I was interviewed by Scott Bliss for his internet-only radio-show-without-a-radio-station. It was a fun interview to do. We Skyped, but each of us recorded his own audio. After we spoke, I sent my recording to him for editing.

Might use that trick for something myself one day. Sounds pretty good – and after a while you forget that the two people talking are on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Of course, along the way, I say some stuff about that book I’m writing…

I was in Lancaster with Tim today, and we visited the student radio station that he worked at in the late 1970s when he was at university there – now called Bailrigg FM. We met a great bunch of students there, and they got a bit of an insight into their history.

Check some photos from the visit here.

I have a book out from the library. It’s a little overdue. Actually, it’s about eight years overdue. I suspect they’ve cancelled my Auckland Public Library membership by now.

The book is called ‘The Shoestring Pirates’ by Adrian Blackburn. It’s the true account (more or less) of four men who set sail to establish a pirate radio station on an old ship anchored in a small triangle of what was deemed to be a patch of ‘international waters’ in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf – as the result of what can only be described as an accident of cartography.

They broadcast pop tunes as well as friendly and hip DJ banter – not to mention commercials and, on occasion, distress calls, for about four years (actually 1111 days, believe it or not) before finally being given a legal licence to broadcast on land.

There are parallel stories to that of Radio Hauraki in other parts of the world at around the same period in history. Radio Caroline in the UK and Radio Veronica in the Netherlands are two close to what is now my home. It’s a story of the battle for independent, private radio in an age of state monopoly control over broadcasting. And it involves men in boats, rock ‘n’ roll records and legal battles.

What makes it of particular significance to me is that I later worked closely with several of the people involved, mostly at other stations (two of the four original “pirates” were management at Radio Pacific, where I worked for five years), but on occasion at Hauraki itself as well.

Of course, what Radio Hauraki represents today is about as far from ‘piracy’ as it’s possible to get in twenty-first century media. But echoes of what it symbolised in the late 1960s and earliest part of the 1970s carried through the station’s development and multiple changes of line-up and ownership until quite recently.

These days, of course, ‘offshore’ means something different to the people of Hauraki. It’s just where the profit goes. And counter-culture has long since been replaced by corporate culture.

But as I go into 2012 – a year in which I write my own book about radio – it’s nice to take a bit of that history with me. And I like to think I’m commemorating their important and historical act of disobedience with a small act of rebellion of my own.

I’ve decided I’m not actually planning on taking the book back for at least another year. And I may even photocopy the whole thing before I do.

If you like cats, or stories about cats – or if you just like stories – here’s a Christmas gift from me to you (and your kids, if you happen to have any).

I made a ‘cartoon for radio’ about 15 years ago. It’s about cats – well, specifically about one cat, Ashley, who finds himself transported out of the world of humans, can openers, laundry baskets and suburbia – and into a magical world of castles, dragons, princesses and wizards. A world run entirely by cats.

If you’d like a taster before you grab the whole thing, you can check out the first 14 episodes on Bandcamp.

Or you can just dive straight in. All 50 episodes of series one are here for you to download as free mp3s. Merry Christmas.

Click to download Ashley’s Worlds. [192MB zip file]

Series two to follow in the new year…

Continuing along the thread of digitally archiving the radio programmes and jazz sessions I did in the 1990s, I’ve started digitising the series Ashley’s Worlds – a “cartoon for radio” that was syndicated on 26 stations around New Zealand on Sunday morning kids’ radio programmes.

It’s been fun to hear them again. It was an ambitious project (as usual) and I certainly wasn’t making things easy for myself from a sound design perspective. On average, each 3-5 min episode took around 16 hours to make. And there were 100 episodes in all.

It’s going to take me a while to get them all nicely polished and ready to face the world again, but the first 14 are up online for free download, with more to follow.

The fact that the New Zealand Radio Sound Archives are in Christchurch is a bit of a sobering thought. I hate to think how much of our cultural history could potentially have been lost in that devastating earthquake.

My theory is that the more people have copies of this stuff, the less likely it is to disappear forever. Digital archiving is about dissemination and propagating, not hoarding and hiding. So if it’s of interest to you, please grab yourself a copy, and feel free to pass it around.

Hope you enjoy it.

Photo by YlvaS

I’ve been thinking a great deal about radio over the past few weeks. After having done the conference keynote in Auckland, a number of things have lined up to bring me back into that world, after a good five or so years being only peripherally involved at best.

I’ve been asked to write a book about radio in the digital age, for a kickoff. It’s early stages yet, and there’s no contract – but it looks pretty promising. In fact, it’s probably the book I should have been writing since about 2004. I’ll give myself 18 months to turn that one around.

I’ve also been doing a fair bit more academic work in the radio realm than at any time since I originally left New Zealand… and all of a sudden I’m doing a spot of radio consultancy here and there as well.

I did my usual, weekly four-hour jazz, bossa, rare groove, laid-back funk DJ set at the Hare and Hounds this afternoon, while people ate their Sunday roasts. There’s a playlist here, if you’re interested.

Now, because all this radio stuff is going around in my head, I’m thinking of ways of using that activity as the basis for a radio show of some kind. Since I’m playing records anyway…

Radio without additional effort
Here’s the scenario: I have these decks in front of me, and I have brought a pile of records – proper, 12″ vinyl, 33 1/3 rpm albums. Lots of them are rare and all of them are perfect for that Sunday afternoon vibe. In fact, Sunday afternoon’s kind of my specialism. I hosted It’s A Jazz Thing on George FM in the 2-4pm Sunday slot for about 6 years, and then did more or less the same thing on Rhubarb Radio a couple of years ago.

So there’s a four-hour mix each week at the same time. I’m in the back room of a pub which has been converted into a restaurant for the occasion, and people are eating, drinking, listening to my tunes, and talking with their friends and loved ones. Surely, an extra wire, or a little bit of internet technology could plug the output into a web radio stream and provide a low-effort, expertly curated jazz Sunday afternoon vibe for some radio station somewhere.

Could be a community radio station in Lithuania, a small college radio station in Minnesota, a local station here in Birmingham, a web-only station with no obvious point of origin – or whatever.

It just seems like an under-utilisation of media production for the records I play only to be heard in one room, when my laptop’s sitting right there…

Not really radio
A couple of things: first, I don’t talk during my DJ set. People are eating, and I’m more or less just providing the ambience (though it is a very cool ambience) – so there’d be no “Hi, you’re listening to X, that was Y, and coming up, I’m going to be playing some Z”. It’s just a continuous music mix for four hours.

Second, I’m not a DJ in the beat-matching, scratching, turntablist sense of the word. I play one record, and then I play another. I’ve put a lot of thought into what record comes next, and there’s generally no silence between the two – but that’s as good as it gets. One good record after another.

Third, I don’t play much in the way of new music. I would say over 90% of what I play was made between 1967 and 1977. As such, some of the records are a little bit surface-noisy. It all adds to the vibe.

It all takes place in a pub, through a simple mixing desk between two Technics turntables. I’m pretty certain a single feed off the desk could be piped into an upload stream at a decent and reliable rate that could be rebroadcast anywhere.

Of course, I could record it and then syndicate it out in some kind of reliable recorded music format, and I guess I could be persuaded to do that – but it’s the idea of it happening live that most interests me. The idea that someone is listening right now, and they know that what they’re hearing is happening somewhere in the world as they hear it.

So – that’s what I’ve got, and that’s what I’ve been thinking. Anyone interested in taking a feed and filling a slot on their station? Drop me a note.

While I was in Helsinki, I was interviewed by Radio New Zealand National‘s Saturday Morning host Kim Hill. The pretext was that Finland had just been declared best country in the world to live in, and since I was a New Zealander who just happened to be there, I was on the radio for quarter of an hour extolling its virtues and examining the national character.

Of course, I know very little about Finland or its people having only visited twice, and having actually spent most of that time sitting inside at conferences. But all the same, I managed to glean enough to keep things going for a bit.

If you’re interested, here’s my interview:

…and some responses to it from the radio show’s audience:

Photo by hebedesign

This is not an idea about radio as much as it is an idea for radio. And it’s a very simple idea about podcasting – but not one that I’m aware that radio stations have ever thought about or implemented.

Before I tell you the idea, let me describe the issue it addresses. Podcasting is a method of distribution. Nothing more. It’s not a new type of radio, an audio download, a democratisation of broadcasting or a category of content. It’s purely and simply a means of getting media content to audiences. Technically, it’s a media enclosure within an RSS feed.

And radio people have been aware for the past five years that the distribution technology exists and that they should make use of it somehow. Many of them do.

There are two main ways in which radio stations use podcasting:

The first is to make entire shows (often edited to remove copyright music) that can be heard on air available via RSS subscription online. This is usually thought of in terms of ‘timeshifting’. You listen to the same programme, but at a time that suits you, not the broadcaster.

The second is to create and package up extra content that does not make it onto the airwaves. This is more rare, but sometimes involves things like interviews in their entirety that had been edited for broadcast, or additional content designed to reinforce the station brand.

But there’s a third way – and one that I think could make the most of what radio stations already do, promote and enhance their brand, and allow audiences to customise their experience of the radio station. It’s modularisation.

What does modularisation mean?
In short, the process of modularisation is to cut broadcasts up into discrete segments and make sense of them as pieces that can be reassembled in other ways.

Think of them like Lego blocks. If you listen to breakfast radio, there’ll be the news – national stories, local stories, human interest stories… and then the sports – football, tennis, golf… the weather – today’s weather, local, national, long-range forecast… and there’s the traffic report, the regular features, the interview slot – and so on.

In fact, most commercial breakfast music radio shows are so information-intensive (and advertising-heavy) that you’d be lucky to squeeze in five whole songs an hour.

But all of these components are thought of as a ‘show’ not as component pieces that can be reassembled and re-presented in other ways or in different combinations.

And most of those components repeat hour by hour between 6am and 9am, as different people turn on the radio according to their personal routines. The 7am news bulletin is virtually identical to the 8am news bulletin. So for me to listen to the 7am news at 8.42am as I ride the train to work is not a particular disadvantage in terms of staying abreast of the world. In fact, it would not be terribly inconvenient if that bulletin had been recorded at 5.30am.

At least – it wouldn’t be inconvenient for me.

Modular podcasts (modcasts?)
Let’s say I have a 30 minute daily commute. I want to arrive at work informed, entertained and up with the play. However, I’m not interested in sport, what the long-range weather forecast might be or the financial news. I’m especially interested in local news, and international news headlines, given that I’m from elsewhere, and who knows – somebody from New Zealand might do something that makes it into a bulletin.

Now, each of those modules are pieces of the actual broadcast that make it to air, but using very simple digital editing, could be stored on a server and tagged according to what they are.

As a listener, I would like to be able to go to a radio station’s website and customise a podcast just for me. I enter my 30 minute commute time, check the boxes that relate to the items I’m particularly interested in, uncheck the boxes that relate to the items I’m not at all interested in, and then allow the station, on a daily basis, to fill a pre-recorded podcast that is delivered via RSS to my computer and onto my iPod every morning before I leave for work.

The items that I have selected will fill perhaps 10 minutes of that 30 minute podcast, and the remainder can be filled with other bits of the programme to make up the time. Perhaps a discussion about last night’s television, a phone-in competition (that I can listen to, without participating, obviously) and just general radio show banter – perhaps even with a bit of music.

It’s about workflow
People who work on breakfast radio shows get up earlier than you and I do. They arrive and prep before the show starts at 6am (usually) and can be in the office as early as 4.30am. I know. I worked on one for a year or so.

The ability to routinely record a piece of the broadcast as it’s being made, and then tag it as a particular type of content could be as simple as hitting a single button and dragging and dropping an audio file into a folder.

It’s not about getting the broadcasters to do anything especially new or different, but about including tiny tasks such as pushing a button while they take a breath between one module and another (news, weather, sports, traffic) – or even automating that process where it already happens (often there is a recorded ‘sting’ that gets played out to identify a new idea or segment – and the button press is a part of that workflow).

The press of the button splits the recorded audio into segments, which can then be dragged and dropped into the correct buckets. If done early enough – say as part of the show prep, or in the first half hour of the programme, these pieces can be processed and ready to be automatically assembled into customised podcasts before most people have even had their first cup of coffee.

Then there’s a bit of magic that happens
Making the modularised content is not the trick. Assembling that content in lots of different ways and then distributing customised RSS enclosures is the trick. How do you make it so that everyone gets their very own version of the Heart FM or Galaxy breakfast show?

There are a number of ways around this. First, there could be a limited number of variables, and with perhaps as few as 50 different possible variations of options and durations (that’s not a big number for a computer).

Once the different modules have been recorded and tagged (say, by 6.30am), the server could compile all the different combinations into single audio files, and the options chosen by the listener would determine which feed (and therefore which audio file) they would receive by 7am.

The other way is to podcast multiple tracks, with each component numbered. So you would receive tracks 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 11 to 13. They would arrive independently of each other, but on your iPod, they would play in order. As you had selected not to subscribe to tracks 3, 6 and 10 (Sport, Long-Range Weather Forecast and Financial News), they would not appear in your playlist.

Advantages on both sides
Clearly, there’s an advantage for listeners. They get to build their own radio programme that fits into their own routine, and contains only the bits that they’re interested in, plus a few surprises to make up the rest.

For radio stations, there’s a way to superserve your audience, reinforce brand identity and sell sponsorship at an even more granular level. There’s the opportunity to make and include additional content and the chance to engage with an iPod listening audience in a way you were previously unable to do.

But perhaps even more importantly, you can get entirely accurate statistics about what people like and don’t like at a microscopic level of detail far beyond that of the quarter-hour RAJAR figures.

Not just for pop music stations
Obviously, this can be done for any kind of radio station – and, in fact, could offer the opportunity for radio station groups to offer modular packages that cut across brand identity, and allow listeners to (for instance) get the news from one station, the celebrity gossip from another, and the sports from a third – all packaged up into a neat and tidy daily bundle that automatically arrives each morning on my mp3 player, and is of exactly the duration I require.

All I have to do is put my iPod on its dock when I go to bed, and when I leave the house the next morning, I’m listening to the radio.

MY radio.

This audio slideshow was edited from the full length documentary – and explores the musical influences on Zane growing up in New Zealand…

Radio New Zealand has confirmed the following broadcast dates for “Urban Disturbance in Broadcasting House: The Zane Lowe Story”, produced by Sam Coley and presented by Andrew Dubber.

Part One:
4:10 pm Saturday 10 Apr 2010
8:05 pm Friday 16 Apr 2010

Part Two:
4:10 pm Saturday 17 Apr 2010
8:05 pm Friday 23 Apr 2010

For more details, see producer Sam Coley’s website.

Sam Coley and I made a documentary about Zane. Coming soon…