'pon the playlist 2

For a comparison with the Radio One playlist-by-social-media-stats approach, it's worth reading what happened when Saga magazine met Jeff Smith, head of music at Radio 2, last month.

Radio 2's approach is a little different:

The sound of the station is defined and refined on a weekly basis at its crucial ‘playlist’ meeting every Wednesday. Here the producers of the station’s daytime shows pitch about 20 new songs from a list of around 70. In turn, each is assigned to the A (15-20 plays a week), B (7-10 plays) or C (2-5 plays) list.

Each DJ’s show producer has an input. Exceptions can be made: for example, if a particular musician is a guest on a show, then more of their music will be played. But, in the main, Jeff and his team decide on 99% of what is played on Radio 2 during the daytime.

That's not so very different to what happens at Radio 1. But the basis for decision making? That is:

While Radio 1 increasingly looks to social media and online popularity (YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter) to help to decide which new acts to back, Jeff says Radio 2’s choices still stem from gut instinct. ‘We don’t need to have that sort of data to deliver what we’re doing,’ he says. ‘We don’t do any formal audience research.’

Radio 2’s audience is not rigidly segmented into ‘buckets’ in the way that most demographic-based audience research tends to be (55-64 over here, 65-74 over there and so on).

Understanding the audience, and knowing what works for them, rather than using YouTube views? Why, that's a recipe for, erm, ever-growing and happy listenership.

'pon the playlist

There's something a little worrying about the report in The Observer which watches a Radio One playlist meeting. Can you spot it, I wonder?

A snatch of each song blares through speakers before Ergatoudis lists the artist's YouTube views, Soundcloud hits, Shazam ratings, Twitter followers and Facebook likes. "[Indie foursome] Wolf Alice's Moaning Lisa Smile video has had 15,000 views on YouTube and they've got 11,000 followers on Twitter," Ergatoudis tells the room. "James, you want to go first?"

There's a lot of this - records being weighed on how many Twitter followers the band has; the number of times a YouTube video has been played by man or machine; and so on.

A snatch of music, a bellyful of statistics. Surely that's the wrong way round? Surely Radio One should be playlisting music based on the track itself, rather than because it's already popular elsewhere? If YouTube views are the new chart, then this is like the playlist meeting in 1993 choosing records based on what Bruno Brookes had read out on the Top 40 the previous Saturday.

The Observer's Nadia Khomami asks Radio One's George Ergatoudis about this point:

It's faintly depressing to hear bands referred to as "brands" with their worth determined by online data. Stats is business talk. It isn't creative, it isn't art, it's box-ticking. It's playing people the kind of music that they're already listening to. Harding says, though, that there are exceptions to this rule. "There have been moments where we've been tempted to completely go against data. Clean Bandit have had the biggest single of the year so far and we booked them for a live lounge in January last year, purely on the basis that we had a feeling they were doing something special. They didn't have very much in terms of stats. And it took a year of us playing a sequence of singles for people to jump on to them - a lot of people think Rather Be was their first single but actually it was their fourth that we playlisted on Radio 1."

That this is an exception, rather than a rule, is something of a problem. Because if Radio One is basically deciding what to play using a 'what's already popular' formula, you might wonder why its target audience would bother tuning in.

"Hey, kids, listen to the radio - we've got all the songs you liked a fortnight ago, right here."

It's not the most exciting proposition, is it?

"Radio One: In YouTube's statistical integrity we trust."

Isn't Radio One's job to build the talent, rather than count the numbers?

Ministry Of Sound take on Spotify to protect not-so-secret recipe

Ministry of Sound don't really have much of a recorded music business, when you think about it. All it does is scrape together a bunch of other people's singles, bundle 'em up, and flog 'em off.

Trouble is, anyone can create similar bundles of tracks - as a Spotify playlist, for example. And that's what people are doing. And sometimes, they're just emulating the track-listing of MOS collections, and even pointing out that's what they're doing in the name.

This has upset the Ministry. Rather than chuckling "well, we've had two decades of being able to make money out of making mixtapes, which was taking the piss in the first place" and moving on, they're taking legal action, somehow thinking a list of songs is protected by copyright:

“Everyone is talking about curation, but curation has been the cornerstone of our business for the last 20 years,” says [CEO Lohan] Presencer. “If we don’t step up and take some action against a service and users that are dismissing our curation skills as just a list, that opens up the floodgates to anybody who wants to copy what a curator is doing.”

Oh, Lohan. The music industry has spent the time you've been busy shuffling "anthems" into different orders trying to prevent people from helping themselves to the songs themselves; you don't think trying to protect the idea that Jam And Spoon comes after Underworld is a doomed exercise?

Gordon in the morning: The sun slides down behind the tower

Gordon stretches his mind this morning to try and bring us a think-piece in response to the news that Radio One haven't playlisted Madonna's new single.

And after some digging through chart history, that's the first time one of her singles has not made the playlist.

Not quite sure why you'd be digging in "chart history" to explore Radio One playlists - a bit like exploring House Of Commons history to find out who the leader of the TUC was; I'm also not entirely convinced that Everybody would have been playlisted, even if Burning Up was. Still, that's small potatoes, and Madonna not making the playlist is a marker point, if not quite as significant as Smart would like it to be.

You wouldn't expect an Elton John track, even if it was a violent return-to-form, to end up on the Radio One playlist, would you?

Madonna can console herself in the knowledge that at least Radio 2 have found a place for the song and have been playing it for the past two weeks.

Yes. Where there's overlap between her market and their target audience, you mean?

Still, this must be difficult for Gordon, having to run bad news about one of the artists he believes his readers cherish the most, right?

Her Madgesty's last album, Hard Candy, didn't do as well as expected. Probably because it was rubbish.

What... because it was rubbish? But I thought you called it an album with "an edgy, urban feel for her latest reinvention" with "a few tasty treats" when you gave it a good write-up last March? Sure, you did sound one or two downbeat notes, but nobody reading that review would come away thinking the album was "rubbish".

I'm also sick of the sight of her parading around in her undercrackers

Although as I've observed before, that seemed to come quite quickly, as one day you were still finding it quite exciting:

Queen Of Pop Madge, meanwhile, has been flashing her undies in new promo pics for album Hard Candy.

I wonder if Lady G will look as good when she hits 50.

.., and then the very next day you were pretending to be bored:

WHEN I set eyes on this picture of MADONNA yesterday I felt for the first time that I had seen enough of her posing in her undercrackers.

Literally the next day.

On September 29 Madge will release her latest Greatest Hits compilation, also called Celebration.

I think I'll celebrate when she finally puts her feet up and calls it a day.

You might feel that, Gordon. On the other hand, what would you do if she did go? According to Journalisted, you tend to rely on her to fill your column rather a lot:

Courtneener grumbles: Radio One hates us

Bands really do move at an alarming rate these days, don't they? One album and all of a sudden they're being marked up as an All Time Great, two hit singles and they're the new Beatles. And now, The Courteeners have turned into Status Quo without going through the aging process, wondering why Radio One hates them:

In an interview with the Daily Star, the singer [Liam Fray] asked why the station's executives continue to play Kaiser Chiefs' tracks when the indie rock group "haven't got one song better than any on our album".

"Kaiser Chiefs have been on Radio 1 since day one but they won't play us," Fray continued. "I'd rather be 100 people's favourite band than a million who've just been fed it by Radio 1. We've sold out 40,000 tickets for our tour so how the fuck can Radio 1 say no to playing us? I don't get it.

"But I don't give a shit about them or chart positions so long as the kids are down the front at our shows going mental."

As James P points out, Liam can't quite decide if he's outraged by Radio One not playing his music, or really pleased that they don't, or if he can't be arsed either way. The clue to his true feelings, I suspect, is in the 'taking time to moan about it to a newspaper'.

(For the record, Last FM's data for Radio One shows the Courteeners have been played 115 times since they started collecting data - as often as Santogold. And Santogold is better than The Courteeners.)