There are at least three challenges that every broadcaster is going to have to overcome in order to secure their future.
1. Relevance
Once upon a time in a world of lower expectations and far fewer choices, “relevance” meant something that was vaguely good enough for everybody. The very roots of “broad” “casting” imply the [...]

Last night saw nominations announced for the 2009 Sony Radio Academy Awards which are the equivalent of the BAFTAs for Radio, and Absolute Radio had a great night securing a record haul of nominations - seven in total - more than the station has ever had before, and more than any other commercial radio station [...]

At the weekend, BBC Radio 4 aired a documentary entitled Radio Sales. It covered advertising in the UK for the last 80 years from advertisers who used stations like Radio Luxembourg, through pirate radio (soon to be featured in the new Richard Curtis film The Boat That Rocked), to the launch of legal commercial radio [...]

If you see me, feel free wish me happy birthday. It’s not my real birthday, that I would like you to remember is 26th September, but this Saturday is my second Twitter birthday. It was then, during 2007’s SXSW that use of the service first exploded, as attendees of the Interactive festival used it to [...]

If you’re not too interested in radio audience measurement, you might want to skip over this entry, but if you are, then this link is worth a read.
UK measurement body RAJAR spent a lot of time and money testing meters (PPMs) that would automatically measure what services you listened to before ultimately rejecting them as [...]

James Cridland notes that despite the media world having changed so much even since the millennium:
“The total number of people listening to radio every week (45.5m) is the second highest figure since 2000″
and
“The total number of people listening to radio every week is the second highest figure since 2000.”
Meanwhile a new report covered in Media [...]

The best of what’s coming up on Absolute Radio over the next month:
** STOP PRESS**
U2
Interview on the Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show
Thursday 26th February, 06:00 – 10:00
Bono and The Edge join Christian O’Connell to talk about all things U2 in 2009, their new album ‘No Line On The Horizon’ and whether Batman would beat Spiderman in [...]

[UPDATED] The same thing was posted twice in our excitement. Here are our RAJAR figures, and for more on our take on it, please read this.
2008 Q4 Staff Presentation
View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: rajar)

In mid-October Clive asked me to forecast what I thought our search traffic would be by the end of the year. It had only taken six weeks for searches containing “absolute” to overtake those containing “virgin” so how high would it climb over the next eleven weeks?
This wasn’t the most robust of forecasts. I didn’t [...]

We’re soon to lose our old Virgin Radio domain names, so we thought it would be a good idea to run some reports and see how we’re getting on with reducing the amount of incoming emails to those domains.
We were hoping that our system of bouncing emails back to the senders and asking them to [...]

Below is a presentation from the RadioCentre showing how commercial radio is doing currently following the most recent RAJAR figures released for Q3 2008. Amongst other things, the slides show that commercial radio is very good at reaching a younger audience, and how in places such as London, Glasgow and Birmingham, there is more listening [...]

Tim Shaw debates with Nigel Evans MP, Shadow Culture Minister on Sky News about the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross affair.

Absolute Radio’s brand new TV advertising campaign starts today, and here’s the schedule from our advertising agency listing spots for today, tomorrow and Sunday. Ads are running on all the major commercial channels on terrestrial and digital television.
We’ll be sharing these ads with you later today, but in the meantime, plan your weekend’s TV viewing [...]

In a comment Adrian asked the following question:
Hi Donnach, please tell us what Absolute has in store for the future of the Medium Wave transmissions.
We’re fully committed to continuing to broadcast on Medium Wave or AM as it’s otherwise known for the forseeable future. Our licence to broadcast from Ofcom on AM continues until 2012, [...]