A Rose by Any Other Name – by Tim Lichfield

01Jul

Right, time for a spot quiz… What do Starburst & Snickers have in common? “They’re both sweets?!” Alright smart a*se, that’s not what I was getting at. Let’s try again… What do Cif, Starbust, Snickers & Cosignia have in common? (Ok, maybe the last one isn’t a good example).

That’s correct – they’ve all had successful name changes.

Since TIML (which, incidentally is my first name and first initial welded together, but that’s not important right now) purchased Virgin Radio, the amount of people in and out of the industry who’ve asked me what I think we’ll now be called is quite a few.

The truth is, I believe that TIML will come up with the goods as far as names and brands are concerned. Why? They’re radio people. They know what sounds powerful, yet not intimidating. And, let’s be honest, with the budget they have, they’re not going to do a shoddy job. Not to mention the marketing team behind it.

On another blog site from a former Virgin Radio employee, they state the reasons why the loss of ‘Virgin Radio’ is not such a bad thing. If you read this, it really does make a lot of sense.

The only worry, for me at least, is the format of the station. Geoff has said in previous blogs how he feels about the music, so I won’t harp on about that too much. Let’s just step back for a second and look at other stations. Why did XFM get so successful? Why are Kiss 100 doing so well? What has Capital been missing for a while? Music format. Simple as. You may be reading this thinking I’m being naive, but this is what I believe.

Why do you tune into a certain radio station? You do it to hear your favourite style of music or a certain song you love right now (or to be entertained, but that goes without saying). With Kiss, you know you’re going to get dance/r’n'b, etc. With XFM, you used to get personality and the newest of different genres of rock-based music. With Capital, back in the day (and they’re now heading back in the right direction), it was the hits you wanted to hear with the odd spice recurrent. With Magic, you get your ballads, etc. What I’m saying is, you know what you’re getting.

Virgin, to me, is a rock station (read Geoff’s blog on the word ‘rock’ – good points). If it was changed into a love song only station/speech only/dance station, it would lose it’s edge and we’d just be another copycat station in the deep pool of the industry.

As that bearded bloke once wrote, “A rose by any other name, would smell as sweet”. It has meaning, especially when considering a major re-brand.

Tim

Categories: Brands Guest posts 2

Posted by admin on July 1, 2008

Taking Control Of The Infinite Dial by Sean Ross of Edison Media Research

30Jun

Even before Wednesday’s announcement that Chrysler would make its 2009 US models Internet enabled, terrestrial broadcasters faced multiple challenges in securing their place on The Infinite Dial: the WiMax car radio of the future that would make every station stream in the world available to motorists.

The first is creating a unique selling proposition for their stations in a space with scores of Top 40 “Kiss FMs” or multiple Jack-FMs. That situation exists already, as it happens, on Clear Channel and CBS’ respective media players.

The second is being located among thousands upon thousands of choices — current terrestrial brands, Internet-only stations, repurposed satellite radio channels and likely hybrids of all of the above. Page through the offerings of even the best organized stream-aggregators now, and you’ll see what a challenge this represents for a potential listener.

And now we can add the issue of whether the Infinite Dial is even offered to consumers. It has long been believed that the automakers would regard streaming audio as only one aspect of a broad package of in-car options, and would probably offer a heavily culled list of radio choices. And so far, mainstream terrestrial radio’s track record in that environment, while improving, is spotty.

Some of the new tabletop Internet radio devices give special prominence to Webcasters like Slacker’s showcase on RCA’s Infinite Radio and presumably Pandora’s just announced deal with Grace Digital. Some stream aggregators, like iTunes, have long emphasized Web-exotica over mainstream terrestrial stations. Others rely heavily on fans as curators — wikiradio, essentially — and on even the well-tended sites, “W” and “K” call letters sit in the middle of an dizzying list of available choices.

Recently, the large groups have become more aggressive about securing their place among the stream aggregators. CBS Radio stations are now available on iTunes — practically the only mainstream commercial stations that are. Clear Channel got a lot of press for announcing it would make its streams compatible with the Receiva radio guide, but it had already done the same for RadioTime.

The majors are doing what they ought to be doing, but in their doing so, there is now a particular challenge for those stations that are neither major-group-owned or Webexotic in a curator-friendly way. Mark Ramsey correctly points out the distinct possibility of an automaker plugging in Slacker, Pandora, AccuRadio, or CBS/AOL radio, to which he could add the 750-plus stations now available in one place on Clear Channel’s player or Citadel’s stations, which have all been available on a single player for more than a year.

So what then can radio as a whole do to take control of the Infinite Dial?

1) Radio, as an industry, must assert itself into any dialogue now taking place on the architecture of the WiMax car radio of the future or any of the devices that precede it to ensure both ease of use and representation of as many voices as possible. Part of NAB’s job must be ensuring that smaller and standalone operators are not squeezed out.

2) Radio, as an industry, needs to redirect the effort that has gone into interesting Detroit in HD Radio into selling the value of 12,000 stations with an established listener base — not merely a less developed handful of “stations between the stations.”

3) Radio is already in the business of providing news, traffic, weather, and (in the case of most Rock radio websites) adult content. If streaming audio is going to be one of multiple applications offered by an in-car or tabletop device, radio should be offering one-stop-shopping. The only thing wrong with the multi-group initiative to offer traffic through HD Radio is its apparently limited scope.

4) To that effect, more broadcasters need to stay in the business of providing other services. Broadcasters’ willingness to let news, traffic and weather come through a relatively small number of pipes has given the advantage to the major groups to whom broadcasters already handed those functions on a local level.

5) Part of the job of every marketing director in radio should today become the on-line presentation and search optimization of their stream. Radio people know that Chicago’s Jack-FM rocks harder and L.A.’s Jack-FM plays more ’80s alternative. Nothing on the good-looking CBS Play.It tuner would yet convey that to a listener.

6) Part of the job of every program director must be honing a station into a franchise that has a reason to exist among thousands of others. Broadcasters cannot count indefinitely on the affinity that listeners currently show to their local stations, even on-line. (That said, the franchise for a station among thousands of others may indeed lie in being “New Jersey 101.5″ for their market, and broadcasters who want to own that franchise must now reassert their sense-of-place among hours of jockless content and syndicated shows that may not even be available on their own stream.)

There’s no intended bias toward mainstream terrestrial broadcasters here — they’re the emphasis of this article because, if anything, there’s been some bias against them in the early days of stream aggregation. On my fantasy WiMax car radio, there are already presets set aside for WHTZ (Z100) New York, Radio IO’s R&B Oldies channel, eclectic suburban Phoenix Classic Rocker KCDX, London’s Capital FM, Sirius Hits 1, and a few hundred others. I’m not going to be happy if every one of them isn’t readily accessible. Consumers shouldn’t be happy if their current choice of two dozen locals is replaced with somebody else’s limited slate of options. And the industry as a whole should be ashamed of itself it lets that happen.

Categories: Media 1

Posted by admin on June 30, 2008

Gentlemen. Are we ready to rock? Hmmm. Maybe not. It’s a funny word, ‘rock’… – by Geoff (big time blogger) Lloyd

27Jun

In the US, it exists much more as an umbrella name for any music played by a band with electric guitars and a drum kit to a 4/4 beat. Whether you see Springsteen and the E Street band at the Madison Square Garden, or MGMT at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, you’d be attending a rock concert. Sub-genres branch out from there; college-rock, blue jeans-rock, grunge-rock, alt-rock, cock-rock, folk-rock, trigonometry-rock etc., but as disparate as they are, they all exist happily under the banner of rock.

I think we’re less comfortable with the word in the UK. Even though, at a push we’ll use it in that context, we prefer our genres without the ‘rock’ suffix – just plain indie, goth, metal, punk etc, and we even like to split those up into subsections.

Over here, ‘rock’ carries an odd subtext. It says bad poodle perms. It says stonewashed jeans, it says an horrible old leather jacket with ‘The Scorpions’ crudely painted on the back. Then again, it sits comfortably in the last year’s mass hysteria about the legendary Led Zeppelin reforming, it’s in pushchairs on our high streets emblazoned on ironic AC/DC baby-grows, and in ‘Guitar Hero’ and ‘Rock Band’, maybe it’s finding a new generation.

We don’t quite feel right with the word, we’re not sure what it means. We can say what is rock and what isn’t (Red Hot Chili Peppers – yes. Coldplay – no.) and as soon as we put alongside another word; ‘roll’, it makes things a lot easier (Oasis. Maybe not a rock band, but defintely one of the great rock and roll bands.)

What does ‘rock and roll’ mean today, though? Was it something that once exploded with life in the likes of Little Richard’s ‘Rip It Up’, and died a long slow death, its corpse twitching to the death rattle of Showaddywaddy and Shakin’ Stevens? If we say the phrase ‘rock and roll’ today, does it conjure up the sad image of an old man with a teddy boy haircut, trying to cling onto his youth, or has it been reinvented in the form of the ‘rock and roll lifestyle’ of tabloid stars such as Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty and Kate Moss. Our audience may not aspire to be like them, but they’re certainly the hottest show in town when judged by column inches.

A word we’ve used in the past to bundle with ‘rock’ is ‘pop’; as in ‘The UK’s Number One Commercial Rock and Pop Station’. Some of the greatest songs in the rock canon, are in fact pop records, but when we use the phrase ‘rock and pop’, the latter somehow castrates the former. Pop, now more than anytime since the late ’50s, is synonymous with pretty boys and girls singing cover versions to teenagers. When we say that we’re a rock and pop station, maybe we come across as a little timid, saying “Here’s some big, butch RAWWWK music, but don’t be afraid – there’ll be some anodyne pap along in a minute.” It’s a hybrid that possibly works until you start giving it a name; that funny old ‘rock’ word which sits badly on its own, yet makes an uneasy bedfellow with ‘pop’.

One of the most exciting things about the opportunity ahead is that while Virgin is a brilliant brand, beloved by the masses for the association with a ’screw you’ eccentric visionary entrepreneur in casual knitwear, Virgin Radio is a brand with a lot of baggage, not all of it good.

Back when Virgin Radio launched, the UK radio landscape was a very different place. Local commercial services were still very broad and unfocused and the ubiquitous unmodernised BBC radio networks felt like the old guard, the establishment. The thought of a rebel billionnaire, sticking it to the Beeb and evoking the spirit of the pirates felt genuinely exciting. Medium wave was a popular and viable platform for music radio, and it was exciting to hear a song like ‘A Day In The Life’ or ‘Kashmir’ on the radio, because you never heard them. Anywhere. It was a brilliant proposition for a brand.

Over time though, it lost its relevance. A brand needs to be lovingly tended and tweaked to stay in step with broader trends in society. Grunge and Britpop redefined rock music in the UK, part of which was robbing it of its catch-all name. Live music, bands playing electric guitars to 4/4 beats began a resurgence which continues today, with what were once freaky hippie festivals now being mainstream, generation-defining events. In the maelstrom, the word ‘rock’ was left for dead on the roadside. ‘Rock festival’ meant spandex and gothic script at Donnington, not the new, Cool Britannia Glastonbury.

Virgin Radio, maybe not in its on-air output, but in public perception, was left behind while the newly invigorated Radio 1 mopped up. By the time Britpop hit its peak, plans for the offload to Capital must have been underway. Virgin weren’t spending the marketing money to make sure its brand stayed in step with the sea change. And then: The Second Coming of Chris…

It’s difficult now to find a comparable media star to Chris Evans at his peak. If you take the ratings juggernaut of Moyles, add the talent of Jonathan Ross, and multilply by the charisma and tabloid magnetism of Russell Brand, you might end up somewhere close. Virgin Radio reaped such rewards from the association that we gave up on marketing ourselves as anything other than The Court of King Chris, even though the tabloids were doing a fabulous job of that for free. It was, famously, a ratings, critical and commercial heyday, but one question that is seldom asked is why, even though Chris did wonders for Virgin’s ratings proportionately, did only a small fraction of the Radio 1 audience follow him across? What is it about the people who never listen to Virgin Radio that repels them from sampling us? What is their perception?

The Chris Evans glorydays messily segued into the SMG era, and although the radio station eventually recovered from the hangover and progressed in terms of what comes out of the speaker, there has never been any significant amount of money to build and communicate what the modern brand stands for. To the non-listener, we were left with a huge, smouldering Chris Evans shaped hole, and if you leant over it and listened carefully, maybe you’d hear distant strains of Status Quo or Whitesnake.

So. Is that funny word, ‘rock’ actually a millstone around Virgin Radio’s neck? Before I worked here, and before Chris Evans took over the breakfast show, I’d written Virgin off (like the genre of rock) as a dinosaur. I never tuned in, because I expected to hear hoary old riffs and strained vocals. The kind of thing that might be playing in the background of a rough pub in the Peak District, where bikers stop off to play pool, or what Alan Partridge might listen to on the Blaupunkt stereo in his Ford Mondeo. I now realise that probably wasn’t the case, but as a non-listener, the thing which prevented me from ever even stepping over the threshold was the fear of rock, in a very British sense.

Geoff

Categories: Brands Guest posts Music 1

Posted by admin on June 27, 2008

The Kids are alright – Or are they? by Geoff Lloyd

26Jun

Hats off to the redoubtable Mr Lloyd for sticking his head above the parapet on such a contentious subject!

The arguments that David lists as examples of what other, successful UK radio stations might put forward on music policy are perhaps sound, but certainly not watertight, and probably not very future-proof either.

The jukebox one topples over pretty easily, just by pointing out that a jukebox is a jukebox in a pub, not a radio. They serve completely different purposes. Adam posted some stats in ‘The Golden Goose’ thread, saying that 76% of all listeners discover new music through AM/FM radio. People expect a jukebox to play jukebox hits. New, unfamiliar music is something they like and expect from their radio. (That’s not to say a jukebox format isn’t viable, many radio stations make a great success of it.

The iPod argument is similarly flimsy. If someone has 375 tracks on their iPod, then they’ve probably hand-picked 375 tracks that they really like. If you are programming a radio station’s core music policy, you’re filling it with tracks that come up most positively and frequently in research across a broad sample.

If you gave someone a straight choice between 375 tracks they know that they love, and 375 tracks, some of which they love, some of which they like, some they’re indifferent to, and some of which they hate, nobody is going to pick the latter. Fortunately, it’s not a straight, like-for-like choice between a radio and an iPod. Yet…

It’s possible that people only have an average of 375 songs in their iPod because it’s still a relatively new thing, and their interaction with this technology is still in its infancy, compared with radio. I’d guess that if you were to look at what this figure were just in a younger demographic, it’d be a lot higher than 375 songs. Young people are owning (although not necessarily paying for) a lot more music – something which was again touched on in the comments to Clive’s ‘Golden Goose’ post. Who cares about young people, though? They’re not in our target demographic. But they will be, one day, and technology first adopted by teenagers has a habit of quickly spreading across generations. We ignore da kidz at our peril.

Radio-rivalling emerging technologies are sometimes dismissed by the establishment as niche or the preserve of the youth. Services such as last.fm or Pandora are seen as the clever and complicated playthings of geeks, far removed from the mainstream. They’ll never catch on. Or will they? Media seems to be heading the way of the bespoke. Sky+ lets us watch only the TV we want, the BBC homepage or iGoogle feed us the news, weather, alerts of our choosing, Facebook organises and connects our social lives. There’s a massive shift in the direction of personalised information and entertainment. Is it not folly for us to look the other way and console ourselves with smug statistics about people only filling their iPods with 375 songs?

The line about people not getting tired of hearing their favourite song is a nonsense. Mental unwellness notwithstanding, there are only a finite amount of times someone wants to hear anything. Every time I hear George Harrison’s beautiful, bright guitar burst in after the first verse of ‘Nowhere Man’, my spirit soars and I feel all the optimism of a sun drenched morning. That said, if you were to chop that guitar solo out, make it into a loop and lock me in room with it going round and round and round, I’m pretty sure I would stab through my own eardrums before sundown. The reason no one complains about hearing their favourite song too often is that if they hear it too often, it stops being their favourite song. (Which is OK – we’ve all had heady, but short-lived love affairs with great pop songs. )

Distorted perceptions of repetition? Probably some truth in that one, but it also smacks of radio programmers hearing feedback they don’t like and patronisingly writing off as “Tsk! Those simple, ordinary people listening, with their easily confused brains!”, rather than trying to address it.

Similarly, I’m sure there are listeners who recall songs less well than we do (again a condescending view of “them” and “us”, though) and I’m sure anyone who’s ever answered a studio switchboard can tell an hilarious tale of punters-say-the-dumbest-things like the ‘Hey Jude’ one, but it’s completely unfair to assume that they represent the majority.

There’s a horrible piece of received wisdom along the lines of ‘nobody ever went bust underestimating the general public’. I’ve heard this and variations on it dozens of times throughout my career. Shame on anyone who claims to have any pride in their work and then trots out this nasty idiom. Where is your integrity if you are treating your consumers with such disdain? Sure, a lot of people have made a lot of money doing exactly that, but isn’t it far, far better to throw all your talent and energy into doing exactly the opposite: Giving people something that exceeds their expectations? Striving to make something truly great rather than something bland enough for people to swallow down without really noticing? Wouldn’t you rather be Radiohead than Westlife, or ‘The Simpsons’ rather than ‘2 Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps’?

Moving on through the list: For just about every positive comment on ‘loving the music variety’, stations get someone bemoaning the relentless repetition. And finally, we can all point at once successful, tightly-formatted radio stations which follow the high-rotation, research driven formula whose figures are now in decline.

It’s interesting that the quote David opens with is from an American radio boss. I’ve never really understood the UK commercial radio industry’s fascination with trying to ape the U.S., or for that matter, Australia. Both have undoubtedly, produced many, many excellent examples of radio broadcasting. However, in the UK the public’s relationship with, and expectations of radio are completely different because of the omnipresence and heritage of a quality, listener focused, well resourced state broadcaster.

The benchmark for radio in this country has always been set by the fact that listeners are used to programmes being produced for them; with their enjoyment in mind, by the BBC. In a less-regulated, free market commercial radio environment, listeners are there to be mined for, collected and offered up to advertisers.

Let’s not kid ourselves, that’s what we’re doing in UK commercial radio, too, but whereas in, say, the States it’s all about investing as little as possible into programming for the maximum possible return (ie. you just need to be one notch less rubbish than your closest competitor), the high quality and production values of the BBC’s radio services have raised the game.

Which brings us on to the Radio Two view, which I’d love to get my teeth into, but I’ve ranted on for far too long, and it’s about time somebody else had a go.

I think it’s absolutely brilliant that David’s thrown this one out to us wolves, and look forward to being part of the conversation as it unfolds. It’s a sad but common state of affairs in commercial radio when it’s actually a handicap for a DJ to be passionate about music. Is there a future in a music policy where this passion can be harnessed instead of frowned upon and robotically dismissed with reams of “computer says no” research?

Geoff

Categories: Guest posts Media Music 4

Posted by admin on June 26, 2008

Ah. Music repetition. What a great topic – by David Lloyd

25Jun

I remember some eccentric American radio boss at a conference panel saying: “the more I tighten the music rotations- the more the listeners scream – and the higher the ratings go”. In her markets, it was certainly true. As we know, some of the UK’s most successful stations play very little variety. They might call upon familiar sound arguments. For example, the ‘jukebox theory’: who puts money into a jukebox to hear an unfamiliar track? The iPod example: when people ‘programme’ their ‘personal radio stations’, they are said to choose only, on average, 375 tunes. The question about no-one ever complaining about hearing their favourite song. The fact that people buy a song – to hear it repeatedly. And, of course, the length of time spent by the average listener to a particular radio station, vs how many times they really hear a song. And the false memory syndrome when perceptions of repetition are created by different stations playing the same songs. And listeners often recalling songs less well than we do – I loved our ‘Haven’t Heard It For Ages’ feature recently when a listener suggested we play ‘Hey Jude’ although she could not quite remember who it was by.

For just about every adverse comment on repetition, stations get someone ‘loving the music variety’. And, of course, we can all point to brave radio stations playing all sorts of admirable less familiar material which have failed to attract audiences. These points in favour of high rotations are sound arguments, and ones advanced by many sensible and experienced people reading this blog – and the world’s best music programmers. This thinking has produced some great radio stations. So – it is not wrong, is it?

There is at least one other view. Music repetition is a common complaint of us- just as it is of other hugely successful stations. Radio Two has done pretty well from playing a broader variety of songs. Maybe Radio Two’s confidence and difference – in so many ways – has been the spirit of its success. So – their thinking is not wrong either, is it?

No-one denies the need for a music policy – and sticking to it – what is exciting is scratching heads and working out what that might be – given a blank sheet of paper – and a fresh chance to stand for something. What can really make us stand out in increasingly crowded markets where stations are gravitating to both similar musical ground and similar implementation?

So. What should be our thinking?

David

Categories: FAQ Guest posts 15

Posted by admin on June 25, 2008