RotD Music Editor Lee Thompson reports back from this week's Radio Festival in Salford

16 October 2014 - Editorial

It’s been a truly remarkable week in British radio. On Wednesday afternoon, one of the industry’s best-loved characters, a true geek, total anorak, glorious advocate and ambassador for everything that’s great about the medium in this country, walked out on stage on the final afternoon at this year’s Radio Festival 2014 in Salford and received a rapturous reception from a full house of UK-wide delegates. The twist is that the person being interviewed is a friend of mine and old colleague who I, nor most people who had ever met or worked with them, had no idea prior to last weekend that they’d been living a lie for almost 30 years.

If you ever doubted the power of broadcasting in its purest form, Saturday night at 10pm on BBC Radio 5Live proved to be one of the most remarkable pieces of speech radio I’d ever heard. ‘Hirsty’ announced in an interview with the award-winning presenter Stephen Nolan that he was no longer going to be known by his birth name of Simon but had changed it by deed poll to Stephanie and was in the process of becoming a woman. When he exited Capital Yorkshire’s Breakfast show in June, shortly after being nominated at the prestigious Radio Academy awards for his show, the press and PR blurb saw him say “I’ve decided to take a break as, personally, it’s been a tough 12 months and the time has come to make one of the hardest decisions of my life”. I saw Simon (as he still then was) at our old radio station Viking FM’s 30^th anniversary party a few short weeks before this surprise announcement and S was on great form as always. He’d confided in me that it was almost time for him to pack in breakfast but, then again, he’d told me that on the past three occasions I’d seen him before that too. I had no inkling that he was going through a personal hell that stretched back to childhood when, as he’s now confessed, he’d be watching Dangermouse on TV one minute then, as his mum popped out, would run upstairs to play with her make-up and try on her clothes.

There’s now a Facebook page that’s been set up with almost 23,000 likes from fans demanding ‘We Want Stephanie Hirst Back On Capital FM’. She’ll return to the job she was born for soon, sadly probably not working for her former employers, but as she told Phil Williams on stage, looking relaxed and truly beautiful “I’m ready to be back on the air. I’ve got stories to tell”. And that was one of the universal themes that came through at this year’s tremendous festival – radio and the people who work in it have some remarkable stories to tell.

One of my favourite sessions came from Sir Tim Smit, an unlikely name on the speakers list, as he’s best known as the man who created the Eden Project in Cornwall. However, as he explained, his connection with Peter Gabriel and his innovative Real World project (which continues to bring previously-little-heard indigenous African music to a western audience) put him in a great position to give one of the most inspiring 30 minutes of speech I’d heard in years. Some tasty soundbites included “if you love something, there’ll be millions of other people who love it too – you just need to make them hear it' and added “radio’s influence is more influential than anything else”.

He’s not wrong, it seems. The wealth and array of stats and facts that I picked up over the three-day event was mind-boggling and provides a ton of food for thought for everyone in the music industry, not just radio itself.

For instance, 90% of the entire UK population listen to radio each week, a figure that’s thought to be the highest ever recorded. We’ll see if that’s changed drastically when the quarterly RAJAR audience figures are released in a couple of weeks but what is absolutely clear is that the way we consume radio is changing rapidly, just perhaps not rapidly enough for the makers of podcasts, though.

A stat that I picked up was that only 79% of radio listeners claimed to have actually heard of the word ‘podcast’ and, of the ones that had, only 18% actually used them. In the on-demand world that we now inhabit and particularly with the constant innovative approach that the BBC has when it comes to being able to access their programming, it seems that we’ve become much more likely to be engaged in ‘catching-up’ on radio programming from national stations. Alison Winter from the BBC’s Audiences and Research team told delegates that live listening for Radio 1 was steady during the main daytime 9am-5pm traditional working hours, but the biggest day for on-demand listening was a Monday, something they’d never expected before their insight analysis was carried out. Big weekend shows like the Top 40 chart and specialist programmes were the key drivers, as people were choosing to listen to them at a more convenient time. 6 Music and Radio 2 listeners behaved in an almost identical way. The biggest radio audiences across the board on connected TV and tablet devices for Auntie Beeb were delivered on weekday evenings. As Radio 1 controller Ben Cooper pointed out in his Wednesday morning session, one in three children now own their own tablet, but only one in seven have their own radio. That’s a figure that would’ve been unheard of even three years ago.

So what’s the average age of a Radio 1 listener, broken down per show, you might ask? Gemma Cairney who’s on air 4-6.30am rather unsurprisingly has the highest average aged listener at 34.1 years old, the lowest average for any specialist show is 30.6 and Zane Lowe's audience averages 31. However, the station claims to have more 17-year-olds listening than any other age. The mean age is 32.

There was a solid defence of the station’s ‘distinctiveness’ against their commercial radio rivals, something that the organisation RadioCentre always wants to challenge Radio 1 on. Turns out they don’t really have a leg to stand on. In the past 30 days Radio 1 had played 3,448 different tracks – the figure on Capital Radio was just 191.

On a slight side note, I personally tried to challenge Korda Marshall, Chairman of The Official Charts Company, during a Q&A session on radio’s role regarding breaking new music and asked him why his organisation wasn’t fighting harder to see a weekly Top 40 music show on primetime TV once more. “That ship has sailed” he told me and it’s simply not going to happen. NEXT! Hey, at least I tried but did wonder why I even bothered to ask.

Later that evening I bumped into an old friend who’s been setting up a radio station in Ethiopia over the past year and learnt more in ten minutes about that amazing country than anything I could have ever read online. James Horspool told me of the hideous bureaucracy involved in getting music radio broadcasts up and running in the country. I was staggered to learn that the potential audience are totally au fait with international acts like David Guetta and Bruno Mars and are crying out to be able to hear them 24/7 via a national pop station coming out of Addis Ababa, set to be heard to a population of 90 million people. Probably less surprisingly they worship Sir Bob Geldof and would be lost without BBC World News, he told me.

All in all, the positivity in Salford was palpable. Young students from fledgling campus stations, mixing shoulders and networking with some of the most powerful and influential key figures in British radio and everyone of them coming away more enlightened, inspired and enriched by something they heard or witnessed over the three-day period.

Next year, it would be good to see more of an industry presence from the labels too. Radio programmers need new, innovative music for specialist shows, massive pop hits for commercial radio and a better understanding of how the majors operate and how best to do business with them. In the run-up to the 2015 event, I'd advise you try and block three days out in your diary and go to meet the people that could one day be the folk that’ll make or break your priority act, but who currently feel disconnected from you; they’re even more passionate about their job than you’d ever imagine.