MULTIMEDIA MEETS RADIO

MMR07: the opportunities and challenges of podcasting

Eighty per cent of podcast users are under the age of 40, while 63 per cent of them are men. That is the situation in Germany, according to figures supplied by MDR's Reinhard Baerenz, but it is much the same story everywhere else.

Mads Fink said Danish Radio had received a letter from a 94 year old lady thanking them because podcasts had enabled her to clean her attic while listening to her favourite programmes. Generally, though, Danish grannies are as unlikely to own iPods or MP3 players as old ladies in other countries.

Switzerland's mx3 is certainly not aimed at the regulars of Darby and Joan clubs. The service allows unsigned Swiss bands to upload their music onto a special website.

It has been phenomenally successful for a country with a population of just seven million. More than 1000 bands had signed up to mx3 within a week of its launch.

It now boasts some 4700 bands and 12,500 songs. According to Samuel Vuillermoz (RSR) and Dominik Born (DSR), on an EU level that would be proportionally equivalent to a quarter of a million contributing bands.

Samuel and Dominik put the success of the application down to an attractive design, an intuitive GUI and fast-loading pages. It offers users powerful search and caegorization tools, personalization, a recommendation service and the opportunity to share with friends.

The bands like it too. They can link to online shops that sell their music and more importantly, they know they can get their songs played on the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's (SSR-SRG Idée Suisse) radio stations.

Much of the focus of the podcasting session at Multimedia Meets Radio, though, was on rights. Several broadcasters gave details about the agreements they have negotiated with the record industry.

DR has a two-year deal that allows them to pay one fee upfront to use the music on all platforms. It covers both streaming and downloading and has enabled the Danish broadcaster to podcast programmes with 49 per cent music content.

Belgium's French language broadcaster RTBF has a more complicated rights agreement. It is based on paying per download, according to the percentage of music in the podcast.

It is not clear whether this is a sustainable model, especially since RTBF is committed to not passing the additional costs on to users. RTBF believes passionately that public service radio should continue to be freely available.

On the other end of the scale, mx3 has no digital rights management and makes MP3 files available in reasonable quality 128kbps.

Several people in the audience urged the EBU to do more to help leverage better deals from the music industry.

mmr07

The future of podcasting

Every few months, the EBU organizes a 'Lunchtime Business Briefing' to bring staff up-to-date with developments in media and technology. The last one was a few days ago, when I was press-ganged into sharing a podium with my colleague David Wood to speak about podcasting.

David went first. He provided technical explanations, showed off his new iPod, played the rather sad 'Star Wars Kid' video, which has been watched 900 million times, and recommended a few podcasts.

David even managed to play My Sharona, with the excuse that the song features prominently on President Bush's playlist, as he proceeded to inform, educate and entertain the audience.

The words 'short' and 'straw' flashed across my mind as I stood up to say a few words about trends and the future of podcasting.

My starting point was a report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. It suggests that while the number of people who have experimented with podcasts continues to grow, few people are downloading regularly.

Other significant findings are that men are more likely than women to download content and that the over-50s are surprisingly keen on podcasts. This last point also emerged from a recent survey by Gramophone magazine, which showed that in 2005 British listeners over the age of 50 downloaded an average of 11 pieces of music.

That podcasting appeals to radically different demographics is reflected too in the published results from the BBC's ongoing Download and Podcast Trial. The most popular weekly shows are In Our Time, where middle-aged intellectuals ponder the meaning of life, and the Best of Moyles, a youth-oriented podcast by the eponymous Radio 1 DJ.

In France, the most popular podcast is 2000 Ans d'Histoire, a history programme which appeals mostly to middle-aged listeners.

In my presentation, I played a clip of GeekBrief, a video podcast aimed at technophiles. I joked that the pretty female presenter was perhaps a reason why more men than women downloaded podcasts.

Music is likely to play a very important part in the future of podcasting. We need look no further than the success of the BBC's Beethoven podcasts - 600,000 downloads in 2005 - and more recently, DR's Mozart anniversary podcasts, which attracted more than a million downloads in the space of a few days.

NRK were pioneers of pop music podcasts in Europe, avoiding rights problems by featuring unsigned bands, under the label Untouched Music. Recently, Belgium's French-language broadcaster, RTBF, reached a landmark deal with local record companies enabling it to offer downloadable music programmes via a website with a friendly GUI.

However, as the Pew survey suggests, the real challenge appears to be getting people hooked on podcasting. Technology may help, but broadcasters need to work on what we used to call stickiness - creating a community of returning users.

On the technology front, Microsoft's MP3 player, Zune, comes with wireless technology that allows users to beam content to friends. Despite the limitations, it's a significant development if you remember that the web's most successful communities have been built on peer-to-peer file sharing.

Mobile phones will undoubtedly play an important part too, as more people start using them as MP3 players. Nokia has made no secret of its ambition to challenge Apple's iPod.

Things are also happening on the content front.

Some broadcasters, including the BBC World Service, have been experimenting with free software, like Odeo, to make their podcasts interactive. The idea is that listeners leave voice messages on a website, which may then be used to create a podcast.

iPods and old lace

Like latter-day King Lears, wandering bemused across a digital landscape and blind to innovation - that must be how large swathes of the media regard people over the age of 50. They appear to associate middle-age with listening to BBC Radio 3 and struggling to use a video recorder.

At least, that would explain all the eyebrows that have been raised over a new survey that "reveals" that fans of classical music are not, after all, a bunch of decrepit technophobes. It shows that people aged over 50 actually own iPods and download music!

The survey, commissioned by Gramophone magazine, suggests that 75 per cent of classical buffs have used a computer, MP3 player, or digital radio to listen to music. Another finding that apparently has analysts on the edge of their seats is that classical music appeals to younger listeners too.

If older people are luddites with lumbago, then the flip side of the cliché is that young people tap their feet to a hip hop beat while toying with the latest digital devices.

The Gramophone survey comes as the BBC's Third Programme crosses the Rubicon into the age of blue rinses and free bus passes. The Third Programme began broadcasting classical music, along with some world music and jazz, 60 years ago, on 29th September 1946.

At this point, it is probably worth remembering that nearly one-and-a-half million people downloaded Beethoven's symphonies last year, when Radio 3 made them available on its website.

However, Radio 3 has many critics, who appear keen to spoil its birthday party. The station is dismissed by some as 'intimidating", "elitist" and "stuffy".

Others have accused Radio 3 of "dumbing down" and filling the airwaves with pop music and quizzes, as it tries to attract a younger audience. You can't win them all, as Mozart probably said when they accused him of "dumbing down" by composing a German-language opera about a magic flute.

I digress.

One hundred and fifteen years after Mozart penned Die Zauberflöte and 60 years before Radio 3 was born, Reginald Fessenden broadcast the first-ever radio programme. The historic broadcast, on 24th December 1906, included violin music and a reading from the Bible.

In Italy, Tivoli Radio Watch has carried out a survey to mark the 100th anniversary of the event. The study suggests that Italians feel more attached to the radio than any other medium because of the emotions it inspires.

I have written before about the renaissance of Italian radio in recent years. Talented broadcasters like Fiorello are attracting new audiences, while the latest technologies are increasing people's choices about when, where and how they listen.

The same is true across Europe. It is not about demographics, young and old are responding as broadcasters find new ways of engaging them: when Danish Radio made Mozart's symphonies available for download, hundreds of thousands of people responded.

As baby boomers reach retirement age, it is about time the media realised that pigeonholes are for, well, pigeons. The over-50s are the rock 'n' roll generation, who grew up listening to Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, as well as Brahms, Liszt and Schubert.

Postmortem

Radio is sexier than TV, at least that is my highly biased spin on MMR+TV. The session on blogs and podcasts was certainly the best attended of the two days.

The focus of this year's event was cross-media and multi-platform, but the message I got was that multimedial production values and new technology were winning listeners for traditional radio. Several speakers told us that the success of podcasting, for example, was not just in the download figures, but also in the new listeners tuning into the scheduled editions of podcast programmes.

I introduced the workshop by saying that two phenomena - which I called "voice" and "choice" - were changing the way people used the radio. There was now a modicum of genuine interactivity (voice) and broadcasters were starting to listen and to take interest in what their audiences were telling them; at the same, people wanted to decide not only what they listened to, but also when (time-shifting) and where (place-shifting) they listened - the choice factor.

Blogs, along with tools like message-boards, e-mail and SMS, were giving voice to once passive listeners, while podcasting was doing for radio what TiVo had achieved for TV. That was the premise and the reason for bundling blogs and podcasts together in the workshop.

But not everyone agrees with me. One criticism is that the word "radio" was only heard once or twice during the entire podcasting session - my memory must be playing tricks because I remember it differently. Another criiticim is that blogging has nothing to do with either radio or TV.

On a more positive note, several people have written to say how much they enjoyed our opening session on cross-media productions. Radio Members have singled out YLE's Sibelius project and France5's C.U.L.T. as two of the highlights of the conference, perhaps surprisingly since the latter involved no radio.

By a similar token, one of the most popular TV sessions involved a presentation on videoblogging by Tuija Aalto of YLE Radio.

The internet radio presentations were another favourite, while one senior editor told me that the marvellous things that the Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians and Swedes had achieved on shoestring budgets (Friday afternoon session) had filled him with ideas for his company's website.

(The screenshot is from Tuija's photos from MMR. You will find them on Flickr, tagged MMR).   

A look ahead

This year's Multimedia Meets Radio event will highlight the opportunities and challenges facing broadcasters as radio moves firmly into the age of interactivity and choice. EBU members who have embraced technologies such as podcasting, weblogs and internet radio players will share their experiences and present their vision of the future.

The legendary founder of the BBC, Lord Reith, famously defined the mission of public service broadcasters as to inform, educate and entertain. This has not changed, but now the era of "auntie knows best" is over and broadcasters are also expected to listen.

Even in Reith's day, the success of the media depended on its ability to create a conversation among a community of listeners. Broadcasting is still about creating conversations, except that broadcasters have become part of the process: fully-fledged interlocutors rather than benign observers. In large part, this is because phenomena like weblogs and podcasting empower audiences by giving them a direct channel to the programme-makers.

While it is premature to dismiss schedules as a thing of the past, as some commentators have suggested, the fact remains that consumers finally have some say in how, when and where they listen. But this is just a beginning as broadcasters look for ways to overcome hurdles, such as rights issues, in order to broaden the range of programmes they can make available on demand.

These and other concerns will be the focus of a weblogs and podcasting workshop on Friday 24th March. Speakers will include the BBC's Kevin Anderson, Holger Hank of DW-World, Judy McAlpine of CBC and Jonathan Marks of Critical Distance.

MMR kicks off (this is a World Cup year) with a joint radio-TV session on the synergies of cross-media productions. It will look at the strategies and tools that broadcasters are using to harness the complementary strengths of radio, television and the internet in order to bring added value to their customers.

The radio only session on Thursday afternoon will take in two very different topics: radio in post-tsunami Asia and the technology of internet radio players. On Friday afternoon, delegates will find out how some broadcasters have combined the Reithian tenets of informing, educating and entertaining in a single production.

Among the many highlights are a website that crosses a Big Brother-style format with a documentary about apes, a multimedia encyclopaedia and a game to make young people aware of gender issues. MMR 2006 promises all this and more.