All radio is audio but not all audio is radio
Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 12:01PM Radio is never far from our minds here; we're all avid listeners, and on the professional front, Justin, Matthew and myself are all alumni of the BBC's Radio and Music Division. But this last week, radio has been especially present in our thinking; we've been meeting with the good folks from New York Public Radio (the people behind classical station WQXR), helping a radio-based consortium shape up their response to a successful Technology Strategy Board CADI bid and, perhaps more tangentially, trying to to get our heads around the implications of the launch of the UK Radio Player.
In truth, that's all pretty disparate, but nonetheless, a few themes have been emerging for us, and over the months I suspect we'll be returning to several of them here. But here's one which keeps coming up and which strikes a particular chord with me: All radio is audio but not all audio is radio.
The death of radio has been a New Media meme for some years now; indeed, the very phrase was the title for one of former BBC Radio & Music Interactive Controller Simon Nelson's more barnstorming presentations. And there is good reason to fear for it in the long run. As the father of a 20 year old and two teens, I see little evidence of young people picking up the radio habit.
But what I really don't see as a threat to radio's survival is the rise of online streaming music services: Last, SoundCloud, Rhapsody, Spotify and on and on. These services - which I've written about in depth elsewhere at various stages of their development - are surely a threat to traditional record listening (whatever the hell that is), but not to radio. I have no empirical evidence for this (and I do accept that the presence of streaming music sites and apps contributes to an increasingly diffuse and a tad overwhelming media consumption environment which in turn is one of the things "doing in" radio), but it seems self-evident to me that these new services are qualititively different to radio: not necessarily either better or worse, but definitely different.
We're all familiar with the term celestial jukebox; the reality is of course some way off (although I am streaming an album of Korean classical music to my Spotify iPhone app as I write this on the train from Brighton to London, so we're a lot closer than I thought we'd be by 2011, to be honest). But we don't turn to radio - be it live, on-demand or otherwise - as a jukebox. I'm not going to list all the things for which we do turn to radio, but company it strikes me, would be chief among them (and a particularly intimate kind of company at that).
So here's a thing. I've only just really come across what UK music streaming service We7 are doing. Plainly they've decided that at this juncture, going up against Spotify and Last is a mug's game, and I think that's smart. Instead they're proposing an interesting amalgam of streaming jukebox and linear radio, with such content as news inserts and traffic announcements breaking up streams, essentially "faking" radio. Indeed, a consortium including We7 and the media production company for whom I used to be Head of Interactive, Somethin' Else, have just been awarded a TSB grant for R&D into taking this to the next level.
Whether We7 will be successful in this remains to be seen - and judging from their current offering, I'm way too far from their target demographic to really judge it. But it does strike me as a very clear statement that radio is something distinctive from streamed music - and that at least one UK company thinks there's a potential future audience for it.
In future posts I'll be looking at such radio-related issues as the rise of lossless, the value of metadata, the role of gatekeepers and why lean forward vs sit back doesn't quite hack it for a secondary medium.