Thought this was worth a mention. I’m a huge fan of the concept, and recommend to all my students that if they make radio programmes, they should submit them for peer review and possible broadcast here on PRX.org

One of the problems we face when talking about what’s happening to radio in the digital environment is the lack of clarity about what we mean when we say ‘radio’.

The trouble is, it has come to mean so many different things over the course of its history as a medium.

A radio is a device that sits on the kitchen bench and allows us to listen to things we call programmes. Radio is a series of professional practices that involve writing, producing, interviewing, and generally doing things that we call ‘broadcasting’. Radio is the means by which these programmes are transmitted – via ‘radio waves’. And radio is a series of institutional forms shaped by regulation and business practice.

Please explain
So when we talk about new strategies for radio, it’s important to be clear about which bit we mean. And that may sound like an exercise in semantics – but semantics are important, lest we get lost in a mire of pointless phrases like ‘podcasting is a new type of radio’ (something I hear a lot, but which is entirely devoid of meaning).

I once presented a conference paper, deliberately provocatively entitled ‘There’s No Such Thing As Internet Radio’, which made the point by talking about the things we think of as essential characteristics of radio: it’s time-bound, linear, secondary, geographically defined, etc. — and comparing those things to what we think of as the essential characteristics of the internet. That is, the opposite of all of those things.

The point is that when developing strategies for radio (whatever, in fact, that may be) it pays to be entirely deliberate about what we mean, what we are trying to achieve – and which bit of radio we happen to be talking about.

Because without that very simple and obvious bit of clarity, it’s very easy to descend into vague, utopian (or dystopian) nonsense that is little better than guesswork and technobabble.

Over the past 6 months or so, I’ve been involved in a research project with the BBC. We’ve been looking at what listeners and fans do online. The project investigated notions of interactivity; it looked at the ways in which fans of specific presenters express their fandom online; it examined the things that fans of radio soap The Archers do in order to connect and discuss their favourite show; and my bit, with Professor Tim Wall, was about specialist music online.

Specifically, we looked at three things:

1) What do specialist music fans do online?
2) What does the BBC do for specialist music fans?
3) How do BBC staff think about specialist music provision?

The findings, I think, are quite interesting – and a summary of the project is being published on the BBC Radio Labs blog.

But one of the things I found most interesting was the notion of ‘orientations’ that we noticed among BBC staffers. There were clearly people who thought about the online world as a central part of what they did, and others for whom the broadcast was the thing – and anything that the radio station did online was simply there to extend and reinforce the brand.

Now, these orientations are not polar opposites, and lots of people had a mix of both orientations, but people were predominantly facing one way or another. And in fact, we considered both of those to represent missed opportunities.

Now, of course, what the BBC does for specialist music, it does so for reasons of public service, and we go into some detail on that in our report. But it got me thinking about radio personnel in general, and the ways in which they think about the online environment.

If you’re the kind of music radio person with a broadcast orientation, all the internet is to you is a bigger transmitter. Or it’s a kind of a trap that you lay out there in the world, and when people stumble into it, you can grab them and pull them in to your broadcast programming.

If you have more of an online orientation, you may consider the medium on its own terms, but may not be making the most of the music programming which, if your station is doing anything right, is where all the real action is.

The trick is to step outside both of those frames and consider your station as a media organisation in a broader sense.

You are particularly good at media that uses sound – music, speech and effects – but a holistic view of your organisation as ‘media in general’ encapsulates both the online experience and the broadcast one, so that these can work together with a common goal in mind.

In the case of the BBC, it’s specialist music for public service. In your case, it might be music and entertainment for commercial purposes. Or information and debate for community purposes. Either way, the cognitive step outside the two orientations into a wider media perspective allows you to think about broadcasting and the internet, radio and new media, as part of one coherent thing.

And when you begin to do that, a lot of the problems facing radio in the 21st century begin to melt away, and a lot of really interesting opportunities emerge. I’ll be talking more about that idea here on New Radio Strategies in the coming months.

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But the new bosses appear to be – bloggers? Not only that – but bosses that give presentations at the Skype offices and then upload them to Slideshare. Don’t they realise they’re running an old media firm and that they’re not supposed to understand – let alone be ahead of the curve on – this whole interweb thing?

Still stranger, these are not just bosses posing as bloggers for the sake of appearing hip. They actually say things to their staff like:

We know some of you write blogs – we enjoy reading them… We want to reassure you all that you can speak your minds about what’s going on. We’re serious when we say we want your input, and you don’t have anything to fear about expressing doubts or concerns

And what is One Golden Square anyway? Just a blog? A street address (my London geography knowledge is near nil, other than the odd round of Mornington Crescent)? A hint at the new name for the radio station?

The team: Donnach (silent ‘ch’), Clive and Adrian are Absolute Radio – essentially a consultancy firm who have been given the reins of one of the UK’s leading commercial radio brands. And their mission, as they see it, is to remind people how much they’ve always loved it.

The weird thing (for me, anyway) is the chatty, approachable, ‘call me Donna’ feel to the blog. It’s immensely encouraging and great to see this sort of open, communicative, new-era thinking applied to station management.

Commercial radio will no doubt find it very confusing. And, for the moment, so do I. But regardless of what will end up coming out of the speakers, I think I like this new station.

I suspect that this will only work in the UK – but I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on it.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about social media over the past couple of months. So much so, that I’ve almost had no time for blogging. Social media’s the term now given to what was for a time known as ‘interactive media’ – until we all figured out that it wasn’t interactive in the sense of being able to actually affect the outcome of the content.

I attended a blogging conference in Chicago last week, and had a lot of discussions about this very issue, and at every opportunity, tried out the idea of radio as a social network for music fandom. I think there’s good work to be done here.

Chris Brogan brought up (in passing) the topic of music in social network sites, and the ways in which social networking needs to specialise in order to develop. It’s no good just being able to log on, make friends and build a profile anymore. Social engagement is a feature, no longer a destination.

Network radio – as in ’social’
And it occurred to me that what he was really talking about was an opportunity for radio.

Music Radio stations are, at least potentially, pre-existing music communities. People have self-selected into groups organised around a brand. The role of that brand, looked at from a social perspective, is to reinforce certain cultural values, reflect musical taste, and (most importantly) act as an source of opinion leadership.

That, I think, is where much music radio currently falls down. And I think this is where new strategies could come into play to help re-think music radio. Reflecting musical taste is prioritised, and making the most of the opinion leaders is downplayed because of what are now quite dated philosophies of music programming.

Not just a jukebox
Because emergent technologies increasingly allow for radio to act as a many-to-many medium, rather than just as a one-to-many medium, there is the opportunity for radio stations to draw upon the wisdom of the crowd and to reward and incentivise music taste-making. And this is an area in which radio has not already been beaten out by internet music servces. Because I think most online music services who cast themselves as ‘the new radio’ miss this one very important point:

It’s not just a jukebox – it’s a very human way of ordering, presenting and making sense of musical cultures. One that understands human routines, changing moods and preferences, why you might want to listen to something at night that you wouldn’t want to listen to during the day… and so on.

And likewise, I think there’s scope for radio to draw on the power of the community to generate and present metadata about the music that allows fans to make connections, develop new ways of engaging with the station output, and contributing more to the informational content about the music than simply “that was… this is… I’m… the time is… and you’re listening to…”

I’d be really interested in your thoughts about the ways in which this idea of community built around a station can be fostered – because I think this is one of the keys to the ongoing success of music radio.

I was curious – and skeptical about the legality – so I twittered my friend Gabe who was in the audience. Gabe missed the chance to ask a question during the session, but took the guy aside afterwards and, using his mobile phone, did a live video interview, with me asking the questions in the text chat window.

I’m not convinced by the service, but I’m well impressed by the technology that allowed us to do this. Clever stuff.

Nothing kills a technology faster than a format war. HD-DVD, if you haven’t heard, is over before it has even begun. Nobody owns mini-disk players anymore. Consumer DAT is a joke. They’ve all gone the way of the Betamax video cassette: that is to say, there are some commercial uses for these devices, but they are hardly mainstream consumer technologies.

In digital radio, decisions about formats are being made – not by the consumer, but by the nation-state. America has different digital radio to Britain, for instance. The Japanese and the French have their own ideas.

In my home country of New Zealand, the debate is still raging as to which format to choose for DAB. But here in my adopted home of England, I enjoy digital radio services that allow me to hear some programming that I would otherwise not be able to hear. Not because I can’t get those programmes without a DAB radio – I listen to 6Music online, actually – but because the only reason those programmes exist is because there was a platform for them to exist on.

My favourite music radio station is – in a sense – just a mechanism to encourage people to migrate to a digital platform. And yet, that’s not the digital platform on which I listen to that station. I suspect I’m not alone in that.

Of course, HD Radio is a non-starter as far as encouraging new and exciting programming is concerned. The same frequencies are used by the same incumbents, and the same fare is dished up through slightly more expensive and shinier-sounding technologies.

That same Phil Collins track will sound slightly closer to the sound of a CD of Phil Collins than to a terrestrial broadcast of that CD – but it’ll still, sadly, be Phil Collins. After the break… Dire Straits.

But these – and even, I suspect, satellite radio – feel like an interim technology. Because nothing breaks a format war faster than a universal enabling technology. Say… like the internet.

Imagine if you could pick up the internet at high quality bitrates on portable, personal devices without connecting via modems, cables and dial-up infrastructures.

Ubiquitous wi-fi you say? Just around the corner? Portable wi-fi devices capable of tuning into any streaming service without reference to the geography of that signal’s point of origin?

Is it, in fact, possible that New Zealand – being the last developed country on the face of the planet to even formulate coherent digital radio policy – might have been right to drag its feet over a format decision for DAB and leapfrog over these interim technologies altogether?

Oh no… wait. Now they’re spending money on infrastructure. When it comes to broadcasting, it’s never too late to make a mistake.