commentaries of games in the ground. Arsenal is very good about showing replays of major incidents - unless they're in any way contentious when the big screen certainly won't show them so as not to incite the crowd.

I tuned into Five Live on my little DAB radio and perhaps unsurprisingly, they were covering the Man Utd game. Never mind. Let's check out Five Live Sports Extra - the BBC's digital sports channel. Surely they'd be covering the game?

No.

Hmm. OK. Much as it goes against the grain, I thought I'd give Talksport a whirl. I know that they've also been covering Champions' League fixtures which aren't sold on an exclusive basis like TV fixtures are. Despite the cost of sending out commentators and an engineer to Portugal, that's where Talksport went with their commentators sitting no doubt a few feet from Alan Green and his Five Live team.

OK. Let's try BBC London. I know that they'd done a deal with Chelsea previously for all their Champions' League fixtures, but maybe they'd be covering it. Nope. They didn't even seem to have a sports programme on.

I flicked around at this point but new it was useless. There are no other radio stations in London that cover football. Certainly no commercial station does. [Capital] Gold once used to, and I listened to that station regularly. But they stopped years ago, and I've not listened since. Xfm has aired a few games in the past, but no longer. Forget Heart or Magic. My own station, Absolute, has never covered live football. And nobody else was doing so either.

So on Tuesday, three stations in the capital were covering the same game featuring a London club - a game that was being broadcast on free to air terrestrial TV.

Tonight there was another London club playing. The game was only available on subscription TV (Sky) meaning that millions of potential listeners were unable to hear it.

It's a sorry state of affairs - it really is.

I'm surprised that the BBC didn't find space on Sports Extra for it, but I'm also disappointed that commercial radio is in such a state that it won't bother with sport at all - the exceptions being Talksport and some local services in big football areas like the North West and North East (I can't imagine that Man Utd playing in the Champions' League would not be covered locally as well as nationally).

I know that RAJAR - the radio ratings system - doesn't serve one-off fixtures very well, making it hard to sell to sponsors. And for all I know Arsenal or UEFA charged a fortune for the rights to this game. But I rather suspect that nobody was interested. And it's the public that loses out.

Arsenal won 3-0 on the night at 4-1 on aggregate. They'll meet Manchester United in the two-legged semi-final. Those games will be on the radio.

[Update] Amusingly, a work colleague was driving back from somewhere on Tuesday night and was trying to find the Arsenal game. He couldn't of course, but on AM he did find a Spanish station that was covering it. Despite not speaking Spanish he was able to listen just picking out the names: "Fabregas.... Van Persie... Walcott!"

It's interesting to see that Russell Brand has a new CD/download out called The Russell Brand Radio Show - The Best Of What's Legal. It's available as a set of three CDs (plus bonus DVD!), or as a download from places like iTunes.

At first glance the question you might ask is what on earth the BBC is doing putting out this as a CD? But it's nothing to do with the BBC of course. As we all now know, the radio show was produced by his own production company, Vanity Projects, from May 2008. I assume that part of that deal was that the rights to the audio reverted to his company after the BBC's usage had expired - largely the 7 day iPlayer window.

So Brand is free to monetise his radio show accordingly.

But has he done it right? Judging from the extracts on iTunes, it's basically some new linking material surrounding previously heard clips from the radio show. That's nothing more than prospective purchasers would expect of course. But paying £15.99 or more for audio that you got free previously is a bit much.

It's basically three hours, and even Ricky Gervais doesn't charge as much as that. The reviews at iTunes are worth a read. It's clear that fans know that the full podcasts are saved up in other areas.

Now if he started releasing weekly podcasts at £1.89 he might do well. That said, even Ricky Gervais sells a CD set of his podcasts at a similar price for 3 CDs.

Feedback on Radio 4

Last week it was lots of complaints about the new Radio 4 website, and somehow I think those complaints will return. But this week it was more about when children's radio is scheduled on BBC Radio 7. The reality is that children largely don't listen at scheduled times, yet the BBC has to first broadcast programmes before children can actually listen to them via the iPlayer. So we have the faintly ludicrous situation where programmes go out between 5am and 8am on BBC 7 before they reach the website. Very under 6 year olds are likely to be tuning in their DAB radios at 5am to listen to Cbeebies Radio.

Archive on 4: Carl Sagan - A Personal Journey on Radio 4

Brian Cox presents a programme about Carl Sagan, presenter of the world-renound programme Cosmos. He created a series that had a massive impact on a new generation of budding scientists - like Cox himself - and others interested in the world, and the universe around us.

I do wonder if we make those sorts of programmes today? Alongside Cosmos, there are pioneering series like The Ascent of Man, or the lovingly remembered Connections with James Burke. Do we still make series like that?

There are certainly series like Planet Earth and the recent Nature's Great Events focusing on wildlife that find primetime appearances on BBC1, but science equivalents no longer do so. While I'm excited to hear about The History Of Science and Seven Wonders Of The Solar System, both are being made for BBC2 and have 6 and 5 episodes respectively. Not the monumental 13 that both Cosmos and The Ascent of Man had.

During the programme, Sagan's wife mentions that when Cosmos was released on iTunes, it was a runaway best-seller. It's just a shame that it's not available on iTunes in the UK. Nor indeed is it available on DVD in the UK. Goodness knows what rights issues are preventing that. Still, it's importable...

Treasure Quest on BBC Radio Norfolk

This is an odd one. It's basically the old Channel 4 series, Treasure Hunt, but on the radio. The BBC Norfolk website presents the show as "an affectionate homage" to the TV series, who's music they've also borrowed. But it's a bit different to the series you remember on TV with Anneka Rice (and briefly revived by BBC2 in 2002). For one thing, it's on the radio. And for another, they've not got a helicopter. This is BBC local radio after all.

Instead we get presenter David Clayton in the studio while Becky Betts is in a radio car. The "Questmaster" poses a clue for a location in Norfolk, and listeners have to phone, email or text into the studio with their thoughts about where Betts should go. She keeps up a fairly relentless live commentary, and with limited technology (i.e. no sat-navs or GPS), they race around the Norfolk countryside - within the speed limit - solving clues and moving on to the next one.

It's an entertaining listen, with locals seemingly popping out of their houses if they realise the radio car is in the areas, but perhaps a bit lost, helping out.

Wikipedia tells me that it's actually something that originated on BBC Three Counties Radio.

The communications work impressively well - although I'm not sure to what extent they have to drive around in their radio car with the mast extended. In the episode I listened to, only very occassionally did they fall back to mobile phone. It's also quite neat how they map GPS co-ordinates of Betts' location live online (even if she can't see those maps herself!).

It's certainly entertaining Sunday morning fare, and it can be a struggle to squeeze any music into the show even if it's three hours long. And I did laugh when Betts needed to use the toilet part-way through the show. You wouldn't have caught the jump-suited rice having to take a "natural break" like that!

This evening the nominations were announced for the 2009 Sony Radio Academy Awards. This was held in the same nightclub in the West End that it's always held in - although each year it curiously changes name.

Anyway, it's always an entertaining event with a partisan audience cheering on their favourites, and being deathly silent when Radio 1 is nominated (I don't know where their team was).

Johnny Vaughan and Lisa Snowdon were masters of ceremonies, taking over from Chris Evans who it was confirmed, will be the main presenter of this year's awards. Johnny was on form even if he perhaps took one too many swipes at the BBC.

As ever, the BBC dominated, but many categories will always mean it does. Drama isn't a commercial radio strong suit, and scripted comedy certainly isn't.

I'm very pleased to report that Absolute Radio took 7 nominations - which I think is actually a record for a single year for the station, beating our Virgin Radio days.

So congratulations to the team behind Absolute Coldplay (for the Music Special award and the live event coverage award), the Discover Real Music production (the Promo award), Iain Lee's team (in the Listener Participation award), and particularly Geoff Lloyd, Christian O'Connell and Tim Shaw who all compete against one another in the same category for The Entertainment Award. That's almost certainly the first time that three DJs from the same commercial station have competed in the same category. They face tough competition with Chris Evans and Adam & Joe also being nominated. Still, as someone pointed out, Absolute Radio is guaranteed a bronze!

Elsewhere, some standout radio deservedly nominated includes Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone on 6 Music, Jon Ronson, Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode, and Danny Baker, who's 606 is actually listed in the comedy category, where Radio 4 hasn't got a great showing this year surprisingly.

Only one BBC nominee in the competition award - but even that's a bit high in a year when the BBC basically wasn't running any competitions.

The internet programme award is interesting because nearly anyone is able to enter this. The Guardian has an episode of Media Talk nominated (probably a bit too incestuous to win, good and irritating in equal measures though it is). The other nominees I was totally unfamiliar with, and I might check out the RSPB one. Most curious of all was the Clifton Diocese podcast - Let Us Pod.

Multimedia will be tough. Global's Capital Radio iPhone application has done very well and was ahead of the rest of the game, but the BBC has some great resource to do amazingly clever things at events like the Radio 1 Big Weekend or Wimbledon on Five Live.

However I'm really not at all sure how Stephen Nolan is so popular. It's really not my idea of good phone-in radio.

The main Station of the Year competition will be fought out between Radio 1, Radio 3 and Classic FM; a very interesting "fight".

I must admit that I've not heard any of the drama nominees, although I believe that there may be an opportunity to hear some of the nominees online. While I'm sure that the BBC will be repeating its dramas, it'd be good if the mooted online streaming of all nominated award entries was followed up. There's obviously a great deal of exceptional radio out there, and much of it will have passed many of us by - particularly if it was only broadcast in a particular region.

The full list of nominees is here, and the awards will be presented on May 11.

A couple of worthwhile pieces in today's Media Guardian for those interested in the radio industry.

Global's Stephen Miron gives an interview. The subject of licence roll-over is brought up. Classic FM is the first of the three INR licences to be renewed, expiring in September 2011. Global would like an extension rather than the highest bidder mechanism - something that's currently legislated.

The piece also highlights two speculated national services for DAB, including a talk station. Miron won't talk about that, so we'll have to wait and see.

The bit I'm unsure about is the comparison between the Heart network and Radio 2. Miron positions Heart as a Radio 2 that you can advertise on. Given the recent issues Global's had with Ofcom in regard to contemporary music levels, I'm not sure that the comparison is quite there (although Radio 2 certainly does play a significant level of contemporary music). Many of the services that have recently become Hearts were actually more chart based than Radio 2, and they've not had their formats changed.

Meanwhile Martin Kelner - recently employed by TalkSport - addresses the marketing surrounding the introduction of Heart in the last week to lots of towns and cities west of London. Toby Anstis, who's morning show is networked across all 29 Heart services, had been rolled out to places such as Oxford, Plymouth, Exeter and Reading to explain why his show was relevant to local audiences. His reasoning was indeed a little flawed - he'd visited some of these places before, been on holiday there, or his brother had been to university and so on.

The only way to really win this argument is to provide compelling programming to those audiences - something better than they'd been getting before.

Kelner, meanwhile, wanders off in an odd direction at the end, suggesting that the BBC scraps local radio to let commercial radio have a proper go. I'm really not sure that this is a great solution. In most parts of the country BBC local radio is targeting a much older audience - witness the furore surrounding Dave and Sue a few years ago.

As Kelner notes, many local services really aren't doing as much journalism as they might once have, so is it a good idea to scrap the one type of service that is doing local news? Particularly at a time when local newspapers and downsizing or shutting down throughout the land.

The BBC Trust ruled against the BBC's local video plans last year, amid great protest from local newspapers and radio services. Ironically, I can see there actually being a significant hole in coverage in the future, as many stations rely solely on the Press Association or Sky News for their journalistic requirements. David Simon in The Guardian this weekend pointed out that a loss of local media means it's easier to get away with things like political corruption. While the nationals may catch Jacqui Smith's TV viewing habits, do they catch agreements between local councillors and supermarket chains, or developers? Is that something that bloggers will catch if there are no journalists?

Any destruction of the coverage of local news is something to be opposed at every level. It'll be bad enough if there's only a single source of news - the BBC.

[As always, these opinions are mine, and do not reflect those of my employer.]

In this week's Broadcast magazine, Emily Bell suggests that it'd be a good idea for there to be a one-stop shop for audio. She's referring, of course, to Tim Davie's interview with Media Guardian on Monday suggesting that the BBC works with commercial radio to build a single "radioplayer."

"I'm talking about getting radio fit for the on-demand digital age. Why shouldn't we be able to live pause, put it on hard drive, grab stuff from the past seven days and pre-book on radio as well as TV," he says.

That's all pretty exciting, and there are some interesting ideas there. A core technology backbone for all radio offerings would be a good idea.

But a single radio player?

The problem is that he's coming at it from the point of view of a public broadcaster who's job is simply to get the Corporation's audio out to as many people as possible. But while that might be a major aim for commercial operators who also want their radio to be heard by as many people as possible, their prime aim is to make money via the medium. If one can't be done with the other, then it's not a solution.

And websites make money for radio stations - groups have digital sales teams. Once upon a time, a radio station's website might effectively have been classed as a line on the marketing budget. But no longer.

Commercial radio stations quite like it when stations listen to their service online via their own website. That's why you'll hear presenters drive listeners to stations' websites to interact, watch videos, enter competitions, find out more and so on.

Websites' radio players can also do smart things like be "skinned" by advertisers, have video or audio pre-rolls, and provide links to other popular fare like videos or social networking tools.

The idea that a listener instead goes to a generic 'www.radioplayer.co.uk' and goes direct to the stream is not something that's obviously commercially workable.

In her piece, Bell notes that we all go to YouTube for video. Most providers, even if they initially held firm, end up putting something on YouTube and hope that viewers come back to their sites for more. Thus the BBC put clips up and so on. But that's also the reason that Comedy Central in the US, for example, gets you to go to its own site for clips of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report. It's all there and embeddable (indeed embedding clips is about the only way of watching outside the US), but those page impressions drive advertising direct to the producers.

I know that a viewer might prefer it if if they went to one place - a bit like their digital TV service's EPG to get programming. And maybe one day, individual station websites will seem as quaint as stations sending out magazines at regular intervals to members. Hastening their demise doesn't really help in the medium term. Not when it's the one certain revenue growth area in any media.

For some providers, of course, the idea might be good. The Guardian produces a lot of excellent programming, and would probably quite like to have The Guardian Daily show up in the same player that houses The Today Programme, have Media Talk sit alongside The Media Show, or Football Weekly somewhere in the vicinity of Five Live.

But even The Guardian might be concerned if it started to have an overall impact on page impressions of their otherwise very popular main site. Audio and video, to The Guardian, are not core components - they're nice extras that they're trying to grow.

Newspapers have had a difficult time with Google News, but most at least are clear that the page views are returned to the individual papers with their stories. That said, is The Guardian or The Times really comfortable with the fact that some (potential) readers head to www.google.co.uk/news rather than www.guardian.co.uk or www.timesonline.co.uk for their news needs?

At the moment, if someone wants to listen to Absolute Radio, they visit our website, and they aren't tempted by Xfm or 6 Music sitting just alongside.

I don't want to sound overly negative, but some very careful thought has to be put into how such ideas might work. Sharing some of the knowledge that the BBC has built up, and the developments it has made seems very sensible. The idea that I could set something to record a radio programme for me ahead of time is very interesting. And if I listen via a WiFi radio, then of course I'm not going to be visiting anybody's website and it's all moot anyway.

But in the current tough climate, radio groups are going to be ever more reliant on additional revenues generated away from simple spot airtime, and that means digital revenues. Anything that damages them is not going to be welcomed with open arms.

More on this from Matt, earlier in the week.

[As ever, these views are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer]

Third Reich & Roll is a cracking three part documentary from Radio 2.

Stephen Fry narrates this story about how Nazi technology helped develop tape recording technology, and then the post-war development of multi-track technologies and stereo.

Part 2 is available until Monday and details what kind of technologies various classic albums used, from the fact that The Beatles were limited to no more than eight tracks - sometimes using two four-track devices in parrallel to achieve this - to the incredible tape layering required by Queen to achieve Bohemian Rhapsody.

I suspect that this Monday's final episode will get into the digital realm where tracks are now limitless.

Thanks to Speechification for the heads-up.

David Mitchell's The Unbelievable Truth is back for a third series this week. Not to be confused with the not-at-all-the-same yet not-all-that-different-either Would I Lie To You on TV, it's another Monday night comedy panel game.

From a few weeks ago, the Radio 4 book of the week was The Decisive Moment. This shouldn't really still be available on the iPlayer, but epsiode 3 is strangely still there. Anyway, it's quite an interesting listen, and no doubt a good read. That said, I thought that it jumped around a little bit, and I'm always a tad suspicious of the science in books like this. It always feels like someone has tried to retro-actively fit a bit of science around an otherwise interesting story. That might be the serviceman who decided that a radar blip was a missile rather than friendly plane, or the fireman who came up with a life-saving wildfire survival technique in a moment which was otherwise counter-intuitive.

And our very own Frank Skinner podcast is doing quite nicely in the suspicious iTunes podcast charts (Suspicious because it's never entirely clear how they're generated).

Still to listen to: William Boyd on Raymond Chandler on this week's Open Book.

Earlier this evening, the Radio Academy had one of its regular events - this one was a celebration of radio comedy.

Jon Holmes hosted the evening, speaking to two excellent proponents of comedy on radio: Barry Cryer and Steve Punt.

Barry Cryer picked some his "desert island" comedy classics and we were treated to excerpts. So we had Around the Horn which is a fantastic show that I learnt about via BBC cassettes, the peerless Armando Iannucci's Charm Offensive, and of course, I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue. The only programme of his that I really didn't know was Bleak Expectations; I can see that I'm going to have to educate myself.

Via the medium of video, Adam and Joe talked about an influential piece of comedy in Peter Cook's calls to Clive Bull in the guise of Sven the Norwegian (I listened to a lot of LBC around that time, but never heard about Sven until it was too late. I did, however, hear Clive Bull's "talent show" radio of the same period. Bull's still with LBC!). Adam and Joe mentioned that it was a regular thing that comics phoned in radio shows. Shocking!

Steve Punt had an interesting selection of influential radio comedy in that it's not quite the usual selection of Radio 4 comedies. So he mentioned Kenny Everett's Captain Kremen (something I tried listening to as a child but never really got. I didn't listen to Capital either), and Adrian Juste's Saturday lunchtime radio comedy show featuring lots of cut-up clips of comedy records interspersed with Juste's own jokes and music. I do remember listening to that, and Juste was in the audience this evening.

Punt also referenced Steve Wright and his then original zoo format show with a cast of regular phone-in characters: Sid the manager et al. And finally, there was one Radio 4 comedy in amongst them all - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Finally Lauren Lavergne appeared via the medium of video and told us she'd effectively just discovered On The Hour. Well the CDs were released just before Christmas!

What I did find interesting was that both Cryer and Punt had access to, at various times, "writers' rooms" of sorts where comedians of the day gathered to talk to one another, exchange ideas, and make outgoing phone calls at the BBC's expense.

And this kind of environment is important, we were told, since although you can become famous to an extent via YouTube today and get yourself discovered, until you're produced by someone experienced, it's hard to become fully formed.

I must admit that I came out enthused about listening to more radio comedy. I guess it's a shame that commercial radio just isn't able to do scripted comedy. Of course there are comics on the radio - and my employer has quite a few - but fully fledged scripted comedy is still exceptional.

As I mentioned the other day, the Radio Sales documentary on Radio 4 on Saturday ended with the infamous "Superscreen" ad.

OK. Here it is:

In recent days there was another really annoying advert. A certain major soap opera was advertising a major event that took place in last Friday's episodes. Radio advertising is the perfect way to drive audiences to this major event (even if it is up against Comic Relief night), but heard a few too many times, it does begin to grate a little. See what you think:

[Obviously these are my own views, and don't reflect those of my employer who thinks ITV is a fine advertiser who it's happy to continue working with]

I was invited to present at the EBU conference Multimedia Meets Radio conference in Prague. More alert readers might realise that the EBU is a union of public service broadcasters and wonder why someone who works for a commercial radio station would present there. But we're all radio services and there's always plenty to learn about how others are doing things.

On the first day Mike Mullane, head of news, sport and new media at the EBU opened the conference by quoting some interesting statistics from a Canadian study that showed 62% of people agree that the radio influences their internet surfing. It's all linked, and multimedia is an important part of any station's armoury these days.

Vaclav Kasik of Czech Radio opened proceedings and detailed a few multimedia things that they'd done in the last few years. They've worked with a number of sets of animals including migrating storks (is this where BBC Radio 4's bird tracking came from?), and famously The Revealed which began as a pastiche of reality shows like Big Brother, instead following a group of gorillas at Prague Zoo. But it grew beyond that and it's become an educational tool with spin-off merchandise that's sent money back to save the gorillas in their natural habitat. More recent projects have included oral histories and looks at the 1968 uprising.

We then heard from Steve Purdham of We7 the online music specialist. They offer an ad funded music service and he spoke about the early success that they've had since launch in the latter part of last year.

He talked about the various models that can be adopted to get the economics right: from free , via ad-funded, to a service strategy (e.g. Nokia's Connect With Music) through to subscription and premium.

He also talked about the complexity of putting together the offerings. Peter Gabriel, the musician, is a part owner of the service and allowed his music to be included. Yet it took a total of 21 months from him giving permission to the music eventually reaching the site. This was a record company issue.

Jonas Woost of Last.fm also ran through his service showing us some of the functionality of their website that we were unaware of. I must admit that Last.fm is one of those sites that I really need to spend more time with. I know that all the excitement's with Spotify at the moment, but then I'm lucky that my passsword's not one of the ones that they lost recently.

A very impressive presentation then followed from MX3 who have positioned themselves as the home of Swiss music. They've managed to put agreements together that allows them to include all the best and biggest Swiss music on one service, even when the artists are signed to major labels.

Their service offers over 35,000 songs by nearly 11,000 artists. And the impressive technology that they have to access their service means that they're currently serving 2TB of traffic a month. The technology that lets users embed widgets in all manner of websites and social networks is similarly impressive - in particular their cube. It's some technology that's really worth checking out, although I believe that it's mostly blocked outside Switzerland.

DR Musik presented Karrierekanonen 2008 in which they tried to promote 50 unknown artists using some clever technology.

Steve Pratt of CBC in Canada gave one of the best presentations of the conference when he talked us through the success of Radio 3. It talked about how it basically went against all the standard "rules" of how to make a great radio station.

Indeed he said that they'd seemingly gone out to make "The Worst. Radio Station. Ever."

They'd created a new format, played a wide variety of genres, had infrequent repetition, don't broadcast on AM or FM, have their entire music library user-generated and don't encumber their downloads with DRM. And there are some pretty big Canadian artists on the service like Arcade Fire and Feist.

He explained that they didn't consider Radio 3 to be just a podcast or a website (it doesn't have a traditional broadcast stream). They position themselves as experts in Canadian music. Radio 3 is defined by content and not by platform. Canadians have something of a low opinion of their own music, it seems - one that's not shared outside the country. In the UK we actually listen to a fair few Canadian artists.

The whole of Radio 3 is from user generated content. There are about 75,000 songs.

What they do is ensure that they offer multiple formats ensuring that each platform, making use of the unique properties of each platform. Then they publish where the audience already is.

Mission Europe is an attempt to use radio to teach languagues. Radio France International, Deutsche Welle and Polskie Radio have joined together to produce 3 bilingual dramas in 4 versions each. These are in turn rebroadast by a network of further stations.

A really fascinating piece of technology was then demonstrated by WDR. The WDR Radiorecorder gets around the fact that rights issues mean that only a limited number of podcasts can be made available by stations. However, just as perhaps we once recorded radio shows to cassettes completely legally (unless we sold or passed on those tapes), the WDR Radiorecorder is a neat way of doing this.

It records on the user's PC from the stream. But you can use EPG data to determine which programmes are recorded and when. It's capable of recording more than one stream simultaneously, and it neatly incorporates the resulting mp3s into your iTunes library for syncing with your iPod or iPhone.

It really looks like an excellent product.

Vaclav Hradecky of Czech Radio spoke about how they'd used techniques such as online focus groups to test their services. And Tiziano Bonini of Rai Radio 2 spoke about Amnesia, a daily radio drama that presents life from the point of view of a 32 year old who's forgotten everything. It's presented as a "true story" but is a drama, and it's backed up by a wealth of multimedia online. If I spoke Italian, I'd certainly download the podcast.

Brett Spencer from BBC Radio Five Live presented some videos demonstrating some of the excellent recent multimedia work that BBC Radio has done recently. This includes the visual radio version of Chris Moyles, as well as the excellent additional elements they included with Wimbledon last year.

Brett had to leave early and it was as well that he didn't hear from Silvain Gire of Arte Radio. He explained that, "My religion forbids me to use PowerPoint." And you won't find much in the way of pictures on his website either. Gire has a very pure idea of what radio is, and it's an auditory medium.

He's lucky with the position he's in: "We are completely free to do what I want..."

He talked about making a recent radio drama with the BBC - Deja Vu. As you'll note from that link, beyond its iPlayer life, it's no longer available. But a visit over to Arte reveals it's there for download! (It's a bilingual play).

"It took about a year to get the contracts agreed and as far as I know it's still not signed."

Mats Akerlund of Swedish Radio showed how they try to get podcasts into the mainstream including advertising on the metro system. They even placed boxes you could plug into to listen while you travelled. But what I thought was really clever was an app that asked how long your commute was and then recommended podcasts of a suitable duration.

Finally Jonathan Marks of Critical Distance gave us food for thought with a presentation about how radio is being used around the world. He was very dismissive of Asian Radio which he believes has really dumbed down and was now either non-stop music or rolling news. Without ebracing the editorial aspects of it (Ireland, Denmark and Catalonia were cited), radio will die.

He talked about small radio stations in West Africa which use SMS networks to pass on harvesting details, and how the stations partner with mobile phone providers to share costs and keep both masts and antennas running. He talked about how your SIM card is your identity. If you don't have a bank account you can receive payment in airtime, which can later be exchanged back for cash.

He talked about a service that a radio station in Ghana offers allowing listeners to use SMS to check whether drugs they're being sold are real or fake - something that's a major issue there.

In another case he talked about a distance learning station that he was trying to get to archive its output. The station only goes on air when the teachers arrive, and using RFID chips, it can power up the station and now start recording their programme. By cleverly getting the first sentences to summarise the programme's subject matter, archiving is possible (recalcitrant professors are told they won't be paid unless they do this!).

From a wider perspective he said that DRM = Doesn't Really Matter. But Africa won't be going digital anytime soon until models under 10 Euro are on the market.

All in all, some very interesting ideas presented over a day and a half and read what James Cridland had to say on procedings here and here.

I suppose that if there's one thing I took away from this conference - it's that everyone's doing an iPhone app. They're all very smart and lovely, but I do wonder where the S60 apps (for Nokias) and Windows Media or Sony Ericsson apps are? Last time I checked, slightly more people are using these phones that Apple's one phone from one carrier solution.

Kelner is always worth a read:

[Lesley Douglas's campaign] a central plank of which was the replacement of Gideon Coe with the supposedly more female-friendly George Lamb, ranks in success somewhere between Balaclava and Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

Perhaps that heading is a little misleading, but that's what it feels like at the moment.

On Friday, Ofcom gave GWR FM (Bristol and Bath) a yellow card for not operating within its format.

GWR has a format which states (All stations' format can be found on the Ofcom website).

The format for GWR FM is:

A LOCALLY ORIENTED CONTEMPORARY AND CHART MUSIC AND INFORMATION STATION FOR UNDER 44s IN THE BRISTOL AND BATH AREA, WITH TARGETED 'SPLIT' PROGRAMMING FOR BRISTOL & BATH AT LEAST DURING WEEKDAY BREAKFAST.

The important part of that is the "contemporary and chart music" part. And what's worth knowing is that of the nineteen stations that have already changed or have been announced to change next Monday to the Heart format, only four of the smallest stations do not have these words in their format.

In other words they near enough all have to be "contemporary and chart music" formatted.

Based on some analysis of GWR's output (and possibly analysis of its logs), Ofcom claims that GWR is not playing enough of this music. Ofcom claims that at least 66% of music must be of this category. GWR was monitored as playing 47%.

It's also clear that this breach is not just a single station issue. The same levels of contemporary and chart music must be played on all fifteen of those new Hearts. In effect, while these stations can share the same name with the London and East Midlands stations of the same name, they can't directly share the same music logs.

In response, Global Radio has said "We do not accept this finding, and are considering our position."

Ofcom's obviously upset, and Global's repsonding robustly, I think it's fair to say. I think I'll just stand at the sidelines and watch the outcome.

Matt Deegan also has some useful thoughts, and Paul Easton's comments on the same blog are useful too.

And Radio Today has an interesting piece in an editorial sent to its mailing list this morning. Sadly, I can't find it on their website, but they highlight the difference between UK markets and New York, where K-ROCK rebranded as a chart station last week with barely a murmur of dissent. But we still have formats in the UK, and while you can change name, you have to ask permission to change formats.

This evening's Archive on 4 documentary was a terrific piece based around radio advertising in the UK through the ages.

Presented by, the much missed Brian Hayes, it started with ads way before LBC and Capital Radio became the first legitimate UK commercial radio stations in 1973.

Listen to it on the iPlayer, or catch the Monday afternoon repeat.

There were some great pieces of advertising that I'd never heard - commercial radio in particular is particularly bad at looking after its own heritage in my opinion. If it wasn't for "radio anoraks" recording stuff, we'd have lost loads of early radio (and frankly, we're probably still not saving it).

I must admit that I do always think that more "worthy" advertising messages can more easily be adapted into excellent ads - hence award winning ads for charities and passing on various prevention messages.

But have a listen.

And finally, I simply don't believe that "Super Screen" ad is only from 2004 (surely it'd have been selling DVDs and not videos in 2004, and it's unlikely that portable TVs would have cost 49.99 then). The RAB had it around then, because that's when I got a copy. But it evidently dates from closer to 2000 or even earlier.

Last Monday's Just A Minute included a round on the subject of digital radio.

David Mitchell isn't a fan...

Listen again to the whole show on the BBC iPlayer (by next Monday).

A week or so ago, Media Guardian got very excited about some RAJAR figures. They had the half hour figures for some BBC 6Music programmes.

These figures showed that the peak listening for the "controversial" George Lamb was 40,000 while Adam and Joe on a Saturday morning peaked at 69,000 - the highest of the station.

The peace also highlighted the peak listening points for other services like Planet Rock and Absolute Radio Xtreme.

But mainly, I think the point of the piece was to note these relatively low numbers and the cost of the services. The article pointed out that 6Music costs £7.5m a year to fund. And that is quite a lot, especially compared to the commercial sector. But then Radio 1's budget is £43.1m, so that puts it in perspective a little.

BBC 6 Music does reach a fairly impressive 619,000 people a week - and this is the number you'll see quoted a lot more. To put that in perspective, BBC Radio 3 reaches 1,981,000 a week - just over three times that. BBC Radio 3 has a far larger budget and more importantly, and FM transmitter network (as well as digital). But I'm not hearing clamours for that station to be closed down.

And in the most recent Mediaguardian Media Talk, Matt Wells brings the subject up, seemingly pleased that radio correspondent John Plunkett has got hold of the figures. They're not actually private though: if The Guardian wants to subscribe to RAJAR it's free to do so - like it must do for its overnight TV ratings. There a few systems out there like Telmar, Octagon and RALPH. Just pay your money and, as long as they follow the publication code, they can analyse RAJAR like the rest of us.

The figures that Plunkett's piece quoted from came from a big list of spreadsheets that all RAJAR subscribers have access to - for every station.

Matt Wells did make a few mistakes in the podcast: "6Music's George Lamb gets just 40,000 listeners on the morning show." That's not true. He gets 40,000 listeners at one point on the show. But listeners are tuning in and out all morning. In the next half hour, some of those listeners have stopped and others have tuned in.

And of course DAB gets another mention. Well 6Music is broadcast on other platforms too. It's a digital station not just a DAB station.

During the podcast, the question was asked: "How many of the BBC 6Music listeners are unique [from Radio 1 and Radio 2]?"

Well I'll answer that because I know. Of the 619,000 weekly reach, 192,000 are unique. That is, they don't listen to either Radio 1 or Radio 2.

Just short of a third of them then. Given that Radio 1 reaches 10.5m and Radio 2 reaches 13.5m - you're actually doing very well to not listen to either of them! A third of 6Music listeners not listening to either service is actually not that bad at all.

A broader question might be why so many older/younger listeners are listening to Radios 1 and 2, rather than having a pop at 6Music listeners.

PS. I wish Media Talk would stop going on about the ages of the various channel controllers. Age discrimination is illegal in the workplace in the UK. Just because someone in charge of Radio 1 is older than 30 doesn't mean that they have no idea what their listeners want. CBeebies isn't run by toddlers after all.

As ever, this piece is written in a personal capacity and does not reflect the opinions of my employer or RAJAR.

Have you seen the new ITV gameshow presented by Chris Tarrant yet? It's called The Colour of Money and has nothing to do with the Terry Pratchett novel of the same name.

ITV's clearly very excited by it. It's presenter comes from the global phenomenom that was Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and the production company behind it 12 Yard is owned by ITV and has the team who were also responsible for another highly successful format - The Weakest Link (although I believe the BBC retains the rights to that format).

A couple of weeks ago there was a good Money Programme looking into the format business Media Revolution: Tomorrow's TV (it wasn't actually called The Money Programme, and you might only have known that it was from that if you'd recognised the theme tune). That looked at global formats that come from the UK like Millionaire, The Weakest Link and Dancing With The Stars (aka Strictly Come Dancing). They all feed lots of cash back to a burgeoning production sector.

So ITV undoubtedly has high hopes for The Colour of Money - not just as a popular early evening Saturday night gameshow that leads into Ant and Dec, but the production fees payable from all over the world as local versions are made.

I looked carefully at the credits