I’ve just come back from CES, and one of the overwhelming impressions I’ve had is that screen displays get better and better every year. There are many devices with beautiful UI – but radio within them is a bit of a boring, 97.3-like affair.

Radio has to compete with visually-rich media on the same device if it isn’t to look old-fashioned and boring. But there again, we need to ensure that we get these visuals right – nothing worse than, as I see in many European countries, a few TV cameras shoved into a radio studio, so we can watch the breakfast producer picking his nose.

The BBC is trialling, this week, a visualised radio player which is allowing us to experiment with the content on these platforms. It has a number of different ‘modes’, from the inevitable live video stream to other interesting ways of dealing with listener feedback.

I’ll help myself to another super-strong coffee, and try and stave off the jet lag – while my Creative Director, Yasser Rashid, takes up the story on the BBC Radio Labs blog if you’d like to discover more.

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

Shane Brown on “Street Cred” 89.1FM, Birmingham U.K.

Tim Wall’s earlier NRS entry “Thinking through the new economics of sound broadcasting over the internet” discussed the current need for new programming ideas and fresh radio services for listeners. His posting concluded that radio’s future held “considerable possibilities for public service and community broadcasters.” Following on from this theme and in keeping with Robin Valk’s NRS comments on inspiring stations like New York’s WFUV and Digbeth’s “Rhubarb”, I thought I’d report on an innovative station, just two miles from Birmingham City University’s Radio Dept.

Aston FM 89.1 is an example of community radio at its best ( astonfm.com ). They pay their way with regular commercial breaks promoting local businesses and have managed to wrangle a reasonably powerful transmission signal. Unlike many of their tightly rotated competitors, Aston’s playlist exceeds five thousand tracks – so you get an incredibly varied sound to the station. They also provide a legal home for underground radio by sharing their frequency late at night with local “pirates”.

“Aston FM is Birmingham ’s newest local radio station, broadcasting to the whole of Birmingham from Villa Park, 24 hours a day seven days a week, on 89.1 FM and on the internet. Aston FM is the only radio station to broadcast live, all Aston Villa football matches, both home and away. Aston FM is committed to working with all the different communities in Birmingham and giving the City a radio station it can be proud of. We invite guests in for interviews to talk about what is going on in the City and actively encourage listeners to tell us what is happening in their part of Birmingham. We are also involved in training children from local schools in all aspects of radio and helping them put together their own radio shows to be played on the internet.”

As other stations move towards nationally networked content, Aston FM’s been quick to exploit their local presence. But it’s their attitude to specialist programming that really stands them apart. More specifically, the way they’ve embraced local pirate radio culture.

Just to set the scene a little… Pirate radio is common on the U.K.’s FM dial. Heavy regulations, limited access to frequencies and the increasing affordability of equipment means many young broadcasters are simply setting up their own illegal stations. It should be mentioned that unlicensed broadcasting is a criminal offence in the U.K. with a maximum sentence of two years. Convicted pirates can also expect to have their equipment confiscated and be barred from working on a legal station for five years (a long walk off the metaphorical media plank). However, as Miranda Sawyer wrote in the Observer, 2.11.08, “Ofcom research from 2007 showed that 25 percent of the entire London radio audience tunes into pirates (40 per cent of the black audience).” So they must be doing something right…

“Smart, hi-tech and inclusive, pirate stations are paving the way for the future of radio. The future of radio is the internet: the pirates have moved online in a big way. All the biggest stations have live web feeds. Combine this with mobile phone internet access and you can use your phone to tune into a London Pirate when you’re in, say, Glasgow. Then simply plug your mobile into your car radio and away you go. Pirate stations instantly move from being local to national and even worldwide.”

Sawyer’s article used this shift to online radio as an example of “DAB’s increasingly shrinking relevance” – but that’s another story for another day. Pirate radio’s current popularity and community radio’s continued growth meant the two were inevitably destined to meet.

“Street Cred” was a typical underground station until they found a safe home on Aston’s 89.1 frequency. Regular presenter DJ Hevs started out by playing sets on pirate station KRISS FM 95.3 in Birmingham, broadcasting to Walsall and the surrounding areas. However, he was raided by the authorities and prosecuted, prompting him to write on his myspace page; “I lost my music, lost my hope, and was starting to think, is this really worth it?” Thankfully, Aston FM came to the rescue and he’s now legally “smashing up the airwaves, playing the chunkiest 4 x 4 basslines” every Saturday night, 11pm until 2am.

I talked with Gary James from Aston FM about how pirate and community radio has managed to join forces and co-exist in (relative) harmony…

Can you tell us something about pirate radio in the Midlands?

Pirate radio has been going for a number of years in Birmingham. Usually young people have equipment based in tower blocks in the city, broadcasting illegally and often using someone else’s frequency.

Generally pirate radio broadcasts late at night and into the early hours of the morning. It’s a specific – very heavy black, afro-Caribbean music. Something you wouldn’t usually hear on normal radio… but it’s got a massive, massive audience. In Birmingham it’s something like 16% of the listening audience tuning into pirate radio. Sometime between, say, 10 at night and 6 in the morning.

How did your relationship with pirate radio actually begin?

When Aston FM was put together, the company that owns Aston FM approached Ofcom (Office of Communications) and said “look, there’s this massive audience out there that are crying out for this sort of music. Surely it makes sense to make it in someway legal”. So Ofcom went away and thought about it and came back and said “Ok – try it for 12 months – you get a pirate station in to broadcast legally on Aston FM’s frequency from the hours of 9 o’clock at night ‘til 2 in the morning and we’ll see how it goes…”

Obviously, because it’s a legal radio station, there had to be some form of professionalism. The naughty words had to go… no swearing. There was a limitation on some of the music, because that type of music does have some strong content which can be a bit iffy. But it has an audience and it’s after the watershed and if those people want to listen to it then that’s fine. There’s always the “on/off” button.

So it was agreed… And now Aston FM has a pirate group onboard called “Street Cred” who are well known in the Midlands. They broadcast from 9 at night ‘til 2 in the morning, 7 days a week, on our frequency 89.1 FM. But because they can be heard now online, streaming on the Aston FM website, they get emails and text messages from literally all over the world. It’s a massive audience.

How have things gone so far?

The whole thing works well. They’re (Street Cred) happy because they’re not being raided every five minutes and having their equipment confiscated by the authorities. It gives them a professional environment to work in, they’ve got a good frequency to broadcast on – and on the other side of things – the Police in Birmingham have said they like it because while the kids are listening to “Street Cred” they’re not out fighting, involved in knife crime, gun crime, graffiti – and generally making a nuisance of themselves. They’re off the streets and listening to the music they love. Some of the guys that work at “Street Cred” are in some ways heroes to these local kids. If they want to follow in their footsteps it can only be good. Certainly for Birmingham and as far as Aston FM and Street Cred’s concerned.

So those are the positives… There must be some negatives. Do some regular listeners take offence at their station being “taken over”?

Nobody’s really come across and said “we don’t like that” to be honest. We’ve probably got three separate audiences at Aston FM and this is the beauty of the station. And if you like – what makes it unique.

You’ve got day time listening, which is your normal sort of average soft rock, pop-music, chart etc. and local content – what’s going on in the city and around. Then you’ve got another audience for specialist shows Monday through to Friday for two hours, 7 ‘til 9 pm. From country music to hip-hop, to grunge, to dance – you name it – it’s there. And finally you’ve got this other audience that kicks in after 9, which is the “Street Cred” pirate radio audience.

It very much is three different audiences – and we know that from the emails and texts we get. We hope that somewhere there is a cross over between all audiences. We hope that some of the “Street Cred” pirate audience will listen at some time during the day. In fact, we’ve taken 2 of their guys, Lee and Paul, who were working for Street Cred and they now do our weekend breakfast show. So they’ve moved from being “pirates” if you like, to working on the station, doing legitimate weekend shows on Aston FM. Which is certainly not playing “pirate” music – but more normal, middle of the road, 60’s / 70’s / 80’s tracks.

You’ve talked about some of the issues with swearing. Any other problems to overcome?

Initially, they weren’t used to working in a radio studio. They were used to a portable mini-mixing desk, probably with three or four faders on it, a couple of decks and may be a CD player… like something you might find at home. And they love their music loud. Their speakers are usually taller than the presenters. They’d really bang it out – especially the bass. So, in the beginning we’d have a few problems as they’d come into the studios and turn everything up to the max! And it was blowing the speakers. That had to be controlled. They weren’t used to that, they were more used to have their music blaring out. They’d think they were nightclub DJ’s, whacking faders up and down. So there was a bit of that going on and a couple of things were being broken. But, to be fair, I think it was assumed from the Aston FM management that once they were shown around the studio and how things work – they’d be like normal presenters. But of course, no, they came from a completely different mentality. It was a small problem to start with that’s now been put right. They understand it now…

So what does the future hold?

Originally, Ofcom said to try it for 12 months and see how it goes. If it’s successful then they will do what they need to do re. the license to continue it. So everyone’s happy at the moment. Like anything new – the teething problems had to be sorted out. But it’s now working well and it’s giving the audience that’s out there for pirate radio somewhere they know they can tune in – at the same time every night, 7 nights a week, all year round and hear the music and the presenters they’re used to. Without worrying that their station’s about to raided and taken off the air. So it’s working well… Everybody’s gelling now. Their presenters are actually learning the trade of being a presenter and how things work in a professional radio studio.

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.

There are many challenges involved in thinking about adapting traditional radio practices to distribution via the internet, but I wanted to focus on one in my first post. Understanding the economics of sound broadcasting is, I believe, as important as understanding how the technology opens up the possibility of linking sound to other forms of media communication, and how audience may shift the way they listen. My central point is that the current idea of radio as a mass medium is based upon the economics of over-the-air broadcasting, that the use of the internet as a broadcast medium radically alters these economics, and so implies that we need new models of radio practice.

In essence, while over-the-air radio is largely a high fixed cost / zero marginal cost activity, internet radio has far lower fixed costs, but relatively high marginal costs. This should be apparent if we compare the costs involved in setting up a significant over-the air station with studio, production and broadcast staff, and transmitters with those required for internet broadcasting. The general observation is backed up by some academic research (Ting and Wildman 2002). Of course, with the regulatory directions faced by licensed broadcasters, and the attention to higher production values amongst over-the-air station managers, contrasting with the desire amongst online providers to automate as much as possible, this isn’t surprising. It is, though, the marginal cost profile which is most important. An over-the-air station with 500 listeners incurs the same costs even if its listenership goes up to 500 000 listeners. That’s not to say that the station won’t improve its production values (and so costs) if the larger listenership raises more revenue, but to make the point that there aren’t any direct costs involved in the extra listeners: the stations still has to pay the same station, labour and transmitter costs regardless of the number of listeners in the geographical area in which it broadcasts. By contrast, the costs of adding the additional bandwidth to service extra listeners faced by internet broadcasters adds significantly to its costs. Even though in the years since Ting and Wildman undertook their study bandwidth costs have fallen, it will always drive up costs to add listeners online when compared with the zero marginal costs of the FM broadcaster.

The ordering of costs in traditional over-the-air radio has always pushed stations to attempt to maximise their audiences within their broadcast footprint. There are again qualifications – stations target wealthy, or less well-served, groups in competitive commercial markets – but mass audiences and spot advertising-based funding characterised the main business model for late twentieth century radio. Each station will have a breakeven point where advertising revenue covers the fixed costs. After this point the revenue from each additional listener is all profit, so even if the marginal revenue falls as the scale increases (as is often the case with broader market groups) potential profits can be considerable.

In online radio, the higher marginal costs of the extra bandwidth may be greater than the additional revenue, especially if marginal revenue falls as scale of listenership increases. It may well be worth having smaller, more tightly-focused listenerships. This may well be even more the case when you start to add additional gains that online distribution presents. I’ll return to some of these gains in future posts, but just to pick a few makes the point well: the ease with which the listeners can be profiled suggests tighter marketing is likely; the ability to charge for listening rights means subscription charges are possible; and the ability to construct bespoke services with computer compiled programmes responding to listener preferences, all make new sorts of radio service more likely.

This all suggests to me that radio formatters and programmers can start to think in radically different ways about how we design radio services for listeners. This opens up considerable possibilities for public service and community broadcasters, and certainly in the commercial field it looks like a business imperative.

References
Carol Ting and Steven S. Wildman ‘The Economics of Internet Radio’ at intel.si.umich.edu/tprc/papers/2002/89/InternetRadio.pdf

Hello there. I’m James Cridland, and I’ve been working in radio and new media for the last fifteen years or so. This website kindly links to my blog, and you’ll see the odd blog posting too from me here.

Last week, the great and good from the radio industry met in Westminster, London, for a conference run by the Radio Academy, which I was responsible for chairing.

The conference, Radio at the Edge, has been running for some time now, but it’s difficult to explain quite what it discusses. Its tagline, “What’s next, now”, goes a little way towards suggesting that it’s to do with new technology that makes radio programming better. Yes, things like new forms of broadcasting radio, but mainly what happens, to quote my own blog’s byline, “where radio and new platforms collide”.

I wrote up the event, while sitting at the back, in a long and somewhat badly thrown-together live blog. But if you don’t have the patience to read it (I certainly don’t), here’s what we learnt:

• Absolute Radio used their social media network to perform the UK’s largest radio rebrand in a really interesting and open way; giving unprecedented control to the listener.
• DAB Digital Radio, while suffering from some commercial pressures, is still alive and well within the UK, and can coexist well with internet broadcasting
• The BBC World Service uses the internet in a clever tactical way – from online questionnaires, to innovative broadcasting and mobile use.
• Blogs, Twitter, etc, can strengthen radio presenters’ connections with their audience, to a degree that almost means that if they change radio station, their audience will mostly follow them
• Music personalisation services like last.fm might not be the killer to radio that some people think
• Adding visuals to radio can make for a really interesting proposition, and Global Radio launched an iPhone app during the event
• Leo Laporte spoke about podcasting and radio in the US – seeing podcasting as being a useful addition to radio, but not a total replacement. And he also spoke about how he’s earning revenue from the podcasts he does.
• Andrew Collins and Richard Herring performed a live podcast in front of us, and gave us some interesting statistics about what their audience thought about their programme.

Radio conferences are sometimes a hit and miss affair. But I hope that this year, it was rather more ‘hit’ than ‘miss’. What are your thoughts on radio conferences? What are the good ones you’ve been to? Do let me know in the comments.

Audio slideshow producer Ben Chesterton on location in Africa

There was a television show back in the eighties called “Radio with Pictures” which played music videos from around the world. The name was nothing more than a snappy oxymoron at the time – but it’s turned out to be rather prescient. The future of radio would seem destined to include pictures of some description…

It stands to reason really. Many of the platforms on which we consume radio now feature a screen: DAB, mobile phone, ipod, computer monitor etc. Which is why the BBC has employed a team of young boffins to investigate the visualisation radio – and ask themselves the pertinent question “What exactly does radio look like?”

Even radio advertising is in on the act… The search for fresh revenue streams has inspired the creative arm of Global Radio to produce audio/visual commercials for clients which are displayed on their stations websites. Simon Forster, the Creative Services Manager for Global’s UK branch in the West Midlands, says the service is proving increasingly popular. They’ve produced over 30 of these “hybrid commercials” this year alone, at very lucrative rates.

“Enhanced podcasts”, such as the ones produced for the Chris Moyles breakfast show, have been around for a while now and have proven their success on the BBC website. (Although these types of files are not universally supported and can cause play-back issues.)

Although mainstream radio may have picked up on the trend towards “visual radio” – more could certainly be made of the opportunity. Switch on any radio station available via freeview, satellite or cable in the UK – and pretty much all you’ll see is a large blank screen staring back at you…

Another form of audio/visual narrative that’s gathering on-line momentum is the “audio-slideshow”. These differ from traditional vodcasts as they utilise still images instead of video and are therefore far easier to produce – and quicker to download.

As the name suggests, viewers/listeners see a series of still images while hearing a complimentary audio documentary. These pictures can be manipulated by cropping, dissolving the image, fading in or out, or directing the viewer’s eye with the “Ken Burns” technique – the name given to the act of moving a still image across the screen. But why try to explain it – when you can, quite literally, see for yourself…

This example comes from photographer David White and producer Ben Chesterton. I first got to know Ben and his family while working on a project in Ethiopia. He was in charge of a BBC World Service Trust project, training journalists to create innovative, often provocative programmes for Radio Ethiopia.

Before his involvement in development radio, Ben had enjoyed an award winning career as a documentary producer for the BBC. I was therefore surprised when he turned his back on traditional radio to start “duckrabbit.info” – a company specialising in bespoke audio-slideshows. I was curious to find out why and invited him answer a series of questions for New Radio Strategies…

As a former producer of traditional documentaries for Radio Four, what was it that attracted you to audio slideshows?

I used them as a training tool for journalists in Kenya. To shake and wake them up and force them out of the studio by confronting them with what was going on in the refugee camps. Apart from that, I love photos and I was becoming creatively frustrated with my work – so I thought I’d have a crack at something different.

Are audio slideshows more closely aligned to visual or audio documentaries?

I think it all depends on the use of the audio slideshow. I mean, at times it might have more in common with the language of art or poetry then documentary. I don’t think it’s got too much to do with radio in the sense that a good slideshow is completely dependent on the visuals to make sense, whereas it might not be so dependant on the audio.

So can they truly be considered a new form of “radio”?

They can be a great way of promoting radio but to call audio slideshows a new form of radio isn’t something I’d agree with. In fact there’s nothing really new about them. What’s new is the publishing platform, the web, which makes them worthwhile because there’s a potentially massive audience.

What are the differences between producing an audio slideshow – compared to producing a purely audio based project?

The major difference is that peoples attention span on the web is very limited so you are looking to contain an audio slideshow to usually around three minutes. For someone who is used to producing half hour docos this is really challenging! The other thing is learning to let the photos lead. At the end of the day it’s the photos that will keep people hooked, or otherwise.

What is the future of audio-slideshows as you see it?

It’s hard to say. I think they will have a limited use on news websites like the BBC. I think that radio people will start to use them to promote radio documentaries, if they can pull some budget together for this. Certainly Radio 4 could do really well promoting some of their stand out documentaries on the BBC website by using audio slideshows. I think commercially they offer a lot of possibilities for organisations to get stories out about themselves. I also think they offer plenty of possibilities for citizen journalism, for the way that everyday life is chronicled. They are also a great way of making art available to many more people on the web, in a way that is engaging and memorable.

Do you have any recommendations for people wanting to make their own slideshows – and where can people go to discover more about audio-slideshows?

Just come to our blog www.duckrabbit.info/blog where we showcase loads of great examples and also links to other great websites doing a similar thing. I recommend the software Soundslides, which is simple and produces great looking slideshows.

You can have all the kit in the world but at the end of the day it’s all about how you tell the story.

First, I’m currently reading the 1931 autobiography of Sir Oliver Lodge, the Victorian physicist who first publicly demonstrated radio transmission in an Oxford lecture theatre in 1894. Leaving aside the complex and disputed issue of who ‘invented’ radio, where, and when, we certainly know that Lodge has a strong claim to be counted among the founding figures of the medium. With his mind focused on pure science, he let the technology slip into the hands of other, more commercially-minded men, chief among them Marconi. But what intrigues me is the way in which, given both his later desire to communicate science to a wider public through radio talks and his equally well-known dabbling with psychic phenomena – most famously, perhaps, his belief that he could use wireless to ‘contact’ his son, Raymond, following his death at the Somme in 1916 – he somehow envisaged the communicative potential of the medium far more honestly and intuitively than Marconi ever did. I think his story might be a revealing way into the fundamental question of why radio took off as a social phenomenon in the aftermath of the First World War. To push the matter further still, I’d like to know – and I’m looking for ways to find out – exactly what it felt like for ordinary people to listen to radio in the earliest years, how it changed the way they thought about the world. They’re questions we need to keep asking, I think – childish, ’so what?’ questions, maybe, but ones that surely need to be asked at all stages of technological development.

My second interest in radio’s relationship between past and future is more taxing, perhaps. It’s to historicize the ‘digital revolution’. Or, to put it another way, it’s to ask what the broader historical significance might be of recent and current shifts in listening habits, when, in the future, we look back to the present. Actually, my default position on such matters, having been educated as a Medievalist in thrall to the Long Duree approach, is to quote Chou En Lai’s reply when asked a few years back for his reading of the effect of the French Revolution of 1789: “too early to tell”, he is said to have replied. Yet, the journalist in me wants to have a go at that first draft of history. Besides, my horizon isn’t endless: I’m not planning to capture every dimension of social change. How could I? My focus, in fact, is very much just on consciousness. I’m interested in knowing where the digital revolution might be taking our brains. And there are some interesting developments in cognate disciplines that we need to keep an eye on, I reckon. True, talk of media ‘effects’ is supposed to have had its day. But, having rubbished the first, and most primitive versions of this school of analysis, it might be time to re-examine some of its more persuasive aspects. The 1990s, so the neuroscientists say, was the ‘decade of the brain’. We now know quite a bit more than we did in the 1930s, or even in the 1980s, about the relationship between the senses and our thought-processes. The brain, it would seem, is highly plastic: what we see and hear re-wires it more than we imagined. The field for research is opening up in exciting ways. And, as I try to navigate my way through it, I’d like to think aloud here, with you – and to know whether you think I’m discovering new frontiers or I’m simply lost in a New World wilderness of my own foolish making.

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.

I lead the R&D team for the BBC’s Audio & Music interactive team – we call ourselves BBC Radio Labs- and we try to take new technologies and internet trends and apply them to the BBC’s radio stations and music services. And I plan to write about some of these prototypes and experiments here – it seems appropriate for somewhere called New Radio Strategies after all. Our most recent prototype is a new web application called Radio Pop which tracks your radio listening and builds a social website out of it. Radio Pop is our attempt to fuse the trend of social networking sites with radio. To take the best of each world and combine them into something new.

Primarily we built Radio Pop to learn things about radio and social software. The really popular social networking sites are based almost purely on social interactions – think status updates, poking and throwing sheep – but lots of other social sites, like Flickr or last.fm are built around the idea of a “social object“. This social object is something which you can have conversations around or find that you have in common with people; like books, music, last night’s TV or your holiday photos. We wanted to create something where radio was the social object; because radio has always been about the shared experience – whether it was gathering around the radio set in the living room, chatting about last night’s programme with your friends, calling a phone-in programme or just knowing that you’re one in millions of others listening to Chris Moyles right now. And we were also looking at the trend of “presence” or status updates on the web. Hopefully you’ve all seen that on Twitter or Facebook; the archetypal “What are you doing?”. Well, could we create something where “What are you listening to?” was a core feature?

Sign up to Radio Pop and we will store your listening to BBC Radio whenever you listen online. Radio Pop can then use this data in a number of ways. You can see a history of what you listened to – maybe you heard something last week and you’d like to check it out some more or even track how your listening habits have changed over the years. You get your own profile page with statistics and graphs showing your favourite radio networks and programmes (here’s mine). And you can share your data – show off those statistics to your friends or add a blog badge that shows the world when you’re listening. And as well as listening, Radio Pop features a Pop button for when you hear something you really like. The site will then remember when you clicked it and add it to a list of your Pops. It’s a bit like bookmarks, but for your radio.

Like most social networking sites out there you can add your friends – then you can see what they’re listening to right now, subscribe to their latest programmes feed or see the combined statistics for all your friends. Soon we’ll be able to use all this data to create personalised recommendations for radio programmes, a bit like you get on Amazon.

Since we launched we’ve had lots of great feedback, some of my favourites are: “BBC’s radiopop.co.uk gives terrestrial radio a change. Love it. Best new online music property going.” and “I think the Radio Pop site is actually compelling me to listen to MORE radio”. I particularly like the last one – there certainly seem to be some people who, once you let them track consumption, feel compelled to do so (cf. behaviours on last.fm).

Finally, this doesn’t all have to happen through your computer. With our experimental Olinda radio we can track your listening from a real kitchen radio. But that’s for another post…