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.)

On February 11th, something rather unusual happened.

A bunch of people who we might call ‘competitors’ - coders and clever people from across the commercial radio industry - came into Broadcasting House and met some of my team.

Under a stern portrait of Lord Reith in the wood-panelled Council Chamber, lots of mostly scruffy people wearing t-shirts talked about tagging and new ways of visualising audio. We discussed Musicbrainz IDs and other interesting things. Well, interesting to us. And the plan was to work together. Which we did, nicking off to the pub at 4.00pm to continue working together. (The beers weren’t on the licence-fee.)

The phrase you’re looking for (which I nicked off Nick Piggott) is “agree on technology, compete on content”. Sharing technological understanding is one of the things I believe that public service broadcasting should be doing - just as we worked with the rest of the industry to invent DAB Digital Radio, so we should work with the rest of the industry around how we describe music tracks, programmes, and other broadcast ephemera - for all of our benefit. Wouldn’t it enrich the UK broadcasting landscape if we could all describe things in the same way to enable a third party, or even one of us, to say “You liked this programme on BBC 6 music - so you ought to like this programme on XFM“?

It’s hopefully going to be one of the founding thoughts behind the Radio Academy’s “Radio at the Edge” conference in November this year - a conference where this time around I’d like to not just talk about stuff together but make it, too.

If you’ve any ideas what else we should be doing at Radio at the Edge this year - or even who should be on the committee to help - then I’d be interested in your comments (both private and public).

Photo: Tim Williams. Used under licence.

In late November 2007, I was proud to chair Radio at The Edge, a really thought-provoking day around what new technology brings to radio.

As a scene-setter for a great panel session ably produced by one of my colleagues Alan Phillips, the above video was played - which demonstrates the tremendous strides we’ve made in the UK. Whether it’s as simple as “now-playing” information, click-to-buy, or some really interesting prototypes that the BBC has been working on in terms of visualising radio, this is a great video to watch.

As other radio commentators repeatedly say, radio must remain relevant to the audience of today and tomorrow. As a demonstration of the benefits of adding more information to radio broadcasting, it couldn’t be clearer. When radio and new platforms collide, great things happen. Watch it, share this with others, and enjoy.

My thanks, particularly, to Michael Gray, who’s Interactive Platform Producer in BBC Audio & Music Interactive’s Distribution Technologies team, for his excellent work; and I’m particularly pleased that this video shows off the strides that all the radio industry has made in the UK - especially my old team’s work at Virgin, the team at Unique Interactive, and GCap’s XFM.

UPDATE
As a piece of clarification for my overseas visitors, since this blog post is already getting plenty of hammer, it’s worth pointing out what are simply “ideas” right now, and what is launched:
- Now-playing info: live now on almost all DAB radio stations. (5m+ sets in the UK)
- Buy the songs you hear - Cliq live now on seven commercial radio brands
- BBC Radio 1’s TV visualisation: a prototype; a simpler version is live now on the Radio 1 website
- Listen-again: live now on all BBC and some commercial station websites
- Rewind live radio: available on a number of DAB sets now
- Record radio: available on a number of DAB sets now
- Radio electronic programme guide: live now on many stations; available on a number of DAB sets now
- Watch live sessions: live now on most major radio station websites
- Podcasts: live now on most major radio station websites
- DAB Digital Radio iPod plugin: two different makes instore now
- Downloadable videos: from some commercial radio stations
- Texting radio stations: live now on all stations
- Picture-messaging radio stations: live now on many stations
… i.e. everything you see is actually launched, and live. These aren’t purely ideas.

(I’ve posted this on my own blog without getting copyright clearances for the commercial music involved. I’d like to claim it’s fair use; but that’s why I’m a little concerned about sticking this into an official BBC Radio blog. I’m not posting this on behalf of the BBC, so if you’re Billy Idol and you’d rather I removed this, please do get in touch.)

If you missed the Radio At The Edge conference recently, here’s the podcast.

Download it here. It’s an interesting listen, including some decent insights from the guest speakers. And no, I’ve no idea - no idea at all - why I sound like I’m about 12 on this podcast. Sorry. But if you ever need a slightly nervous-sounding young boy on a podcast, you know where to come.

Photo: Hidde de Vries. Used under licence

Excellent conference yesterday, apart from the chairman who was a bit flippant and got the entire audience to slap their wrists at one point, if you can believe it. ;)

Hugely enjoyable. Thank you to all concerned.

If you missed it - panic not. Thanks to the lovely people at Blue Barracuda, you’ll be able to listen to a splendid podcast of the event shortly, including interviews with all the main presenters involved.

If you can cope with the rubbish person presenting it (who sounds as if he’s not been behind a microphone since 2000), come back here later for the link and possibly even some embedded audio.