Yesterday in London saw the Radio Academy’s Radio at the Edge conference.

Hosted by James Cridland, it saw lots of talk and discussion about the future of radio, audio, websites, interactivity, and all things related to radio in the UK (and beyond).

A few highlights:

Mikko Linnamaki from Spodtronic.com and Mark Rock from Audioboo talked about mobile. Mikko impressed us with some of the statistics surrounding some the mobile phone apps his business has been producing. Particularly impressive was the number of Nokia apps people were downloading. Mark spoke about Audioboo’s progress to date and some of the future developments they have coming including uploading audio from your PC, and additional mobile phone platforms. Radio is a key customer they see, and there are some very interesting things that could be done with radio station being sent audio from its listeners at a much higher quality than just down the phone.

In a session called “Rip It Up And Start Again”, Chris Kimber from the BBC (although speaking in his personal capacity) told us why he thought the current digital radio service model was wrong, with many stations getting very low average listening hours. Absolute Radio’s Chris Lawson spoke about what One Golden Square Labs have been up to including CompareMyRadio and now Dabbl.

Michael Hill talked us through his experiences at Channel 4 Radio, and detailed how their model had always been a world where small nuggets could exist that could be cut up and edited. He also spoke about how BBC Radio Five Live had adapted to a digital world when AM is dying waveband.

Then Paul Campbell from Amazing Radio told us their model that produces a station that only plays music that their website’s visitors have chosen. He said that they had beaten Dabbl to the punch in this regard! He was also concerned about the BBC treading on their feet.

In a session entitled Radio with Pictures, Robin Pembrooke and one his colleagues from Global talked about the success they’d had with their mobile apps, with a cumulative 750,000 downloads to date. He told us that last month, they’d had as many page impressions via their apps for Capital as they’d had on their main website. He’s also looking forward to the opportunities that Canvas will provide.

Brett Spencer from BBC Radio Five Live demonstrated what they’d done with, in particular, Simon Mayo’s show, and what learnings they’d taken from the experiment in which they webcast the show in a much fuller manner. He explained that they had treated it at something to learn from day by day – with a viewer watching the final shows getting a very different experience from the earlier shows.

Colin Crawford from Pure told us about the new Pure Sensia and what opportunities in opened up.

Ben Perreau (currently of Sky, but very soon of Global) hosted a session titled: Spotify – Friend or Foe. Nigel Pinto from Human Capital provided some topline findings from rough and ready research he’d done into the kind of person who may or may not use Spotify-type services. His conclusion was that while a small minority will certainly use services like this, there might be as many as 60% of people who will never use them, while a smaller percentage is up for grabs.

Nikhil Shah from Mixcloud talked about his business which is about hosting music and providing a platform that can monetise that music – a competitor in some regards to radio. He saw Last.fm as being closer to radio than Spotify which has been less successful at producing a radio-type experience without the need to interact.

Jeff Smith from Radio 2 and 6Music had previously worked for Napster, and saw both sides of the equation. He pointed out that in the US, iTunes partners widely with radio stations who sell tracks from their playlists, so it’s not always quite sleeping with the enemy.

In an interesting Q&A session it was acknowledged that what Spotify doesn’t have is a “trusted guide” – but were they to sign up a respected DJ who could produce that function the equation might change. And Chris Kimber from the BBC wondered if something like Word Magazine’s Spotify playlists weren’t already doing this? (In a Twitter response – this is a truly interactive conference – Word Magazine wondered if by letting readers choose their tracks, they hadn’t reinvented the radio request show?).

Lisa Kerr from the DRDB gave a strong speech entitled: Why Radio Must Go Digital, the full text of which is available here (Word document). She concluded her speech:

Let’s get real: legislation and fixing infrastructure first; content and services next; followed by promoting-like-crazy, then uptake and then upgrade.  That’s how it’s going to work.  And that’s how, in a few years from now, we’ll have a radio industry spending more money on content and less on transmission, and therefore an audience that has more choice, more interactivity, and cracking (not crackling) reception.

Bruce Mitchell from Bauer produced a session called Build v Buy v Free in which he examined the options a station has for building a website. When they relaunched TotalKiss they opted for free. He explained that the whole website was built around a Wordpress backend (as this blog is), and that they’d incorporated many other open source software packages and services that they employed. He explained the pros (and a few of the cons) of going about things this way, and told us how they’d been able to build something quickly and cheaply without the resources that other groups might have been able to throw at things.

Jonathan Marks from Critical Distance presented a very thought provoking presentation based on his global overview of radio, and in particular some of the work he’s been doing in Africa, where radio can be a vitally important part of the community. He explained the importance of mobile, and how some new technologies were being employed or could be employed in the developing world in the future.

Jonathan Gillespie is Commercial Director at GMG Radio, but previously he worked for Google, so he talked about What Would Google Do if it were in our position. He talked about the extent to which Google has persuaded people of the value of the “last click” before purchase, but how perhaps the full value of earlier parts of the chain wasn’t being accounted for – how does the consumer make the decision to put a particular term in Google in the first place?

Finally, Richard Bacon interviewed Tony Blackburn about the changes that have taken place in the years that Tony’s worked as a DJ – from the earliest days as a pirate when you’d receive letters and postcodes, through to today when he makes full use of services like Twitter and AudioBoo to promote his shows (he’s currently presenting on four different stations!).

There were some interesting discussions about the fineline between a presenter’s personal feelings perhaps impacting on the radio station he works for (and promotes is Twitter account from). And Richard Bacon revealed that on the evening that Michael Jackson had died, he’d Tweeted as much half an hour before the BBC had confirmed the unsourced earlier reports.

All in all, a fascinating and worthwhile day – and Absolute Radio got an embarrassing number of plaudits! The Radio Academy will be uploading the audio in the coming few days, and it’s worth keeping an eye on their website if you want to listen back to a specific session.

My much more detailed notes can be found here, if you have half an hour spare.

But in the meantime, I produced some “factoid” videos for the event, which bookended some of the sessions. I’ve embedded them below. Each addresses a different subject and represents some of the most recent statistics published.

Digital Listening

Youth Listening

Podcasting

Spotify

Mobile

iPods – Other MP3 players are available

Miscellaneous Interesting Facts

Adam