I’m at The Radio Festival today and tomorrow (and apologies if you follow me on Twitter since I’ve rather been blasting the system with tweets, using the @radiofest08 feedback loop to engage in conversation with other Twitterers).

Today’s been a good day, after a slow start.

First, the Digital Radio Working Group (DRWG) reported back on their interim report. Except they published the report last week, so today was a rather lukewarm presentation of some of the key findings that you could have read a week or so ago, which was a shame. I do rush to point out that my boss was really very good. Very good indeed.

“The View From Out Here” was a splendidly good and provocative session from The Guardian’s Emily Bell, ably assisted by some talking heads on video. Emily was nicely catty about the BBC, while Jeff Jarvis was the talking head that made sense: arguing for the BBC to release its technology as open source, encouraging the BBC to open up research, and lots more. Very good stuff.

After the inevitable technical foobar and then coffee, “Who pays the digital piper” was a piece from the big cheeses at PPL and MCPS/PRS who explained how music licencing works, which was fairly illuminating, since they went into detail on how people do get paid - 65% of the PPL money goes to “the featured artist” (like Robbie Williams), while 35% goes to the “unfeatured artist” like the session singers and musicians. Good so far. Then, sadly, they were (at best) economical with the truth - one audience member asked them how they police the internet and to give them some examples of court cases, and they said “well, Pandora is one example”. Not only did they fail to explain how they police the internet, but Pandora didn’t go to court, and indeed was priced out of the game in the UK. Some mealy-mouthed excuses later, and vague threats of “wanting to re-examine how the music licencing works for commercial radio”, they left the stage. I think we (the audience) were way too soft on them.

For example, not only are radio stations charged to play music (fairly), so hairdressers are also charged to listen to the radio in their own workplace. So, radio pays to broadcast music, pays for the infrastructure and the delivery mechanism, only so that the music companies can make another buck from workplace licensing. Surely radio should get a rebate? Otherwise, what are we paying for? Grr.

Then we had a good “what’s the future of music radio” piece, where the wholly sensible solution (and the solution regular readers will be familiar with since I witter along about it as much as I can here) was that we should concentrate on more than just non-stop music - some great documentaries from GMG, some good personality radio too, and George from BBC Radio 1 talking about how they hire their DJs for their music knowledge.

Lunch was nice - both hot and cold, and even pudding. Later today we have a session on The Radio Academy, Community Radio, and ‘Radio’ Fighting Talk which looks fun. I’m avoiding the sessions going on now, though - it’s all about compliance and diversity which sounds slightly less than fun but sshhhh, don’t tell anyone, they might go looking for me.

(The above is my personal view; I’m a director and trustee of the Radio Academy who organise the Festival. My disclosure is probably worthwhile looking at occasionally.)

Tags: radio, radio festival, radio-academy | Permalink | Comments RSS | Leave a response, or trackback.