Category: Radio

Today is the 20th anniversary of Virgin Radio. It launched at 12.15pm on Friday 30th April 1993 with Richard Branson joining Russ and Jono at the Virgin Megastore in Manchester. But Richard Skinner was back in the studio and played in the first track – a specially recorded version of Born To Be Wild by…

In 1973, commercial radio launched with LBC, Capital Radio and Radio Clyde all launching within weeks of one another. So this year is commerical radio’s 40th anniversary, and RadioCentre is celebrating with a Roll of Honour featuring forty names, which will be announced at this year’s Arqiva Awards in July. Initial inductions were made last…

I wrote this piece for the Onegoldensquare blog, but I thought I might as well post it here for completeness! This week, the 2013 award nominations were announced, and we’ve already mentioned in passing that we got a few. This year, there are a few new categories, and the disappearance of a few older ones.…

Bank Holidays at radio stations tend to mean the regular talent getting the day off. If it’s Christmas, then they may get a full fortnight away. Listening patterns are different at Bank Holidays. People don’t get up as early since they don’t need to get to work. They’re more likely to be traveling – seeing…

Here’s a copy of the presentation I gave to the Radio Academy’s London Branch earlier today. It was part of an evening called All About RAJARs which saw RAJAR‘s Lyndsey Ferrigan, Hallett Arendt‘s John Shorter and myself talking a bit about RAJAR. Matt Deegan was our host. Rajar radio academy – adam bowie from Adam…

I really enjoyed The Essay this week on Radio 3. Writer Andrew Martin suffers from phonophobia – a condition that makes extraneous noise particularly annoying. Cheekily called The Sound and the Fury (coming just a couple of weeks after BBC Four’s excellent and completely unrelated series on twentieth century music completed), the five essays detailed…

The first release of 2013 is actually the last data from 2012. In general, last quarter, radio listening had fallen a bit – a combination of the summer and the Olympics. Television did well, which in turn meant that radio suffered. Did listening bounce back in Q4? Yes it did. Overall, 90% of UK adults…

During the Radio Festival, I was busily writing some contemporaneous notes about what was happening at the sessions I attended. But these weren’t really a considered view – more, what struck me as interesting or worth repeating at the time I was writing them. Having had a couple of night’s sleep since then, these are…

Apologies for any typos in these notes. I’ll tidy things up later… The excellent Margherita Taylor – due to be inducted into the Radio Academy Hall of Fame this evening – is once again hosting room 2 at the Lowry in Salford. But the first session in the room was on speech radio. Colin Pattinson…

I’m writing this as we go, and will tidy up the text later. But these are my notes “live”… As David Lloyd, MCing Techcon at the Radio Festival again this year mentions, it’s been a quiet weekend in the media. The first session was about studio design, and Tim Lowther from Global talked us through…

On Monday, the great and the good of the UK radio industry, and visitors from beyond, will gather in Salford for the annual Radio Festival. If you’re going, say hi to me! But there are potentially some dark clouds on the horizon. It might be a somewhat distant horizon, but the radio industry – as…