How the music industry is erasing culture in the digital age
This is well worth a read. The man who gave us iPlayer and Wired UK gave a presentation this past week about the BBC Archives. He talks about a digital public space for public content – and also says almost exactly what I said the following day at the Like Minds conference about curation: “what’s interesting is not up to me”.
Read the full text of his presentation here.
Read the Guardian article here.
Bernie Andrews, who has died aged 76, was the maverick producer behind the early BBC radio appearances of many of the leading pop artists of the 1960s, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix.
In his dimly-lit production cubicle, Andrews painstakingly strove to secure the best performance possible from his musicians, frequently letting them overrun their strictly allotted studio time. His nocturnal working habits earned him a reputation as a nine-to-five man — 9pm until 5am.
After these sessions, instead of lodging the master tapes in the BBC library, Andrews invariably — and crucially — took them home. This was in breach of the rules, but it meant that much precious material escaped the BBC’s infamous policy of “wiping” tapes to save money.
(Read more in The Telegraph)
Roly Keating delivers his keynote speech at FOCAL
Late last year, I was involved in a research project with the BBC’s Audio and Music Interactive Department. It was about how specialist music fans connected with the BBC with regard to that kind of programming.
You can read what we came up with as a result of that research, but for me, one of the key lessons was the problem of the word Broadcasting as a defining and totalising concept for the BBC – that is, the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Because the BBC’s role, in a digital sphere, is no longer simply about making content and pushing it out there to audiences. It’s about acting as a resource for public media. That’s not to say they shouldn’t do broadcasting – but that the broadcasting should be part of a bigger concept of British Public Media (and BPM’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?).