BBC 6 MUSIC BEATS RADIO 3

The latest radio listening figures from RAJAR  show that digital-only station BBC 6 Music has overtaken its BBC sister network Radio 3 for the first time. The figures - released today - show that for the last quarter (April - June), 6 Music averaged 1.89m listeners compared to Radio 3's 1.8m. It seems that amongst the digerati, eclectic music from across the genres trumps the classically-based stalwart.

This is fascinating news for several reasons. Firstly, 6 Music was threatened with closure by the BBC Trust just three years ago - and since then, has seen a huge transformation in its audience figures. Secondly, 6 Music is digital only, whereas Radio 3 is available on FM transmitters too. And of course, the budget for 6 Music is much smaller than that for Radio 3. Indeed, looking at digital only stations, 6 Music is way ahead of it nearest competitor, Absolute (formely Virgin) which itself turned in its best figures of 1.24m listeners. 

BBC 6 Music - More Popular
than Radio 3

BBC Radio 3 - Classical stalwart

The 6 Music mix of experienced DJs and artists turned DJ (think Jarvis Cocker, Guy Garvey, Tom Robinson, Cerys Matthews) certainly seems to be a winner - and it also, pleasingly, champions much live session music and supports concerts and special live events too.

Once with Catatonia, Cerys Matthews is now a 6 Music DJ on Sundays

Despite all the competing sources of music today, radio overall does seem remarkably healthy. Digging into the RAJAR figures, it's clear that several stations are doing very well - and this may well be driven by the increasing percentage of the population who choose to listen via a digital format. Analogue listening accounts for 56.8% of the audience (down from 58.6% for the same period last year) and for those who listen at home, it has fallen to just 45.6%. The increasing use of apps on smart phones also boosts the digital figures with something like 6.2% of all digital listening being via this medium. The CEO of Digital UK Ford Ennals commented that for digital listening to take a further boost "...will require significantly more growth in car as well as local DAB coverage to be expanded towards FM equivalence". He also adds that more national digital-only stations should be developed.

Chris Evans - Nearly 10 Millions listeners

And, it seems, some things don't really change as the UK's most popular radio show remains The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2 where record figures see his listenership soar to  almost 10 million. The London market too has seen some changes in the popularity of stations serving the capital with Capital FM regaining its position as the number one commercial station with some 2.2m listeners. Only Radio 2 and Radio 4 exceed this.

Capital FM - Leading the London commercial market

If you'd like to see more about radio listener figures, click on this link and check out the RAJAR figures for yourself: RAJAR Radio Listenership Q2 2014 

Alan Dorey

31st July 2014

MUSIC - AS EASY AS  ABC?

The trend started 30 years ago with the introduction of the Sony Walkman - and today, it is spelling the death knell for the traditional album. It has become all-pervasive and everyone from BBC radio to Amazon to iTunes is pushing it like there's no tomorrow.

What is this LP-slaying, paradigm-shifting and clearly popular piece of cultural change when it's at home then?

Playlists.

The simple compilation of disparate songs into a chosen sequence to suit the consumer. 

They've been around for many years, of course, stretching back to the early days of popular music on the BBC Light Programme. Controllers created a playlist of songs from which presenters could select, happy in the knowledge that they would all be safe, inoffensive and ideal for day-time airplay. The BBC determined what was on the playlist and this had the effect of record pluggers and labels all trying to get their latest product play-listed. It was a perfect circle for them, but perhaps not so exciting for increasingly sophisticated listeners. The launch of the compact audio cassette transferred the sequencing power into the hands of the music fan. Cassette recorders became de rigeur in the 70s and the turn of that decade saw the rise of the mix-tape. Sony's Walkman completed the power-shift by making the mix-tape and playback completely portable - you could take your music anywhere - jogging, to the gym, on the bus or train - whatever took your fancy.

Vinyl LPs - Alphabetical?

Personal playlists still depended upon source material, what tracks you had on your vinyl LPs and singles - how easy they were to source and record - and this process could be fraught with challenges. Scratches and jumps on your vinyl transferred themselves in all their glory to your tape. Then you actually had to find your chosen track in the first place. No instantly searchable on-line database in those days. Did you keep your albums in proper alphabetical order? By artist or genre? Or did you keep them in a haphazard pile between the bookcase and your record deck? Were the correct LPs restored to the correct sleeves after use? Did they get left on turntables - or out in the sun near a window to warp into all manner of bizarre shapes, none of which were remotely playable?

And assuming you did find what you wanted, the whole taping-experience was a challenge. Timing pieces to fit into the 45 minutes per side of a C90 cassette. Cursing that tapes stretched, or crinkled  - or occasionally reversed themselves. Or broke after a few plays, necessitating emergency repairs which then introduced slight bumps or gaps or distorted sounds at crucial points in your favourite song. It was a taxing process - and not one for the faint-hearted.

CDs - More compact, less space - Alphabetical?

But - power was with the music fan and although the mere act of recording from an album or single was illegal ("but everybody does it"), the floodgates had opened. CDs took matters a stage further with improved fidelity - and then the launch of home PCs and then in time, CD burners, recordable and rewritable CDs and the process became even more straight forward. Playlists abounded and music fans became more discerning about what songs they actually wanted. If only these pesky albums didn't have "filler" tracks, if only there was some way of buying just what you wanted and then using the tracks in whatever sequence you liked.

Enter iTunes from Apple.

Napster - At one time - it would have been
bigger than iTunes

Here was a store, a store bursting with all manner of songs and crucially, you could buy them on-line 24 hours a day. The downside was cost - and that sneaky little thing DRM - Digital Rights Management which prevented you from copying the download to anything other than an Apple product such as the iPod. Pirate sites like Napster sprang up and for a while, there was a delightful anarchy for the consumer if not the record companies and  artists who lost out on income. Piracy was a short-lived phenomenon and Apple and other download sites realised that to make profits, fans needed to be able to play their purchases on the device of their choice. DRM was consigned to the bin, pricing structures were altered and iTunes even permitted songs to be converted to MP3 format and copied onto CDs, PCs, Memory Sticks, Smartphones, Tablets and a myriad of other devices. What a revolution that has been in the past few years.  

Lana Del Rey - 2014 album straight in at #1 in the UK
Album Charts - and yet in its first week,
barely 48,000 copies sold.

Cherry-picking from albums became the order of the day - and although download sales increased, hard-copy album sales started an inexorable down-turn. Charts contain results from both hard-copy and download, but with fewer physical albums being sold - and download albums not replacing them (most fans picked songs rather than a whole album) - it now makes quite a mockery of the UK Albums chart. One of the most recent releases to go straight to number one on release was the third album from Lana Del Rey "Ultraviolence". It's a good album, thoroughly deserving of this accolade - and yet sold less than 50,000 copies in its first week of release. In the 70s and 80s, that would have barely registered and it might have scraped into the lower reaches of the top 40. 

So Playlists - cherry-picked songs from download  sites - have become ubiquitous. But, as I noted recently, downloads themselves are under threat from Streaming Sites like Spotify where it is even easier to create a playlist. Just pay your £10 or so monthly fee - and anything that the service has is yours if you so desire. Playlists no longer sit on your own device, but are stored in the cloud or with the streaming site. Keep paying your monthly fee and all those playlists and all those new songs still to be enjoyed are yours. No wonder album sales are rushing headlong down the river to the waterfalls of doom.

BBC Playlister

Radio too is getting into Playlists as clearly, we still hear and learn about new music from our favourite radio stations. What if there was a way to bookmark songs as you hear them - and then create your own playlist as you go along? That's just what the BBC's Playlister facility does - and I must admit, I am a keen user. If you listen on-line, as a song plays, an option appear to playlist it. Just click - and the task is done. It applies across the BBC's national stations - and your playlist builds up and is held on your own BBC Playlist account. Not every song is available, but the vast majority are. And when you playback, you have the option of listening to them via (for example) Spotify or iTunes - with whom the BBC has reached various "accommodations".

One of many Music Databases available

With the array of database formats available on-line, you can also store, download and upload all manner of music to a single database, instantly searchable  - and thus never again will you suffer from mislaid songs, album sleeves, warped vinyl and stretched tapes. Some of them allow album artwork, artist profiles and even let you rate each song so that your top choices are easily found. As a radio DJ, I'd be lost without my musical database - but, there is still no subsititute in terms of aesthetics to having racks and shelves stuffed full of LPs, CDs and so forth. But then I am a bloke - and blokes are supposed to alphabeticise and categorise everything which (in theory) makes it easy to find stuff. But much as I enjoy my music collection, even I find that it's the database and the digital versions of songs that I go to first.

I still buy albums though. Duff tracks and all because, as I find, what I didn't like at first, years later has the strange quality of becoming better and more enjoyable with the passage of time. Usually.

So, how long before albums disappear as a key method of getting music to music fans? It's hard to say. There's nothing quite like a band "working on an album" to get the creative juices flowing. It's handy to buy a bunch of songs in one go as well. They'll be around for a few years - but in ten years time? Hard to say. Vinyl limited editions - yes. CDs? Unlikely I'd say. And when that happens, the album will be a rare beast. But where do we go beyond streaming? Complete wireless cloud access? Google Glasses implants? Direct matter transference into some kind of mind-modem? Who knows - but right now, I have an urge, a craving, a nostalgic desire to play some vinyl - crackles and pops and all.

Now, which sleeve did I put my copy of Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing At Baxters in? Somehow, the copy of Singalongamax that fell out of it doesn't quite cut the mustard.

Alan Dorey

30th July 2014   

STREAMING UP, DOWNLOADING DOWN

In the battle for the music-consumer's hard earned cash, there's a subtle and growing change in how music is purchased.

Much has been said about the decline of fixed-format music (CDs particularly) in the face of on-line digital competition. CD sales continue to decline and it's only the current phenomenon of vinyl becoming increasingly attractive that shows any hope for this line of business. But, in some new figures released in the USA by Neilsen Soundscan, it now appears that even the download industry is struggling in the face of a relentless onslaught from streaming services such as Spotify, Rhapsody, Youtube and Rdio. In the first six months of 2014, the number of audio and video streams increased by a massive 42% compared to the similiar period in 2013. To put some scale to this, the number of songs streamed moved from 50 million to over 70 million - whilst at the same time, download sales (such as iTunes for example) have declined by almost 15%. This means that increasingly, consumers are becoming more motivated by paying a monthly fixed fee for a streaming service rather than buying and *owning* individual tracks or albums.

Deezer - Looking to expand into North and South America

Part of this is a change of habit - it is not the acquisition of a piece of music which is important, but the ability to access it quickly and easily whenever the desire strikes, Add to that the continued rumblings from some quarters about who *owns* downloaded songs (iTunes have previously asserted that a customer's iTunes songs cannot be passed on to chosen beneficiaries in the event of death) and it's easy to see why streaming might be the current top dog. I've written before about moves by companies such as Amazon wanting to get into the streaming business and it seems that a further smaller-scale player - Deezer - is poised to make a big breakthrough in terms of volume streaming with a new service aimed at Latin America, Brazil in particular. It currently only accounts for 5% of all streamed music, mostly in Europe and mostly in partnership with telecoms companies such as Orange. However, as these telecoms companies get an increasingly wider foothold in an increasing number of countries, Deezer rides on the back of that success. Deezer's own view is that by going down this route, they've actually benefited the streaming business by "...taking people who were pirating into people who are now paying". Deezer's next step is to break the US market - and they've recently hired a new CEO with specific responsibility for cracking that monolith. 

iTunes - in the USA, *issues* about passing a purchased iTunes
library to a chosen beneficiary on death. 

We shouldn't get too carried away just yet: there are only perhaps 25 million on-line music fans who pay for streaming services - and that's out of a potential market that could reach as high as 2 billion if all internet-connected consumers bought music. But, it does demonstrate the potential - and where there is potential, large corporations smell profit. Whether this benefits the consumer remains to be seem. Music ownership will be a difficult barrier to truly remove - and by the time that it has, what's to say that streaming as a method of delivery will itself have been superceded?

Thanks goodness for the continuing existence of local
live bands such as Bournemouth's The Lizzards
(Picture: Beca Fludgate)

I consider myself pretty open-minded when it comes to how I find music and how I experience it. But the constant changes in formats and delivery strategies do little to engender confidence that it's really about the music and the art, rather than the monetisation and profit. And as always, those that make the music in the first place don't seem to be consulted about seismic changes about how their music is sold. Thank goodness, I say, that there are still local bands up and down the land who are prepared to create and present great music - let's just hope that they don't get drowned in the backwash of decisions made in the rarified atmosphere of some corporate boardroom. 

Alan Dorey

21st July 2014  

LAST CALL FOR LIVE MUSIC?

Was there ever a "golden age" of local live music?

Surveying the current precarious music scene and then listening to music fans, you'd think that every town was bursting with venues back in years gone by. And not just packed with venues, but each venue was heaving with customers all anxious to be part of their local musical millieux. I'm sure that on occasion, it might have seemed like that, but I can recall going to local gigs in the 80s and well, let's say, I never had to queue at the bar. 

Pubs closing at the rate of 28 net losses per week

But, there's no doubt that in many of our larger towns, there is a paucity of music venues. Yes, there are a handful of purpose-built or full-time sites, but the venues I refer to are the pubs, clubs, hotels and all the other locations that can add such vibrancy to a healthy local music scene. CAMRA - the Campaign For Real Ale -  points out that in 2014 the net closure of pubs each week in the UK has risen from 26 to 28. That's a net loss each and every week of 28 pubs, 4 a day. Whilst many of these may be small locals in out of the way places, a significant number are town-centre and suburban sites, the sort of sites that could have held regular music nights. Certainly, there are new pubs opening up, pubs by chains such as Wetherspoons have made a successful financial model out of selecting good town-centre sites and then converting non-pub buildings into their house style. But, no matter what Wetherspoons may have done for reasonable prices and all-day service, live music isn't part of the mix. The music venue situation is thus worse than imagined: pubs close, fewer new ones open and of those that do, opportunity for live music is minimal.

Mr Kyps at Lower Parkstone - Ideal full-time venue

Why does this matter?

There are several reasons, I believe. Firstly, there are just as many new bands and artists starting out these days as there ever was. With improved technology and flexibility, it's easier to create music and share it with fans and friends. The test - as always - is the ability to go out and play live, learn your stage-craft, gain experience of working with an audience and critically, practice musicianship in front of a potentially critical group of people. Bands and artists need venues not just for gigging purposes, but also rehearsals and creativity. And hopefully, for those who are determined and capable, playing live can generate some kind of an income.

Absent Jack playing a Forest FM gig  

Secondly, it is that financial aspect. Most local bands are never going to make a living out of playing live. However, gig fees are useful - they pay for fuel and transport, equipment, hiring rehearsal space and perhaps, sometimes,. little luxuries like food and drink. But playing live is a contractual thing, a deal with the pub or club: we'll learn our craft and provide entertainment, you pay us for that, you get more customers who spend more on your food and drink. And hopefully, they'll come back again. Several musicians tell me that 15 or 20 years ago, it did seem healthier: local bands could play a reasonably busy pub and take home £400 or more. Today, with fewer venues and less local flexibility in terms of pub managers and owners having the freedom to build a "scene", it's a rare occasion that a respected and accomplished band will take home £400. So why should an artist or band want to go and play live if the net result is that it costs them, rather than being seen as that happy medium where they make an audience happy and get rewarded for doing so?

The Kings Head, London - 1968 Open Mic

There's a third thing here too. It's a bit of a double-edged sword as it looks as if it is something which can truly benefit local artists who want to play live. This is the growing popularity of Open Mic nights, a feature that was a big part of the late 50s and early 60s folk revival, but these days is something else altogether. If I was being optimistic, an Open Mic night has got several good things going for it. Local artists get the chance to play live, practice their skills, try out songs - and mix and network with fellow artists. Set-ups are usually minimal - mostly acoustic - and it's a chance to gradually make a name. There's no money involved - possibly a free drink or a slice of pizza - but at least there's that chance to have your moment on a regular basis. The nights are often organised by roving entrepreneurs who are happy to put the time and energy in to making them happen. The bars and pubs benefit as they rarely pay for the event, but gain from increased food and drink sales. And sometimes, a magical night results.

Open Mic - 2014

However, there are issues with Open Mic nights. For a start, there seems to be an over-supply and the jam gets spread a little thinly. Some are properly organised with performers looked after and supported - but others are little more than a succession of poorly organised occasions with dodgy sound and and an act or two who, let's be honest, probably aren't doing the venue any favours. On balance, Open Mic nights are a good thing, but if there are too many - then the whole dynamic of local live music changes. Why would a landlord or owner pay £500 for a band - when an Open Mic would provide (probably) the same number of customers and sales for the price of couple of pizzas and a drink? The squeeze thus continues on the genuine bars and pubs that want to put on live music. 

Some say that provincial cities and towns will never regain the vibrancy and excitement of a good local music scene as musicians decide that reallly, it has to be the bright lights of London or nothing. There's an element of truth in that, but it's always been that way. And not every band wants to seek fame and fortune, many are quite happy to have day jobs and ply their musical trade as and when they can. I'm not against change - indeed, much change can be a positive thing - but if current trends continue, what town the size of say, Bournemouth or Poole, is going to be be able to support a local music community? And then where will aspiring artists go to learn their skills and progress?

Rough Trade London - Food, Drink, Music Sales, Gigs, Relaxation

There are answers, but as with all such things, money has to come into the equation. Creating a healthy local music scene isn't just about the artists. It's also about promoters, writers, supporters, fans and advertisers - the happy group of people who can all help manage a music scene, enjoy what they do and get something from it too. A multi-purpose venue aimed at music, but also providing space for eating, drinking, coffee, events, retail (books, magazines, music for example) so that income is generated from a wider base of services. The ambience of the venue, the look and feel is all focused on music, the artistic aspects of local culture and its promotion. It would be a welcoming location, always something going on and a place where the vibe changes throughout the day. It's not a purely music venue (which is thus closed during the day and not earning an income) nor is it a make-shift site that's vying for attention with customers who are showing little interest in the music (and boy do they show that). It's a hybrid of the two, welcoming and not off-putting, comfortable at times and edgy at others. And of course - without that investment - a pipe-dream. But who knows what could be achieved if the right minds came together? The right enthusiasms matched with the necessary practicalities? 

There is hope because music is important. There will always be a way to ensure local live music can continue, even if the journey is a tough and painful one. But if anyone wants to start a Kickstarter campaign for the Ideal Venue - please let me know,won't you?  

Alan Dorey

9th July 2014