I don’t know if you know about WFUV. Based in New York, at Fordham University in the Bronx, ‘FUV is a college station that just happens to kick serious butt in New York City. Why? because they offer an individual voice in a stultifying conservative market. It’s ironic that a town as vibrant and stimulating as New York should produce such formulaic radio, but that is radio market economics these days. WFUV spotted a gap and charged right through. Now, though, there’s another reason to cheer them on, beyond their inventive programming, impressive audience figures and invaluable training and development work.

WFUV have launched a new internet-only service – the alternate side - with a statement of intent that cheers me enormously: ‘New Music. New York. Now.’ This is a public radio service, and the station is supported by the New York State Music Fund. That said, what we now have is a New York-based station that is proud to reflect and champion musical activity in its own community. And because it’s from New York, I’m hearing a slew of fiery attitude-laden inventive new stuff. I’m thrilled. Of course, local radio playing local music is not a novel idea, but in truth, its implementation is tragically rare.

Of course, The Alternate Side is by no means the first such operation on the net. There are hundreds of interesting and alternative radio streams to discover. A sterling local initiative in my neck of the woods is the excellent Rhubarb Radio. But to see something as intelligently assembled and as engaging as The Alternative Side emerge in an area which is a hotbed of creativity, but where mainstream radio has long since abandoned any ideas of localness and adventurousness… just gladdens my heart. I’m excited. Maybe others will be too.

Here’s a little local story. I spent a LARGE chunk of my working life, just under 20 years, working for BRMB, the first commercial station in Birmingham, in the UK. I joined them 35 years ago, pre-launch, as a baby rock jock, and left as Head of Music and Research, having done pretty much everything there was to do in old-style commercial radio.

News came out last month that their current owners, Global, are selling them off, along with three other stations in the West Midlands. This lets Global off the anti-competition hook, so they can carry on in the much more lucrative London market with, er, Capital, LBC, Heart, Choice, Classic FM and several other AM and digital brands. Go figure.

I’m not really concerned with London radio right now. It’s like New York: the lack of diversity and interesting programming is striking, and of course it’s all down to hyper-competition and the perceptions of the executives who make the programming and marketing decisions. But I still have have stupidly fond memories of the old station where I plied much of my trade, back in the last century.

For me, there are two big questions hanging over BRMB (and Mercia, Beacon and Wyvern):

Question one: given that we are now in a recession, and that, in the UK, radio advertising suffers first and worst when they cut the ad budgets, is there still a shiny future for ‘traditional’ local radio when it is cut adrift from a well funded network? Remember that these stations were all launched as full-service stations, and all those old-time features have been ruthlessly stripped away as competition piled in from Networks and the Internet.

Question two: That old-fashioned appeal is fondly remembered by many who listened twenty and thirty years ago. It was that same old-fashioned approach that let me experiment as a Rock DJ, with a degree of freedom inconceivable by today’s standards. I went on to record many of the region’s finest bands, and in so doing built up frankly extraordinary listening figures, again, by today’s standards. But is this kind of approach remotely cost-effective, appealing though it may seem? In short, have we seen the best, and maybe last, of old-school radio?

I do know that it’s possible to do great things really cheaply, and that is encouraging. Modern kit means it now costs less to run a business and far less to cover some of the radio basics – doing the accounts, keeping in touch with staff, building running orders, assembling a library, scheduling advertising, setting up promotions via email and the web, and so on. But that’s only part of the picture.

Are these old businesses worth paying good money for? Is it worth breathing life into them anew, once all emotion has been put aside? You tell me. I’d love to see it done the right way. But I wonder how many people share my opinions.

That makes Pandora’s new app the third most successful in the iPhoneverse. Pandora can sadly not now be received in the UK because of our obscenely restrictive copyright restrictions, and I truly regret not being able to listen to them any more. They are, for me, the best webstreamers by far. The iPhone hookup got them 180,000 new users in three days. They claim a new user every two seconds. This is BIG stuff.

So what do we take from this? I think we are finally seeing another conjunction of new technology, audience, demographics and circumstance. You need ease of use; you need attractive programming; you need affordability; and you need someone to spot the gap and fill it. This is uncannily similar to events in the 50s when Rock and Roll and Top 40 Radio came together.

This may be a huge step forward. I hope so; Pandora deserve it. I still won’t call it radio, though. In my luddite book, radio still involves someone communicating with you. I’m sure Pandora have an adorable detailed and fantastically well-connected database, the fruit of their very savvy staff. I’d kill to be able to play around with it. But I can’t relate to databases. I still want to hear from real people. But if I was living permanently in the US, Pandora’s app would be enough to make me get an iPhone.

It was a nice night. The current crew are pleasant, clear-headed, and there seems to be a lot of talent. I was impressed by how many are already building paths into the industry. I approve heartily, but then I would, because that’s what I did too.

College radio has, of course, been feeding mainstream broadcasters for some time. My first paid job was at a US station which regularly hired DJs from the local college stations. Of the six ancients at the URY dinner, two, me included, are still in the industry. And among the younger alumni who attended, there was an impressive sprinkling of industry-specific email addreses. That’s not too shabby for what is, after all, a volunteer radio station. A station, moreover, that has developed its own sequencing software for overnight automation.

It strikes me that we may be missing a trick or two. College Radio is there for fun. It has has absolutely no statutory obligation to be a training ground. But URY and its counterparts are clearly functioning exactly this way. These stations run all the time (well, during term time), broadcasting online or with very restricted coverage, only venturing out on RSLs once in a while. To join in calls for time and commitment. Like others, I only bailed out in my final year to concentrate on actually getting a degree. Often it also calls for volunteers’ money, like many student organisations. But that sort of commitment is exactly what most real-world stations are looking for.

So here’s a thought. Many Universities run Media Training courses. They tend to go on air with short term restricted service licenses – maybe two weeks each year. But across the campus, there are these kids doing radio for love, 24/7… at least during term time. Maybe it’s time for the teaching wings and the student radio stations to come together? Nowhere else will there be such a convergence of disciplines and interests.

What Park says is not at all dissimilar from the sentiments I posted here a few weeks back. There is a lot of talent to be celebrated. There is even more waiting to be developed, if stations are prepared to take the time to do it. And there is absolutely nothing the BBC can do against a well-constructed Indie station that is rooted in its community, that knows the issues and the talent on its patch.

So, two cheers for Park’s rallying call; he’s not wrong. I’ll make it two and a half if Global starts sourcing its national talent from its local stations, and three if Global frees up (and then supports) its local stations to actually be local again.

Seems to me that in the US, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Italy, or anywhere in southern Europe, really, all you have to do is swing a mic around and you’ll hit someone who sounds great on the air. Back in England, we burden ourselves, with honourable exceptions, with ridiculous contrived styles. I’d love to hear a contemporary Brit Broadcaster who could deliver the mix of informality, rhythm, poise and gravitas of an Alastair Cooke or a Garrison Keillor. I’d love to see if that classic French affable wordy formal/informal radio style could translate to English. I have my doubts…

A while back, I mused about what we mean by radio, which sort of centered on communication between broadcaster and audience. And on that tip, I don’t feel I am being communicated with when I hear a hideously exaggerated local accent from someone who really doesn’t talk like that in real life. And I don’t feel I am being communicated with when I hear the same generic voice (butch, male, faintly pompous and shouty) doing the idents on a dozen automated digital stations.

That’s why I liked what I heard on Radio Campus 93.3. That gallic style – rich and relaxed – hasn’t changed in decades, and it fits well. Simple, inviting, unapologetic and direct does it for me. But, as with the last interesting new station I’ve come across (vocalo, out of Chicago), content is king and the style of the station flows from there.

Often, Songs can just up and change audience on us without our really realising it. It can take years, but the appeal of a Song never ever stays still. A glorious example of this was highlighted at a London conference last week. Here’s a link from the Guardian’s gossip column to illustrate. It cattily paints GCap chief exec Fru Hazlitt in a bad light, which is slightly unfair. The gist of the story is that Hazlitt mentioned Abba’s ‘Dancing Queen’ as her favourite song. No big. But she was then followed by a speaker who demonstrated how research had this same song down as an all time audience turkey. The article failed to mention a few other facts, chief among which was that this was with a specific set of radio listeners in the US, and that this was live monitoring software. I must declare an interest here, by the way – the speaker was Philippe Generali, who heads up RCS, for whom I do a lot of work, and the research interpretation software he was demonstrating is, in my view, pretty damn powerful stuff.

Clever software apart, here is my point: ‘Dancing Queen’ has been through several lives, and it hasn’t stopped yet. And it’s got almost nothing to do with early adopters who bought the records, and almost everything to do with how the song has been used since then. From its first pure pop success, when it was comprehensively dismissed by music purists, though grudging acceptance for its pop craftsmanship, through reinvention as a camp classic with huge gay appeal, and exposure to new audiences through movies like ‘Muriel’s Wedding’ and the ‘Mamma Mia’ musical, through relentless airplay on Gold stations the world over… the song has changed audiences. Several times.

Many boomers who heard it over and over now can’t stand it; post-boomers, like Hazlitt, still love it; kids love it because it is ironic cheesy pop… and the listeners to a particular radio station in the US are pretty damn tired of it.

Like I said, several audiences. It’s up to us to work out who loves it, who hates it, and why. And after that, when to use it, and in what context. I’ll bet it sounds great on an all-Abba channel. Or a mid-70s pop channel.
It all depends on the context. Get that right, and you’ve cracked it.

But…. it really doesn’t have to be this way. And I’d really like to see the Indies give the BBC a serious run for their money; we’d all benefit. It’s by no means a fair fight, but I really think the Indies have it all to play for – with just a few teeny hurdles to overcome.

Let’s break it down… What has the BBC got that the Indies haven’t? Well… quite a lot, actually. Big name talents, backed by splendid production teams. Fat production budgets, even in these straightened times (and if you think they are generous now, you should have seen them back in the day). Great strategic thinking most of the time. Sensational cross-platform promotion. One hell of a brand. Way fewer format restrictions. Cradle to grave programming offers. Generous advertising budgets (at the movies this month, Radio 1 was in HEAVY rotation). I could go on.

And what have the Indies got that the Beeb hasn’t? BBC readers can stop sniggering; this is a serious question. The answers are diffuse; they vary from group to group and town to town. But even with no money and a looming recession, there is quite a lot to play for and exploit, in a good way. Here goes:

Localness: this is a terrific USP. If you have hot local bands, get them on the air before Radio 1 does. I’ve posted on this, here, here and here. It’s not the be all and end all, but it can really help.

Fresh talent: the indies are where many of us started out. There’s a stream of people at the start of their careers who will run through brick walls to do great things if they are allowed. How about cutting them loose on some off-peak shows?

Great Ideas come for free, you know. You just got to have them. And maybe some guts and imagination and humility.

Realise that you can do it better. Or, do what you are uniquely equipped to do, better than what opposition. Go looking for something, anything, that engages your audience. They’ll thank you for it.

Speed and agility. Indie output is local – well some of it still is – so the Indies can mix it up at speed. That’s a huge asset. You don’t need a committee in Broadcasting House. Just a green light from the PD.

I could go on, but I want to keep this short and to the point. Anyone care to add to the list?

Breaking the output down to work out how they put it together seems to go like this: lots of short, produced speech items, concise studio links, urban music never more than a few minutes way. All local people and local issues, with sympathetic production linked by comfortably confident presenters. To start I was less than impressed with the output – neither Jamiroquai nor Michael Jackson paedo gags would be my first choice – but some punchy social issue audio drama, with live studio commentary and discussion, tightly produced, picked up the pace. And now I don’t want to switch off, because it’s interesting, and I have no idea what’s coming next, and it’s doing what I want my radio to do: painting a picture.

Over on the website, there are loads of archived podcasts – with maybe not quite enough context – and the whole thing looks not unlike a Myspace page, full of graphics and user input. This is probably not the first attempt to mix up web 2.0 with radio stream; clearly they have given it a LOT of thought, and it shows. It’s web first, radio second: the stream idents the website, not the FM frequency.

If this is the new face of public radio in the US – where, according to the New York Times, listenership is up – then there’s grounds for some serious optimism. As long as they’re hitting their audience, not just old hippie liberals from the UK like me, that is. At least they’re not playing the same Amy Winehouse material everyone else is playing. Is this the future of community radio? I bloody well hope so.

So far so good. Trouble was, the track was treated and compressed, probably for MP3 and the transmission chain. This did not do the song any favours. That striking bassline was WAY up, the middle and top was sort of up, but a lot of the rest was… just hoovered back into the mix. Yuk.

So the same thing that brought Cogbill’s work to the fore damaged the rest of the mix. I’m all for digital storage, so we can have huge libraries to use as brilliant programming resources (see this interesting post from Billy Sabatini). But aren’t we in danger of damaging prime gold repertoire by crunching stuff down so insensitively? This is a huge problem with 60s and 70s material, which was often recorded live or near-live, with a wholly different approach to balancing and mixing. This stuff was built to jump out of tiny transistor radio speakers. Now, it’s altered by digitisation and remastering for radio, and crushed almost beyond recognition to fit on our Ipods and our databases. It’s not so much a technical issue as a cultural issue. To store our libraries in the digital world, we reprocess, remaster, spindle, fold, and mutilate our music. We commoditise and devalue it. We are in real danger of ignoring what the producers, artists and musicians were trying to do. Maybe that doesn’t matter to some stations, but it matters to old farts like me who remember the stuff from the first time around.

There’s good and bad here. I don’t have a solution. I’d just like to hear a better way of processing classic hits from 30, 40 or 50 years ago.

Hell of a bassline though…