The Buzz of the 2011 Radio Festival

The 2011 Radio Academy Radio Festival was held in The Lowry in Salford Quays, the regeneration area of Manchester that, as was mentioned, has a real buzz about it. The Festival itself had a feeling of ‘buzz’, maybe this was because the sell out event featured the top echelons of the UK Radio industry, celebrity broadcasters, other well known names (if not faces) who broadcast, and those who simply have an interest or career in radio as a whole. It was also expertly hosted by Lancastrians Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie in the main room, who did a great job introducing each of the sessions and brought a sense of the vibrant North in to the auditorium.

The programme was varied and all encompassing. The Tuesday kicked off with the Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, who is trying to manage cuts across the Corporation and invest in a digital infrastructure that the medium so desperately needs if it is to achieve the digital switch over. The BBC do seem to be making moves into the electronic cataloguing of their programming – the example given was Desert Island Discs, with a large proportion of the shows being already available in downloadable format online. However, while there are still rumours of large pay packets going to the celebrity names in other areas of the BBC, cuts are never going to be popular.

Other sessions included a couple of Meet the Boss interviewers with Ashley Tabor, head of Global Radio and then Dee Ford, Managing Director of Bauer Radio. The two biggest players in the commercial radio sector have very different business models.  Global have spent the last couple of years pulling together the stations acquired from a string of mergers and acquisitions featuring the likes of GWR, Chrysalis and GCap Media into nationally recognisable brands – Heart, Capital, XFM, Gold, LBC and Choice. Bauer meanwhile have retained the majority of their local identities and re-aligned them by the feel the broadcast aims to engender – a feeling of togetherness and locality with the Place portfolio and a more music-focussed Passion portfolio.

The radio industry at the moment does face a number of key issues and opportunities which were also covered. The amazing ability of radio to personally connect with so many on a regular basis puts it in a unique place – few other media can claim to consistently reach in excess of 90% of the entire UK population in one way or another on a weekly basis. This puts it in a very strong position and can give celebrity names a unique platform to generate public interest. The likes of Ronnie Wood, Jamie Callum, Robbie Savage and Michael Vaughan were all present on stage in one way or another and are seeing their public profiles rising, as they move from ex-sportsman or musician into a broadcasting career.

The unique sense of warmth the listener gets from radio broadcast means it is no more at risk now with the rise of social media, online playlists, the vast array of music and means of listening to it, that have exploded over the last few years, as it was when television burst onto the scene 75 years ago. However there are risks and these were discussed at various points.

The threat of losing the youth market is most definitely being considered, this is of course the future radio listener, and a session featuring the people at the front of pushing out radio content to the new platforms – YouTube, Facebook et al – put forward some good discussion about how the airwaves are developing amongst the younger generation. Is it really still radio though?

Speech works really well on the radio compared to the plethora of other ways to listen to music. Nowadays, a music collection is pretty simple to carry around, and if you don’t have your own playlist available, there are numerous ways of accessing one really very easily.

One of the key reasons to listen to the radio is for the presenter or specifically for a speech based show. In particular, Absolute Radio have worked on bringing in such well known comedians Frank Skinner and Dave Gorman; meanwhile the BBC are no stranger to comedic presenters - Radcliffe and Maconie themselves have a show on 6 Music, but also at a regional level, Rhod Gilbert has come to Radio Wales to try and attract a more youthful listener base. Discussing radio as a platform for comedy, the Festival put on a very enjoyable piece running through some great clips of radio gold and discussing the place of comedy broadcasting featuring the likes of Patrick Kielty and (my personal favourite) Adam Buxton.

Another issue that was roundly talked about was the need for collaboration amongst the key players in the radio market to move the expansion of the digital infrastructure forward. It seems that this has been discussed and alluded to for a while now, so hopefully the common discussion will help all realise there is a pan-industry enthusiasm for it (or dare I say again buzz) and that some recommendations will follow by the end of the year.