The way we do the things we do – allright!

I came back up to Birmingham on Tuesday night, fresh from two days on the South Coast working with the admirable and very listenable Coast 106, about whom I will post in detail soon. This was so I could catch the UB40 show at the Rainbow. This, in case you’re not from Birmingham, has been the talk of the town for weeks, reaching fever pitch last night, and flowing through to a front page feature in the Birmingham Post today, reviews on BBC WM, live streaming on Rhubarb and elsewhere, and other coverage, which I’ll come to.

Oh, it was good. Remember, UB40 have been doing this stuff for 30 years. They are road-hardened, professional, and very tight. So...they hit the stage, and steamed into One In Ten.

Wham. 500 people lock into sync and rock with the band for 90 cheerful raucous all-hometown minutes. A great night. And all because the UBs, led by Brian Travers, lent their support to a grass-roots campaign. I am so impressed with the gesture. It makes you proud.

There are several stories here.

First: how often do you get the chance to see a band this big, this good, play a 500 capacity hometown venue, when they can just as easily fill the NIA? Only when the band themselves choose to play such a gig. Rare and precious. And the band knew it.

Second: there was - and is - a vital point to this gig: we need our local music venues. We need places for our fantastic local musicians to hone their stagecraft. We can’t allow one of the most vibrant music scenes in the country, one which generates vast amounts of money for the local economy, to be stifled by planning regulations. Take a look at the Rainbow's own page for more details. If you agree, do something. Join a Facebook group - try Keep Digbeth Vibrant for starters. Let your local councillor know how you feel..

Third: UB40 are undeniably rooted in Birmingham. There is a bond between band and audience I have only very rarely seen. I suppose if I got to see Bruce Springsteen play a bar in New Jersey, I might get a similar vibe. But I’m not from Jersey. This is where I live, and a gig like last night makes me feel proud for our local scene on so many levels. And whatever you do, you must take a look at the UB40: Music As Culture site for more background. It’s a revelation. You'll never get closer to a band and their fans.

Fourth: full personal disclosure here: When I was a local radio DJ in this town, I gave UB40 their first session, and that was in the days when radio paid bands to do sessions - just imagine that. So… and I’ve seriously only just realised this… that makes me the first DJ anywhere in the world to have played UB40 on the radio. Blimey.

The tapes were early mixes of tracks that went on to be released as the first single and tracks from the first album, produced by Bob Lamb. They were lovely. The songs had huge impact. I felt I'd hit the motherlode when I realised just how important they were to my audience. That's why I have a personal and very direct sense of involvement with the band - but that’s only my angle. Others, thousands of others, who supported the band through their early gigs, feel the same kinship for their own valid reasons.

Last but not least: I don’t know how many times I’ve made this point, and in how many ways I’ve said it. But I’ll say it again now. Stuff like this is pure gold; you can’t bottle it. It is a USP, in business terms. And yet most mainstream radio stations in our town, and elsewhere, continue to ignore this kind of thing. Last night’s gig was, yet again, a powerful demonstration of local identity, expressed though music, and in UB40’s case, as a unique and confident statement of local culture. It’s there: part of the fabric of our town. And this makes it an absolute gift to local media. All you need, if you’re in the media, is the humility to see that this sort of thing is probably more powerful and enduring than your particular outlet. Then you really need to measure it against juggernaut machine-tooled stuff like X Factor TV exposed product. And lastly, you need to make a decision on whether you want to get on board this thing, and how.

Up to you, media mavens. For me, it’s a no-brainer.
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Who's listening to what?

I spent some time yesterday at Absolute Radio's studios in London. My main purpose was to take a closer look at one of their new online products, comparemyradio. This is a very cute piece of software, and it has caused no end of fuss in the very closed hothouse world of UK Radio. Basically, this software tracks plays of songs on a number of major stations – most of the big ones, in fact – and lets you compare who plays what, how often, and where the overlaps are. It’s open to anyone to play with, and it throws up some very interesting perspectives.

Full disclosure: I author help for a heavyweight professional media analysis software package called Media Monitors, a sister company to RCS, the Selector people, for whom I also write help packages. So I had more than a pure radio interest: I wanted to see what the One Golden Square Labs boys were up to, what their analysis kit could do… and, above all, exactly why they chose to share all this with you and me.

Absolute were the soul of hospitality, in keeping with their mission statement of openness and accountability, which I applaud. I’m all for exchanging ideas and comparing notes. Personally, I'm not threatened by the idea of sharing what I know. Those that do feel this way, in my opinion, lose out, and wind up hobbling their own creativity. That said, I didn’t quite get all the answers I was looking for, but I’ll come back to that.

Comparemyradio went public last week and instantly kicked up a fuss. Bauer Media’s Kiss-fm promptly disabled their 'now playing' site feed, which is where the comparemyradio software scrapes its data from, arguing that their daytime output does not reflect the full range of output from their specialist shows, which presumably do not feed their data out in such detail. When I looked this morning, BRMB had also lifted up its skirts and (note this page may have changed again if you check it) removed its output from Absolute’s grasp. Other industry operators have publicly expressed their irritation.

This is being just a trifle precious. A station’s output is public. Once broadcast, it’s published, it’s out there. Anybody who wants to take the time and trouble can study the output, analyse it, and draw their own conclusions. What comparemyradio has done is simply make this a lot easier. However, some stations don’t exactly look that great under this new bright light. So it’s fair to say that Absolute are being a mite provocative. The most provocative tool of all is something they call the variety index. This charts the ratio of lightly played material as a proportion of overall output. Clearly, the greater number of songs which get unique plays over a given period, the more genuine variety the station can claim to be offering. To put it another way: if you play 300 songs a day, and 150 of those are unique plays, you’ve got a lot of variety. But if you play ten songs six times a day, another 30 songs three times a day, and 60 more twice a day, there’s only 30 single play slots left in your day, so you’ve got less room to mix it up.

I really wanted to do a comparison on all West Midlands stations, as this blog focusses on this area. I’ve have loved to have BRMB’s figures, but, as mentioned, they’ve blocked this now (boo! hiss! shame!). But Heart West Midlands has a variety index of 11%, not entirely encouraging in a station that claims to offer more music variety. Smooth London, whose output is uncannily close that that at Smooth Birmingham, can offer a respectable 26%. But scooting over to Radio 2, the big beast in the radio jungle, we see a huge variety index of 60%, which must reflect their detailed and admirable specialist show output, as well as their large (by today’s standards) active daytime library. It presents them in a frankly golden light, but then, look at their listening figures. And what about Absolute themselves, purveyors of this provocative package? Well, their flagship service offers a (not at all bad, but could do better in my view) figure of 20%.

So what are we to make of all this data? Well, for people like me, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s a useful new rough and ready tool to get a feel for certain areas. So I’m quite pleased it’s there. It’s certainly stirred up a hornet’s nest of resentment in the industry, which I can happily live with. There are questions as to the validity of the data and the accuracy of the source material that is scraped to analyse in the first place, but Absolute do acknowledge this. I also heard dark mutterings yesterday about the use of other public streaming sites’ software to do some of the heavy lifting in the analysis area, and that worries me – the more third party involvement, the less trustworthy the data tends to be. But I have no way of verifying this.

The primary beneficiary of all this has to be, of course, Absolute Radio. They have offered their users something new, which might just be a novelty. Or it might be something to raise the company’s profile – chalk up a success there – and keep users on site to explore some of their other products. So in terms of building relationships with listeners while dissing the opposition, it’s pretty cute and Imaginative.

A closing note: Anthony Abott, the courteous and affable Absolute Radio webmaster who spent time with me, and to whom I extend my thanks, checked this blog out before I arrived. He in turn was interested in my championing of local bands and my mantra that local radio benefits from exposing the best of its local talent. Now, this is something that makes no sense whatsoever from a London or a national perspective, so I can see why he was curious. I’m sure there are millions of interesting music scenes in London that aren’t getting the exposure they deserve – that’s the problem with radio in big cities: it's too damn conservative because it's too damn competitive. New York is the same, which is even more tragic.

But this really does give operators outside of the smoke a big advantage, where cities and regions have much stronger senses of local identity. And how does this tie in with what I’ve been discussing? Simple. Forget about variety indexes just for a moment. Forget that hugely depressing overlap between stations. Look instead at the USP for your market. This is something the big boys can’t ever do. If nothing else, comparemyradio has shone a dirty great light into this area. It’s up to local stations to exploit what they can learn from it. If that includes bumping up a variety index by championing bands that you know for certain matter to your audience, then it’s all good.
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Grains of sand, pebble, rocks and bloody big boulders

Hello Digital in Birmingham this week was interesting and useful. Lots of great ideas flying around; some interesting thinkers; way too much showoff tweeting. C4’s Head of Future Media, John Gisby, painted an interesting picture of multiple arrays of services and programming, provided on as many platforms as they could dream up, including YouTube. And he used the idea of pebbles to describe the new TV landscape on Freeview, cable and online TV, as opposed to the three huge terrestrial boulders (BBC1, BBC2 and ITV we had before Channel 4 landed 27 years ago. It’s a neat analogy, and I want to play with it a bit.

Before we do, I have to ask: was John talking about the economic clout of pebbles and boulders, or the creative punch of same? I’m pretty sure it was the economic clout. After all, the creative punch of a high-end TV production can be, and is, spread generously across multiple channels. We enter the world of repeats, trickling down over and over (Cheers on E4, anyone?), to polish up even the most cynically thrown together auto-repeats channel on the further reaches of your programme guide. But the economic clout – well, that’s where the action is, as far as TV goes.

Now let’s turn to radio. First, we need more definitions. I’m going to start with grains of sand: that’s the podcasters, the one man web streamers, and the community radio stations. Gritty sums it up just right. Then we can work back up the scale to take in local radio (sadly, often a case of onetime rocks, now ground down to pebbles), and then working up to the boulders, by and large the national commercial outlets and the BBC Networks. Of course, I’m stretching this analogy a bit: some of the BBC’s digital offerings are really rocks or even pebbles, rather than boulders. But you get the general picture. I don’t think anyone would dispute my assertion that Radio 2, for example is a big, fat, hulking boulder. So big, a lot of rocks and pebbles say it’s stealing some of their sun.

Here’s where it splits away from the TV analogy. The creative process is not so totally dependent on budgets in radio. Certainly in popular music radio, it is fundamentally the same process at grain of sand level as it is at boulder level. The creative punch of a dedicated one-man podcaster can stand next to that of a highly produced network show. It’s about ideas, relating to the audience and playing the music that’s right for the show and the listener. Just because a show doesn’t get much podcast take-up does not make it artistically less valid than the most listened to Network offering. This is not where the uneven playing field is to be found.

Now let’s take it on to the web. This is where it gets very interesting. Like C4’s impressive diversification, there are a number of imaginative radio operators, large and small, who are working on new ways of serving up radio, on multiple platforms, real-time and other wise, packaged and unpackaged, and sometimes with a far more impressive degree of audience involvement than recycled facebook messages and listener tweets. Quite a few rocks spawning some interesting pebbles. The beauty of it all is that there are far far less barriers to creativity – even if you don’t have, like Absolute Radio, your own software writers.

Back at Hello Digital, as usual, not too many radio people seemed to be interested in what the web and social media tools can offer. They should have taken note of what happened to local web station Rhubarb Radio, who was enthusiastically streaming live: there was enough online demand to temporarily crash their servers. Point made? Read more