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Category: Radio

  • Radio Festival 2013 Day 1 – TechCon

    Introductory Note: I’m writing these notes during this year’s Radio Festival. There will probably be typos and other errors. I’ll try to correct them as I go along. And with any luck, some of this might end up on the Radio Academy website! First up – TechCon! After a typically excellent introduction from Orion’s David…

  • LBC at Forty – Memories

    Happy Birthday to LBC which is forty years old, and was the first – legal – commercial radio station in the UK, launching on 8th October 1973 just a few days ahead of Capital Radio and Radio Clyde. I’m not going to write a history about it here, because others will do that, and they’ll…

  • Ministry of Sound v Spotify – What Does This Mean For Radio?

    I find the story of Ministry of Sound taking legal action against Spotify absolutely fascinating, and potentially troubling, as it potentially opens up many cans of worms. As I understand it, it goes something like this. Ministry of Sound has a very profitable business releasing compilation albums. They licence tracks from various labels which they…

  • The Drowned Man

    In recent years there has been something of an explosion in immersive experiences. Although these events always sound to me like something I’d probably like, I’ve been quite slow in actually getting involved. Up until now, the closest I’ve got is probably Secret Cinema. I went to one of their earlier productions – Funny Face…

  • RAJAR Q2 2013

    Yesterday, the DCMS finally got around to publishing something that became neither a white paper, nor a green paper, but instead Connectivity, Content and Consumers: Britain’s Digital Platform for Growth – a policy statement that bundled a lot of things together. Importantly for radio, it reinforced the Government’s commitment to make an in-principle decision on…

  • Absolute Radio to be Acquired by Bauer Media

    Somehow Storify seemed like the appropriate vehicle for this! And it also neatly gets me out of trying to analyse the future of the business that I’ve worked at for nearly 17 years, especially when it mightn’t be appropriate. [View the story “Bauer Media to Acquire Absolute Radio” on Storify] Yes, this will affect me.…

  • Reclaiming Radio

    For months now, there’s been a document kicking around in my Google Drive entitled – as this blog is – “Reclaiming Radio”. It was effectively common knowledge that Apple was working towards some kind of streaming music offering, and earlier this week, having concluded a deal with the third and final major record label, they…

  • Radio Downloads Added to iPlayer

    The BBC has announced that from 2014, listeners will be able to download radio programmes via the various iPlayer mobile and desktop apps to catch up with offline. As with TV, there’ll be a 7 day catch-up window. In some respects, it’s really strange that it has taken this long to get. You’d imagine that…

  • CNN Pieces

    Over the weekend, CNN published an interesting US-focused series entitled “The future of music radio” that looked at the current state of play in US music radio. While the US is very different market to the UK, it would be very complacent of the UK radio industry to completely write off what’s happening there. Do…

  • RAJAR Q1 2013 – London

    I’ve updated the previous entry, but I thought it was worth giving London an entry of its own because not only have I added back a Motion Chart of the London marketplace, but there’s significantly more data underlying it than I’ve managed for the national chart. Now you can examine the marketplace in lots of…

  • RAJAR Q1 2013

    It has been a big radio week already with the Sony Radio Academy Awards on Monday. And next week will be big with the final Competition Commission ruling on its attempted takeover of GMG’s radio assets. But let’s look at the latest RAJAR which is released today. At first glance this quarter might look less…

  • Sony Radio Academy Award Winners 2013

    So last night in a hot and sweaty room where the tables were just that bit too close together, this year’s Sony Awards were handed out. Absolute Radio did rather well, and I suspect that there may be a few sore heads around the station today. Most of the press seems to be leading on…

  • Sony Radio Academy Awards – A Look Back

    [UPDATE: Many of the charts on this page are now broken. Please see the 2014 updated version of this page with much more detail.] The Sony Radio Academy Awards are upon us in a week or so’s time. But if you want to get a broader view of who has won what over the years…