On BBC Music Day 2019, we are launching an enhanced version of BBC Music Memories which now includes three new categories of music: In addition to the Popular, Classical and Theme Tunes categories, we have added UK Regional Music, which offers traditional songs from England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland; International Music which offers songs from the 20 countries with the largest ageing immigrant populations living in the UK; and Social Music, which includes nursery rhymes, football songs, pub songs, scout and brownie songs as well as music from the major religions.

People can submit their playlists to the BBC using our anonymous survey. This data will help researchers in music and dementia help others to make recommendations that will help others find their own personally memorable music.

The BBC Music Library team, along with colleagues from around the BBC managed to find hundreds of new tracks in each of the new categories. We hope that there is now some music that will mean something to everyone, regardless of where they are from.

As before, in order to make this service free and globally available, for copyright reasons we have only been able to include 30 seconds of each popular track or 60 seconds for classical music. Once an initial playlist has been created on BBC Music Memories, we would encourage people to use other music services or stores to get hold of the full-length tracks.

We have also launched Memory Radio - three longer-form music and archive-based programmes made specifically for people with dementia, and designed in consultation with people with dementia and professional carers.

There is one Memory Radio show for each of the 1940’s, 1950’s and 1960’s. Each show starts at the beginning of the decade, offering a mixture of music, news archive and popular radio programmes from that year, and then moves forward through the decade.

The programmes might sound a little different to a ‘normal’ radio programme: the pace is deliberately slow and has a consistent level of energy; there are long pauses between each section; and we try to avoid speech over a music track to optimise the clarity of the spoken word. There are small, simple quizzes included in the programmes, and each programme is accompanied by a downloadable Index and Activity Guide which is designed to be used by carers in a family or care home environment to stimulate conversation and reminiscence.

Memory Radio is available on the Music Memories website, on BBC Sounds and on Alexa voice assistants.

Background
If you didn’t read the original blog post from 2018, I’ll describe again some of the thinking and theory behind music and dementia.

Music and Memory

Evidence shows that music can help people with dementia to feel and live better, and we wanted to build on the success of the award-winning BBC Reminiscence Archive, using content from the BBC’s archives to help improve the lives of people with dementia.

The thinking behind BBC Music Memories is quite simple, and is based on the principle of the ‘reminiscence bump’ - people tend to recall more from their adolescence and early adulthood - and the phenomenon that structures of the brain that process music can remain intact when other cognitive functions deteriorate.

Musical Reminiscence

Reminiscence work - the recalling and sharing of life events - is increasingly being used to help people with dementia have meaningful conversations with family and carers, and increase their wellbeing and quality of life. Such conversations can be beneficial for both the person with dementia and the families and carers around them.

BBC Music Memories helps people with dementia to find personally meaningful music - perhaps the tracks they listened to as a teenager or in early adulthood - and create a ‘playlist’ of their favourites, to be used as a starting point for reminiscence. We hope that BBC Music Memories will also be used in a family setting, perhaps with a grandparent and grandchild taking it in turns to find their own personally memorable music, and talking about the tracks and the memories that accompany them.

What happens next?

We are planning some research in to how Music Memories and Memory Radio are used by people with dementia, their families and carers, and will use any insights to improve and add to the service in 2020.

BBC Music Day

BBC Music Day is the annual celebration of the power of music to change lives with events and broadcasts across the week of 26 September. The theme this year is music and wellbeing. As part of this, music legend Nile Rodgers is the Ambassador for an unprecedented collaboration that brings together 85 organisations including Alzheimer’s Society, Alzheimer Scotland, Age UK, Playlist for Life and the NHS, to help bring music to everyone with dementia in the UK by 2020. The initiative has inspired over 800 events across the UK, from pop-up nightclubs and raves at care homes to intergenerational singing sessions, all celebrating the power of music to change lives.

Across the week of BBC Music Day, over 2,000 events in total will take place celebrating music and wellbeing, including pop up performances, interviews, musical takeovers and short films by artists including Craig David, Ed Sheeran, Lewis Capaldi, Liam Gallagher, Anne-Marie, Guy Garvey, Professor Green, Ray BLK, Keane, Naughty Boy, Nina Nesbitt and more.

“The power of music to integrate and cure. . . is quite fundamental. It is the profoundest nonchemical medication." Oliver Sacks, Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University

Today, on BBC Music Day 2018, we are launching BBC Music Memories, a website designed to use music to help people with dementia reconnect with their most powerful memories. We are also launching a survey - integrated into the website - which aims to help discover the nation’s favourite music memories. The survey data will help researchers suggest tunes that could bring back memories for people who have developed dementia or other brain conditions.

BBC Music Memories is incredibly simple to use on PC, tablet or smartphone. It has a simple user guide along with helpful links to further dementia support resources. We worked with experts from music and dementia charities, including Playlist For Life, on the design and shape of the service.

Music and Memory

Evidence shows that music can help people with dementia to feel and live better, and we wanted to build on the success of the award-winning BBC Reminiscence Archive, using content from the BBC’s archives, to help improve the lives of people with dementia.

The thinking behind BBC Music Memories is quite simple, and is based on the principle of the ‘reminiscence bump’ - people tend to recall more from their adolescence and early adulthood - and the phenomenon that ‘whilst verbal communication and associated thought processes deteriorate in dementia, the brain structures involved in the processing of musical information often remain intact’.

Musical Reminiscence

Reminiscence work - the recalling and sharing of life events - is increasing being used to help people with dementia have meaningful conversations with family and carers, and increase their wellbeing and quality of life. Such conversations can be beneficial for both the person with dementia and the families and carers around them.

BBC Music Memories helps people with dementia to find personally meaningful music - perhaps the tracks they listened to as a teenager or in early adulthood - and create a ‘playlist’ of their favourites, to be used as a starting point for reminiscence. We hope that BBC Music Memories will be also be used in a family setting, perhaps with grandparent and grandchild taking it in turns to find their own personally memorable music, and talking about the tracks and the memories that accompany them.

The Music

Working with the BBC Music Library, we researched the most popular music from the last 100 years, and produced a list of around 120 tracks for each decade from 1920 up to the present day. Many of the earlier tracks, despite being hugely popular at the time, were pretty difficult to find, but the Music Library team did a fantastic job of tracking them down and digitising them. The BBC Photo Library also managed to find many unique images of the performers from the archives, and we have added these evocative images to the website.

We also selected the 23 most popular classical composers, and for each composer, selected their 20 most played pieces. And finally, we selected the theme tunes from 100 BBC TV and Radio shows.

In total, these add up to around 1800 clips of music that can be listened to for free, and added to a playlist. The playlist can also be printed off, and has a box where people can note down their memories related to each track.

Give it a try and share your playlist with the nation

Why not give it a try? To begin, select whether you want to browse through classical, popular music or theme tunes. Then, choose a composer or decade. When in the ‘popular’ category, within each decade you can also filter by musical genre. Add some favourites, and then share your favourites via our anonymous survey, helping researchers in to music and dementia help others to create their own playlists of personally memorable music.

BBC Music Memories is launching on September 28th as part of BBC Music Day - an annual celebration of the power of music to change lives. We hope that BBC Music Memories, in some small way, will do exactly that.

This summer we've delivered a huge update to our platform for covering music events on the web, and I'd like to take you backstage. Bringing people together around live music is one of the BBC's vital public purposes. There's no better example than the Manchester concert a few weeks ago, but our experience on-air stretches all the way back to 1927 covering the Proms. I’ve worked on our live music output for a decade, from roles at the side of the stage (fun) to ones encoding videos at 3am in a sweltering office (less fun).

What is "Music Events"?

Our ambition for 'Music Events’ v6 is to deliver the best online coverage of live music in the world. Codenamed ‘Eavis’ after Glastonbury’s inimitable founder, our platform serves a broad portfolio. It has to do many jobs, providing:

• news stories and info about who’s performing
• information about tickets
• live video from multiple stages
• hundreds of catch up videos and galleries
• a lightweight CMS to quickly publish this content

I like to think of it as unique blend of Boiler Room, YouTube, Ticketmaster, IMBD and bespoke marketing websites.

The platform launched in 2009 covering the big festivals. It expanded to cover other broadcasts, music awards and our own performing groups. In 2015 we integrated The Proms, including a 122 year concert archive. 2016 was our most successful year ever, with millions of users generating record reach. We’re proud of this platform, and we wanted to build on it.

Three Key Improvements

Our design goals for v6 were typical of a mature product. We wanted to step back, clean up the design and modernise our technical foundations. We have refined every aspect of the platform, focusing on the core experience of empowering users to find great performances.

1 All New Design

Based on user research, we’ve made it clearer to tell whether you’re visiting before, during or after each event. Flexible modules reflect the available content. New mobile and large screen views showcase performers better than ever before.

2 Information Architecture

We’ve made it easier to find and enjoy the full breadth of our content. Browsing has been simplified into an A-Z view and a calendar. The calendar spans decades for Proms, but can drill into incredible detail for a three day festival.

You can ‘lean back’ on the new playback page, which offers a continuous stream of similar videos from each event. And if you want a more personalised experience, you can follow your favourite acts on the new “My Event” page.

3 Cloud

Lastly, we have completely rewritten ‘Music Events’ to be hosted on the cloud, reducing our codebase by nearly 60% in the process. Pages load much faster, even under heavy load. The Manchester concert generated x6 more traffic than previous spikes without a blink in performance.

Serious thanks are due to our brilliant project team, hailing from across the BBC and agency Softwire. I hope you enjoy these updates when Radiohead, Ed Sheeran and co. take to the stage at Glastonbury this weekend. Let me know below the line.

If someone had told you 10 years ago that they could have a conversation with their hi-fi speaker, be virtually teleported to a music festival from their living room and carry millions of songs with them wherever they went, it is unlikely that you would have believed them.

Today, experiencing music in such ways is increasingly commonplace. Advances in technology have brought about dramatic changes to the way that we listen to, buy and interact with music and radio. Driven by the rapid growth of devices such as smartphones and tablets, new digital music services and formats have emerged, with innovation taking place across the music and radio industry.

Future of Music Conference 2016

On Friday 4th November we held a half-day ‘Future of Music’ conference, bringing together industry experts from across the sector to discuss and debate how digital music and innovation is likely to impact the music and radio industry in the coming years.

From Guglielmo Marconi transmitting the first radio waves across the earth (from the Isle of Wight to Cornwall) to the music of some of the world’s biggest selling acts such as the Beatles and Adele, the UK has always been a major influencer and innovator when it comes to music.

It is exciting to consider what could come next from the UK’s music industry.

With that in mind, as part of our Future of Music conference, we invited along some interesting start-ups to demo their products and services to the attendees. We had a variety of start-ups at the event, ranging from one that uses artificial intelligence to write new songs, to one that has created a ‘3D’ music controller that allows you to manipulate sounds just by moving your hand around in thin air.

Artificial intelligence and music

Set up in 2014 by two Cambridge University graduates, Jukedeck is training ‘neural networks’ (computer systems modelled on the way that the human brain solves problems) to create new and unique tracks in a matter of seconds. As well as individual content creators looking for some customised music (that they will then own the exclusive copyright to), Jukedeck’s technology is also being used by Google, the Natural History Museum and even the Royal Family.

Virtual reality – inviting artists into your living room

With the increasing capabilities of virtual reality headsets, the last couple of years have seen the emergence of production companies focussing on virtual reality and immersive experiences. Visualise is a UK based company that has produced a variety of 360 degree videos and virtual reality content across a range of genres ranging from sport to entertainment.

The new medium of virtual reality holds great potential for the music industry. Technologies like this will bring fans closer to the artist and allow them to experience music in a unique and incredibly immersive way – imagine sitting in your living room and being able to feel as if you had been teleported to the front row of a stadium concert in another part of the world or feel as if your favourite artist was singing just for you.

3D music controllers

Titan Reality has created a ‘3D sensing’ device that uses artificial intelligence and gives individuals a whole new way to manipulate sound and lighting. We were lucky enough to have one of only a handful of Titan Reality devices in the world at the event. By simply floating and moving your hand above the device, it is possible to change the tone and pitch of sounds, switch instruments and add in effects. It was exciting to see the device in action and how it offers a user with little musical instrument training the ability to create unique soundscapes. As well as the music industry, the company is also looking at how the device can be used in other areas such as controlling industrial robots by using machine vision technology.

Broadcast your own radio station from your phone

Artists, DJs and bands are increasingly using new technologies and online platforms to reach audiences around the world and Mixlr is looking to capitalise on that trend. Founded in 2010, the company has built an app that allows users to live stream their performances to fans around the world (for example via a band’s own website) and at the same time share that broadcast on social media outlets and on-demand music platforms. As you can see from the image above, the set-up is simple, making what has traditionally been a complex operational challenge accessible to a much wider audience.

The start-ups and technologies that demoed at our Future of Music 2016 event give us a glimpse into how digital technology will change the future of the music and radio industry.

Not that long ago, a portable cassette player seemed to be the cutting edge of technology – now they are considered retro collectible antiques. Today, smartphones are the driving forces of change in the music industry. And who knows, in years to come we might look back nostalgically on the smartphone era as we walk around with chips implanted into our brains and have our music beamed directly to us!

We are always looking out for ways to bring third party innovation into the BBC to help us explore how we can use new technologies to create new types of content and experiences for our audiences. If you have any innovation ideas or technologies that you think our audiences could potentially benefit from, do get in touch in the comments section below or contact me on Twitter @cyrussaihan.

Why a music app?

As my colleague Ben Chapman notes, the BBC already invests significantly in the music genre, from radio stations, TV programmes, live events, news and online content. We want to make that a coherent offer for audiences looking for a music experience, no matter which area of the BBC that content originates from, or what platform it was originally broadcast on.

Mobile has become such an important platform for music consumption, with many commercial music products focusing their efforts in this space. Looking at the usage data for BBC Music online, the clear trend is towards portable devices, which together make up well over half of all our web traffic.

So for BBC Music to have an impact with audiences it was clear that we had to have a great mobile experience, and in addition to making our website perform well on mobile devices we wanted to take advantage of the opportunities offered by native apps to offer a more personalised and seamless experience.

What does it do?

While the BBC Music website offers a comprehensive browsing experience (including articles, artist pages and genre aggregations), we wanted to keep the native app focused on music discovery and consumption. Thinking about the wide range of music content produced across the BBC, we feel the best way to do this is to gather some basic music preferences upfront to allow us to offer a more tailored content offer.

So once a user has signed in to BBC iD and answered a few simple questions, we can then offer relevant short-form audio and video, including live performances, mixes and artist interviews. Our belief is that while we produce high quality audio and video content, the missing element is the one place to easily find all that’s relevant to the individual user.

Music discovery is key to our mission at BBC Music, so we have made our curated playlists available in the app, where users can preview short samples of all the tracks or listen in full via one of our partners, Spotify, Deezer or YouTube. Tapping the “Add Playlist” button on one of these playlists allows users to keep track of the latest tracks added to it by our presenters and programmes via notifications on bbc.co.uk, and improves the recommendations we can offer.

Similarly, we have now included BBC Playlister capability into the app, which means users can add tracks to their own personal lists (now called “My Tracks”) then export that list to one of our partners for full playback. Adding tracks helps to feed our recommendation engine, so the more you add, the better the recommendations get.

Lastly we have included our Find A Track feature, which allows users to find any track played on BBC Radio over the past seven days by selecting a date, station and time.

What next?

We’re excited to be releasing the app and website changes this week, and we’re really looking forward to finding out what our users think is of most value. So we’ll be closely monitoring feedback and using it to help us decide what to build next. We’ll be releasing monthly updates to the app, taking on board the feedback we receive from our users.

There’s a Feedback link in the app Menu, or you can send feedback on our website via our Feedback page here.

Download links

The BBC Music native app is available on iOS (versions 8 and 9) and Android (versions 4.1 and above).

BBC Music on the Apple app store 

BBC Music on Google Play 

BBC Music on Amazon 

Symphinity is a new storytelling app that uses playlists to guide you through the history of classical music, introducing you to the artists who create it, the places and periods they inhabit and the worlds they create.

It's a project that came out of the BBC Connected Studio digital innovation team, who brought together people from Radio 3, BBC Wales and BBC Research and Development, and has been designed and built by digital agency 100 Shapes. The music has been chosen and the words written by Radio producer Chris Barstow.

Testing new ideas with audiences

Ideas that get time on BBC Taster are deliberately beta versions rather than finished products, so the purpose is to allow us to quickly test ideas with real audiences and learn how they react to them. We can then use what they tell us to help improve or change the prototype.

The questions we're looking to answer with this project include:

• How can we bring curious audiences who aren’t familiar with Radio 3 to classical music?
• How can we use our storytelling skills to make classical music more accessible online?
• How do we present classical stories in a way that feels up-to-date and belongs on a tablet or a mobile?
• How can we bring storytelling and listening together?

Symphinity is built around the storytelling skills of our producers – there’s no algorithm. Each playlist tells a simple story about an important moment, genre, instrument or tradition. The story unfolds on-screen as you listen.

There are some new design approaches here: we’re trying a new way to present words that accompany music. The story appears as the playlist advances, animating across the screen and paced to support the music – connecting reading and listening in a new way.

We’re also trying a new way to tell listeners how much longer they've got to listen. The playback controls are minimised and a shifting, coloured background indicates how far you are through the track. It’s more subtle than a progress bar, more part of the background.

We’re interested in learning if listeners will adjust to a less definite playback experience for content that’s enjoyed in this way. Can we use the music and the words to create a more immersive experience – something that flows?

You can try, rate and share Symphinity now on BBC Taster.

In the past year we also added in a new partner – iTunes – for those users who wanted to be able to download tracks as opposed to stream them. In addition, we have enabled export to Spotify on mobile devices, which was frequently requested by our users.

At the heart of BBC Music in digital spaces is editorial curation of music, and so I’m also pleased to announce that we have just released a significant new product feature, which allows us to make a step change in our music curation offer. BBC Music Playlister now offers a much wider range of playlists from across the BBC, taken from TV, Radio and events, in addition to the more personal playlists from individual presenters. Click on “BBC Playlists” from the Playlister site to see the full range.

Add tracks directly from BBC iPlayer

Over the last year we’ve seen music being added to playlists from both Radio and TV programmes, although until now it has not been possible to add music directly from the video playback experience within BBC iPlayer. I’m pleased to announce that it’s now possible to add music tracks that are played in TV programmes directly from BBC iPlayer. You need to be logged in to BBC iD to see this, and currently this functionality is only available to desktop browser users. We’ll monitor usage and audience feedback over the coming months before we look at rolling it out to other platforms.

Over the coming months we’ll continue to improve Playlister, with our next focus being on making the product even easier to understand and use for new users.

BBC Music

I’m also thrilled to announce that we have released a brand new design for the many thousands of artist pages we have (there’s one for nearly every artist played on the BBC), and also a new homepage for BBC Music.

Our new artist pages are very focused on exclusive BBC content, and data about broadcasts on BBC channels/stations. Users can now find exactly which tracks have been played on the BBC and share individual tracks with friends. We are also introducing artist concert information via a new partnership with UK based start-up Songkick . This means that you can see when an artist performed at a BBC event, and also upcoming concerts across the UK. For example, here’s Jake Bugg, Pharrell Williams and Johnny Marr.

The new homepage for BBC Music is a radical departure from the previous version, and for the first time we are offering personalised music recommendations to users based on the tracks they have added to Playlister. All you need to do is add some tracks to Playlister (try it now if you haven’t already done so) and you’ll receive a set of recommendations for programmes, clips, tracks and artists based on your musical preferences. For the first time you can also listen live to the BBC’s music radio stations in one click from the BBC Music homepage, and get editorially curated recommendations to the latest and best music content from across BBC TV, Radio and online.

We will have more news to share with you in the coming months, so follow us on twitter to get the latest updates. We really like to hear your feedback, so please let us know with a comment below or via our email address.

Chris Kimber is Executive Product Manager, Radio, BBC Future Media

1. The first public radio transmission of any kind - on 13 January 1910 - was a live broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.

The great Enrico Caruso sang the role Of Canio in Leoncavallo's 'Pagliacci'. Nobody owned a radio at the time, of course, so receivers were set up on ships in New York harbour, in hotels and public places in Manhattan. It was a sensation in the popular media of the time and, of course, paved the way for music radio as we now understand it.

2. Caruso's recording of an aria from the same role, six years earlier, became what is widely-thought to have been the world's first million-selling record.

The first superstar of the recorded era was a classical artist. Caruso's breakthrough was the beginning of a hundred-year golden age for recorded music which some think may be coming to an end now.

3. From the BBC's own innovation timeline. Our first outside broadcast, when the organisation was only a few months old, right at the beginning of 1923.

It wasn't a coronation or a sporting event but one act from Mozart's 'The Magic Flute', performed by the British National Opera Company, live from Covent Garden.

4. 31 October 1953, the first full-length colour television programme in the world, was - you guessed it - a one-hour excerpt from a production of Bizet's Carmen with the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini.

It's fascinating that the great conductor and his pioneering broadcast orchestra were seen on television in colour before any of the big stars of the day.

5. Here's my absolute favourite.

It's a remarkable subscription service that delivered live classical music, from a choice of major venues in Paris, including the Opéra de Paris and several theatres, direct to the home.

Customers - including one Marcel Proust in his Boulevard Hausmann apartment - chose their venue for the evening and sat back to listen in their living rooms, on custom-designed stereo kit. The service was called Théâtrophone. We're in Paris in 1881, over thirty years before the BBC existed (this itself came four years after the first ever transmission of music by telephone, in Switzerland, which was - of coruse - an opera performance). This highly-immersive Victorian cyberspace was built on the first of the really big wired networks - the public telephone system and, in many ways, prefigured the on-demand world of online radio today (more about Théâtrophone and other remarkable services, including Budapest's remarkable Telefon Hírmondó, in this blog post.

I've got dozens more examples - I could have brought you stereo radio in Berlin the 30s, movies with synch sound in the 1890s, cinema simulcasts in the twenties, nineteenth century audio relays to City squares, all driven by the peculiar economics and the hunger for new audiences in classical music.

To finish: in 1865 when Wagner, for the first time, in his new opera house in Bayreuth, put the orchestra out of sight, in a pit in front of the stage, he was doing what all these other innovators had done. He was removing barriers, bringing his audience closer to the music, to the compelling experiences and vivid stories that it offers.

What all of these innovations have in common is a real impatience with the limitations of the old ways of making classical music available and a real sense of the urgency of doing so.

With the latest Connected Studio we want to renew this sense of urgency and put classical music right back at the centre of innovation.

Steve Bowbrick is Editor of Digital, BBC Radio 3

Agile development

For Eavis we take a relatively agile approach. Every few months we set a new goal for the platform, which helps focus our development effort. Our goals so far have been:

1. May 2012 – Deliver Hackney Weekend

2. Nov 2012 – Deliver Speech and Sessions Events

3. May 2013 – Deliver Glastonbury

4. Jan 2014 – Deliver Performing Groups

As you can see, our most recent goal was to replace the old performing groups sites with new, multiplatform Eavis-powered sites.

Each time we set a goal, we make sure it is focused, and achievable in roughly 3 months of development. Each goal is delivered to benefit all events, and gradually expands the capabilities of the platform; as of today the Eavis platform delivers 45 different event brands.

The Music Events Domain.

In Eavis, we have also taken a domain driven approach, allowing us to:

- Reduce communication errors, since the team shares a common ‘domain’ language – we use the same terms throughout requirements, specifications, code and in the content management system.

- Increase sustainability and reduce maintenance costs of the product. A good domain model should change infrequently, and therefore the shape of the database underpinning the product should change infrequently. This should reduce maintenance costs.

- Create and manage content in a multiplatform way. The content is structured, and aligned to a domain, not a method of presentation. For example, updating information about a performance will update all parts of the experience where that performance information is used.

Michael Smethurst has written about how we make websites  before. Past and present colleagues like Michael Atherton and Paul Rissen have presentations you can read about Domain Driven Design (DDD).

Applying the DDD craft to Eavis, we first defined the nouns for the domain, and the relationships between those nouns. The Eavis domain we might call a ‘music events domain’. The nouns (aka things we want to talk about) include Events, Acts and Stages and Performances.

This Domain Driven approach really helps our multiplatform content strategy, in that it doesn’t matter what device you experience a music event on, we still want to create experiences for the entities in the model – events, acts, stages, performances. In the longer term, the content we create should be easy to migrate to a new technology or platform, since the nouns in the domain haven’t changed.

With each new phase of development, once we have a defined goal, we review the model and usually add a small number of new entities or entity attributes.

Most recently, with the addition of classical music events, we needed to be able to promote tickets, and to be able to talk about classical music, and composers and performers of that music.

In the future, we will be improving the way we present our live event coverage, using technologies and user experience patterns developed as part of the BBC's new approach to live events which has launched this month for BBC Sport's Winter Olympics coverage.

I'd be happy to respond to any questions you might have about Eavis and the approach we have taken here.

Chris Thorne is a Senior User Experience Architect, BBC Future Media

The second major change is that we have integrated BBC Playlister functionality into our BBC iPlayer Radio native applications for iOS and Android. Now you can add any piece of music from a live or on-demand stream directly to your personal playlist from within the app. You can also view your playlist and export to two of our partners, You Tube and Deezer, and we’re working to bring this functionality to Spotify users soon.

This is the first time we have enabled log-in to BBC iD from within a native app. Today we are using a web view to do this, but in future we’re looking at alternative ways to allow even better integration between a native app and your BBC iD account. The advantage with this is that we are now on track to start making the app more personalised, and allowing that personalisation to work across devices. So, for example, if you add tracks via your mobile phone using the app, you can then view, explore and export those music tracks via your laptop or desktop later.

We’re watching how people are using BBC Playlister so we can learn how to improve the product. One interesting thing we’ve seen is how certain TV programmes use music which seems to capture lots of interest. Peaky Blinders  on BBC 2 was one such programme, where distinctive music was used, and many people added tracks from that progamme to their playlist. Another is that our Most Popular view is being viewed far more than our Recently Played view. We’re also seeing many more desktop users than mobile up to now, but we think that may change now that Playlister is part of our iPlayer Radio app.

We’ve seen alot of positive comments about BBC Playlister, particularly on Twitter. With on-air promotion starting this week on Radio 1, 1Xtra and Radio 6 Music, we hope to receive much more feedback via our Feedback email address , via Twitter, or please leave a comment below.

Chris Kimber is Executive Product Manager, Radio & Music, BBC Future Media

At the time of development Spotify didn’t use OAuth so we used the method they developed to open the playlist in the BBC Playlister Spotify application.

Currently we export to the desktop and mobile applications of YouTube & Deezer - however with Spotify we developed an application on their platform. The BBC Playlister Spotify application serves a number of goals:

• Allowing you to discover new music through featured playlists across BBC Radio & TV
• Browse BBC Playlists such as Zane Lowe on Radio 1 to Nile Rodgers on BBC Four
• Manage your exported BBC Playlist through Spotify and listen to tracks

 

BBC Playlister’s Spotify application is built with conventional web technologies - HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Although the BBC Playlister team built the application from the ground up, Spotify were on hand to answer questions and point us in the right direction when required with some useful guidelines.

One of the first challenges when we started to develop the BBC Playlister Spotify App was to decide the structure and technologies to use. We chose Handlebars as the template engine, loading the templates dynamically via AJAX. The BBC Playlister Spotify App is composed of five templates (Home, Browse, Playlist, Your Tracks and Offline). All of them are loaded dynamically avoiding a long load time.

In relation to the JavaScript structure we had a separate module for each view and some additional modules to manage BBC Playlister API calls, use of Spotify components and helpers. We can recommend Spotify components, which enables rapid development of an app without having to worry about the details of design and implementation. On BBC Playlister we made extensive use of components such as ‘Image and Player’, ‘List’, ‘Tabs and Buttons’.

As a team we’re very proud of BBC Playlister and excited to be working with partners like Spotify, YouTube and Deezer. There’s lots of things on our roadmap and we’re looking forward to releasing some great new features in the near future.

Tom Kershaw is Senior Web Developer, BBC Playlister

The other big announcement this week was the BBC Playlister Beta. The BBC News story is where comment action can be found.

Other interesting headlines around Playlister include:

"BBC plays down fears of exposure to explicit material through Playlister" from The Guardian.

"How BBC Playlister will curate the nation's musical tastes" from The Telegraph.

The Independent's story includes this quote from Bob Shennan, Controller of BBC Radio 2:

"We are not offering the club card mentality. But we are living in a world where a lot of our audience expects us to know who they are. They live in a world where they expect to sign in but it’s really important that what they get from the BBC is an enhanced service rather than exploitation"

The Register tentatively welcomes Playlister:

"Yet even in its crude version 1.0 incarnation, PlayLister brings some welcome integration to music fans. It seems absurd in the internet era that discovery and "fulfillment" (aka actually listening to the song or buying it) are so poorly integrated: radio and third-party music services live in separate worlds."

Elsewhere David Berlin has left a comment on his blog post with an update on BBC iPlayer downloads on Android devices:

"We have found that some brand new high powered popular devices can only receive streams to a certain level, or that video downloads bugs can cause cyclical crashes and device hard resets, rendering the BBC iPlayer app useless thereafter and the device temporarily paralyzed. These are not your usual basic bugs and such severe behavior is not acceptable to the BBC. This is why we’ve adopted the strategy of whitelisting devices."

Five more Android devices now have support for BBC iPlayer downloads. The full list is on the iPlayer help pages.

On the BBC College of Production website interactive producer Alex Hudson describes how social media has changed BBC Question Time.

While Digital Annex blogged their experiences at the Connected Studio in Glasgow:

"While not quite a hack day, BBC Connected Studio invites technologists, creatives, writers and planners to bring solutions to often complicated problems and, although we were there to bring ideas, we walked away having learnt more than we could have expected"

Have a nice weekend!

Nick Reynolds is Editor, BBC Internet blog

 

BBC Playlister will do this by offering three main features.

Firstly, BBC Playlister aims to solve the problem of hearing music on the radio or on TV and not knowing what it is, and how to remember it for later. From today, whenever we play music on our national music radio stations and some TV programmes, you will be able to simply “Add” that piece of music to your own personal playlist with one click. And then you can retrieve your playlist from anywhere, at home or at work, using your BBC iD to share this information across desktop, tablet and mobile.

Secondly, great music recommendations. The problem many users face today is not getting access to music, but discovering the right kind of music that suits their taste. BBC Playlister aims to translate our expert musical guidance from on-air, to online. See Ben Chapman’s blog post for more on this. Being able to see what our presenters are personally recommending and following them for regular updates is coming in a future product release (see a taster video below), so today we have a simple offer focussing on recently played music and on popular tracks.

Lastly, the ability to actually listen to the music you have “saved” or been recommended. The BBC doesn’t own the rights to allow you to listen in full to commercial music on-demand, so we are initially partnering with three of the biggest players in the digital music space: Spotify, Deezer and You Tube. With Spotify we are also releasing a branded Playlister space which houses not just your exported tracks, but also editorially curated playlists from our radio and TV stations. This means you will be able to remember music you’ve heard on the BBC by adding it to a playlist, then “export” or send that information to one of our partners so you can listen in full to the music there.

There has been lots of background work necessary to deliver Playlister. We’ve had to rebuild our entire music backend and content management system that delivers much of the underlying data that drives Playlister; we’ve had to create new unique identifiers for individual tracks to allow us to offer aggregations such as “Popular” and to share track resources such as images and short sound clips. We’ve also had to improve the technical architecture of our music metadata ingest systems so that recently played tracks are quickly available for users to add to BBC Playlister.

Playlister is labelled a “Trial Beta” for now whilst we gather feedback from users, ensure the technology is robust and resilient enough, and we complete the initial feature set including recommendations from our on-air presenters. Later this year we expect to remove the Beta label, which is also when we’ll integrate Playlister functionality into our BBC iPlayer Radio mobile apps.

I’m keen to hear your thoughts once you have used the service, so either leave a comment below or email us direct at bbcplaylister@bbc.co.uk or tweet us @bbcplaylister.

Chris Kimber is Executive Product Manager in BBC Future Media for Radio & Music   

This year, some of the BBC FOUR Proms are being made available in HD on the BBC Red Button HD stream.

A total of 12 Proms are going to appear on the special Red Button HD stream which is available to viewers with a HD TV or set-top box with Freeview HD, YouView, Freesat HD or Virgin Media.  Viewers can watch the additional Proms by tuning directly to these channel numbers:

 

Freeview / YouView on channel 303

Virgin Media on channel 994

Freesat on channel 980

 

The BBC Proms that you will be able to see on Red Button are as follows:

National Youth Orchestra USA - Friday 26 July at 7.30pm

BBC Symphony Orchestra – Sunday 28July at 7.30pm

Mahler Chamber Orchestra – Thursday 1 August at 7.30pm

BBC Philharmonic – Friday 2 August at 7.30pm

BBC National Orchestra of Wales – Sunday 4 August at 7.30pm

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra – Thursday 8 August at 7.30pm

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra – Friday 9 August at 7.30pm

Santa Cecilia – Thursday 15 August at 7.30pm

Bach Oratorios – Friday 16 August at 7.30pm

Hollywood Rhapsody Prom – Friday 30 August at 7.30pm

Tristan and Isolde – Sunday 1 September at 7.30pm

National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain – Friday 6 September at 7.30pm

This was the culmination of months of planning and preparation, bringing teams and technologies from across the whole of the BBC together in a way that hasn’t really been tried before and certainly not at this scale for a live music event. In essence we put a whole festival together in our labs with colleagues from Radio & Music Multi-platform, Future Media, News Location Facilities, Broadcast Systems Development, Sport Multi-platform and Music Television (plus volunteers from other teams such as Finance and Marketing).

In order to keep costs down,we turned the whole production process upside down. Instead of sending many of the team to a muddy field in Somerset, we used the latest connectivity to get all the coverage back to a BBC base, and then brought the necessary producers, editors, compliance experts, bloggers and everyone else together in the R&D base in London or in Salford.  The immediate benefits are pretty obvious - lower travel and accommodation costs and a readymade office and production environment for people to work in, plus the ability to use our own existing networks and systems to move all the content around as it’s checked, edited, transcoded, and loaded up to be watched.  What maybe isn’t obvious is what sort of a ‘thing’ you make when you invite the whole of the online coverage of the largest greenfield festival in the world into a building that day to day is a technology R&D lab.

Lets take a look

First of all we took over a fair chunk of the car park with an OB (Outside Broadcast) truck which housed the editors for the red button live streaming output for the weekend.

Up on the 3rd floor, we had the compliance area, where the live feeds from the Glastonbury stages were monitored for editorial content by staff from across the BBC.  Compliers had their fingers hovering over a range of buttons that would trigger anything from an on-screen apology to an immediate cut of the video feed, which thankfully was rarely needed.  The output from this team then went directly up to Salford via a combination of video circuits and new BBC built StageBoxes, to be encoded by the same systems which brought you the Olympics and, that same weekend, were bringing you online streaming of Wimbledon and the Formula 1 action from Silverstone.

 

Just around the corner from the compliance area, in what usually serves as the library for R&D, we packed together the social media team that would be live blogging, tweeting and sharing images and information across the BBC’s platforms.  And, not only were those guys watching the live unedited feeds from all the stages, but they were hearing the compliance guys talking about the performances, getting the backstage chat from the editors, hearing and seeing all the other bloggers social media activity, and, in a really exciting first time deployment, they were seeing real time page visit stats of all the BBC’s online coverage of the festival.  No one has really done this in the BBC before - fed real time stats for access straight back into an element of the production team - and in a way it was like putting the production team right in the middle of the audience.  Pretty appropriate for a festival really!

Meanwhile, as all this activity is going on real time, there was also all the offline, catch-up, on-demand production going on too (told you we were busy!).  Editors would be reviewing each set as it finished and using special BBC-built tech called ‘Raven boxes’ to assemble digital packages to go out on the all the different channels. And just remember, they were doing that right next door to where all the real time conversations on social media were going on – via the live blog, Twitter and Facebook, along with the team that were complying the streams.  Never before have editors had such a close understanding of what their audiences need, almost without having to ask.  The only way we could have given them a better insight was to have plopped them down with their edit kit in the middle of the mosh-pit at the festival.

Another team then uploaded these videos to the BBC Glastonbury site, BBC iPlayer (and selected clips onto YouTube and other syndication) so you could catch up on those Glasto moments you'd missed. And yes – you guessed it - the guys loading up the videos, with all the metadata, were sitting there amongst a crowd of people who have essentially created a tiny satellite Glastonbury right here in sunny Shepherd’s Bush.  So they know exactly what the demand is, exactly what the key words that people will be using to search for it will be.

How long did this all take? Well normally you would expect the upload to be an overnight job. However thanks to the massively improved workflow and months of planning, pretty much everything was done and dusted by 3am each morning, a huge improvement in performance. And, due to the project's collaborative nature and the way the technology was tested and deployed, we delivered the most immersive, responsive and electrifying digital festival ever.

Your feedback

The feedback so far has been fantastic. We saw huge numbers of you tuning in to the BBC’s Glastonbury coverage online and via the red button with a record 1.5 million unique browsers to the BBC’s Glastonbury content throughout the weekend. You seemed to love watching it on the go, with 42 per cent of total traffic across the weekend from mobiles and tablets. Over 6.2m of you pressed red over the weekend, up by 77 per cent compared Glastonbury 2011. And no surprise, the legendary Rolling Stones performance on Saturday night was the most watched with over 700,000 requests (and growing).

We like to hear how we can improve our coverage again for next year, so please leave a comment below. I’m already looking forward to Glastonbury 2014 and thinking about how the BBC can improve its digital coverage.

Nick Pinks is a Technology Transfer Manager in BBC R&D