So what does YOUR station think you should be hearing?

Music tastes change. So should station libraries. 

More friendly advice for the Beeb from the Times    Flickr - Shawn Kincade

I'm getting tired of the endless government and rival media onslaught on the BBC. Pretty much every day, the Times or the Mail run smugly venomous pieces on the Corporation's failings. I hate this. The Beeb is not perfect. I'm one of many who want to see serious BBC production at all levels back in the Midlands. But as I've said before, the Beeb is unique; it delivers brilliant programmes; we need it.   

BBC Local Radio is in the frame now. An announcement that BBCLR might be a bit more personality driven met yet more carping: the BBC is reneging on its journalistic brief; more jobs to go; the beginning of the end. All that. Hard on the carping came strenuous denials that the Beeb was doing anything of the kind. And so on.

But much of this was about music on the radio. That's a wholly different debate.

Jim Cleary: 40 years on from Big Ears

Jim Cleary, a pioneering 70s Birmingham singer-songwriter and promoter, passed away on the 10th April 2012.  This post covers the day, in late 2011, that Jim came back to town, and found a room full of love.

This video clip is from a concert/gathering /celebration in October 2011. I've been messing around with the clip to set up this blog for a couple of days, and now I can't stop singing the song.  If you are of a certain vintage, or familiar with some of the great Birmingham players who emerged in the 70s, this will all make sense immediately; you’ll recognise the faces and some of the names. If not, I’d love you to read on. It’s a great story.

Jim Cleary was the man in the middle. The event was his tribute night. As guest of honour, he had a string of different and stellar musicians perform his songs, before taking to the stage to close the event out. The evening was organised by friends and colleagues, of whom more later. It took place at a tiny venue: The Tower Of Song, in King’s Norton, Birmingham. What’s really important was the how and why of it all.

Let’s roll back 40 years. In 1972, the role of the singer-songwriter was becoming restricted. After that rush of amazing late 60s talent (Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Sandy Denny, Harvey Andrews, Clifford T Ward, Pete Atkin, Arlo Guthrie… I could go on) the record companies gorged themselves by signing up anyone and everyone they thought they could market. Hey, why stop at James Taylor when you could sign his three brothers and his sister as well? This led to a glut of, frankly, substandard albums that didn’t do anyone any favours. Of course, the record companies, having messed things up, backed off as usual, focussing instead on other, mainly rock-based, areas, and leaving a lot of dashed hopes behind in their wake. 

It’s fascinating to look back at this period from our 21st century viewpoint: so much has changed. The record companies’ influence has shrunk, and we have seen a much wider acceptance of varied performance styles. This is both creative and healthy. Back then, though, artists like Jim Cleary, passed over by the mainstream record industry, faced a closing of the ranks on the folk scene as well. There was a distinctly chilly view in many folk circles about anyone who stepped outside the boundaries. Folk-Rock was completely beyond the pale.

Jim was a singer-songwriter. Back then, a lot of new music was emerging in town, not least from Jim himself, but it didn’t fit any of the fashionable niches. It wasn’t noisy enough for rock, nor acceptable to purist ears at the major folk clubs. His solution was to start a new venue, Big Ears, based at the Fighting Cocks in Moseley, where those musicians who were shut out from mainstream rock and folk could perform.

Big Ears punched above its weight. It was a pioneering venue, and it gave a broad platform to a host of fine bands and great musicians. Jim reeled out some fantastic material during that time. He recorded, with a range of different musicians; deals were signed; but sadly, nothing emerged. Big Ears ran for about five years – I remember talking up Big Ears gigs in my early days as a radio jock – before Jim moved on for work and personal reasons.

Now let’s come back up to last year.  Vo Fletcher and Catherine Howe run a regular night at the Tower of Song. In attendance, one late 2011 summer evening were Andrew Morton, of Slender Loris fame, and John Mostyn from Highbury Studio. All of them had worked and performed with Jim. Between them, they hatched up the plan to bring their much missed colleague back up to Birmingham from Kent for a closed-doors evening to celebrate his music. Old pals signed up immediately, and once word got out, the night sold out at speed. Plans to record and video the event were added; an  excerpt from these activities is the video clip at the top of this post.  If you watch the full video, and take in the banter and affection as well as some sterling performances, you’ll get an idea of how much it meant to everybody who attended.

It’s about recognition and approbation. So much creative work echoes out into the void, and we have no idea if it strikes a chord. But, and this is the central point to this post, it seems to me that if an idea strikes a spark somewhere, that spark can live on, for decades... for a lifetime. Almost daily, I find myself thinking of some of the amazing music I’ve been privileged to experience down the years, and my thoughts often turn to those musicians whose work changed my life. That’s still going on now, I am glad to say. But I wonder how often those wonderful musicians of my youth get to be recognised and celebrated in the way Jim Cleary was, last October? This was a fantastic, princely gesture from a group of musicians and music professionals, made to a much respected and loved colleague.

One of the most important parts of the music-making process is the relationship between the performer and his audience. Everything else revolves around that. Promoters deal with that reality, DJs and journalists feed off it, the radio industry feverishly tries to research it down to the nth degree, and completely misses the point by slicing and dicing far too precisely. But this event understood and respected that precious relationship. Congratulations are due to all concerned. 

There had been plans, now, sadly, shelved, to repeat the exercise in the spring. 

Links
Copies of the CD and DVD of the evening can be had from John Mostyn at john.mostyn@gmail.com.
Kris Halpin engineered the night. Here are his thoughts.

Other blog posts on people we have lost here 

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Researching Music: Is this REALLY popular in your neck of the woods? Ever asked why?

One of my must-visit radio blog pages is the Infinite Dial, from the US-based Edison Research – who, unsurprisingly, do research for radio. They have a refreshingly open-minded approach to what radio may be now, and what it may become.  A recent post covers regional tastes, and it’s fascinating. Well worth a read, here.

I absolutely love this aspect of the business – ferreting out local tastes, finding out what matters locally. It’s a source of endless interest.  Of course, I also like this post because it reinforces my thoughts on localism. But I’d like to take things a little bit further.  

Our man at Edison remarks, quite rightly, that it’s always interesting to find those places where ‘Mony Mony’ and ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ (hey, not talking Gold much) barely register with listeners, and indeed it is. The processes by which songs become popular and spread out to audiences are interesting and increasingly varied. Who would have thought that computer games like Guitar Hero and trash teen tv (Glee) would have had become major players, bigger than tightly playlisted radio format radio, in shifting product?

What interests me is this. If those horribly familiar songs (to US ears at least) Edison Research is talking about don’t light up audiences everywhere, should we question the continued faith placed in them in their core markets? And, more interesting still, exactly what songs are now lighting up those different audiences?  Classic oldie songs on Gold formats have been around a long time; they’ve had time to develop deep roots. So what made those roots either not take in the first place, or, more likely, lose their grip? And if this is genuine evidence – I’m not quite sure it is - that pop music radio's cosy  assumptions of the past fifty years are turning out to be either wrong, skewed, or outdated, why is such faith still placed in the old ways of operating?

Each market is individual. While we have increasing media homogeneity, this report is pretty convincing evidence that that homogeneity breaks down when you dig deep into each market. I’m not for one minute going to wear any jingoistic assumptions that because this research is driven from the US, that it is blinkered and limited in its vision; I think we’re largely doing a lot worse over here. But if my supposition that local individuality persists against an overwhelming tide of homogeneity, that is horribly inconvenient for our larger scale broadcasters, who increasingly resist any obligations to relate to their local market places.

And here’s the point: by skipping past the local, the network boys are in danger of handing over listenership to new local operators who are rooted in their markets, and willing to both dig into local tastes and reflect their markets. The only question now is: can local small-scale operators in the market and still to come to market, find ways to sustain themselves so they can survive and prosper? The next few years could be very interesting.

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.