Over the course of the last fortnight we have given away more than 200 Pure Highway in-car DAB radios.

The online daily draw has proved to be incredibly successful with almost 25,000 entries and more than 67,000 page impressions on our DAB microsite.

The biggest day for entries was Friday 14th November when we had 15,000 page views and 5,000 entries thanks to a big push in the Absolute Radio newsletter. Our second biggest day was the incredible Monday where we gave away the radios to 100 cabbies as part of the breakfast show. I don’t think any of us would have expected this to be as popular as it was and I certainly had a sleepless night, thinking only 3 cabs would turn up.

We’re going to be rolling out the great digital radio giveaway over the next few weeks, visiting towns and cities across the country - stand by for more details on that.

I don’t think anybody is in any doubt that Absolute Radio is behind the digital radio revolution. We’re continuing to give away more of the Pure Highways on-air in breakfast, hometime and ‘Haven’t Heard it for Ages’ and we’re offering listeners the chance to buy one instead. As I type, we’re also catching up with the unlucky online draw entrants and offering them the chance to buy one before Christmas!

Thanks for all of your support on this!

Paul

No - that’s not just us at Absolute Radio talking - but the whole UK radio industry.

Christmas is a very important time for DAB digital radio, with a vast proportion of sets sold over the period as people realise that they make lovely cost effective gifts - from low priced Asda DAB radios to state of the art models that incorporate WiFi radio as well.

This Christmas, the Digital Radio Development Bureau (DRDB) has ensured that a common message is used by both commercial radio and the BBC to drive digital radio set sales. From now until Christmas, just about every major commercial radio group and station in the UK will be carrying promotional audio ads for DAB. And there’ll be trails on BBC radio and television as well.

There’ll be point-of-sale material in branches of John Lewis, Currys and Sony Centres, as well as in several of the major supermarket chains.

There are three pieces of commercial radio copy, and you can listen to them right here:

Bathroom Soap

Aftershave

Jumper

The new Absolute Radio playlist is published today.

We’re soon to lose our old Virgin Radio domain names, so we thought it would be a good idea to run some reports and see how we’re getting on with reducing the amount of incoming emails to those domains.

We were hoping that our system of bouncing emails back to the senders and asking them to resend them with the new address (whilst still cheekily forwarding them to the intended recipient) would help, and it seems to be working. We also thought that informing the users when somebody uses their old address would help users work out what contacts, mailing lists and automated services (Facebook, ahem) they still need to change.

This is what we found - a distinct reduction in incoming emails to these old domains since it was implemented.

So what’s the next step? Well, we’ll keep the current system running, run the reports regularly to monitor progress, then divert all mail to these old domains to a centralised mailbox (which our Service Desk will monitor) as soon as it’s appropriate. By this stage we are hoping that all emails will be of the variety that people would like to see the back of, but you never know!

When I was in my early twenties, and on the dole, I had a friend who worked on the barely-remembered Mike Smith TV quiz ‘That’s Showbusiness’. I sometimes used to go down to recordings at the BBC on Oxford Road in Manchester to avail myself of the sparkling white wine and crudites in the green room.

Mike McGear, formerly of the band The Scaffold (’Lily the Pink’) was at one of these recordings. I was beside myself with excitement: Mike is the brother of Paul McCartney. I felt that this was going to be my own tenuous-connection-to-a-Beatle story; that I stood in the same room as Paul’s brother.

Since being at One Golden Square, I’ve been lucky enough to meet Paul about ten times. There’s always a tornado of chaos around him, with him being cool, calm and charming in the eye of the storm. This week was no exception - the flurry of emails about the state of the lavatory speaks for itself.

I was asked for a ‘blog post about Paul McCartney week, but you’re probably sick to death of hearing about it on the speakers in the office. As far as tidbits go, all I can tell you is that he’s a lovely man who really likes a biscuit.

If The Beatles’ music is special to you, then you already know why it’s such a big deal for Macca to come in. If The Beatles do little or nothing for you, then you either have no soul, or you haven’t reached your road to Damascus moment yet.

To help you with your conversion, I’ve dug out a piece I was asked to write a while ago about my love affair with The Beatles. It’s very long and self-indulgent, so I don’t expect anybody to persevere past the first couple of paragraphs. Also, like anyone telling you about a love affair, it’s probably a bit sickly. Here is my testimony:

I can’t remember the first time I heard the Beatles’ music. I was born three years after the band had split up, and my memories start at around the time Punk came along to smash everything which went before it, yet the Beatles’ songs seem to have always been part of my consciousness.

My parents didn’t have a cool record collection; I don’t think there was even one Beatles LP or single. The wire racks next to the music centre in our house contained a mawkish selection; Bobby Goldsboro’s ‘Honey’, a widow’s lament/horticultural ballad, Peter Sarstedt’s rags to riches ‘Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?’ (notable for its use of manic ‘ha-ha-ha’ laughter to complete one particular line, in lieu of actual lyrics which scan.) It’s odd that given the prevalence of songs-which-tell-a-story, there was no room in my parents’ collection for the kitchen sink melancholy of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ or the vivid Victoriana of ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite’.

The Beatles songs that are hardwired into my memory are ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. The former has long since joined the ranks of nursery rhyme, so it’s easy to work out how that one got itself in there.

The latter was recorded over a decade before my brain became cognisant, but is such a template for perfect pop that it still blared out of the transistor radio, towering over the hits of the day. People often love the songs they fell in love to: ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ is the soundtrack to the world falling in love with The Beatles.

The first time I remember being aware of The Beatles as an entity was in primary school. We didn’t have any teachers with musical fingers, so a wild-haired, elbow-patched old local man called Mr. Cutbush came in to play piano for us once a week. One of the songs we sang or blew our descant recorders along to was ‘When I¹m Sixty Four’.

I remember seeing ‘Words and Music by John Lennon and Paul McCartney’ at the top of the sheet music, and thinking about two friends crafting a song, one sitting at a piano, and the other scribbling away. I remember singing about the Isle of Wight, and a drunken man coming home late to an angry wife, and scrimping and saving; and feeling that for the first time the words in the song were things from real life, instead of hallelujahs and sea shanties. Even the words ‘Published by Northern Songs’ felt warm to me, growing up in the north of England. That song felt like something I could touch.

Sometime later, there was an episode of the TV show ‘Fame’ in which Little Jimmy Osmond guest-starred as a mentally challenged student. He pitched the role somewhere between Benny from ‘Crossroads’ and The Elephant Man. During the show, he gave performance of ‘Penny Lane’ that displayed a similar kind of sensitivity to that in his dramatic work. Fortunately I was too young to notice I was witnessing a massacre, and again I was thrilled to hear such everyday things as kids on street corners and barbers and fish fingers being mentioned in a song. I’ve been predisposed to melancholy since childhood (blame ‘Peanuts’ cartoons and Moomin books), and I sensed an attractive strangeness in the pretty nurse who feels as if she’s in a play, but is anyway.

Once I started to buy records, The Beatles were off my radar. Cool adolescents bought singles they’d read about in their older brothers’ NME, or old Velvet Underground LPs from second-hand shops. The rest bought songs they’d heard on the radio chart show or Saturday morning TV from the Top 40 display in Woolworths. Lou Reed was conspicuous by his absence from my little hotch-potch collection of records I’d heard on Piccadilly Radio.

Our music teacher at secondary school was a glamorous, slight, greying cat-like lady called Mrs. Frenz. She was from Stockport, but spoke in a similar mid-Atlantic drawl to Lulu. If we, as a class, needed to distract her from the business of teaching us about baroque string quartets or the Pentatonic scale, we¹d get her talking about the Swinging Sixties.

‘Wow!’ she’d say, tossing her head to one side and giving a French-style open shrug, ‘The Sixties were really something else!’

And then she’d be off for a good half hour.

Her reminiscing invariably led to The Beatles. She would sit with her head propped on her folded arms on top of the modern upright piano, and try to convey to us how the whole of rock and roll took a quantum leap forwards when The Beatles came along, sometimes illustrated with impromptu reproductions of riffs on the keyboard.

At the time, I didn’t get it: I could hear that The Beatlemania-era songs were fantastic, exuberant pop, but I couldn’t put that much space between them and the other catchy oldies records I’d hear on the radio.

I gradually became more familiar with the odd Beatles song here and there: I started up my own mobile disco and saw that ‘Twist and Shout’ would fill a dancefloor. I learned ‘Let It Be’ on the piano, knowing that it¹s always good to have a singalong up your sleeve for a party piece. My first girlfriend and I would listen to her mum’s old copy of ‘Rubber Soul’, and in particular ‘Nowhere Man’ which in my mind came to represent her suburban, Daily Mail-reading, Sunday car-washing dad.

It was a nasty and unfair judgement, probably born out of resentment at him for not letting us hormonal teenagers share a bed when I stayed over, but nonetheless that song gave me a mast to nail my colours to. I heard it as striking a blow against conformers and mediocrity, and when George Harrison’s lead guitar burst in after the first verse, it sounded to me like all of the world¹s promise and possibility distilled into fourteen seconds.

It still does.

When I was eighteen, I began to work at a local radio station. Thrown in at the deep end on a radio station which broadcast a huge range of music from the previous three decades, I had to quickly familiarise myself with the rock and pop music canon. The Beatles’ songs, both individually and as part of a catalogue, seemed brighter, or 3D, or Technicolor compared to even the greatest records.

One day my boss, Neil, was opening his post. He held up a CD and asked if I’d ever heard it. It was a reissue of John Lennon¹s first solo album, ‘Plastic Ono Band’. I said that I hadn’t, and Neil insisted that I found myself somewhere quiet and listened to it straight away. I found a small, barely used editing booth, put the disc into a player and turned up the speakers.

I don’t know how long I stayed in there for, I’m guessing it was between two and three hours. I had to listen to it over and over. The album is from a tough time in Lennon’s life; The Beatles had just split up and their affairs were poisoned with acrimony, his relationship with Yoko Ono was intense and they shared a siege mentality, together they were fighting heroin addiction and had just undergone a programme of Arthur Janov’s new Primal (Scream) Therapy.

John Lennon’s catharsis on ‘Plastic Ono Band’ didn’t match very much in my experiences of the world, but I’d never heard such honesty in a record. For the first time, music clicked with me as an expression of the human condition; my soul recognised another’s, baring itself through time from 1970. Hearing and responding to the rawness of that album changed the way in which I heard music forever. It changed from something enjoyable, but superficial, to my deepest and truest love.

From then onwards, I immersed myself in The Beatles. I got hold of the then deleted red and blue ‘Best Of’ compilations. My friend Chris had a lesser-known brown one, made up of love songs. I was living in a bedsit with very little money, but each week bought a new Beatles album on CD. I would listen to that album non-stop all week, learning its songs and its subtleties, flitting between losing myself in the music, and listening hard, contextualising it.

‘Revolver’ was the first one that I bought. I’d read in a magazine that the critics had hailed it the best. I obsessed over the end-of-a-relationship lament, ‘For No One’, wishing that I could meet a girl and have our love die out so that I could feel that kind of melancholy. The driving rhythms of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, ‘Taxman’ and ‘She Said, She Said’ hypnotised me as I learned to find my way around cheap red wine. I learned the hard way that Beatles LPs don’t function well as seduction soundtracks, especially here with Ringo singing ‘Yellow Submarine’ (whatever its merits as a psychadelic singalong.)

After I’d bought all of the albums, I began to read voraciously about The Beatles, wanting to consume every bit of information available on what inspired the songs, and how these amazing records came to be. I pored over Mark Lewinsohn’s ‘Complete Beatles Recording Sessions’ as devotedly as a pilgrim studying scripture. Every time I found out how a certain sound or effect had been made, I felt like an amateur magician suddenly privy to the lofty secrets of the Magic Circle.

The story of The Beatles became romantic to me; the chance meetings and trailblazing and loves and friendships and great leaps forwards and the slow deterioration. I’d travel across the city to record fairs and boot sales, where I’d search for bootleg outtake recordings and VHS copies of out-of-circulation films and performances. When ‘The Beatles Anthology’ documentary aired on TV in the mid-nineties, it was to me like ‘The World at War’ had been to my father.

Beatles songs became the score to life¹s moments. If ‘Day Tripper’ or ‘Come Together’ was played in an indie disco, I would flail around freely (albeit unrhythmically), without fear of making a spectacle of myself in front of girls I was unsuccessfully trying to attract.

One time, after a long night out in Manchester city centre, my friend Chris and I were on the top deck of the notorious 192 night bus. We’d been in a club called The Brickhouse, and the DJ had ended on ‘Hey Jude’. A little drunken and emotional, we sat at the front of the bus, singing this to ourselves. The guy behind joined in. Then the guy across the aisle. Then a couple of Goth girls a way back. Then another drunken gang up the back. By the time we got to our stop just after the McVities biscuit factory, the whole bus was singing the Na-Na-Nas. That was special.

The Beatles have provided me with so many moments like those. Falling in love to ‘Here, There and Everywhere’. Feeling like George Harrison’s demo recording of ‘All Things Must Pass’ saved my life on a dark night of the soul. Sometimes the beauty of the sound of a song I’ve heard hundreds of times can unexpectedly move me to tears; the cello counterpoint to the third verse of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, the nervous young boys on the brink of something which would change their lives and 20th century pop culture on ‘Love Me Do’, the beauty of the-greatest-band-that-ever-was ending the last album they recorded with a song (called ‘The End’ What else?) which encompasses the message of their career and that of the Sixties.

I sometimes worry that I’ll grow out of The Beatles. I’ll be in a phase where I’m listening to a lot of, say, Tom Waits or Nina Simone, and I’ll wonder if The Beatles will sound immature or insubstantial by comparison.

Then I put on Revolver, or Abbey Road, and they never do.

I think back to my music teacher, Mrs Frenz, explaining to us just how The Beatles blew everything apart, and now, having listened and studied, I understand - at least intellectually. But I would give anything to be thirteen years old in 1962, and to follow The Beatles’ story from the off, as it unfolded, hearing all that incredible music, in context, with fresh ears.

To have been listening to balladeers, like Franke Ifield singing ‘I Remember’ on Radio Luxembourg, and then to hear it followed by a new single, ‘Love Me Do’ by The Beatles. To have been enthralled by these voices and beats which sounded so unlike what surrounded them, to have followed ‘Please Please Me’ up the hit parade, and then been itching to go out and buy the LP of the same name the day it was released – to take that LP home, remove it from its cardboard sleeve and dust jacket and place it onto the turntable, eagerly taking the arm of the record player, carefully placing the needle onto the run-in groove, a couple of seconds popping and hiss before the first track, (’I Saw Her Standing There’ according to the sleeve, which I’d be intently studying), and to have heard that song, for the very first time, storm in with McCartney’s confident ‘1-2-3-4!’

The new playlist is out today.

Needs YOU!

Here at Absolute Radio we’re famous for the great music we play. However, what you may not know is that we’ve got our fair share of talented musicians as well who also love that same great music. SO, we thought why not form our own Absolute Radio House Band (…and start a revolution… in the words of Jack Black!)

Fancy yourself as a singer, can you play guitar, drums, keyboards, bass…kazoo?! (maybe not)
It doesnt matter really how many people want to get involved, we can rotate and we’ll try and get as many people involved as we can.

Email me back to let me know if you’re interested and let me know what you can play, you’d need to be available to commit to a few practices before the first gig at the Christmas night in Dec (exact date TBC).

If you need some inspiration:

Rawk!

Gareth

Well, we wanted to bring Soho to a standstill with the great cab giveaway this morning and I think we can say Mission Accomplished!

The Pure Highway giveaway has been amazingly successful on-air and online in week one. We’ve had more than 15 000 people enter our online draw in the first week and we had well over 100 cabbies turn up this morning to get their free radios.

We’re hoping to do something similar elsewhere in the country… standby for more on that.

Thanks to everyone that helped out this morning handing the radios - here’s the video starring the OC, VBH and with cameos from some other familiar faces.

PS. Yes - we know we’re a little logo heavy at the moment. We’ll get that sorted!

We’re officially the funniest British radio station on iTunes….

In the comedy charts we have…

Iain at number 13 and number 23 (His choice cut is also in new and notable)

Geoff at 25 and profiled on the page

Tim at 30 and in the new and notable

Christian at 31

Christian’s Men Commandments at 34 and featured in new and notable

No other radio station has as much content in the top 40

We’re still on the home page as well!

In an X-Factor world, the music industry is a glass of fizzy pop.

It’s almost hypnotic… the bubbles in the murky syrup desperately fighting to reach the top. Rows of streamingly endless pockets of air, one after another, racing for a kamikaze jump to see how high they can reach past the rim of the glass. This can’t be the music industry can it? What about the Zepplins, and Elbows, and Rolling Stones’? Then you hear the clinking and realize… Real music is the ice cubes.

No? Maybe it’s just me then.

What is Real Music to you? Clink the link to check out the thoughts of the man/woman on the street. It’s all part of our journey to discover what ‘real’ music is.

Must run, Paul McCartney just walked past my studio… He moves pretty fast for a glacier!

Promo 1:

Promo 2:

Vince

The new playlist is available here.

The “Radio at the Edge” conference took place in Millbank, London yesterday. This is an annual conference that looks at new technologies and directions that radio is taking.

It was very well attended, with a variety of interesting guests.

First up was our own Clive Dickens, presenting “From V to A”, the story of this station’s change to Absolute Radio. Rather than summarise it, take a look at yourself here:

Next up was perhaps the day’s most important panel discussion entitled “DAB - Dead and Buried?” This was led by The Sunday Times’ James Ashton with a panel that included Peter Davies (Ofcom), Mark Friend (BBC), Tony Moretta (DRDB), Darryl Pomicter (Radeo.net), and Paul Fairburn (102.2 Smooth Radio, London).

Tony Moretta was a “defender” of DAB - one in three households have a device, with 14m people listening a week. And these people listen to more services. He also said that the internet isn’t the future of radio; it’ll be part of the ecology, but DAB will be the mainstay. The iPlayer’s great, but it won’t work in the car, walking around or even in the kitchen.

Paul Fairburn of Smooth said that GMG weren’t “rabid enthusiasts.” They’d see how it went, although they saw the costs as very high. But they’d be stupid to drop DAB. 8.5% of his listening comes from DAB.

Mark Friend of the BBC talked about the costs of simulcasting in so many formats, and the infrastructure costs if we were to listen to all our radio via the internet. But he wasn’t sure exactly what a “Freeview moment” might be, referring to calls for digital radio to “do a Freeview” and reinvent itself.

Ofcom’s Peter Davies also addressed this by noting that there were only 600,000 DTT receivers in existance when Freeview launched. There are 8m DAB digital radios out there.

In other parts of the discussion, people talked about possible changes to the local/regional/national set-up of DAB radio. “Machinations” we were told, were taking place [the Digital Radio Working Group is due to report soon].

Kelly Shepherd from the BBC World Service showed us what it was doing to engage its audience in the 21st century. They had started with a redesign of their website, informed by their own listeners. They now offered a broad range of podcasts in a variety of languages, as well as putting a greater emphasis on video. Different sites offered different levels of detail, but mobile is very important to the World Service, and they are ensuring that all their sites are mobile compatible. Finally she highlighted the Bangladesh River Journey site that had used a variety of technologies to illustrate the trip.

Fi Glover, presenter of Radio 4’s Saturday Live led the next session, entitled Getting Intimate with the Audience. This panel featured Absolute Radio’s own Iain Lee who talked about how he used new technologies to communicate with his audience. He talked about his own podcast - Shindiggery. The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones is keen blogger and sends many a Twitter message, so much so, that he was trying to send messages from the stage (here’s a photo he took of Iain Lee). Also on the stage was Channel 4’s Daniel Heaf.

We heard how each of the panel used the various technologies, and the pros and cons of communicating with sometimes a quite small audience.

After lunch, the next session was called Death by a Thousand Cuts: More Choice = More Noise. Speakers from Sony Records, last.fm the BBC and We7 (who’s new offering, we were told, would launch today), spoke about how their various business planned on making money and operating in the future. Frederico Bolza was quite refreshing as a representative of a major record label, with a willingnes to try new models. He pointed out however, that they still earnt 90% of their revenue from sales of recorded music, with the other 10% coming from broadcasters.

There was discussion about how we filter music, with radio stations effectively acting as filters. John Peel used to be a “filter”. There were also discussions about how to add extra value to what’s being played - linking to sites where songs can be purchased and providing additional information about the artists. This isn’t always easy with 57% of music played on Radio 3 being “non-standard” (in other words - making those links isn’t automatic). The BBC talked a little about what it might be doing in the future with personalisation which was something that they felt they needed to be doing now as everyone expected it.

John Ousby from the BBC (and once of these parts), and Robin Pembrooke from Global, then ran us through a session on visualising radio. John talked about some of the things the BBC had already done from Scott Mills’ recent “Live from his Flat” event, to a clever piece of technology the BBC employed to send to people who weren’t lucky earlier this year when it gave away tickets to the Radio 1 Big Weekend - Band In Your Hand (It’s very clever, and if you have a PC and a webcam, you should give it a go). He also demoed some mock-ups of different forms of visualisation of radio that could be available on other platforms like Freeview or cable. The key word was “glanceability”.

Robin Pembrooke took as through some commercial radio visualisations, noting that it didn’t have the manpower that the BBC had to do things as big and clever as the BBC. He thought that some new DAB devices still needed to go through a couple more iterations before they were really easy to use, although the new Pure Evoke Flow was praised as being a step in the right direction.

But what he really wanted to do was show off a new iPhone application that Global will be releasing for many of their FM stations in the next week or so. Although it’s not available just yet, the demo looked very good, with information about now playing artists appearing on the phone, alongside local weather information and even traffic camera pictures. For advertisers, it offers the opportunity for listeners to find out more about their products, and most importantly, all of this is “taggable” so that you can come back later and find out about the song you liked, or the product you wanted to learn more about.

Finally, we had two sessions about podcasting. First up was Leo Laporte, Chief TWiT who came to us live (and ambitiously) via Skype from California. This Week in Tech, or TWiT, is a very popular technology podcast that Leo started several years ago. This has now burgeoned into a network of different podcasts and video streams. He talked to us about numbers, how he was getting it to pay for itself, and difficulties he faced. For example, advertising is all done along national lines, so although all the brands has had as advertisers are international, the buyers are targeting US subjects. As a result, he’s not currently able to monetise a third of his streams.

The numbers sounded quite strong, but he knows that he’s essentially an independent in an area that is slowly being filled up with large media groups. And he emphasised his need to do deals for bandwidth since he’s currently serving 4-5TB a day. The specialised nature of the audience does mean that he’s able to obtain some quite high rates for advertising however.

The day ended with a live-on-tape (well Mac) podcast from Collings and Herring. Andrew Collins and Richard Herring are both writers and broadcasters, each of whom maintains their own blog (their most recent entries talk about their visit to the conference). Their “presentation” was a live recording of their podcast, largely about how it was that they came to make a podcast.

Rather than say too much more about it, I suggest that you download and listen to it yourself. [Warnng: It's not for those of a more delicate sensibility - let's just say, we couldn't broadcast it in its current form!]

The recording done, we stayed for a few drinks courtesy of Media UK before heading to a nearby pub.

As you can see, I’ve been swotting up on my Maori. This is about getting ready and being prepared or something.

After three and a bit years, I leave Absolute Radio at the end of this week to go and work at The Radio Bureau in New Zealand.

I’ve got some learning to do. This was the bloke who told his eldest daughter Millie that she would be able to see koalas and kangaroos in New Zealand.

Amanda and I have always wanted to experience living there and I didn’t want to stop working in radio. Could this work out any better?

It has been an amazing three years in which I’ve learnt an enormous amount about radio, media and people.

Some bright spark once said that a business is only as good as the people that work for it and I’m convinced that this was written about this place – I have never worked at an organisation where the staff are as dedicated, talented, creative and aware of the common goal as much as Absolute Radio.

Radio truly is a pretty friendly place to work, not just within the UK, but globally. Having read through several Radio Bureau documents, there are plenty of references to radio studies conducted though out the world.

In this spirit, I’ll be keeping you up to date with what’s happening at Coast, Fresh FM, Kia Ora Te Le Rere and Millie’s quest for koala bears of course!

Thank you to everyone at One Golden Square for making my time here a lot of fun!

Good luck taking Absolute forward.

Alan

So, Barack Obama won. Yay democracy! Hoorah for change! Yippie kay ay for a president not named after a shrubbery! It has been interesting to see how he has done it. This week as we start our first OPEN MIC session where we ask the community what we have done well and what we can do better.

Although it may seem like a small thing, items like the Obama iPhone app that went through your address book so you could phone anyone who wasn’t already pledging their support for Obama, and keeping donation lines, news, video and events all in one place help to organise grassroots support in an easy, entertaining and modern way.

The links between the US presidential race and our radio station don’t seem to be that obvious and one might even laugh at my audacity of drawing any comparisons, but hey. But in the end both a presidential candidate and a radio station are trying to get the same thing – public support. Obama got it through votes, and at Absolute Radio– we get it through listeners, and not only by keeping the ‘voters’ we have – our core listeners, but by getting the ‘floating voters’ who haven’t committed to a radio station yet, converting supporters who are getting tired of the radio station they used to be loyal to – and even persuading people who never ‘vote’ to start voting – by listening to the radio.

So, what did Obama, a 47 year old first term senator, do to become president? His message was clear – one of change. He and his team projected that the political system in the US had become stagnant and needed changing. In many ways, UK radio has become stagnant too – there hasn’t been a big shake up in radio since Radio Caroline illegally broadcast from international waters in the 60’s – some stations have become predictable and stale – and with modern technology, people don’t have to settle for what large organisations decide they should listen to – and Absolute Radio believes we can change the way that commercial radio is structured in the UK, and we would like to set the benchmarks for how other radio stations should behave – as Obama has done in the US.

Barack also spent a lot of time listening to what the people of America wanted. With our playlist sessions and open forums like this one, Absolute is doing more than any other radio station to try and listen to the people who are listening to it. Just as Obama’s message has been clear and simple, ours is too – we’re putting the listener first. By making a station that works for our audience and users, we’ll get loyal listeners – and if we have brand loyalists – they will get their friends to become listeners as well, who in time will become loyal listeners, and in time will convert others. More important than any adverts that we could buy, more important that the $2 million half hour advert Obama ran is the groundswell support of a loyal public base. So the most important thing for Absolute Radio is you, the person that listens to us – we need you to tell us what we can do to improve the station, and tell others to listen. With the best station, and the most listeners, then the industry can change, and people can get what they want from a radio station, not just what people think they need. The more listeners that Absolute Radio has, the more chance there is that the industry and the world will sit up and listen.

At Absolute Radio, we want to change the nature of commercial radio. We want people to listen to Absolute Radio on DAB in car. We want to have the most highly regarded line-up of presenters on any radio station. We want to be regarded as funny, relevant and up to date. We want to embrace new technology. We want to pay attention to detail, not forgetting the little things when we change the big ones. We want to create a sense of shared involvement so that people listening think of this as their radio station. We want those people to become ambassadors for Absolute Radio. And we want world domination and a billion dollars.

OK, everything apart from the last two.

Perhaps it’s just the election, but Absolute Radio does seem to me more than a business. Like Barack, we’re the ‘new kids on the block’, the upstarts fighting against the establishment. We have something to prove – that commercial radio can be a great medium again. It needs a fresh approach – which we think we have. It also needs support – which you can provide.

I was recently sent this file by David Wilding from Mindshare with the title ‘what can brands learn from Obama’ I think it makes fascinating reading. Just like the people who have voted for Obama, and are hoping that he can live up to his promises, all we can say is listen to us, and we promise that we will do all we can to live up to ours.

Following a review of the Programming strategy across the summer we are saying farewell to Programme Manager, Mark Bingham.

Mark joined Golden Square from the Capital Radio Group on the day Chris Evans left the station, what a baptism by fire! During his time at the company he has made a massive contribution to the UK’s number 1 commercial radio station. Mark has always applied himself with the utmost professionalism and integrity.

We wish him well and all the best with his future career.

Clive