Rumbles in the radio jungle

Tricky times for pop radio

If you look at what's playing at radio, you'll mostly find bleakly repetitive fare. 

Further down this post, I've got an analysis of five stations (three West Midlands analogue, two national digital), with their current most-played artists, taken from the Compare My Radio site. Everyone is playing youth diva Taylor Swift. Four of the five are playing Sam Smith. 

It's a typical pattern; has been for years. Most commercial stations go for safe, reliable and familiar. It's the McDonalds way: familiarity and repetition. Punters know what to expect; the brand is crystal-clear. 

But the web came along and overturned the applecart. And now, news that came out last week could have huge implications for the industry. 

The bell tolls for Kerrang Radio

Sad news - another local radio service exits the Midlands. 

On June 3rd 2013, Bauer Media, the second largest UK Radio group, announced that they were taking Kerrang! off their West Midlands FM regional frequency, to replace it from Friday 14th June with the newly acquired Planet Rock, previously only on digital and online. Planet Rock comes from London, so yet more good West Midlands radio people will hit the scrapheap. And it’s bad news for local musicians who lose another outlet sympathetic to their efforts. 

Kerrang will limp on as a youth-positioned voice-tracked rock service on digital, with a much-reduced on-air staff, delivered from London. There is one really interesting angle to all this. Planet Rock had a smaller reach than Kerrang. The station has never made money, and its previous owner unloaded it last year. Planet Rock, if truth be told, had a considerably smaller profile that Bauer was hitherto able to give to Kerrang with cross-platform positioning. 

So why kill the bigger brand? 

2012 season preview: The Songwriters Cafe

All photos courtesy of Richard Shakespeare

On Thursday 3rd May, the 2012 season of the Songwriter’s Café gets underway, with live performances from a secret Birmingham venue, streamed online from this web address to a vocal and appreciative world wide audience. 

The webcasts go live, weekly, at 8.30pm UK time (that's 3.30pm ET), from Thursday May 3rd until 26th July. 

And to mark this, this blog post comes with audio! I’m interviewing the two hosts of Songwriter’s Café, and it’s fitting that you should listen to them, because they’re both fantastic talkers; I could listen to them all day. Paul Murphy is the live host of Songwriter’s Café, and Valeria Rispo is the online host. Paul dreamed up the idea and engages and enchants the live audience; Valeria interprets and clarifies for the world wide online listenership. Songwriters Cafe is a fantastic, magical thing, and I’m delighted to be involved in a small way. The online community that gathers around the SWC live event is pretty magical too, and you get something equally unique and magical, but different, by logging on. It's in three parts . 

In part 1, Paul Murphy looks back with me at a few of the highlights from the 2011 season. 

Songwriters cafe preview part 1 

In part 2, Paul talks us though the origins of the Songwriter’s café in the 90s. There's also some a vintage performances from the old days,  highlights from 2011.

Songwriters Cafe preview part 2 

In part 3, Valeria discusses her role as online host, and Paul looks back to the end of the first, 90s version of the Songwriters Cafe, and, for very good reasons,  there's a track from Paul Murphy’s 2012 solo album, ‘The Glen'. 

Songwriters Cafe preview part 3 

This isn’t – quite – a public event. You have to be invited to join the audience. And once invited, the terms are specific: that you will listen, properly, to singer-songwriters, practising and developing their craft in front of a sympathetic audience. If you want to chat through someone’s songs, you’ll be told, nicely but firmly, to shut up.  

Mahalia making only her second-ever live performance in 2011

The range of performers is huge, from new and highly promising to vastly experienced. They sing for their supper, literally, and every evening brings surprises. The line-up is not announced ahead of time. Paul and Valeria could tell you who’s playing come May 3… but then they’d have to kill you. 

Paul Murphy introduces Friends Of The Stars

This might sound severe. It’s not. It’s simply a great way to provide the kind of receptive environment that songwriters crave, and need, to develop as artists. It takes place weekly throughout the summer months, while the weather is kind and the days are long, in a unique performance space.  

Online host Valeria Rispo

I was lucky enough to attend several times last year. Each time I was  enthralled and surprised. I also felt a keen sense of privilege at being a part of something really lovely and collective. 

Once I’ve posted the third audio clip, we will have a one-hour documentary, and as always with documentaries on this blog, the full documentary is available, free of charge to any station, anywhere, that wishes to run it. The audio clips can also be found on Paul’s Songwriters Café pages as well. 

The Songwriter's Cafe is streamed live though the SWC website at 8.30 pm UK time (3.30pm ET), Thursdays from May 3rd, thoughout the summer. 

You'll find the Songwriter's Cafe site here

Details of Paul's 'The Glen' 2012 CD are here

There is also a preview page, updated daily, featuring some of the artists appearing at Songwriter's Cafe 2012.

Getting that gig on Radio – it’s tougher than ever…

I realised, looking at the front blog page today, that, to my shame, I have not posted for well over a month; for this I apologise. However, I do have good reason for this apparent inactivity: I have been, and still am, ferociously busy on something I am calling the Pilot Project, about which I will blog in enormous detail very soon.

I'm also about to start teaching a seriously detailed Radio Course, concentrating on presenting skills. Normally I cover music scheduling, in a concentrated burst – not perhaps the best way to approach the topic - but this gig has me working on presenting and production, at length, with a team of committed and savvy students; I’m looking forwards to it. And, in a connected bit of serendipity, I was asked today for advice on how to apply to a station. So now seems a good time to pull all this together. More after the jump….  

If you want a paid gig on a radio station in the UK in 2010, you need to know a few key truths:

First: there are a helluva lot less jobs to go for now than there were at the beginning of the year. See my posts here and here for a few more details.

Second: the pay’s really not that great, unless you work your way up to stardom.

Third: the guys – it’s almost always guys, by the way – that you need to reach are, frankly, feeling just a bit beleaguered, what with budget cuts on one side, and job cuts on  the other.

But let’s say that you’re going to bite the bullet and go for it anyway. Here are some tips to help you along.

Listen, hard and long, to your chosen station or stations. Make a note of what you consider the strengths and weaknesses. Then listen, hard and long, to your stuff. How does this sound in comparison? What have you got that might fit with your target station? And what else has the station done that has worked well – or badly?

By the way, I’m assuming you have existing stuff; there’s really no excuse not to have existing stuff, even if you’re starting out – there’s community, student and internet stations galore. Go get involved, now, if you’re not involved already.

Put a demo together, specifically for the station you’re pitching to. Don’t just assemble a demo and think that will do for everybody – it won’t. 

Make the demo short. Lose almost all the music, and use the opportunity to show off with some flash music edits to highlight your production chops… or simply fade out and in. The station wants to know what you sound like, and how you work with music. Even though you are targeting a specific station, be true to yourself.

Put the demo together on a CD, and label it properly – printed label, with your name, address, email and phone number.

Find out the right guy to send it to. Include a CV that majors on your radio experience. Don’t forget to list real-world experience too – it helps to show that you’re a real person.  You got positive press-cuttings, endorsements, and letters of praise? Great! Put them together on the CD too.

Send it, and wait. The station almost certainly won’t come back to you instantly. But they may keep the CD on file, especially if it impresses. 

Keep waiting.

Do NOT pester the PD, his PA, or anyone else at the station.

Keep waiting.

If you don’t hear anything… well, you’re no worse off than you were before. Keep on working at your existing station and/or your day job. 

Keep waiting.

If they ask you in for a chat, go back to that list of strengths and weaknesses you drew up when you researched the station. Be ready to draw on that list… but whatever you do, be careful. They may have a truly crap drive time presenter… but he could just be the PD’s protégé.  The music selection may make you feel ever so slightly icky, but it’s almost certainly going to be a long time before they come to you for your considered views on programming. Rubbishing what they are doing almost never works.

But be ready to make constructive suggestions, based on what you’ve found in your research.  Present yourself so that they see you as having something they may need.  Throw some competition or promotional ideas out – and be ready for them to be pinched.

Have an answer ready if they offer you a job on (ha) ‘intern’ terms. Decide how you would handle a salary of rather less than you’re getting now at your day job.

And, if you get the job… have an exit route planned, just in case you conclude, too late, that you’ve landed a gig working with a bunch of deluded basket cases, lead by a penny-pinching psycho who will never pay you properly, or promote you. It's not uncommon - sadly.

And don’t count on this as a long-term career move. This year, there are dozens of able, worthy, experienced professionals, all of who have families and mortgages, who right now are wondering where they can go to, now their stations have been rationalised out of existence. A lot of stations cater to kids or parents with young families – that’s what the advertisers want. So they tend to go for presenters with that kind of appeal. The means... twenty and thirty somethings.

By the way, in case you think I’m trying to talk you out of going for that dream gig… I really am not. I’d just like you to have all the facts. But I really, really, want you in the industry if you happen to be hugely talented and determined.

Good luck….
.

Budgets, cash flow and creativity

There’s been huge coverage of the jobs lost at commercial radio over the past few weeks. If you want to get up to speed on this, check the Guardian’s pages here. I feel desperately sorry for the several hundred people who will now be leaving the industry they love, some of whom have been hard at work for decades.

Of course, the business rationale is that in a recession, commercial radio needs to find ways to shoulder the extra burden of digital transmission costs, and provide better services to attract listeners to digital. I hear the transmissions costs argument loud and clear, but I’m not going to even discuss issues like ‘quality of output’ now that stations are turning into brands – it’s a pointless exercise.

But there’s a lot of point in thinking about how things can be done convincingly on low budgets. Two weeks ago, I participated in a TV show, hosted by the excellent Apache Indian (check his Wikipedia entry here) from his Corporation Street venue, Apache’s Bar. It was carried on BritAsia, Sky channel 833. He does this monthly. Apache laid on a live band (jazz horns and dhol rhythm section), an audience with things to say, and a key topic – why does radio not do more to support local talent? I was there to talk radio, of course. Interestingly, I was the only guy who turned up from my section of the media; others were invited. Funny, that. And there were only two points I could make.

Firstly: I was not going to defend the indefensible. Radio’s move from local to corporate is soul-crushingly awful for musicians making their way in the world and looking for some exposure.
Secondly: But, hey, radio be damned; great music will find always find a way to its audience, and the better it gets, and the more the audience buys in, the more radio has to acknowledge this. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen radio scramble to catch up with music developments it can no longer begin to control. So.... if you're a musician, get great. Simple.

But those points are tangential to this post. The fact is that Apache delivered a credible, engaging show on a minuscule budget. The same applies all over the country at community radio level. What you need, always, are clearly thought out ideas that your audience will engage with. What you don’t necessarily need is expensive kit.

Still on this topic: I’m just coming to the end of a month-log schools educational project. The equipment we were promised has yet to materialise, through no fault of the school. So we’ve been improvising, using borrowed kit, pressing unexpected tools into service, and working on ancient computers running the excellent and free open source Audacity editing software. Although we’ve had to adapt and revise a fair amount, at no point in the project have these limitations blocked the flow of ideas, and some of these ideas have been belters. I’ll blog separately about this in a week or so, when the project reaches its conclusion.

The best programming approaches, like the best ideas, come for free. They are the results of clear and focussed thought. And often – not always, but often - that clear and focussed thought flourishes best where it won’t be stifled by large corporate structures. If you’re in a tiny operation with zero budget, you may be blessed with a creative freedom you could look back on fondly in future years.

Future of Local Radio???

Stop press - this post seems to have gone modestly viral. BIG response. I'm pleased.

I was the keynote speaker at Creative Networks last night. Brilliant, interested audience of students and practitioners. I gave a seemingly bleak overview of the state of UK radio and the shrinking opportunities for creative work, as cuts continue to bite at the BBC, and the commercial sector continues to strip jobs out, and ramps up automation and networking. All is not lost, however – in fact, all is never lost, if you approach things the right way.

Bullet points after the jump. 

Digital Nirvana...not quite here yet

I posted a few months back about the Digital Britain report.

The bottom line was that the expected 2015 date, by which the big Radio boys in UK radio would move from Analog transmission to Digital, leaving FM to small-scale and community stations, was hoplessly unrealistic. And from a report published in the Guardian on the 26th, it looks like I was right. It may be ten years before the FM band is reinvented as a home for community and small-scale radio.

The 2015 switchover target is only going to be adhered to if 50% of Radio listening is on Digital by then, and right now, that seems highly unlikely. There's a mass of detail in the Guardian piece, and if you care about small-scale radio, as I do, it's a worthwhile read.

What jumped out to me is the statistic that there are at least 100 million FM radios out there. But I think there are a lot more than that. They're in your car, on your stereo, in your phone, on your mp3 player, not counting that plain old transistor radio you may still be using. They're all portable and easy to use, and they all came (sort of) for free, or really cheaply. On the other hand, my single Digital Radio is neither cheap nor portable - it's plugged into the mains - and it's prone to having to be rebooted occasionally, and can give me really crappy signals - 5 live has been particular iffy of late.

Not really an incentive to go out and get another one, it it? All those supposedly hot new digital services don't count if you can't enjoy listening to them. You can't blame listeners for sticking with the durable, proven, and solid FM band.

So now they're talking about, maybe 2016, maybe 2020 before the big switchover. I think it's a damn shame for all parties - but especially for the small-scale stations. That's the independent stations, the small local stations, the community stations who want to simulcast on the web and on FM, or who want to step up their power just so a larger audience can help them survive.

Radio is desperately in need of fresh innovative ideas to pull in new and young audiences. Those ideas normally come from left-field, the same way new music always comes in from left-field. So we need the left-field sector to flourish, to get more professional without getting more corporate, so it can play host to some programming innovation. I was kind of optimistic about a five year gap before the smaller stations can get a level playing field. But it looks like that was too good a target to hold up.

Well, hello there... my, it's been a long, long time...

How am I doing? Ya really wanna know? Well, I guess I'm doing fine.... There's a prize for the first person to spot the song AND the classic 60s singer whose version I'm thinking of, by the way.
My apologies for the dearth of posts at the end of last year. The fact is, I was NOT doing at all fine a month or two back.... Not at all. But now I am.
So here's a first post for 2010, to tell you about a bright new and ever-so-slightly-viral-marketing style initiative from the wonderful Jo Hamilton, which you really should take advantage of.

Jo will present to you - if you go through the right motions - a free concert, online, live and direct from Artisan studios, on January 30th. An e-concert, if you will, at 7.00pm GMT. All the details are on Jo Hamilton's facebook page, or if you are so over the Social Media thing, look at this specific page on her site.

Bottom line? Jo is asking you to post a review on the Amazon page for her album Gown. That spreads the word on Amazon. And it gets you into the e-gig. It's not much to ask for something as intimate and engaging as this will be. I know of what I speak, as I attended one such similar event, but in person, when we worked together on a podcast in Spring 2009 . You should never pass up an opportunity to see an artist like Jo at work, especially in as close and intimate a setting as this. Go get those e-tickets!

You never know who's listening...

I visited the Brussels Museum of Musical Instruments last month. It's brilliant. They give you wireless headphones which spring to life when you approach the display cases: you get a blast of a Mozart wind quintet on period instruments, or some stonking Hurdy Gurdy dance music, or a bit of steaming Hammond B3. It just brings those wonderful old instruments to life. And, of course - this is a state museum in the capital of Eurobureau - it is very fully documented, with discographies and notes. But: did they ever miss a trick... a big one too...

That Mozart piece blew me away. I love Mozart, and this, played on warm and subtly toned period instruments, was just gorgeous. I had to have it. So I visited the museum shop, where a deeply cool and painfully crucial guy with a wicked 'do cooly and politely informed me that, no, there were no CDs available with any of the museum's music samples - just what they had on the shelves... there might be a bit of Mozart wind stuff over there....

I was tempted to ask him if he had trained in retail in the UK, but I passed. He wouldn't have understood.

In all seriousness, this represents a completely wasted opportunity. Here is a museum which attracts music lovers. During their visits, these music lovers are exposed to a tantalising range of fantastic music - hundreds and hundreds of samples, effortlessly brought to life in a charming and accessible way. I would probably have come away with several CDs had they been available for purchase. Of course, there are bound to be copyright issues, but I don't see that these couldn't have been overcome. If I ran a record company, I would happily have made appropriate samples available to the museum, in exchange for their shop stocking the source CDs. It just makes simple business sense, and, provided the curatorial goals of the museum drive the process, there is no reason that the profit motive should override things.

However, since this is a Radio and Local Music booster blog, you may well be asking by now why I am spending so much time banging on about wasted business opportunities in Brussels.

Well, I've got two reasons, the most important of which is this: every time you go on the air, or play a gig, or get your song on the radio, you get a chance to sell yourself. And you never know who might be listening. Don't ever be content to put something lovely together, like the fabulous Brussels MIM, and then skip a chance to press home your advantage. It may just be a dumb tourist, like me in the Museum, asking the questions. But it could be a listener. Or someone who wants to buy your stuff.

This all connects up. Really, it does. There's been much talk lately - see my previous post, and a new post up today on the Infinite Dial blog - about the creative areas, where new radio practitioners are bypassing the old-school network operators, to go straight to their audiences. New ideas and new approaches are being born every minute, and I welcome them. Podcast and community radio audiences might be tiny right now, but you can bet that in among these audiences, there are movers and shakers, future bosses and future decision makers. They're listening right now, because they too are looking to find new inspiration.

Second reason - I just got friended on Facebook by a local muso, Mick Howson... who plays the Hurdy Gurdy... which reminded me about the Brussels MIM. See? It all does connect up.

Buddy, can you spare half a million?

There was an interesting if depressing article on Community Radio Monday 24th in the Guardian, from Steve Buckley, one of the stalwarts of the movement. It got me thinking, and sparked some vigorous debate in the online comments. I'm posting - belatedly - because there's so much to say, not all of it cheering.

The case for governmental Community Radio funding is so clear so and simple. And yet, and yet...
I've posted several times on this blog about visiting Community stations as an interview guest. I'm a thoroughly interested observer: the vibe of a buzzing station is something I really enjoy, and I've found that exact same vibe at all levels of the industry, including at Community level. I am both genuinely impressed with some of the efforts put in at hyper-local level, and genuinely depressed at some of the output I've listened to.

I suppose the most engaging thing about Community Radio is that it truly depends on the efforts of a few people at each station putting in ridiculous amounts of time and effort to stack up a wobbly broadcast edifice against all the odds. I admire that enormously. Leaving that hard work aside, you don't set up a station for free, and a key point in Steve Buckley's article is that promised support funding has been both sparse and unevenly distributed.

But once you open up that funding discussion, things start to get hazy. As I see it, the distinction between small-scale Commercial Radio and Community Radio is getting more and more blurred. The line between the two becomes harder still to draw once Community stations are allowed to sell advertising, raise sponsorship funds, and the like. It's understandable that Commercial Radio is not about to support funding initiatives that would encourage competition from the Community sector, while at the same time seeing some of the commercial revenue they would expect to receive drifting away to the Community boys. And there is also the awkward fact that some Community operations might well be accused of being more interested in getting the funding than serving their audiences.

That said, the good side of that line-blurring is that it should remind us that Radio, like Football, does have a pyramid structure. In Radio, the current legislative structure is criticised at each level of that pyramid. Worse, it offers no defined paths for practitioners to move around. But it is a pyramid structure nonetheless, and we should acknowledge this.

I don't see a perfect solution, probably because there isn't one. Funding is needed to up-skill community stations, give a better experience to the listener, better training to station volunteers, and, vitally, ensure the stations' survival; no argument there. But I can see why the Commercial boys don't want the Community stations firing on all cylinders, and start nipping at their heels - and cash flow. But possibly, despite all the horrible compromises that external funding can bring, that's exactly how it should be.

Decline and fall?

I read a book review last week of a work covering the spectacular, ego-driven, cocaine-fuelled, decline and fall of the record industry. As I was prepping this post, I checked on Amazon on to be sure I had the title right, looking for books on the Record Industry, decline and fall of. Blimey, there's dozens of them. Talk about Hollywood Babylon revisited.

Record industry depravity aside, the review sparked a notion for this post. Some years back, a very savvy and smooth operator, Tim Blackmore, was in charge of the Radio Academy. This is a UK industry talking shop, and I was, and still am, a member. If you care about broadcasting in the UK, you should be a member too. Tim set up a meeting which brought together music radio types and some senior music producers - respected players in the then ego-driven, cocaine-fuelled, etc, etc, record industry - to discuss common ground. You know, all music lovers together, that sort of thing.

Only trouble was... there really wasn't any common ground. Early on, I wittered on worthily about radio's need to relate to its audiences first and foremost, and if that meant radio could support record industry priorities, that was fine and dandy; but that we could not honestly be expected to place their priorities above our own. Blissfully unaware of their reactions, I ploughed on about it was now difficult to trust the chart as a barometer of public taste, and how it made sense to do some research into local sales patterns.

Well, that went down like a lead balloon with the producers. And when the producers in turn talked approvingly about hyping sales to put records into the charts so that radio would be forced to play their product, that went down like a lead balloon with me and not a few others.

Of course, that was in the days of serious audience figures for Top Of The Pops, when Radio 1 was the biggest station in the UK, and Radio 2 was definitely... not. Since that time, record sales have largely tanked, the chart has lost all credibility as a programming tool, and a lot of radio has programmed increasingly conservatively using in-house research. What we didn't expect then was the web: This punched a dirty great hole through all our cosy assumptions. I'm not unhappy at the changes: I'm hearing so much great music from the web - stuff that doesn't fit the financial model the record industry grew fat on. And, as I have already said, I'm not at all unhappy that thousands of new players are experimenting with radio, also on the web.

What I would like to see is some way that the new cream can rise to the top. We're not there yet. But I'm happy to wait. In the meantime, I would love to see a companion Radio Babylon-style book or two about the ego-driven cocaine-fuelled big beasts... of radio... back in the day.