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…

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.