Buried Radio treasure. It's out there, somewhere. Got a map?

I've written this for my website, to go onto a new Selector/Music programming section, but I'm posting it here as well. It's a humble suggestion to programmers, and adds to the debate about what exactly music radio is in the second decade of the 21st century.

How we get and how we use our music has changed. Music itself has changed: it was the thing that pulled young listeners in. In turn, radio was the place to hear the hot new stuff.

Now? We get hot new stuff from the net, from friends, on phones. Pandora in the US, and Last-FM and Spotify in the UK can give you want, when you want it. Radio can’t compete with the web. Instead of enthralling and seducing the listener, to its discredit, much radio has devalued its music and retreated into conservatism.

Worse still, many radio professionals have abandoned the idea of ‘owning’ their music, and have farmed out their programming to remote services, sometime hundreds of miles away.

I’m not saying that music radio has a divine right to continue to exist in the face of hot new technology; after all, the technology that empowered music radio helped to kill off earlier forms of music distribution, like sheet music and piano rolls.

But I still think that there’s a LOT to play for. Radio, on whatever platforms it now uses, still has several prime assets: Radio has a direct connection between presenter and listener, in a way that rival media can not match.

And in music programming, of all types, there’s still a vital ingredient that is out there, waiting to be grasped: localism. By this, I don’t mean a parochial approach. I mean a sense of locality, identity and community. Localism becomes doubly valuable when set against the overwhelming globalisation of the record industry, and centralised programming that, while expedient, ignores potential local variations. It always shocks me when I visit a different country - and hear exactly the same music being played on the radio that I’m used to at home.

One of the non-radio projects I am working on taps into the world of new independent music making, which now exists online. It is thrilling, vital, and exciting. Because musicians can use web tools and computer based recording equipment that is now spectacularly cheap, the quality is often spectacularly good. Musicians the world over have side-stepped record companies to distribute their material directly, and I don’t blame them. If all a record company is interesting in signing is yet another ‘Three Tenors’ clone, or another Beyonce wannabe, or the next Michael Buble, then why go to the trouble of trying to get them to take a chance on your material?

But that’s not to say that the new online alternatives don’t have radio value. It does mean you, the programmer, have to do a bit of work to find it, but that shouldn’t be too hard. And this material can have huge impact, especially if it ‘belongs’ to your town, or your region, or even your country.

So, my question to those programmers who still have the freedom to determine what they can put on their radio stations is: are you entirely sure that those global successes the record companies thrust at you wouldn’t benefit from a judicial addition of something that you know - from experience - matters in your town, your region, or even your country?

Think about it. It could be your usp in the radio war.

West Midlands Mix number 2 (19 Artists, 5 minutes)

I've just had a blast putting this together, following the rather gratifying response to Mix Number 1. This is more of a radio mix, harder, faster, shorter, non-chronological, and genre-mangling. Can you identify everyone?
Bottom line: listening back to this fills me with pride, gratitude and respect for the musicians of the West Midlands. We've got a lot to shout about, right here.  

Another observation: I simply would not have had the tools to put this together back in the day. This used to be the sort of thing you needed four hands to mix. And it's those same tools that have opened up a new level of web-powered creativity that's made our local music scene even more powerful and interesting. I'll have a lot more to say on this subject in the coming months. 

As always, mix suggestions and comments are most welcome.

Own your music: Selector (and other scheduling systems) tip 4

Number four in a series of tips for Selector (and other scheduling system) users.

When I talk about ownership, I’m talking about really getting hold of the material you’re going to play. Simply put, if you have no real idea of what’s important in your library, or why, you’re going to sound messy on air. A  big, deep repertoire is a wonderful thing. But it's absolutely no use to you, unless you know what you’re going to do with that repertoire. If you think about it; you win. If someone else does the thinking, or worse, nobody does the thinking, you lose.
 

An example: A small-scale station was setting up at the end of last year. They had no money for a library. So staff lent their own CD collections to copy to the station server. This is not at all unusual. They happily ripped everything they had: complete albums, dozens of them. This rapidly built up a library of several thousand cuts. However, the station’s system just happened to be off-line… so, no CDDB/Gracenote, and no artist or title recognition. Giving a database full of Song1, Song2, and so on, performed by Artist1, Artist2… and so on.  And, because they were ripping complete albums, including hits packages, that database was also full of duplicates. That’s a nightmare scenario, one which will take far more time to correct than it would have taken to think about core material in the first place.

I’ve seen this happen too on courses I teach at college radio – I do a couple a year. Hundreds of tracks get dumped into memory, just to get something to work with. That’s not building a library.

Here’s why. Take a look at your Ipod. Chances are you’ve done much the same thing, especially if you’ve got a lot of memory and you want to have a BIG library to brag about. And how is that huge choice working for you? Have you taken the time to go through everything in iTunes and prioritise every single track in to favourite and less favourite? I'll bet you haven’t. What about deleting stuff? Tricky. I bet your shuffle play is… random.

Here’s the thing. Even through we’re in the era of single song downloads – a healthy development - we’re drowning in easy availability. We don’t value songs for themselves anymore - that’s so last century. Music, like so much else, has become commoditised, and it’s not healthy.

I believe that each song needs to be looked at hard by any radio programmer, before being put forward for scheduling. Don’t misunderstand me: I am not arguing for 100-song playlists like they have at a lot of stations in the US these days. There’s no reason not to go ahead and build up a huge library. Just make sure, before you do, that there’s a good reason to add each song in the first place (somehow, ‘I just like It’ isn’t quite enough).  Thinking about your stuff before you add it also helps you to build a coherent structure for your scheduling system. Core songs by core artists – no matter what your format – is a great place to start. You can work it out from there.

And it might be wise to make sure you’re online when you're ripping :-).

If this has been useful, pass it on to friends and colleagues. It’s on me. If you'd like more, on a 1 to 1 basis, reply to me through the blog, or email me via the website (link at left under Work-related).

24 artists, 43 years, 9 minutes

This has been by far the most popular post I've put up this year, so I'm going to keep it front page for a while. 

I put this together last month for a radio class I taught to US students. I wanted to put the West Midlands in perspective for them. They knew some of the bands, of course, but not all (do you?), and had no idea that they all came from/worked in the region. There was a role for local radio in supporting pretty much the first 16 or so in the sequence, but those days seem to be over. Shame...


This is a montage, not even close to a proper mashup - for that, check out Sam Redmore's brilliant work - but I had a ball putting it together. The range and diversity makes me proud of my town.

With just one exception, I have interviewed and/or hung out with, worked with, shook hands with, or hugged and kissed all of these guys.

Voicer samples

Strictly for business purposes, here's a voiceover showreel with samples of my work. 

If you like what you hear, email me directly or contact me through my website.

My Voice 123 page has more samples to play with, including Talking Books work.

Robin Valk voicer showreel by Robinvalk on Mixcloud

My Selector Coloring book: Selector Tips 3

This topic mainly applies to Selector version 15 lovers. You can do a bit of color tweakage in Version 12 (that’s the old, ugly, but gorgeously stable and well thought out dos version), but it’s really the windows version of Selector that lets you play with looks, fonts and colors. There’s lots of configuration potential in GSelector, too, but that hasn’t fully rolled out worldwide, and I’m quite sure that these remarks will also apply just as much to other scheduling engines. Bottom line? Customise away, but you should avoid the explosion in the paint factory effect at all costs.

Why is it that contemporary software design is so…. uniform? There’s a very good reason. Computer screens can display a LOT of information. Color is a great help is highlighting areas of concern, and you can often set conditions in your software package – not just your scheduling engine – which will throw a focus on an area of interest, by using a specific color.

But if you make things too busy, your brain has to work a lot harder to take it all in. If the screen is just too busy, you tend to jump past all this information.

Now let’s consider the Editor screen. That’s the one that displays your schedule, or running order. You’ve got to review an entire day of output – that's at least 24 screens, maybe much more.  If the entire screen is a maze of color, you’re going to have a hard time concentrating as hard as you need to for your editing job… which means you might let something slip past… which means the output might sound lousy.

So that’s why I suggest you go easy on the color.  If you like to differentiate between different categories onscreen, that’s fine – but try using shades of the same color, rather than violently clashing and distinct colors. Leave the fireworks for the emergency conditions: schedule failures and the like. And think about whether you need to apply color to the entire page – you can restrict it to one or two fields if you prefer, leaving the rest of the window more uniform.

Above all, make it easy on yourself, so you can make those critical editorial decisions: getting the mix right is way more important than having a pretty screen display that your audience doesn’t know or care about.

If this has been useful, pass it on to friends and colleagues. It’s on me. If you'd like more on a 1 to 1 basis, reply to me through the blog, or email me via the website (link at left under Work-related).

Inheriting a Selector scheduling setup: Selector Tips 2

Most of us in Radio inherit a Selector rig when we join a station, or when the guy before us moves on. Nowadays, you very rarely build up a system, your way, from scratch. So you really need to work out how the guy before you went about his business, before changing things. If you don't, then you’re in for a world of pain working out why the rule settings don’t seem to work right anymore. If the guy before you was obsessive, you better be too. Sorry about that. The basic principles here don't just apply to Selector - they work in any system. I’ve got a how-to tip to help after the jump.

The devil is always in the detail.
A great way to zero in on any aspect of your library is to go to the Browse Window. Let’s say you want to make sure your Artist list is accurate. You really need this. Selector isn’t Word, and it won’t compensate for spelling errors.

Click on the Artist heading.
Work down the list of songs, starting from the top.
Some errors might be right at the very top – like songs with no artist.
Look for anomalies. Are songs suspiciously absent? Maybe they’re listed elsewhere under a mis-spelled artist name.

And don’t forget the famous text string issue – Selector normally sorts by the first letter of the last piece of text (known in geekland as a text string) in the field. So it would see Take That and Take_That as two different artists.

You can repeat this basic exercise for anything that is key in your scheduling rules, but of course there are some quite complex areas to make decisions on, above and beyond factual issues like getting the Artist names right. I'll post some tips in dealing with the more subjective areas soon.

Sorted? Good. Now make a note in Outlook to do this all over again in two months.

If this has been useful - pass it on. If you'd like more on a 1 to 1 basis, reply to me through the blog, or email me via the website (link at left under Work-related).

Pirate Radio Goes Mainstream: Politics, technology and demographics

I've just come back from giving a lecture in London, to a group of university students from the US. My brief was to cover the history of UK post-war popular music radio. I had a lot of fun putting the whole thing together. Learned quite a bit too.
The bottom line? It really doesn’t matter how brilliant your programming is, how cool and innovative your marketing strategy. You are always at the mercy of factors you can’t control.

Coast 106: I love a success story

And this is a success story. I’ve been working as a consultant with a lovely and thoroughly listenable radio station in Southampton. They’re called Coast 106, and I’ve been visiting them on and off since late 2008. In this quarter’s Rajar audience survey, they posted all time high figures. In fact it’s been a pretty solid story of growth from an admittedly low start point, when they took the franchise over from the previous owners.

It’s pretty hard to rebrand a station, and then relaunch it in the teeth of a howling recession at any time. Harder still to post consistent growth figures - doubling reach and nearly trebling market share over an 18 month period. So what’s their secret?.

How do I know my Selector Mood Codes are right? Selector Tip 1

New feature. I’ve been a Selector wrangler for over half my career; it’s partly how I make my living.

I’m going to post a regular series of tips. Most of these cover editorial approach, which I think is an area that gets left behind. Some tips will apply to other scheduling systems. If you like what you see, or if you know someone who might, pass them on. If you really like what you see, get in touch by replying directly to this post (bottom of the post, below) or through the website link in the Work-Related pane at left.

Tip 1 is about finding your Centre Of Gravity - the midpoint of your Mood or Energy values.

The overall balance of station sound depends hugely on how you classify songs. Typically stations code their songs for Mood or Energy (occasionally both), on a scale of 1 to 5. 1 is catatonic, 5 is extremely in your face.

This is, naturally, a very subjective area. So it really helps to get a very clear idea of what the mid-ground Mood value is for your station. That’s what I mean by Centre of Gravity.

Here’s a recipe:
- Open up a list of all your active songs.
- If you have coded songs for Mood or Energy, sort them by this field.
- Now look in the middle area to find, say, three songs that are absolutely bang in the middle of the Mood range for your station. That's your benchmark.
- Work out from there. Work back up the list, and measure every song against your new standard.
- Then go down the list the other way. I guarantee you’ll find some surprises.
- If you have a big library, break it down into Categories first. This can be heavy going.
- If you haven’t set values at all - shame on you - the process is still the same. Find three benchmark songs, and work out from there.
- By the way, this is hard work. Fatigue can set in. You probably won't get it done in one session. Take your time to get it right.

After you've done that initial re-evaluation, do some analysis work to see if you’ve set the Mood or Energy rules up right for what you’ve actually got. That’s a tip for another day.