Month: April 2023

Sadai Banowan, a women-run radio station in northeastern Afghanistan has resumed broadcasting after the Taliban shut it down for playing music during the holy month of Ramadan.Sadai Banowan, which means ‘women’s voice’ in Dari, started 10 years ago in Badakhshan province and has eight staff, six of them female.Moezuddin Ahmadi, the director for Information and Culture in Badakhshan, said the station was allowed to resume activities on Thursday after it had obeyed the “laws and regulations of the Islamic Emirate” and agreed to stop broadcasting any kind of music.Station head Najia Sorosh said after the station “gave a commitment to officials at the information and culture department, they unlocked the door of the station,” and they started broadcasting again.The Afghan Journalist Safety Committee, an Afghan watchdog organization that promotes the safety of journalists and press freedom and which was involved in mediation for the station’s reopening, welcomed the resumption of broadcasts.“Following AJSC’s advocacy efforts, Sadia Banowan radio resumed its broadcasts,” it said in a tweet. […]

Inovonics Inc has introduced the model 611 Streaming Monitor, the firm’s second-generation monitor for IP streaming and Internet Radio. The new 611 is a dedicated hardware solution for uninterrupted monitoring of network streaming audio, such as online Internet radio and other IP streaming applications. It will make its public debut at NAB – Las Vegas April 15 – 19.Streaming audio over IP networks has progressed in recent years and the new 611 is designed to meet the technological challenges of today with greater processing power and advanced functionality. It provides balanced analog and AES-digital outputs, self-logging alarms that constantly checks for audio loss, stream loss and Internet loss. The 611 is easily managed remotely from any Web enabled device and SNMP manager.The 611 Streaming Monitor includes many unique features. It supports HTTPS streams and streaming formats HLS along with Icecast/Shoutcast. It also has a Stream Failover function to automatically switch to back-up streams, and StreamRotation to rotate through up to 30 preset streams.Ben Barber, President & CEO of Inovonics says: “In designing the 611, we drew on our experience with our model 610 to update and add new features that were not possible until now with the superior processing power of the 611. We also listened to our customers to include lots of new and desireable features.”611 Beta units have already been placed with trusted radio engineers for testing to provide Inovonics with valuable feedback to help make final firmware tweaks before production units begin shipping in June 2023. […]

Since SCA CEO Grant Blackley articulated the evolution of Southern Cross Austereo a few years ago at RadioDays Europe, the company has been invited back regularly for Europeans to learn from the Australian company’s strategy for developing its business in a fast-changing media landscape.This year Blackley told the next chapter of the story.“A few years ago we set out to disrupt and transform the digital audio industry. We realised that listeners wanted a single destination for their audio, so we launched LiSTNR.“We are now in the scaling phase of our business,” said Blackley as he outlined the stages of business development expected for SCA audio, which are: launch, scale then peak.Key elements of the success of LiSTNR’s business evolution include personalisation, discovery, commercialisation and visualisation.Personalisation“People have different habits and use different devices each day, so we start by gathering basic information, then keep track of what they choose and where they left off in their audio feeds. We store it in a secure and private profile,” explained Blackley.The company uses Google Firebase and Salesforce to enable “a familiar and continuous experience on apps, website and email newsletters.”Discovery“Content discovery is one of the more difficult things to do well.“We aim to recommend like a friend would give word of mouth suggestions. It has to be a good recommendation delivered at the right time when they are thinking what to listen to next… We use AI to determine the content they may want next and when they want it.”Source AI and Sonnant are used to transcribe all audio for detailed analysis of the content in a show that can then be related back to the listener for recommendations. This is the next stage of a combination of new tools that convert speech to text, analyse the words used in the content, then cross reference them with words in the podcast or catch-up radio segment the person was just listening to, so the recommendation is something directly relevant to content, not just a topic described in the tag or synopsis of the podcast.Commercialisation“Our ad offering is at the core of our strategy, we aim to create a compelling opportunity for brands to use us at scale.” The company has rationalised its platforms, making sure it now controls its “full digital audio inventory,” to be able to offer the best deal to advertisers in a brand safe environment.Tech partners for this aspect of the business strategy are NumberEight and Frequency. “These partners can tell us where the listeners are and what they are doing… at home, driving, jogging, etc… The data never leaves the person’s device so it is private, we don’t store it… with this information we can delivery dynamic ads that are relevant to each person listening.,” said Blackley.The most success SCA has had with this type of advertising is with sports content. “We use dynamic ad insertion at the end of a break which tells the score of a real time game and link it to the sport sponsor or a relevant advertiser.”VisualisationSCA is embracing visualisation more in LiSTNR because “the boundaries between audio and video are continuing to merge, expecially in podcasts. We have visualised our radio content for over 10 years… we are now fully connected visually in all our offices.”Blackley sees visualisations as a “pathway forward for content and advertisers.”There has been a 700% growth of the LiSTNR app in the last 6 months, as a result of a planned digital strategy which began with switching off SCA station feeds from TuneIn in October 2021, closing old apps and migrating people from those early digital listening platforms to the new LiSTNR app. To entice listeners to the new app, SCA expanded its content offerings to include more live sport and international content offerings from Wondery and Stitcher to entice listeners to the new platform.“We are underpinning the future of broadcast radio by delivering more options. People were worried that this might canibalise their radio broadcast audience, but our projections show that it won’t do that, it will grow audience.”SCA has decided to stay within 6 verticals the company thinks are core to its audio expansion strategy:• Radio & Music• Entertainment & Culture• Sport• Factual & Drama• Parenting & Kids Entertainment• News & Info“If something doesn’t fit we won’t take it on.”SCA now controls the RSS feed and insertion of every ad and retains 100% of the funds from those ads, when previously other platforms were inserting ads and taking part of the revenue that should have all been available to the broadcaster. “New income in this area has been driven to this segment of our business…. we now have about 700 sales people and have grown our audio content output by 66%,” said Blackley.“Advertisers and audiences realise that there is a wider distribution available to them now… Younger people don’t listen on radios but they do listen to radio, we have to be on any device of their choice.”“The longer they stay in our ecosystem the more they discover what else we offer and spend more time with all our content. LiSTNR represents their AUDIO world, not just their radio or podcast world… Forget the platform and talk about the world of audio,” urged Blackley. […]

Music Directing is an art and a science. The science part is the rotation and playout. The art is the part that connects people to audiences and tries to make every track matter to each listener when and where they hear it.During an ‘in the round’ session hosted by Nik Goodman at RadioDays Europe last week, three music directors discussed their approach to the art and science of music directing, with input from other music specialists in the round room.Des Paul, a presenter/producer at Greatest Hits Radio, Lea Stonhill, music programmer at Radio X and Chris Price, Head of music at BBC Radio 1 and 1Xtra all shared their approaches to music programming.For some stations, programming music by age demographic is now less important than programming by lifestyle. Des Paul’s niche station plays only show tunes, but makes sure it also has cross over with other stations in the company’s portfolio that have wider appeal. It is one of the sub-brands of Bauer Media’s Magic music brand.In contrast, for the BBC “age is everything,” it is enshrined in BBC Radio’s operating licence and the way it defines each brand. In Britain are locked to their formats by a promise of performance to the regulator Ofcom and the BBC Charter, so it is difficult to change the target audience.BBC Radio 1 is aimed at a younger audience of 15-29-year-olds, playing popular music across a variety of genres. BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 3 both target audiences 35-54 years old, Radio 2 with Talk and Radio 3 with classical music and cultural programming. BBC Radio 4 targets a more mature audience of 55 years and older, focusing on news, current affairs, drama, and cultural programming. Radio 5 targets 25-54-year-olds, with a focus on sports coverage, news, and current affairs.With its tightly defined age limitations BBC Radio stations regularly face the dilemma of throwing away one part of their audience and replacing them with another. The corporation hopes that audiences transition to other BBC stations, but in the changing media landscape this is no longer always the case. To help BBC Radio 1 build its position at the younger end of its target audience pipeline, Chris Price says he gives a lot of thought to “making the right relationships with artists for the future and prioritising female artists.”Lea Stonhill was head of music for Radio X for 7 years, but has recently accepted a job as UK Music Content Manager at YouTube. Commenting on station brands and sub-brands, she observed that “all stations now have sub brands, different versions for a similar, but not the same audience. A sub-brand should increase the number of listeners, not cannibalise the current audience… Niche brands can exist within an ecosystem,” she said.To a round of applause and laughter Des Paul answered the question, ‘how niche can you go,’ saying, “Not much smaller than show tunes.”More seriously he explained: “So long as there’s crossover and commonality between your niche stations it will work… there has to be something in common with the master brand.” They may be radio stations, or stations may use other sub-brand strategies such as podcasts or additional streams.Nik Goodman then threw to another music programmer in the room for an opinion on niche formatting. To another round of laughter, delegates heard about a sub-brand of the kids radio station Fun Kids that only plays music for ‘moments when children just need to chill after playtime.’ Fun Kids Naps is “a station that literally sends its audience to sleep… it fulfills a need.”Many stations have dropped older forms of music research such as auditorium music testing because, with music streaming services such as Spotify changing the landscape, “the way audiences consume music has moved on… the relationship between who’s telling who what to play, or who the new artists are, has changed.”BBC Radio 1 has stopped doing call out music research. “It used to help us with recurrents and golds but now it has changed. We’re awash with data from shazam, spotify, Tiktok… We don’t miss the old research, the most important data point for me now is, have we already played this song, is it connecting to our presenters and audience,” said Price. He still values research about burn rate of songs, but otherwise looks at a more holistic view of music research by combining all the plays data from music services with internal reaction from his music specialist team.Radio 1 has a huge music universe, playing around 12,000 new songs per year, about 1000 a week. This contrasts with some commercial classic hits stations in the US which are on the other extreme of the spectrum, playing as few as 229 songs per week on very high rotation. “They want you to have the song you want as soon as you turn on,” commented another music specialist in the room, Sean Ross.Radio X’s strategy is a little different again is it “a catalog station, a rock indie alternative mix,” according to Stonhill.“It aims to give a full picture of the genre within 20 mins. We kick off the hour with a song that has amazing research for us.” The hourly clock format begins with a familiar song from the noughties, followed by a 90s, then a new song from then current category, then 00s, 90s, a current, into an ad break at the 20 minute mark, followed by a similar rotation each 20 minutes. “Protect your unfamiliar new songs with two familiar songs either side,” advised Price.BBC Radio 1 does it the opposite way. “We break those rules,” said Price.Des Paul gave a tip for presenters in formats with high repetition. “Presenters struggle with repetition… we get excited when we see new songs on the list, but finding new content to talk about for the high rotation songs requires hard work from the presenter.”He also talked about the importance of ‘spice tracks.’ They may not be tracks that test highly or are played often, but they are valuable because they “add something else that gives spice to the hour, something else to talk about, but make sure that there are not too many at once,” he advisedWith Artificial Intelligence being a major theme running through many conference sessions the three speakers shared a common view. Music Direction has been using AI for years in its music scheduling systems and MDs are used to adapting to the latest features, machine learning will help scheduling systems further evolve, but the art of music directing is in the choice of music and the way it connects to the audience. “You have to have cultural knowledge to program music that works for real radio.” […]