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BBC Sounds - an audio treasure trove for everyone in the coming months

Jonathan Wall — Sat, 28 Mar 2020 10:41:47 +0000

Now more than ever, we know people want things which make them laugh and smile, tell them what’s going on and help support their health, education and wellbeing.

We’re making sure BBC Sounds is the best possible audio treasure trove for the nation over the coming months.

We’re adding special new titles and unlocking classics from the archive, so I wanted to share more about what people are going to be able to find on Sounds in the coming weeks and beyond.

The Coronavirus Newscast

BBC Sounds will play an important role in helping people in the UK impacted by the crisis with information, education and support.

Our daily podcast The Coronavirus Newscast will keep listeners updated with the latest from Adam Fleming and other BBC correspondents.

Next week we’ll have a podcast series called 10 Today, which will also be heard regularly on Radio 5 live sports extra; working with Sport England, they’re ten minute workouts aimed at older listeners to help them keep active. We also have special music mixes such as Pacesetter and new mix Solo Rave for those of all ages looking to work out - or rave - at home.

Pace Setter

Our children need help to fill the gap left by school closures so we will have two daily education podcasts, one aimed at primary and the other secondary students, and we’ll also have a new series of short, fun history lessons for all the family with Greg Jenner.

There are twenty classic novels in full on Sounds, and more than 100 short stories. All for free, and many such as Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson and Silas Marner by George Eliot appear on the GCSE syllabus. There are also fifteen children’s stories, including The Children’s Joke by Louisa May Alcott and Finn and the Scottish Giant by Harold F Hughes.

The BBC has an incredibly rich archive of audio, and we’re making sure there’s a huge variety of new and archive programmes on Sounds to help keep listeners of all ages entertained and connected to the world. We’ve especially brought back six series of the classic Hancock’s Half Hour and The Goon Show so whether you prefer those, classic episodes of Just A Minute, The Boosh and Flight of the Conchords, or one of the many episodes of Infinite Monkey Cage, there will be the best of comedy from across the decades to make everyone laugh at a time when it’s needed.

If you haven’t heard the radio series from some of today’s most popular comedians such as Mae Martin, Tez Ilyas, Sarah Millican and Twayna Mayne, they’re on Sounds now too.

Sounds is the place for the best of the BBC’s audio storytelling and escapism too. People can enjoy classic dramas such as Middlemarch, alongside all four series of conspiracy thriller Tracks (awarded best fiction at the British Podcast Awards) and more recent podcast dramas including The Whisperer In Darkness and Fake Heiress.

For those who want to get lost in an audiobook, we have lots for listeners to enjoy including: The Testaments by Margaret Atwood which we’ve just brought back to Sounds, Maya Angelou's Autobiographies, Life On Earth by (and read by) David Attenborough, Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, The Mirror And The Light by Hilary Mantel, Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams and Adults by Emma Jane Unsworth. All of these abridged books, and many more, are available for people to indulge in.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

I’m one of the many, many people in the UK missing live sport. If you’re looking for a sports fix and good chat, we’ve got Colin Murray unearthing classic sports commentaries and interviews in Replay; our brilliant new podcast Match Of The Day: Top 10; forty of the most memorable conversations from Test Match Special’s View from Boundary archive with the likes of the youngest Nobel Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai, singer songwriter Lily Allen, comedy actor John Cleese, and writer Ben Travers (who was the first and watched WG Grace play cricket) are being re-released from next week; and the fourth series of hugely popular That Peter Crouch Podcast is arriving sooner to entertain its many fans.

Match Of The Day: Top 10

All of this great classic and current audio sits alongside our new podcasts landing soon too. Radio 5 live’s Elis and John are making special episodes - The Isolation Tapes - finding big laughs even amidst what’s currently happening, Too Rude For Radio with 1Xtra’s Dotty starts this month, and Perfect Sounds with the brilliant comedian James Acaster launches next month. New podcast You’ll Do has celebrity guests talking about the reality of relationships, and Radio 4 has just commissioned some of the biggest UK comedians including Rufus Hound, Marcus Brigstocke, Rachel Parris, Matt Lucas and Miranda Hart, who are currently not able to do their usual shows, to share their isolation experiences on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds in a new series.

Dotty

We know how vital the news and analysis, music, entertainment and escapism we provide is in these challenging times. Last week live listening to our radio stations went up by 18% on BBC Sounds and there was the highest number of Sounds users - 3.5 million (200k more than the week before). Our top music mix, the Mindful Mix, had more plays last week than throughout February.

It’s because listeners turn to us during significant events that we’ll keep making sure Sounds has what people need over the next few months. In addition to the company of the BBC’s brilliant radio stations, we’ll give people classic and new programmes, audiobooks and podcasts for escapism and laughter, as well as things that help educate our kids, provide trusted information and means to help support the nation’s health and wellbeing.

How our podcasts are doing

James Purnell — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 13:57:13 +0000

Last June, I said we were going to be doing more podcasts.

Here’s an update on how it’s going. Overall, pretty well.

In September, in the UK, there were nearly 26.5 million downloads of BBC podcasts. That’s the highest number we’ve seen since August 2015 when we started recording downloads as we do now and an increase of around 10 million since then too. The previous record was 23.4 million.

There were 14.6 million Radio 4 downloads in the last month, more than we’ve ever had before and up from around 11m three years ago. Brilliant new podcasts such as The Ratline, our investigation into the mysterious disappearance of a senior Nazi, and comedy podcast Flip have contributed to the record as well as ones which regularly top the charts such as Friday Night Comedy and Desert Island Discs - not to mention the award-winning Fortunately.

For Radio 5 live there were around 4.7m downloads, the first time there have been more than 4m and up 60% from around 3m on the previous month. New podcasts such as That Peter Crouch Podcast as well as Football Daily and the return of Flintoff, Savage and the Ping Pong Guy are drawing in loyal listeners in big numbers.

Radio 1 also had its highest number of podcast downloads - over 750,000 and up 30% since the previous month with popular podcasts like The Greg James Podcast and Scott Mills Daily doing particularly well.

Around the world, there were nearly 63m downloads - also a record - with over 24.5m for BBC World Service podcasts.

We can see how listening habits are changing. Live broadcasting accounts for 88% of listening among the over 55s but that falls to 48% among 15-24 year olds (according to this RAJAR Midas research).

Six million of us listen to podcasts every week - that’s almost doubled over the last five years. It’s gone up by around a third in the last twelve months.

Contrary to what is sometimes said, younger listeners are listening to speech and music - but in the way that they want.

Audiences are passionate about the BBC and nowhere is that more true than radio. When a much loved presenter decides to move on, they are quick to tell us what they think and who should replace them. Long may that continue. It shows that we are doing something that really connects, that people love.

We want to build on that to help grow the sector for all audiences. Even though these numbers are rising, still only 11% of the country listen to podcasts each week.

Growing the market for everyone is one of the roles of our new app - BBC Sounds. We’ve been testing it with audiences and they’re already telling us that it’s helping them discover a much wider range of content. Introducing them to podcasts. Helping them find new music. Widening their interests.

It’s just the start - watch this space…

Getting the space to innovate

James Purnell — Sat, 30 Jun 2018 11:00:00 +0000

I said last week that we would be experimenting with new and different types of content. I want to tell you about one way we’ve been doing that - podcasts.

Podcasts aren’t new. The first podcasts - as we now know them - were made in 2004. The same year, the BBC made Radio 4’s In Our Time available as a podcast. More BBC titles followed and we have had some global hits. Across the world, almost 50 million episodes of A History of the World in 100 Objects have been downloaded. In Our Time gets around 2.5 million downloads a month worldwide. The BBC’s biggest podcast - Global News from the World Service - regularly gets 10 million downloads a month. Kermode and Mayo’s Film Review, which has had a cult podcast following since 2005, gets almost a million downloads a month.

But until recently our regulation constrained us. We were required to concentrate on releasing radio programmes on demand, rather than making original podcasts - a subtle, but vital distinction.

Now we’ve been given scope to experiment. We’ve commissioned eight new podcasts, which you’ll start to see appearing over the next few months. We have also done a lot more to curate our output in a way that podcast listeners would expect and welcome. Have a listen to the way we talk about the Radio 4 documentaries in our Seriously strand or the way Comedy of the Week is introduced.

The first new podcasts are doing well - Beyond Reasonable Doubt? is a true crime podcast from 5 live, which Apple have put at the top of the UK iTunes chart. We have released four episodes in one go too. Flintoff, Savage and the Ping Pong Guy which started as a podcast idea and is now on air has been doing well since its launch in February.

We’ve learned two interesting things.

If we stop innovating it’s bad for the whole sector

I’m sure there were good reasons for the regulation that limited us doing podcasts that weren’t for broadcast. But it had a consequence; it stopped us innovating. Having been first into podcasts, the BBC had to narrow its focus.

As time went on however I suspect that harmed the UK podcast market. Podcasts are growing fast in the UK - with 8% of us listening to one every week. But in the States that’s 15% and in Sweden it’s even higher. If we’d been pushing innovation in podcasts since 2004 we could have stimulated the UK market even further. That would have been good for audiences and good for companies producing podcasts in the UK. Audiences adopting a technology early helps grow a bigger market, which makes it possible for companies to innovate in that country and then export what they’ve learned.

With the iPlayer, the BBC helped create a market - with podcasts, we’d like to help accelerate the growth of that market. I’d be interested in any views people have for how we do that.

Innovation is often about the small things

What makes it hard for incumbents like us to innovate is often the small things. With our podcasts, one barrier is time - because a scheduled programme really does have to be ready on time, anything made only for on-demand can fall to the bottom of the to-do list. So, we’re thinking about how we manage our workforce to support podcast innovation.

We’re learning more about podcasts all the time. We’ll share more of that over the coming months.