Thursday 14 July 2005
Printable version
One of the many things I struggle with at the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú is finding exactly
the right words to reply to the sometimes rather difficult letters I
receive from the public.
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Some of my colleagues are far more adept. My friend John Ware, who
is a reporter on the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú programme Panorama, once got a letter from
a viewer after he'd made an investigative film in Northern Ireland.
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'Dear Mr Ware', the letter read - I won't attempt the accent - 'I
would rather eat dog shit than watch another one of your programmes.'
John's reply consisted of the two words: 'bon appetit'.
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Now, I could never claim that kind of wit. My present job, however,
does lead to some surprising correspondence.
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One angry licence-payer wrote recently to complain about a storyline
in that weighty drama, Bob the Builder, in which our small clay hero
set about building an entire new town all by himself.
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To imply, the letter said, that Bob 'is able to not only carry out
building work but that he is capable of producing architectural, structural
and services drawings for buildings and urban development plans, when
he does not have any training skills or qualifications in this profession,
is a flagrant distortion of reality and should not be perpetuated'.
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Children's programmes, of course, are a notorious death-trap. A few
years ago, when I was Controller of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú TWO, I was lucky enough to commission
that other enduring masterpiece, Teletubbies.
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It went on to be a big success for the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú both here and around the
world, but when it was a launched there was a press campaign which ran
for weeks accusing the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú of using the Teletubbies to dumb down the
whole English language.
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Now, as you know, we are always looking for new and inventive ways
of lowering standards, but it takes a pretty sick organisation to dumb
down a programme that was only aimed at two-year-olds in the first place.
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Presenters are another obvious target. 'Why don't you invite Jeremy
Paxman into your office,' someone else wrote to me during the election
campaign, 'take down his flashy striped pants … and administer six of
the best?'
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Here's another rather menacing correspondent: 'Sooner or later you
will have to release pictures of the Five Live newsreaders'.
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The public, I fear, may not yet be ready…
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Music and the example of Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú News
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The point about all these letters and protests - a few slightly potty,
the overwhelming majority courteous, reasonable and quite often obviously
right - is that they spring from a very strong sense of ownership of
the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú among the public.
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They pay for it and its only purpose is to serve them.
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This special relationship is the point of having a Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú, but it brings
with it a number of aspirations and obligations.
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This afternoon I thought I'd offer a few thoughts about one set of
them: the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's commitment to music and music-making and to the music
industry.
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Nearly twenty years ago, one of my predecessors, John Birt, concluded
that news and current affairs was the cornerstone of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú: the core
of its mission both to the British public and to audiences around the
world.
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It's hard to remember it now, but before the mid-Eighties, news had
seemed like one genre among many.
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Investment was variable and so was future strategy. Radio and TV news
occupied different, faintly antagonistic universes.
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John saw that the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú news offer could be bigger than any one programme
or even than any one medium: we needed a news strategy that encompassed
radio and TV.
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Specialism - expert knowledge - could be a key benefit to the public
and a key point of distinction - so the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú invested heavily in specialist
correspondents of every kind.
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And new technology gave us the potential of putting news into the hands
of our audiences when and where they wanted it. So the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú threw resources
into continuous news services, its news website and began experiments
in the Nineties both in personalised and mobile news services.
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Where has all this left us? Well, taken together - and the public
increasingly do take our news output together across media - our news
service packs a bigger punch than it has ever done.
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Last Thursday, the day of the terrible London bombings, more than 31
million people watched Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú news on television. We had our biggest-ever
day on the news website - nearly 116 million page impressions, more
than twice as many as the previous record, with up to an estimated 8
million unique users in the UK and many, many millions more around the
world.
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We don't have numbers yet for radio - I thought that Five Live, Radio
4 and London 94.9FM all did a brilliant job in very challenging circumstances
on the day - but it's likely that the combined UK reach to Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú News
last Thursday will top 40 million people.
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And Thursday confirmed another change in our relationship with the
news audience. Traditionally, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú News was par excellence a top-down
one-way service: London calling, the voice of authority.
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The idea that the public might have an important role in newsgathering,
or that largely unmediated public testimony might form an important
part of the way in which a story was told, would have been regarded
with disbelief.
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Accuracy and authority still really matter to us today - we're still
in the process of strengthening our journalism and reinforcing our standards
in the wake of the Gilligan-Kelly-Hutton affair - but we also really
want to hear what the public have to say.
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By lunchtime last Thursday, texts, still pictures and videos were pouring
into the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú just as they had during the tsunami disaster at the start
of the year.
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People's voices, images, comments and emotions became an important
part of the way the day was covered, not just on the margins of the
website but on the Ten O'Clock News.
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The professionals within Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú News have important things to offer which
are not shared by most members of our audience: expertise, knowledge,
experience, editorial judgement.
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But we don't own the news. Increasingly, news is a partnership, a dialogue
between the public and ourselves.
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So news is a big idea about the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú. And it's an evolving idea, an
idea which shows of every sign of successfully migrating from the age
of limited choice, linear broadcasting to the multi-platform, non-linear
environment we have entered.
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And from the age of one-way broadcasting to a more fluid, two-way relationship
with the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú audience.
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Now what's interesting is that almost all of this is relevant when
we turn from the question of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú and news to that of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú and
music.
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Because to me, music is another of the essential building-blocks of
the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú: in its own way just as important, just as central as news.
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Here, too, we have a strong heritage and a formidable current commitment
- five music radio networks, extensive music on television and our other
radio services, an increasingly rich presence on the web.
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Many of the same editorial instincts and strategies are at work: expertise
and the role of the trusted navigator through new work and old, whether
it's Rob Cowan or Zane Lowe; the placing of music in context, whether
it's The Genius of Mozart on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú TWO or the commitment to World Music
across Radios 2 and 3 and Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú FOUR.
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And, just as in our news and current affairs output, the use of strong
personalities: stars with something to say, to complement the music
and help bring it into a bigger conversation with the broadcast audience.
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One of the things that distinguishes Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú network and local radio from
its commercial competitors is the way we build our music around the
taste and instincts of a widely diverse range of presenters.
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Radio 2 is Terry Wogan, Jonathan Ross and Johnnie Walker, as well as
Stuart Maconie and Mike Harding.
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For us, music is never just a play-list. The same is true on TV, from
Jools Holland to Charles Hazlewood.
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In addition to our on-air commitment to music in all media, we have
a massive impact on what you could call music's supply-side.
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This ranges from our role in supporting our five orchestras and the
Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú singers; our many commissions; our commitment to live performance;
our on-air support for new bands and new performing talent; our support
of specialist music events; and so on.
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In all of this, we work with and rely upon many brilliant partners.
The UK's composers and musicians; music publishers and performance organisers;
the talent unions and the collective rights groups; the concert-going
public themselves who make possible events from the Proms - which begin
tomorrow - to the smallest live gig on Radio 1; and of course to the
record industry.
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We believe in music and music-making. We love helping to find and promote
new talent and to bring it to wide audiences.
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I know we have our differences from time to time, but I also believe
that we are natural allies. One of the ways the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú needs to change
is in its openness and consistency in working with its partners.
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The future of music on the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú
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But I want to concentrate today on the future of music at the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú.
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I'll certainly try to touch on some of the opportunities that I see,
but I'll also focus on some of challenges we all face - in particular
in the protection of intellectual property.
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I'll even touch on the interesting topic of those Beethoven downloads…
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I've made the first point already. To me, music is part of the soul
of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú. As I've said, we do a vast amount - but up until now we've
never really pulled it together. Yes, in recent years Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio has
had a much clearer sense of the musical mission of each of its networks,
but the connection with Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú TV has sometimes been tenuous.
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How does Top of the Pops relate to Radio 1's music strategy, for example?
And how do our online and interactive services fit in?
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Again, where is the right place to draw the boundary between what you
could call the public service zone - the content the public get free
at the point of use in return for their investment in the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú licence-fee
- and what is quite properly regarded as the commercial zone, an area
where the creators of intellectual property and the companies which
develop it and exploit it can quite rightly expect to sell it to consumers?
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In the analogue era, this boundary was pretty clear.
Later… with Jools Holland on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú TWO was obviously public service.
The CDs produced by the bands which featured on Later were obviously
commercial.
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Record companies supported - indeed continue to support - programmes
like Later because they helped to promote the artists and the records.
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But to state the obvious, in a fully digital world, life is a bit more
complicated. Although audiences have been able to tape radio programmes
for half a century, and TV for over twenty years, now the recording
is potentially almost instantaneous, ultra-convenient and at very high
quality.
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In principle, that 'promotional appearance' might be all the consumer
feels they need.
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In the face of questions like these, I asked Jenny Abramsky and Leslie
Douglas to work with creative leaders in all the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's music departments
- and with our external partners - to draw up for the first time a music
strategy for the whole Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú, one which looks not just at today but at
where we should be with music five, ten years from now.
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They're still hard at work, but I think I can risk sharing a few emerging
themes with you today.
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First, there's a growing clarity about what the core of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's
proposition for music and music-making should be. The key words are:
new, live, British, heritage, breadth and depth.
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Not everything we do will meet all of those challenges of course, but
you should nonetheless get the picture.
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Wherever we can, we want to add something, to introduce something,
to focus on fresh performance, to concentrate in particular on emerging
and established UK talent. To offer a greater musical range than any
other media provider can.
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Wherever possible, to add context, history, to relate music to people's
lives, culture, memory.
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The next theme is portability and convenience. Just as in the case
of news, the public quite reasonably except to be able to access the
music that fits a given mood whenever and wherever the mood strikes.
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We used to rely entirely on scheduling to do this job. Traditional
linear broadcasting will still be a vital delivery-system for many music-lovers,
and digital radio means we can offer more choice than ever before.
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But we want to go further. We're exploring the concept of My Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú Radio,
using broadband to enable listeners to pull together their own series
of programmes - effectively their own radio station - out of the totality
of the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's audio output: an early music station for one listener,
a contemporary jazz station for another.
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Diversity of audience and the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's need to try to serve all of its
licence-payers is another theme. But we don't want to typecast our viewers
and listeners either.
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1Xtra is a black music station but it's not a station aimed solely
at black listeners. We live in a world of maximal eclecticism: people
want the freedom to try on whatever clothes or cultures they choose.
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But tone of voice is important. We don't want to dilute or dumb down
our musical offering in the interests of what used to be called 'accessibility',
but we also know that the wrong tone of voice can exclude.
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We want to be welcoming and approachable to everyone. And we want to
use the new technologies to find and share new talent.
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We've already got a place on our website where unsigned bands can post
tracks for others to sample - that's only the start.
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The role of music in non-music programmes is another critical theme.
We play an average of 180,000 separate pieces of music every week at
the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú - much of it in dramas, comedies, factual programmes and so
on.
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Now, of course individual producers and directors need the creative
flexibility to commission or choose the music they believe will work
best for their project; but again, we believe there's the scope for
more purposefulness and coherence in how we think about music more widely
across our output - and also scope for some interesting partnerships
with some of you.
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Partnerships will also be key in another strand of thinking, which
is about unlocking the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's musical archive. We have a treasure-house
of unique recordings stretching back over many decades.
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We want to work with rights-holders to make some of these recordings
available to the public once again: as some of you may know, we've recently
signed a deal with Universal to do just that. We hope that is not the
only partnership we form in this area.
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Another very important theme is the potential for major cross-platform
musical events to become more than the sum of their parts, and in particular
to bring new audiences to an artist or a musical genre for the first
time.
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In a way, this is very old news. As I said, tomorrow sees the start
of the Proms, with a first night playing for the first time on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú ONE,
as well as Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú TWO and Radio 3, and with many, many nights featuring
on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú FOUR as well as on the radio and online.
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In recent weeks, we've seen both Glastonbury and Live 8 playing across
media and reaching enormous numbers, introducing and re-introducing
great talent to new and established audiences.
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You'll be pleased to hear that I'm no longer the only sad person on
the 7.46 from Oxford listening to The Great Gig in the Sky.
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Roll over, Ludwig
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But I want to spend a moment on another recent Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú musical event -
the Beethoven Experience - which played out on Radio 3, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú TWO, Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú
FOUR and of course interactively.
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This project illustrates a number of the points I've been trying to
make this afternoon.
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First, how much more the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú can achieve when it works across channels
and platforms. The Beethoven Experience began as a twinkle in the eye
of Roger Wright, the Radio 3 controller, but it quickly connected with
the creative strategy of Peter Maniura, our head of television classical
music, and with a range of new media and interactive ideas we'd be playing
with for some time.
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Second, it demonstrates how the really big ideas punch through. One
of the counter-intuitive realities of the digital world is that - from
D-Day celebrations to the Olympics to the revival of Dr Who - the big
things, the major events, are getting bigger, certainly in impact and
often in absolute audience size.
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Beethoven was our own event. It wasn't based on an anniversary or some
external festival. It was a purely Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú event. But it played out big.
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And third, Beethoven points both to the potential and to the possible
dangers of world of digital music - and I'm thinking specifically of
the downloads we made available of special Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú programmes featuring
the nine Beethoven symphonies.
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I'll turn to them in a moment, but first - rather than listening to
me trying to describe it, here's a flavour of the event itself.
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[RUN BEETHOVEN DVD.]
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OK, let's look at the issue of the downloads. The downloads, by the
way, were not just recordings of the music but programmes with editorial
scene-setting and context as well as the works themselves.
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As you heard, demand was much greater than we'd estimated. The guess
in advance was that the numbers of downloads would run to the low tens
of thousands. The outturn, as we learned a minute ago, over a million.
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"What do you expect?" Alain Levy of EMI said to me the other
day. "You always get a big take-up when you offer things for free."
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That's a fair point, though certainly in the UK these downloads weren't
free for the public: the programmes were paid for by the licence-payer
and were made for broadcast as well as download; the symphonies were
played by an orchestra which is also paid for by the licence-payer;
and, to state the obvious, the underlying rights are in the public domain.
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But of course, none of that captures why the downloads have caused
anxiety for some in the record business. I think that boils down to
two questions: is this the start of some new regular service from the
Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú, in which, without warning and consultation, the public will be
offered chunks of music free at the point of download - which will inevitably
distort the commercial market in music, whether it is the sale of CDs
or the emerging market in paid-for downloads?
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And second, are there any limits to what the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú might download? Could
we wake up one morning to discover that half the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú's musical archive
is available on the net?
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The answer to these two questions is: no and no. I understand where
the anxiety is coming from: the music industry is already under assault
from piracy of various kinds - we face that issue too, by the way -
and the last thing it needs is the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú unintentionally opening up some
kind of second front.
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But that is not what we're going to do. The Beethoven downloads were
a one-off trial and were strictly limited, both in terms of content
and windowing.
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Roger Wright talked to a number of people in different parts of the
industry before the trial: attitudes varied but almost everyone said
that they thought the idea was acceptable, indeed potentially both useful
and interesting as long as it really was a trial.
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And it is. We won't contemplate another experiment like it without
a great deal more research, consultation and a systematic attempt to
understand the likely market impact.
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We also, of course, need to think hard about the proportion of download
requests coming from outside the UK.
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Later this year, Roger will be offering Radio 3 listeners the Bach
Experience, again - and in the case of Bach this is an awesome thought
- a chance for Radio 3 listeners to hear every note the composer wrote.
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But now we've seen what happened with Beethoven, we want to analyse
and reflect with all of you before we propose any further trials of
free downloads.
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I hope we can all learn from the Beethoven experience and I see a
role for the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú in exploring new technological possibilities and audiences'
response to them on behalf of all of us.
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But I don't want to jump to the conclusion that music downloads from
the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú automatically mean fewer CDs or opportunities for commercial
downloads.
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We don't yet have proper information yet about what impact the Beethoven
Experience had on sales of Beethoven and other classical music.
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It is by no means obvious that the story will only be one way: even
the downloads themselves may have stimulated interest in Beethoven among
new listeners that will lead to new sales.
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For decades, record companies have looked to the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú to help promote
music by offering it to audiences free at the point of use on radio
and television.
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Of course, the internet and the possibility of near-perfect digital
reproduction changes the terms of the debate, but it would be premature
to conclude that our role in allowing listeners to sample and explore
music in ways which then lead them to invest in it as consumers has
no relevance in the digital space.
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But I want to make an additional point. Both in terms of our archive
and current music, we need to work more closely with all of you to enable
our licence-payers, if they choose to, to become paying consumers of
music more conveniently and effortlessly than has been possible in the
past.
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Traditionally, the public service broadcast channel and the music
retail channel were conceptually and physically entirely separate -
in a web or broadband environment they can be contiguous or even continuous.
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Our licence-payers obviously need clarity at every point about what
is going on: this is a free-to-use public service space, this is an
opportunity to pay for a download of the music you just heard.
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We also need to ensure absolute fairness in allowing the public to
choose from a range of commercial providers.
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But I believe that a Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú which does not make it easier and more convenient
for our audiences to move from public service listening mode to commercially
consuming mode will risk losing contact with its public in the field
of music.
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I also believe that the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú and the music industry could do more together
to progress the fight to protect rights.
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The nature of music - the relative ease with which CDs can be copied
and pirated and the relative low bit-rates needed to pass it around
illegally on the internet - mean that your industry has faced this threat
earlier than most of the broadcast industry.
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But that's changing. The first episode of the new Dr Who series was
available on the unauthorised site Bit Torrent three weeks before its
premiere on Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú ONE.
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And, although of course our main model in the UK is free-to-air unencrypted
broadcast, the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú has a duty to exploit the residual commercial value
of the rights we invest in on behalf of the public: we do that both
here and around the world.
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So we have an intense interest in effective digital rights management
systems; in technical, legal and regulatory means to protect the property
of rights-holders; and in increasing public awareness of the moral and
economic consequences of the theft of intellectual property.
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On this last point, I believe the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú could do considerably more than
it does at present.
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Conclusion
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A year ago, the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú published its own vision of its future, Building
Public Value.
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It too contained bold ideas about the future of music at the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú:
the opportunity to bring music learning opportunities to every school,
every child and every adult in the UK with the Music For All project;
the idea of an Alternative Proms featuring great contemporary music
to complement our great classical music festival.
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But Building Public Value sets out a much broader picture of change
for the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú. So too does the Government's Green Paper, published this
March.
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A new and clearer system of governance. New safeguards to ensure that
the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú does not embark on new services without very careful and objective
assessment of the likely net market impact of the proposed services.
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A Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú which is more open to partnership and collaboration, more flexible
in response to changes in audience, technology and competition.
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It's traditional for people to tell the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú: "Of course this
will be the last one - this will be the last Charter or the last gasp
for the licence-fee".
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We were told that in the Eighties and the 1990s and it's being said
again today: "You'll get a Charter this time but there's no chance
that Government or the public will want a traditional publicly-funded
TV and radio broadcaster in 2017".
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Well, I hope it's clear from everything I've said this afternoon that
we have no intention of remaining a traditional broadcaster.
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Already, some of our digital services are more popular than some analogue
ones. We've already started to develop a new relationship with our audience
- to use the web and other technologies to listen to them better and
to start to tap into and share their ideas and their talent.
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We're changing as an organisation too, focussing all of our energy
on creativity, value and on the agility we will need to succeed in the
digital environment.
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The Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú has cast off its old skin and re-invented itself repeatedly
over the past 80 years.
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We're in the process of doing that again.
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But we know that we succeed at the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú when we focus not just on cutting
edge change, but on some rather traditional values: creative ambition,
excellence, respect for our audiences, a determination not to compete
with the market for its own sake but to add something, to bring something
fresh and valuable to bear.
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If we concentrate on these qualities, music really will have a great
future at the Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú.
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Thank you.
