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Absolute Radio – Behind the sound

| jamesstodd
Absolute Radio logo
Image via absoluteradio.co.uk

This week at the Radio Academy Promotion and Marketing Awards, Absolute Radio picked up another haul of awards.

Along with the Creative Gold Award, they won Best National On-Air Promotion (with Faces for Radio), Best On-Air Sponsorship (for Baddiel and Skinner) and Best On-Air Imaging. This adds to the bronze award they picked up at this year’s Sony Radio Awards for Best Station Imaging.

A couple of weeks ago at the Broadcast Symposium 2010 in Nuremberg, I presented a session on Station Imaging in the UK, which featured a video with Absolute Radio’s Creative Director Vince Lynch.

Take a look now behind the thinking of what makes the sound of Absolute Radio.

You can hear more about this year’s awards on Steve Martin’s Earshot blog here.

Quote me on that

| jamesstodd

I came across these today on the walls of BBC Television Centre.

All Images (C) BBC

All are catchphrases featured in highly successful BBC TV shows – displayed proudly in bright colours. Of course, they provide a nice talking point for tours and similar. But a nice way of showing the heritage of the Corporation.

It works for TV and could work for loads of BBC radio too.

But could you use something for your station in a similar way? Maybe not for a small station. But one with a heritage show or big name maybe? Or how about song lyrics from songs that reflect you station right now?

A simple idea?

Flared music – who worked with whom

| jamesstodd

The great thing about the BBC is that you can be pretty sure that there;’s a team of people working behind the scenes on new and clever ways of doing things with content and online data.

I found a link to a project called DATA ART – a partnership between BBC Learning, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Westminster.

You can find details of some of their projects here:

I’ve not yet delved into all of them yet, (writing this on the train on my non Flash-friendly iPhone). But there could be some interesting possibilities with one of these projects – Flared Music.

The site notes that “Flared music lets you visually research relationships between musicians and bands using the Musicbrainz database an online community resource that the BBC is working with to collate music information”. Enter the name of an artist or producer and let the app search out connections and collaborations.

I entered “Paul McCartney” and it listed collaborations from the obvious (Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and of course The Beatles) but also, bizarrely , a connection to Su Pollard. Ok – she was on Ferry Aid! But, it set me thinking – maybe it could be a starting point for a musical feature on the radio? Or the basis of a fun online game?

Take a look – try it for yourself – and see what strange connections it throws up.

And thanks to @backflipltd for flagging this project up.

I Want it All. I Want It Now. UPDATE

| jamesstodd

Ok.

So I wanted it all – when I wanted it. So maybe it’s a pipe dream.

However – I can do some of it – sort of – and certainly on my iPhone on an app I randomly came across called Stitcher

moylesphoto

It’s basically allows you to stream podcasts  – at the touch of the button – categorised by genre, subject and even brand. So you’ll find loads of BBC content  plus stuff from ABC, CBS, CNN, and pretty much everything else. And it does it over wifi and also when you’re out of a wifi hotspots (though not sure how your battery or data consumption will like it). Basically it pulls together loads of podcasts – but you can listen without downloading. 

Searching just now, I’m randomly listening  to KNX 1070 Notable News from Los Angeles – so for the sheer geek  factor of almost live radio from anywhere in the world – this is great. In fact – a lot of the U.S stations seem to update podcast content snippets of various parts of their output from the latest news bulletin to the latest weather. And since the application let’s you choose favourites into a playlist – I could build a playlist right now of the latest news for KNX 1070 Notable NewsL.A., plus weather for New York (because maybe I’m off to the airport to fly there)from the Weather Channel, followed by The Hollywood Minute – and finally BBC Radio 1’s Entertainment News from the UK.

So my “personalised” radio journey still continues. Maybe the BBC can start adding hourly news updates, Traffic Radio can add the latest  travel bulletin by county  and maybe Global Radio can get me a daily dose of the best bitching from Steve Allen (as let’s face it – he is the master of that genre).

If someone could give me the content snippets to pick and choose from – then I’ll be closer to getting exactly what I want.

Or am I maybe being too demanding?