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Watch Billy Bragg's John Peel lecture live online

2012-11-09T14:14:31+00:00

Billy Bragg pic by Anthony Griffin

This Monday from 7pm you can watch Billy Bragg live on the 6 Music website giving the second John Peel lecture. He'll be exploring the idea of how radio pirates became the mainstream and what that means.

The John Peel lecture is part of the annual Radio Festival and is now in its second year.

What is the John Peel lecture?
Watch last year's lecture with Pete Townshend

Blur at the Beeb: Radio 2 and 6 Music

2012-07-30T12:30:39+00:00

Blur

As Blur prepare to play Hyde Park at the end of the Olympics on August 12th, we’ve been delighted to offer them the opportunity to warm up at BBC Maida Vale. On Tuesday night they will play live for both BBC Radio 2 and BBC 6 Music in front of two audiences who have been lucky enough to win tickets for this intimate gathering.

Damon, Graham, Alex and Dave will be talking to Steve Lamacq live on 6 Music and will then play 6 songs for 6 after 6pm. Two of them will be exclusive for online viewers at 7, as you can watch all of the 6 Music coverage live online, direct from Maida Vale. Amazingly it’s the first live session Blur will perform for 6 Music, although Steve Lamacq’s relationship with the band dates back to the early 1990s when they were still called Seymour.

Then at 8pm. Blur will be live in concert for BBC Radio 2, performing for a full hour. You can see them in action online at BBC Radio 2, on the official Blur website and over on the Guardian site as well. We’re keen that our content lives in a variety of digital spaces so it serves as many licence fee payers as possible. The whole set will also be live on the red button on satellite and cable. We can’t squeeze on to Freeview due to the wealth of amazing Olympics coverage but we will be repeating the gig on that platform in September.

Listeners and viewers will be able to take part in a live blog and we will try and get the band into it too. It’s going a memorable night for all Blur fans, you can take part on the hashtag #BlurattheBeeb.

John Myers' review of the BBC's popular music stations

2011-06-14T08:42:00+00:00

Today we are making public a report which looks at potential synergies and savings within Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1Xtra.

Last year, I asked John Myers - CEO of the Radio Academy and one of the most respected figures in the radio industry - to review how our popular music stations are run and how they work together. The key challenge was to identify possible ways of sensibly reducing costs while protecting the quality of our programmes.

The findings of the report will help us with our current planning as we look to save costs. John's extensive experience in commercial radio meant he could take an informed and objective view of our operations.

He spent six weeks in the networks: interviewing, observing and generally digging around. He was given unrestricted access and met people at all levels of the organisation.

We welcome John's broadly positive report and its acknowledgement of the distinctive, high quality services we offer. It is very good to read John's praise of the outstanding people who work at the radio stations.

Importantly, the report recognises that BBC stations have to deliver against detailed service licences which require significant resources and lead to distinct challenges to those producing commercial radio. In John's words, attempting to simply compare the demands on BBC and Commercial Radio is meaningless: "akin to comparing apples and oranges".

However, this doesn't mean that we can't and shouldn't learn from external best practice - this is the very reason that I commissioned the review. The report has some valuable insights and recommendations which have been fed into our discussions around Delivering Quality First (DQF) - the BBC name for the work that is underway to develop a plan for the period of the next Licence Fee settlement.

While it is too early to speculate on specific outcomes (which would all require BBC Trust approval), our commitment to principles such as simplifying the organisation, reducing unnecessary compliance processes and finding new ways of working has already been stated in public.

Helpfully, John has identified some clear areas where we can look to do things more efficiently, such as improving co-ordination and reducing unnecessary duplication where appropriate.

Just like any big organisation, there are always ways of doing things better and BBC radio should continue to demonstrate that it is brilliant value for money. I want to achieve this while ensuring that we do not see a dilution in quality or a reduction in clear station leadership which is at the heart of our editorial success. This will mean better value for Licence Fee payers while not threatening the programmes that listeners love.

Tim Davie is Director of Audio & Music

Download John Myers' report as a PDF: john_myers_report_june_2011.pdf
Read The Telegraph story: BBC enlists commercial sector help to shake up radio from 28th November 2010.

Purveyor of the anti-pop

2011-04-08T16:37:28+00:00

Editor's note: a brand new 6 Music show that's designed from the ground up to be interactive - it's even named after a hashtag. The nerve centre for NowPlaying @6Music is the show's blog - SB

I think it's taken a while for 6 Music to find its niche but now it has really found a sound. You wouldn't find bands like Warpaint or Beach House - who have both been really big acts for us in the past year - on the A-list of any other station. We're all about alternative spirit. It can be many things; it can be an artist's sound and/or their influences. A great recent example has been the Jamie XX and Gil Scott-Heron track 'I'll Take Care of You'. It's been on the 6 Music A-list and is a fantastic example of what the network does best - it's a new act collaborating with a heritage artist both in alternative music to create something new.

I've been producing shows here for four and a half years and I'm just about to launch a brand new show with Tom Robinson on Friday nights (7-9pm) called Now Playing @6Music, which is all about the digital conversation with music. Music has never been more digital. A music fan will listen to radio but also probably look at blogs like Drowned in Sound.

They might well use a third-party music service like Hype Machine or Spotify to either play music or aggregate their tastes in recommending music, and they probably get their music news from an online source rather than a copy of NME. So the idea of this new show is to take part in this online music conversation. We're going to create a space once a week where people can share and recommend tracks related to the week's music news, and find out what's happening in the world of digital music. The show will be a weekly iteration of the activity going on 24/7.

I try to go to a couple of gigs a week to see what's out there and make my own judgement on bands who music PRs have 'plugged' to me. For example, there's a group I went to see last week called Holy Ghost who a PR had pitched to do a 6 Mix - the other show I produce. They are quite hipster and signed to DFA - which is James Murphy from LCD Soundsystem's label. On paper they look pretty good - they're on a very cool label and their music has an electro vibe about it - but, as a producer, I needed to see if they've got more legs than just a single.

To do this, I saw them play live with Cut Copy, gauged their popularity on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook and was ultimately really impressed, so commisioned them to do a mix. It's all about thinking if they're a career band and, if they're not a household name yet and I'm offered them early doors (which we are at 6 Music), it's always worth seeing them perform to get a stronger sense of their talents and where they're heading. I don't want to get really excited about someone, put them on a show or argue to put their record onto playlist and then see them live and they're rubbish. In my position I've always got to think about bands in a broader sense.

Rowan Collinson produces Now Playing @6Music.

Listen to the first programme on BBC Radio 6 Music at 1900 tonight.
The picture shows Warpaint, in session for Radio 1 earlier this month.
Interact with the show on the show's blog, via 6 Music's Facebook page or the Twitter account.

The 6 Music playlist

2010-10-08T14:42:05+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music

Editor's note: in a comment on Tim Davie's first post here on the Radio Blog, LoudGeoffW questioned the need for a playlist at 6 Music. Here, 6 Music boss Paul Rodgers responds - SB.

As Station Editor at 6 Music, music policy is not my direct responsibility. However I'd like to offer my thoughts on the relevance of the playlist as it obviously plays such a key role in defining 6 Music's editorial.

First of all, I think it's useful to note that the playlist is a different entity to 'the core' at 6 Music. The core is the large database of tracks from which music programmers, producers and presenters select tracks to play on air. Presenters and producers often augment these core selections with personal choices, while other shows are entirely curated by presenters and producers.

By playlist, I mean the group of pre-release songs which are selected weekly by a group of 6 Music management, producers and DJs before being scheduled for rotation in defined parts of the 6 Music schedule. These songs are organised into three sections with A list songs receiving more plays than C list ones. Songs often move up and down the A, B & C lists and typically stay active on the playlist for about a month.

I do think it is appropriate that 6 Music runs some kind of playlist.

A playlist is a music playout device which expresses the station's identity. As well as offering some structure to the station's output, it also can express part of the personality of the station. It is a selection of songs which define the station at any particular moment. It also expresses the station's commitment to new music thought to be of interest to the audience.

In 6 Music's case, it's very important to acknowledge that the playlist is only one component within a broad range of music activity at the Station. It sits there in the mix alongside the core database, live music, archive music, programmes curated wholly by producers and/or presenters, specialist genre shows and requests from the audience.

It operates at specific times of the day ('dayparts'). Currently, on 6 Music, the playlist does not apply throughout most of the weekend, after 7 in the evening, or overnight. During daytime, there are agreed opportunities for producer and presenter freeplays. Producers and presenters are afforded, within the context of UK music radio, uniquely broad scope and freedom over what music they want to play.

To have a playlist in operation during daytime seems entirely sensible to me. We listen to radio during the week differently to how we listen in the evening, overnight and during the weekend. Weekday listening patterns can be restricted, with limited opportunities to listen, and then only at specific times of day. More digital listening will probably exacerbate this limited exposure. Consequently, people are often only able to listen for short periods of time, and are therefore unlikely to be over-exposed to music which is carefully rotated.

Paul Rodgers is Station Editor at BBC Radio 6 Music

The 6 Music playlist is published on the web site weekly.
Visit the 6 Music web site and Facebook page. Follow @Inside6Music on Twitter.
Compare My Radio tracks and compares UK radio stations' 'now playing' information. Here's 6 Music's data.
Media UK has a useful summary of 6 Music's public listening data (from RAJAR).
The picture, Crate Digging, by James Hadfield, is used under licence.