I’ve met Gillian Reynolds a few times. She’s the radio critic at The Daily Telegraph. She’s excellent at writing that she loves everything on her radio and is very rarely critical: exactly the sort of critic that radio needs, to my mind. She’s also wonderful in real life: a kind of self-deprecating grandmotherly figure, blissfully in love with the medium she writes about.

Writing today in the Daily Telegraph, she mentions three recent broadcasts that she’s enjoyed. Othello on Radio 3, the near sellout production with Ewan McGregor as Iago (”those idiots who wonder what Radio 3 is for had their answer”); Radio 4’s The Archive Hour (”imagine not having this kind of radio, where programmes start thought processes, make connections”); and another programme on Radio 4, British Jews and the Dream of Zion (”a fine example of how radio welcomes you into the conversation, widens the bounds of what you believed before, makes room for new thoughts, and still affords place for considered opinion”).

Her most interesting point, talking around Othello but valid for virtually anything on the radio:

There is no necessary distinction between quality and popularity. What mass audiences like is not necessarily rubbish. By the same token, some things only small audiences like are worth their place in any schedule because a) a small radio audience is still something like 100,000 listeners, while b) it is insulting to assume Shakespeare is only for posh people, and c) things that start with small audiences can be the place for new ideas and talents to grow.

It’s a clearly valedictory piece for the well-funded public service broadcaster; but in the age of ultra-relevance on the internet (hello, Google Ads), I wonder how we can encourage advertisers that mass audiences are not everything.

After all, if the advertisers don’t want this kind of radio, commercial radio is mostly stuck to playing ten great songs in a row; and commercial radio speech output would, in Gillian Reynolds’s words, be limited to “incendiary phone-ins, or bland promotions of this week’s celebrities”. Arise, LBC, talkSPORT, et al.

If “more-music” radio is better as a one-to-one service from services like last.fm and Pandora (which, when they get their algorithms right, surely will be), to safeguard radio’s future in our lives we need to invest in better and more engaging speech output; but we also need to invest in the commercial climate to make speech radio thrive.

Wonder how we do that?

Photo: Tom Watson. Used under licence

Sean Ross posts in Infinite Dial, a radio website well worth visiting, about a new radio station, being broadcast on FM and also on erockster.com:

Here’s erockster.com as heard on KAJR at 7:40 local time this morning, mostly unhosted but with various artist drops:
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Maps”
Beach Boys, “California Girls”
Tegan & Sara, “Burn Your Life”
Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean”
Bright Eyes, “Old Soul Song”
…
If, three years ago, you were one of those people who liked to point out that Bob- and Jack-FM were not your iPod on shuffle, this may well be.

If we continue to think of radio stations as purely music (”unhosted but with artist drops”), we’re going to hell in a handcart. Because last.fm, Pandora, et al, does a much better job of playing me new music that I’ve otherwise not heard of but I like than the likes of the nonstop music channels like Core, The Arrow, Virgin Groove, Century Digital, etc.

I’m not a typical listener: nor a typical music fan. Listen to my music choice (that’s my music collection in one big playlist), while looking at my most-played tracks of the last 3 months, and you’ll see that my most played track in that three months is The Divine Comedy’s “Absent Friends”, which I’ve played just four times. A typical commercial radio station will play their top tracks eight times a day - once every three hours. Assuming I listen to music for a total of two hours a day (in commutes and desk-bound working), commercial radio would have had me listen to that track 60 times in three months.

Indeed, over the last week, my 210 different artists, and a total of 323 tracks means that, in just 18 hours, I’ve listened to more tracks than many commercial radio stations play per week. I’m singling out commercial radio here, by the way, not because of a misplaced loyalty to my employer, but that commercial radio’s music choice is, by and large, far more tightly musically formatted - and that, for whatever reason, only commercial radio runs nonstop music services.

Clear Channel’s new radio station, or The Arrow, or Virgin Xtreme, or any number of other “music jukebox” channels, just play a mix of music which is suboptimal, for me, to that available from a computer program or a website - or, even, from a tightly tuned iTunes.

Surely the future of radio isn’t just non-stop music jukebox channels? Can’t one-to-one technology do that job better? Or is the job of a programme director really just the job of a music scheduler these days?

(And does the above shine any light on the widening gap between commercial radio services and those from the BBC? Is the Radio 1 breakfast show, or Terry Wogan, or Chris Evans, or Scott Mills ‘all about the music’?)

Photo: flickr user niznoz. Used under licence.

Photo: snow in Sheringham, taken March 23rd by Adam Bowie. Used under licence

Socialthing! on the iPhone
How splendid. Hope I get more invites soon; it’s a really nice app.

New Virgin Radio homepage coming soon
Hidden in this blog posting, news that a new (and naturally 'beta') homepage comes this week from my old friends at Virgin. Looking forward to seeing it.

The LSE's Freetard fiasco - when creator-haters flock together
Of course, this is in The Register, and therefore is probably bollocks. But a great writeup of a typical music copyright meeting. [via John Naughton].

User experience at Google
Suppose I'd better watch this…

Stalkerfeed
My 'stalkerfeed', now I guess known as a friendfeed. Oh well, I missed another web meme. Anyway, this now contains output from 'wordie', my new favourite website.

Wordie
What a splendiferous site. "Like Flickr, but without the photos", it calls itself. Which is about right. There's nothing crapulent about this site; indeed, it’s quite cremulent. I've created two lists, linked from my homepage.

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from March 21st to March 24th. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

A view of a power plant in Houston, taken on February 20th. Photo: Louis Vest. Used under licence.

Google Calendar on your website using PHP and stuff
If you use my code for this, you might like to note that there are quite a few contributed bugfixes, which fix, er, some bugs.

Has digital radio had its day?
I'm quoted in this piece. Executive summary: "no".

The BBC iPlayer and buzz monitoring in action
Nixon McInnes decides that I might know what I'm doing, and that "the BBC still kick ass", which is very nice of him. Must get back to the kicking.

Is Radio Suffering From Too Little Research?
Self-serving post from Edison Media Research. Yes, research is good - but as Henry Ford said, "if I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse".

Adrian Fitch's spring training
The Fitchster uses one of my photographs, and concerningly writes about 'going hard', but it turns out it's about cycling.

Another of my photos
… a rather old manual montage, originally shot on film would you believe, used in this blog posting

Intempo Rebel Kills Radio DJs (Gizmodo UK)
"A music sampling system that, once tuned into an FM station, records the 40 most played tracks and then edits out the DJ chatter and the ads." Nurse? The copyright!

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from February 15th to February 23rd. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

Uploaded on 13 February 2008, this is a viewing platform in the war museum in Salford Quays. Photo by Mike Willshaw. Used under licence.

All this online sharing has to stop
It's ruining the motor mechanic industry. (No, really)

Flickr CC search
A quick page whipped up to help me find nice pictures for this blog - it searches all Flickr CC images together (which the Flickr UI won’t let me do).

Aussies Head to SXSW
A website using one of my photos, albeit only credited in the ALT tag (which isn’t cricket, by the way).

Oceanworld Manly
Another spotting of one of my photographs, complete with a link to my own website. How splendid.

Living on Earth: Swedish Body Heat
Sounds exciting, but actually it’s a radio feature about trains, aired on WBUR and other stations. They used one of my photographs to illustrate it on the web. Cool.

When statistics speak volumes
Good piece by Paul Smith on the press releases radio stations send out on figures day. Paul still owes me a fiver, by the way.

MMS For O2 iPhone
Just the thing I was looking for. Brilliant - now I can receive MMS on the iPhone. (Bizarre that it doesn’t support it…)

Twitter on the iPhone: Hahlo
While I’m on an iPhone theme, I use this for Twitter (it’s much prettier than it looks on this page). For this, and for the MMS thing, I’ve donated.

Keeping the conversation going
Nic Price activates a magic Wordpress plugin. So have I. Good idea.

Do We Have The Backup?
‘how it can be legitimate for a government to build roads but not to lay fibre is a mystery to me, and one that deserves to be questioned.’ Good point.

Big name #4
Hello, ladies. Contacting me has never been easier. Etc.

What HD-2s Don’t Stream And Should?
A rant about streaming. But included in this is interesting: WRXK’s HD2 channel (a new one only for HD radios) is entirely themed around their breakfast presenter. Neat idea. (Course, I was behind the ‘Virgin Radio Party Classics’ channel on Sky, voiced by Suggs.)

Interactivity: A lost opportunity for your station?
Some “isn’t the US behind the rest of us” type thoughts from Mark Ramsey; but some useful and interesting figures he quotes.

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from January 26th to February 14th. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

Photo uploaded on January 26th, by Ibrahim Iujaz. Used under licence.

What HD-2s Don’t Stream And Should?
A rant about streaming. But included in this is interesting: WRXK’s HD2 channel (a new one only for HD radios) is entirely themed around their breakfast presenter. Neat idea.

Interactivity: A lost opportunity for your station?
Some ‘isn’t the US behind us all’ type thoughts from Mark Ramsey; but some useful and interesting figures he quotes.

Tin-Pan Dead End Alley
Adam makes a splendid (and short) point.

The trouble with trust
A rather cogent and interesting speech from BBC DG Mark Thompson; not self-flagellating, but rather, opening issues wider than just “trust in the media”. An interesting read.

Core - A DAB Digital Radio Paradox
“In the UK at least, the hard times for digital are now. There needs to be a wholesale change in the infrastructure cost of digital to ensure its short-term survival and to put it on a sensible economic footing for the future.” Crikey.

A few days ago, I posted the news that Pandora is closing in the UK. Part of the reasons given were…

Both the PPL (which represents the record labels) and the MCPS/PRS Alliance (which represents music publishers) have demanded per track performance minima rates which are far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate

Well, so Pandora say. But they’re just saying that, aren’t they… of course they’ll claim the figures are “far too high”. That’s part of standard negotiation. Right?

Well, let’s do a little maths.

(## Updated, following Paul Brown’s comment lower down // and linked to MCPS/PRS).

Paidcontent.co.uk reports that MCPS/PRS was asking for 0.085p per song per listener - which also appears on this PDF file on the MCPS/PRS website. PPL, in a press release about the Pandora closure, says they would charge 0.0561p 0.0773p per song per listener (the interactive radio rate). Pandora plays around 15 songs per hour.

MCPS/PRS: 15 x 0.085p = 1.275p per listener, per hour
+ PPL: 15 x 0.0773p = 1.159p per listener, per hour
Total music rights payments: 2.434p per listener, per hour.

Now, consider this.

The latest figures from the UK’s Radio Advertising Bureau says that the commercial radio sector as a whole brought in £593m in 2007. The latest RAJAR figures show that commercial radio is listened-to for 441m total hours every week, or alternatively 23,018m total hours a year.

So… 23,018m total hours brings in £593m. Divide one by the other, and we find that, as a total industry average, commercial radio makes 2.57p per listener, per hour. And the revenue figures also include non-radio activity, like websites.

Let’s reiterate:
- The entire commercial radio industry in the UK, after 35 years experience and with 31 million weekly listeners, far outstripping even Google’s online reach, makes 2.57p per listener, per hour.
- For online radio, the UK music industry want rates that are 2.434p per listener, per hour.

Pandora would still have to pay their staff and their streaming costs; but once the music industry have taken 94% of their revenue, it’s a bit hard to understand where they’d find the money…

So, in short, it would clearly appear that these rates really are “far too high to allow ad supported radio to operate”.

Photo: Rossina Bossio Bossa. Used under licence. These are my personal views, and not those of the BBC.