[updated with final notes]

A good conference today at the bottom of CentrePoint - the CBI Conference Centre. Here are my notes of the day. They might be a bit random, and may contain views that are not those of my employer.

Jenny Abramsky from the BBC talked about DAB, ensuring that people are clear of the pro-DAB position of the BBC. Then really stressed that the only thing people really want on radio… is content. Ignore the techie stuff. Get the content right. Hurray for her. And finally had a good long dig at “her good friend” Peter Bazalgette for suggesting that Radio 1 and Radio 2 should be privatised.

Fru Hazlitt: GCap are larger than last.fm (in terms of uniques) and shortly to overtake Yahoo. 2.1 million users online compared to 15 million listeners onair. And monetised far higher in terms of CPT. Audience online growing 71% year on year, and money doing that too. She believes that internet isn’t necessarily the right thing for listening to radio, but it’s certainly a way to extend the brand. Talks about her recent acquisition of welovelocal.com as a way of getting much closer to the audience; and that radio should have tons of local content. “If you’re a kid, what are you going to want? iPod touch? Or a DAB receiver?” Good point. Also claims that GCap are iTunes’s second biggest affiliate partner in Europe. And she said bollocks. Twice. Yay.

Philippe Generali (CEO, RCS Worldwide) does an overview of radio revenue. US revenue: everything down except non-spot revenue, and all is down. UK too, and France (-5.8%). So, what to do?
Starts talking about websites. Apparently content should be relevant. And fresh. And apparently you can slap ads on it. Fuck me. I’d never have thought of that. Websites, eh?
Talks about Skyrock, the third most-visited website in France (because it has created its own, French-language, social networking site, in a world where French-language is ignored by people like Facebook and Bebo). Says we should all have a social network as a result. My jury’s out.
Starts doing a sales pitch for Nokia Visual Radio (which it is now the software provider for). Does so with really, really, faked screenshots. Been there, done that, got the postcard: I wonder if it’s really popular for anyone? (Virgin Radio switched it off the minute I left, quite rightly).
Starts doing a sales pitch for iSelector, which I’ve never quite understood as a concept, given that it is a competitor for your on-air station without the bits that makes the station unique, but what do I know. Gives Nick Piggott a mention for MiXFM and My Classic FM who use this in the UK.
Does a big sales pitch for Media Monitors, an RCS company. Quite nice - it uses Arbitron PPM data to show people tuning in and out of a station, minute by minute. Plays dreadful clip of a public radio station which singlehandedly loses the station over 70% of all their audience. I’ve blogged about the use of PPMs before, but good to see it on the screen. Philippe earns a small reprieve in my otherwise most scornful scorn for showing us this.
Shows a graph showing that Abba’s Dancing Queen is the most hated song on the radio. Much amusement, given that Fru had just announced that her favourite song was, indeed, Abba’s Dancing Queen. I suspect RCS has just lost a contract!

Coffee

After the coffee break, the room is significantly less full. It’s quite cold here in the presentation hall. And the free wifi that was here last time when I was here (at a ‘widgets’ conference), there was copious free wifi, so clearly they’ve switched it off deliberately for us. Nice. Well done, CBI Conference Centre. (Later I discover it needs a key, and it’s so weak it doesn’t work in the auditorium).

Peter Davies from Ofcom did a presentation which didn’t say too much that was new. Talked about Smooth FM in London not being allowed to get rid of their jazz programming. Squirmed delightfully when Paul Robinson pointed out that they’ve shunted their jazz to overnights, so what does it matter?

Rights and radio in the digital age, the first panel session, has Andrew Harrison from the RadioCentre, Martin Stiksel from last.fm, Fran Nevrkla from PPL, and Cliff Fluet from Lewis Silkin.

Martin points out that licensing is v difficult, since he needs to get licenses in 240 countries. Paul points out they haven’t yet, so surely they’re infringing copyright? Martin points out that it’s not quite as easy as that, since they can’t even get some licenses.

Andrew says that commercial radio wants to act responsibly instead. He says that the deal with music rights-holders needs to be “reborn” - to take account of all platforms and on-demand content. Good call.

Fran loves broadcasters, and thinks that “ISPs” are being very bad, not allowing PPL to earn money from them, while still being sold for very high figures. (He has confused last.fm with an ISP - he’s just called them an ISP again.) 90% of the 47,000 performers he represents, he says, exist on less than £18,000 a year from music. Apparently we’re supposed to feel bad for them. He then moves into a polemic about “we should not give music away for free”, which I agree with. He gives a sideswipe to last.fm, saying that PPL should get money from the start, not just when your business gets sold for £300m. He wants to get to know each other better. Aw. However, he’s just said that there’s not goodwill in this industry. (Not sure what industry he’s talking about).

Cliff says that the record industry has to move away from sales to money on a per-play basis, or a licensing basis. Fran nods head. Cliff wants radio to add a ‘buy this song’ link everywhere.

Digital Radio - on the money? was quite a good session:

Matt Wells, The Guardian: he’s been in the sun, he’s bright red, with panda eyes from his sunglasses That’ll peel later this week. He says he doesn’t believe the second DAB mux will be launched. Points out that commercial radio appears to push for FM being killed in order for DAB to succeed. Interesting viewpoint. Thinks that DAB only really offers “5live in better quality” which “isn’t very impressive”. Claims 4digital will require 1200 new transmitters (ah, Guardian accuracy, it’s actually around 170). Says they’ll not earn money out of it, and/or Channel4 is only there to earn money out of it. Points out that PlanetRock and OneWord were not loved by their owners (and I suspect he’s right), but claims PlanetRock will survive. Claim that The Guardian are getting 1.5m podcast downloads a month.

Nathalie Schwarz, 4 Digital Group: talks about tv going digital and how it’s working. Wants a similarly clear roadmap for radio. However, says the second mux will launch. However, doesn’t rule out launching on Digital One. Oooh. Talks about what would be their first station, E4 Radio. (E4 produced a 65% uplift in Freeview boxes, apparently). Brilliantly shuts Matt up by asking whether MediaGuardian is in profit yet - or, indeed, The Guardian itself. (It’s not). Talks about commercial radio bulking and discounting AMers, let alone DAB stations.

Paul Brown, DRDB: is fed up of the radio industry ’staring up our own fundements’. I do like Paul. Points out listener figures, and set sales, are high. Says commercial radio isn’t very good at selling ads on digital radio, interestingly. Very bullish about radio in the future. Says that radio has been hampered by ‘indecisiveness’ because of being owned by shareholders. Says that commercial radio doesn’t crosspromote enough. Mentions that PlanetRock had more Sony Radio Academy Award nominations than any other national station (not entirely sure that’s right, but it did get quite a few).

Mark Friend, BBC: talks about hybrid sets: DAB+IP. Wants to think more carefully about the content and the interface to make it more relevant. He’s a bright, clever, handsome, intelligent man. And my boss, by the way. Cough. Says future required cooperation around technology and marketing.

Ventura Barba, Yahoo Music: wooooah, great radio name! Starts talking about the internet. Probably a little confused about what everyone else has been talking about. Starts talking about copyright and illegal sites. Hey, wrong panel, you’re 45 minutes too late. Can’t help but think he’s been badly booked, he’s had nothing else to really contribute. At the end he mentions that Yahoo earns money. Good for you.

A break for lunch - yum, salmon pasta, then breakout sessions. I went to the one about technology.

Nick Piggott (GCap) talked about the NanoDAB - a magic Bluetooth DAB receiver which talks to your mobile phone. Then showed quite an insipring video of what it might be capable of, full of an iPhone-like device which adds a whole heap of information to radio listening. It’s a brilliant video, so I hope he posts it somewhere. His summary: create “new radio”, get it on the right platforms and devices, and only DAB can economically reach the mass market. Later, Nick talked about tagging: being a way of timeshifting interactivity. He says (and I’m working on this too) that it’s a simple but crucial part of enabling a richer radio; and says it’s far more than buying music. He says that personalisable radio will hopefully result in better revenues for commercial radio.

David Muniz (Gaydar) explained his brand’s evolution - a radio station launched off the back of a website in Feb 2002 on Sky, then May 2003 on DAB in London, and 2004 on DAB in the South Coast (read Brighton, I think). Says that he’d love to be national on DAB, but it’s impossible because of bandwidth costs. Has a lot of slides, rather more than he was seemingly expecting. In terms of how people tune into the station - 60% via internet, 30% DAB, and 10% Sky.

Colin Crawford (Pure) shows an interesting “first connected DAB radio” which isn’t publicly announced yet. This is probably it then. It’s a nice black device, looking not unlike a Pure One, with software buttons on a big screen, and also runs on Linux. LINUX! Wow, that’s quite cool. He says this will enable quick upgrades for new features. He’s running a dedicated portal for this (ah, so he runs our listeners, then). Next, he shows a full-screen, full-colour touchscreen display, coming to market in 2009. Really nice looking. Slideshow support, by the looks of things. Has internet radio on it, as well as DAB. And it does media streaming from your own PC server or your “NAS box”, whatever the hell one of those is. Full colour album covers, etc. This is really nice. Wow, I’m quite flabbergasted about this; I never thought Pure was so forward-looking.

John Ousby (BBC) shows some visualisation we’re working on for IPTV. It’s very good. I won’t spoil it. Also says that 3G coverage is pretty awful and is very difficult to stream reliably with - or, for that matter, DAB Digital Radio coverage, or wifi coverage.

Analysis

Claire Enders came on with some great and interesting figures, culled from a ton of different sources, but first was very excited that she’s just gained British citizenship. Aw. Bless.

She poured some scorn on some of the figures we’ve heard so far; notably some of Fru’s claims about how music is sold as a result of listening to it on the radio (apparently she’s quoting US figures not UK ones).

iPod ownership in the UK is the second largest in the world per capita. That’s interesting.

She predicts a fairly subdued neartime commercial future for radio. Explains her figures don’t include any allowance for hypercyclicality. I had hypercyclicality once, but I got some pills for it and it cleared up within a few days.

Shows percentage share of UK advertising by medium - substantial jump for the internet, but goodness, national newspapers, and business magazines, are in shit: huge great falls. Recently, in the last three years, huge falls in direct mail and regional newspapers too (and similar, though less pronounced, in the radio).

Almost £1billion has been spent on commercial radio acquisitions in the last year, did you know that? Gosh, that’s a lot.

The last session
Well, I’m suffering a little from conference fatigue; as you might guess from the above writeup. The last session is around commercial opportunities which (for now, at least) I can ignore. So, this is my last update. It’s been a mix of positive and sobering discussion, this conference. Quite well done, with lots of arguments, which is nice. It’s almost like a “Radio at the Edge” conference which is rather more biz friendly.

To a really good afternoon hosted by the UK Podcasters Association. Very grateful to have been invited by the inestimable Dean Whitbread. These are my rough (and doubtless wrong) notes; they’ll be publishing the session in full on the UKPA website shortly.

Becky Hogg from the Open Rights Group spoke around the Audio Video Multimedia Services Directive.

Essentially, the EU is proposing to regulate on-demand, non-linear space - for video (and not audio). Mostly, this is around protection for minors, against racist/religious hatred, that kind of thing. OFCOM, the CBI and the government weighed in: saying this kind of regulation was inappropriate (regulation’s mainly there for broadcasters because of scarcity of spectrum) and unworkable.

OFCOM wanted to exclude regulation for “user generated content in communities of interest” (or, as Becky would put it, ‘YouTube’). But it’s not clear that vodcasts are included in this legislation. Only the iPlayer and 4oD are planned to be regulated by the AVMS (but then, the content on these services is regulated anyway, when it was originally broadcast).

“What’s video?” Interesting question - according to the letter of the law, apparently even an enhanced podcast is video (even if the image changes once every 60 seconds). Anything with any visual content, according to this law, is video. (Does this mean that OFCOM would have to regulate, for example, visualised radio under TV regulations? Hmm, interesting.)

Interesting issues with level playing fields with advertising. TV sponsorship rules are different to radio sponsorship, for example, so if they use the TV model, rather than the radio model, this legislation could make something like Leo Laporte’s “This Week In Tech” actually illegal if it was produced in the UK, due to the way that his Audible sponsorship is woven into the programme content. (If it had a video component, of course. Or even had some album art. Oh, hang on, it does).

OFCOM aim to consult on this legislation in May/June. This legislation is likely to be done in 2009, and will be therefore in the Queen’s speech in November 2008. It’s important, then, to speak to your MP in the six weeks after the Queen’s speech. (If this scares you. I am only writing notes down.)

For the rest of Europe: Germany, France and Poland appear to have been really pressing this regulation; and may add a rather heavier regulatory burden.

Indcidentally, it would seem that a possible reason for this legislation is protectionism for the established media. Potentially, established media in other countries may have pressed the EU to regulate. “We are heavily regulated, and the internet is coming with no regulation, wah, we’re scared” is the kind of argument. The correct solution is to relax on regulation, to my mind, not try to regulate the internet. But I digress.

MUSIC PODCASTING

Andy H was there from the MCPS/PRS Alliance. They represent songwriters, and mechanical rights.

They “first created a podcast licence in early 2006″, which has expired. He explained a bit about some of this licence, which interestingly said that the first ten seconds, and last ten seconds, had to be obscured by speech. (That would have made “Hey Jude” sound really good, eh?).

There’s a new licence available now, though apparently you won’t find it on the website until July. (wtf?!)

For commercial podcasts (yes, including ads on your web page), the rate is 8% of revenues. The minimum is 0.15p per musical work used, per download, irrespective of length. But this only covers UK use.

They call this a “LOL” licence. LOL! For lower-tier licences (you can buy licences in ‘bundles’), they are not asking for the burden of full music reporting. And yes, you need a licence with the record companies too.

Question: “How would you know whether this music is represented by MCPS/PRS or not?” Answer: “They’ll probably be a member”. Goodness. They do have an online lookup service, which, if you’re a licensee, you have access to. That’s good then.

Simon from AIM

AIM = association of independent record labels. Traditional broadcasters don’t pay AIM directly (they pay PPL).

Outlined that they licenced the original Napster, you know. Napster was (at least for AIM labels) legal. Goodness. (Naturally, the MCPS/PRS bit wasn’t licenced).

Outlined an experimental, non-precedential, £500 one-shot rate for independent label use. It was issued in 2005 as an experiment. Labels within AIM opt-in to the scheme. There are over 50,000 tracks that are available this way. And yes, you still need the PRS/MCPS licence too. Notwithstanding that, this is a brilliant deal. Well done, AIM.

Incredibly low takeup of this licence from podcasters, depressingly, he says. (I wonder if he understands that the PRS/MCPS licence is the issue.)

Ewan Spence, The Podcast Network

Ewan started a music show just over 3 years ago. (It’s roughly 2 or 3 times a week). It contains lots of unsigned bands.

He reckons that he would have spent £500,000 on MCPS/PRS bills. Had he had to. Splendidly, his stuff is not MCPS/PRS licenced, so he doesn’t. Talks about a band that played every two weeks in a local pub. Gave them a play. And the band sold 500 CDs off the back of it (for $10 a pop) - so they bought some new guitars and now play in the pub the other side of the road for the other two weeks. That’s quite a good story. He makes the point that breaking acts need this exposure.

Question: “What happens when the bands get signed later?” Good question, he says; there’s no real precedent for this (and no, he doesn’t want to be the precedent!). He’s never been asked to take a podcast down, or edit a podcast - he gives an example of ‘Urban Snake’, who got signed, and the label gave permission. But he would be happy to edit an archive if he was requested, though points out that he can’t edit all the other archives (like in my iTunes collection).

Dean explains that PPL aren’t here. “They do radio stations” was the explanation of what they do. Most people apparently ignore PPL mainly because they’re the slowest people to come into this debate.

Ewan to Andy: “How are you paying people, if you’re not asking for music reports?” Andy says that the costs for that is a nightmare. A programmer behind me asks why music reporting is not automated. Andy agrees that it would be good, but says that there’s no real database to use - there’s a ton of different databases within the record industry which aren’t really very well put together. Simon and Ewan go spare when I mention that Musicbrainz might be a good start. Simon goes really quite mental, actually - really surprising. What’s interesting is that there’s no solution here, but pretty universal understanding that Musicbrainz and other user-generated tools are “bullshit” for music reporting purposes. I consider asking “So, it’s broke then. Shall we try fixing it?” but Simon scared me a bit, so I didn’t. On writing these notes up - if MCPS/PRS have an online lookup service, that must mean there’s a pan-industry database, surely? Hmm.

I quote my “commercial radio makes 2.7p per listener per hour” figure, and compare it to Andy’s 1.5p per listener per hour (and a rough additional 1.5p per listener per hour from PPL). Andy says that an inability to make money is not his members’ problem. I can see his point of view. (Making it impossible to afford is his member’s problem, I’d think.)

Question: “Can I get approval from a musician to legally play a song on my podcast?” Andy replies “If you’re a songwriter and you join PRS, the act of joining PRS means that you assign the rights to PRS” - so any musician who is a PRS member cannot also assign the rights to anyone else. The way Ewan recommends is that he write a piece of paper that says “Can you assign the non-exclusive rights to us for the use of this podcast”, which if a musician signs, he feels that he is in the clear. Nice. And I would agree.

Question: “Will there ever be a one-stop shop for music rights?” Quick answer: “no”.

Question: “With your podcast licence, is AIM filling a hole? Is it a PPL-shaped hole?” Simon: “Yes. If PPL was doing this work, we wouldn’t need to”. Crikey.

We then went to The Easton, a (until now) highly recommended pub. We got there at 5.20. It apparently opens at 5.30pm, but the man behind the bar, who was doing nothing much, noticed us standing outside in the rain but refused to let us in without buying anything (perfectly legal) until he opened. We were free to buy our beer from elsewhere, so did. (Someone compared that to the music industry.)

As ever, these are my views (or the views of those speaking) and not those of my employer; indeed, after a long and cordial discussion with a few people from the Open Rights Group (who I have a lot of respect for), my personal laptop is now proudly sporting one of their stickers. That should turn some heads on Monday… (grin)

There’s a “podcasting and rights” conference this afternoon which I’m going to - hosted and run by the UKPA.

If you’re not coming, you can still virtually come: they’re streaming the event live (as a test). If you’re lucky, you might see me with my new haircut. (This depends on whether I go and get my haircut shortly).

I’ll blog something about it, possibly, later.

Photo: Kim Mun Lee; used under licence

So, I went to Cork for a journalism conference last Thursday.

You might reasonably wonder what I know about journalism. Not much, in truth: my background is in music radio.

But my first week in commercial radio was spent in the newsroom.

As is now a source of fascination for some people, incredibly my first job on my first day was holding the mobile phone for one of our reporters, Maria Duarte. You might wonder whether it was very lazy of her not to carry her own mobile phone: but this was back in 1989, when mobile phones were the size of a small flight bag and incredibly heavy - it was like carrying a car battery around. I had to carry it for her as she went to report on a house fire in Bradford - light damage, but smelly. Nobody died, but the station still sent out a reporter to file a piece from the incident, and then to interview a fireman on a Uher tape machine. This piece of audio was driven back to the station, edited on tape using something quite like sticky-tape and some chinagraph pens, transferred to an eight-track cartridge, and played out on the next hour’s news bulletin.

I suppose you’d marvel at the staffing levels of the newsroom if you compared it to a typical newsroom now. During the day, there was a news editor, at least four other journalists, a sports editor, a sports reporter, and a slightly nervous thin looking kid who occasionally helped to carry mobile phones. That’s a news team of around eight in total; in fact, I think it might have been even larger.

That team was creating news for, essentially, one radio station: Classic Gold. News bulletins were five minutes an hour; ten minutes at 1pm. Pennine FM took the first three minutes of every bulletin, with a clunky-sounding timecheck to allow them to opt-out. And that was it: no web, no text message alerts, no production for different stations. Occasionally, the team got a story accepted by IRN, and it was sent around the country. News cues were written on typewriters, on little pieces of A5 thin paper. Audio was on cartridge. If you were really unfortunate, you dropped them on the way in to the studio.

And you try and tell people that these days.

One of the things I wished I’d said at the conference was to tell the students to make sure that they can do more than just write. If they can’t take photos, edit videos, record decent audio, and write, then they’ll be useless in the emerging journalistic world.

Hopefully, when I speak in a panel on Wednesday night in Dublin (on the same subject - what are the odds of that?!), I’ll remember to say it.

Photo: Steve Rhodes. Used under licence.

You probably read this blog because you’re interested about the future of radio. (Or beer).

While beer comes at the end of the day, ‘Radio at the Edge‘ is well worth going to - not just because of the chair of the event! I’ve been to the last five of these events, and they’re eye-opening to anyone really interested in where radio’s going.

Read on; and register your place before they all go.

Above image hosted at Flickr

I went to two conferences last week - one had a cute dog-tag name-badge, one didn’t give me a badge at all.

I then enjoyed Mike Davidson’s better conference badge. It’s a bit boring, but it does what it says on the tin.