Livemau5 on BBC Radio 5 Live

Radio's always best when it's live, and responds to things that happen there and then.

Even if it's unexpected and certainly unwanted.

I love how Shelagh Fogarty deals with this. An honest reaction to an unwelcome guest.

She still manages to back-anno the guests very well though...

The Drugs Don't Work

With the Olympics upon us, there's all sorts of fun you can have on your radio station with Olympic themed content. From the classics like "Name That Anthem" and "Office Olympics" through to some more innovative bits of content.

One which stood out for me over the last week was a station that got its main host to take a performance enhancing drug (albeit a legal one) contained in a supplement powder... and then measured his performance before, and after. Really nice idea. Do the drugs work?

So, which cutting edge, out there, alternative format would pull a stunt like this? Surely some radical American or Australian station pushing the boundaries of acceptability on breakfast radio?

Nope. BBC Radio 5 Live. That's who.

And with all the compliance that the BBC have to go through, full marks to them for getting the idea on air.

Here's how it panned out.

RAJAR Qtr 4 2010; "The numbers are in..."

So it was listening figures time again in the UK this week... and what did we learn?

Well, there are some nice headlines about 90% of the population listening to the radio every week and of course every group or station puts a shine on their particular figures, so no-one seems to be real loser (although of course they can’t all be right!)

A few things caught my eye.

First, I was disappointed at the rate of growth for Digital Listening with a rather modest 0.2% rise in the quarter to a 25% share of all listening via platform. As part of that, DAB was up 0.5% quarter on quarter, and still remains the most popular way of consuming digital radio (15.8% share), but I can’t help feeling that the momentum has slowed a little, and being a firm believer in the importance of radio to ‘go digital’ in future, it’s frustrating to see such slow progress.

What’s the answer? Well... more unique content and stations on DAB would help. It was encouraging to see the continued growth of stations like Absolute 80s (up to 665,000 weekly reach), Absolute 90s (cuming 295,000) and even the recently refreshed Planet Rock (with a new high of 827,000) doing so well. It shows that when there is great content or a different offer on Digital, listeners will gravitate towards it. Niche formats on digital seem to be the way forward. Just make sure your niche is big enough!

Talk radio is proving more and more popular in the UK with the growth of TalkSport as a format (now reaches over 3 Million a week), BBC 5Live gaining record audiences (now over 7 million), and 97.3 LBC in London (almost reaching 1 million a week), radio audience are lapping up mainstream and populist speech content. BBC Radio 4 has always delivered great audiences, but it’s a very different offering to the former 3. It would be great to see the success of speech radio in a local form in the commercial sector outside London; a trick has proved quite difficult to perform so far. Perhaps as some mainstream music radio does less and less speech, the ‘talk sector’ will benefit more in the future.

Meanwhile in London, Magic continue to outperform its commercial rivals taking top spot in reach and share. Its consistent blend of ‘light favourites’ and inoffensive links seems to be just the job for stressed out Londoners! As I write, they’ve just played Amy Winehouse - ‘Back to Black’ into Candi Staton ‘Young Hearts, Run Free’. Lovely ;-)

Capital are just behind Magic, and still sounding good. The benefit of their big TV campaign and the impact of the networking will be felt next quarter. Kiss have overtaken Heart into 3rd place in terms of reach, which is a great result for Kiss and will be naturally disappointing for Heart, who have really lost touch with Magic now. Next in Kiss’s sights will be Capital, and you can hear how tight the battle is between those two simply by listening to how close the music formats are in the daytime. Want Tinie Tempah, Bruno Mars, Rhianna or Mike Posner? Well either station will suffice right now!

So as the number crunchers do their thing, and stations up and down the UK have an explosion of PowerPoint and Excel, it’s nice to know that above it all, the UK is one of the most vibrant and creative radio markets in the whole world with some fantastic formats, and some superb broadcasters. There really is always something great to listen to... and the continued growth of ‘listen again’ / on-demand / podcasts etc, means that you don’t even have to worry that you missed a particular show.

It’s radio that waits ‘till it’s wanted.

Now that’s Magic! ;-)

"Because Your Station Is Worth It..."

As we're getting closer to the World Cup, radio stations in those countries involved in the action are plotting their different ways of reflecting the excitement, fun and national pride that the tournament generates.

One piece of imaging caught my ear last week. It's from BBC Radio 5 Live (I know... I must stop writing about them!)

Imaging Producer, Stephen Mackay, and the rest of the team there have recuited the voice of Stuart Hall (familiar to those in the UK) and written some real stand out pieces of production that just grab your attention because the set up is very different.

When I emailed Stephen asked about the promo, he said that they've gone for the 'off the wall' approach and are going to "...up the weirdness as we get closer to the tournament!"

I look forward to that. But in the meantime, enjoy this short piece of imaging and the very creative approach they have taken to hook you in the the subject.

Funny stuff...

"My name's Nik and I'm an addict..."

I have a confession to make. I think I’m an addict. Not to crack or ‘Meow Meow’. No... something far more addictive. It’s BBC Radio 5 Live.

Maybe it’s down to the UK General Election and the natural amount of news that is circulating as a result of that, or perhaps it was the recent volcanic ash cloud and the ability of radio to really convey the changing nature of the story minute by minute, but I’ve probably spent more time with 5 Live than any other station over the last few weeks.

For those of you not resident in the UK or not familiar with it, let me try and explain what it does.

• It’s a speech station
• It’s main areas are News and Sport
• It also covers entertainment and popular culture
• It’s not stuffy
• It’s very conversational
• It doesn’t always rely on the ‘phone in’ as its main tool
• It has a sense of humour
• It employs some of the best speech broadcasters in the UK
• It has appointment to listen programmes
• It’s broadcast on Medium Wave (!) which is how most listeners hear it, but never mentions this fact on air!
• It’s also available on DAB, online, and all the other platforms too...
• It’s bloody good! Sorry - did I already mention that?

I have a lot of conversations with stations at the moment about how the ‘speech content’ is more and more important as a weapon to a music station these days than ever before. So my appetite for speech stations has grown considerably over the last few years, so perhaps that explains the current love affair with 5 Live.

But I thought I would cheat a little bit on my new found love the other day when I travelling in the car, and tuned into London speech station LBC 97.3, where James Whale was doing the afternoon show live from Bristol where the 2nd Leaders Debate was happening that night. Nice move to put the show in town, but after about 5 minutes of a pretty good interview with William Hague, the show went rapidly downhill with some formulaic callers and then the mother of all technical cock ups where presenter could not hear callers, but callers were on air and then the engineering talk-back went loudly into the headphones, bleeding on air, putting off James even further, until eventually the talk back actually went live in air! (It gets funny from about 4:40pm onwards and it was last Thursday 22nd April if you have access to a London station logger!)

Now, the point of telling you this was not to put a downer on LBC. Nick Ferrari at Breakfast is a great broadcaster and knows his audience very well and really connects with them fantastically on a daily basis, as do many of their other presenters. The point was to point out how difficult really great speech radio is to do and then to heap large amounts of praise on 5 Live, saying that they get it right, day in, day out.

Now, before you cry foul, I know they have “jacuzzis of cash” and a huge team to make it work, but I’m delighted they do, and as a listener I enjoy every bit of it. From 5 Live Breakfast to Richard Bacon, from Danny Baker to Tony Livsey, and from Fighting Talk to Simon Mayo’s Movie Reviews. It’s all good.

It’s far too easy for us who work in the industry to be overly critical when listening to the radio and give opinions on how things could be done differently or done 'far better’... but sometimes we don’t take time out to give praise where praise is due. So I thought it would be nice to do that once in a while, and this is blatantly one of those occasions. (Maybe it's the sunshine or the bank holiday 'feelgood' vibe that has gone to my head!)

I’ve never worked for 5 Live, but I know a couple of people who do. I hope they’re having as much fun working at the station as I’m having listening to it currently.

Happy weekend!