Amazing Radio

As the founder of the only national commercial radio station that’s remotely like 6Music – and someone who recently complained to the BBC Trust about the commercial impact of ‘BBC Introducing’ – I’m dancing on its grave, right?

Wrong. 6Music embodies what the BBC should be doing. It’s fresh, original, rightly popular, and sits happily alongside our more focused and entirely different offering in Amazing Radio. It brings more listeners to digital radio, where it and we are about the only interesting things going. It may have fourteen times our annual budget, but we’re not jealous. We’re lean and mean and growing rapidly, building a global private sector business that indirectly benefits from the BBC’s heritage (it trained most of our people, after all) but contributes to GDP too.

The BBC may be bloated, but 6Music is the wrong place to wield the axe.

That’s right. Change it.

Reports have reached us at Amazing Towers that some Guerrilla Dial Changers have been fighting the good fight in shops all over Britain and changing the dial to Amazing Radio, which is just left of the BBC.

Most shops that sell DAB sets usually have one set up playing in store – next time you’re in a shop, why not change that dial to Amazing Radio and spread our Amazing Tunes to a bigger audience? Guerrilla Dial Changers of the world unite! We’ve been impressed with stories of people spreading the good news in stores across the UK. Most recently Tom Cotton’s dulcet tones were heard by a listener in Fenwicks’ Newcastle department store but we’ve been heard on HMV in Oxford Street, The Plinth and in a curious amount of taxi cabs all over the UK.

Are you a Guerrilla Dial Changer? Have you heard Amazing Radio playing in a shop or public area? Where’s the strangest place you’ve heard Amazing Radio?

If you hear us being played somewhere strange or spectacular, please capture the moment and post it via our Facebook page and make us smile!

Today is another great day for the Amazing Radio scrapbook as we unveil our new schedule. We told you about our new presenters a while ago as well as revealing the name of our first show; It’s Amazing. Well, Trevor’s show is in the can and ready to air tonight at 7pm (GMT). We’ll let Trevor introduce his guests and take you through a selection of songs from amazingtunes.com.

The rest of this week’s schedule looks like this:

Thursday – 7pm – It’s Amazing (with Trevor Dann)
Friday – 7pm – Xan Down South (with Xan Phillips)
Friday – 9pm – Mark Ryan
Saturday – 1pm – Frankie Ward
Sunday – 10am – Greg and Burtt

There’s also another opportunity to catch some of our shows;

Saturday – 3pm – It’s Amazing (with Trevor Dann)
Sunday – 3pm – Xan Down South (with Xan Phillips)

So tune in and let us know what you think either by commenting on this post, via Facebook, Twitter or email.

Oh, and that was just the hors d’oeuvres, we’ve got first shows from Tom Cotton, Fuzz Chaudhrey and the return of Audition with another new presenter, Charlie Ashcroft. We’re sure you’ll love it. Keep an eye on our presenters’ page for further information.

We still keep receiving emails from charities keen to take advantage of our Amazing Christmas offer of free national radio advertising for charities, which is due to end today.  Two people sent submissions late on New Year’s Eve, awesomely proving their commitment to their cause.  In the past two days, we’ve had more.  It seems horribly churlish to say ‘too late, bugger off’ – so we’ve decided to extend Amazing Christmas until the end of January. We’ll have to call it Amazing New Year or something – who cares, the causes are more important than the name.

The feedback was clear when I asked if you wanted some Christmas songs: you do. So we’ve scheduled some.

‘Christmas Audition’ will be on today (Christmas Eve), Christmas Day and Boxing Day at twelve noon.  The playlist is as follows:  –

The Elastic band    It’s Christmas Time   amazingtunes.com/v
Shaharah    Christmas Blues    amazingtunes.com/w
G.J.Lovie    He is Born (A Shepherd’s Witness)    amazingtunes.com/x
Elvis Ashram    Made For Love (A Song for Christmas)   amazingtunes.com/y
Dominic Burgess    Winter Song    amazingtunes.com/z
James Lazzari    I can’t wait for Christmas amazingtunes.com/zz

Merry Christmas and an amazing New Year to everyone.

One of the new shows we launch in January is It’s Amazing, presented by the totally excellent Trevor Dann.  Trevor was producer of Whistle Test and Top of the Pops.  (For our younger readers – they used to be programmes on the television …. when TV played some real music, before it was swamped by talentless shows, that musical equivalent of Soma).  Trevor was later Head of Music at something called ‘Radio One’. Earlier in his career he produced a show broadcast late at night on the aforementioned Radio 1, whose bearded presenter played a lot of new music and had a vaguely Scouse accent.  I can’t quite remember the presenter’s name, but someone told me he was named after a stage at Glastonbury.

Anyway, Trevor will have some rather fancy studio guests (we’ll tell you who they are, later), but being modest to a fault, he wants to know what you think about the music they’ll play and discuss. So get your skates over to this link: – http://www.amazingtunes.com/users/its_amazing/playlists – it’s the playlist for Trevor’s first show. And please let us have your suggestions for tracks to be discussed in future programmes too. It’s Amazing will only live up to its name, if you lend a hand.

Please respond here, or to info@amazingradio.co.uk, or to our new and suddenly rather popular Facebook page.

Thanks a lot,

PC
Paul Campbell
amazing founder
Twitter @drumpaul

We finally got round to it….

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/Amazing-Radio/209736346911?ref=search&sid=601330158.840568542..1

Please come and be our friend!

ps thanks to Stuart for pointing out how crap my URL was above.  Try this pert version instead:  http://www.facebook.com/amazingradio

Permission required, please, Dear Listener.

Should we play Christmas Music on Amazing Radio?

Surprisingly, we have some – quite a lot in fact – in the amazingtunes.com database.  So far, I’ve quite enjoyed the thought that Amazing Radio is a sleighbell-free zone: but I wonder if that’s a bit Scrooge-like.  Maybe we should do something to celebrate the time of year and stick some in the playlist next week.  (Come to think of it – maybe we should acknowledge that Christmas music is quite often the naffest of the naff, and only play the worst music we can find, for comedy value).

I’m torn.  What do you think?

PC
Twitter @drumpaul

ps – by way of illustration - try this.   Probably the finest Christmas song ever written, I’m sure you’ll agree.  All proceeds to Cancer Research.

Here’s an everyday story of technology folk to make you weep.  Me too.

As you know, all the music on Amazing Radio comes from amazingtunes.com.  It gets there when an artist uploads a song they’ve written and recorded.   When they do that, we ask them to upload only an MP3 file.  Our clever system ingests the file, then transcodes it to the Flash format so it can be played on amazingtunes.com.  When you hear a song online, it’s being played in Flash.  When you download it, you download an MP3.

Unfortunately some artists see the copy that says ‘upload MP3 files only’ … and promptly ignore it.  We’ve had all sorts uploaded.  AAC, .wav, nailfiles, combs, key fobs, small bananas – you name it.  Our system handles the import fine, so the file sits uneasily in the database, surrounded by serried ranks of prim and proper MP3 files, all giving it a dirty look.  But then the transcoding to Flash doesn’t work, because the file is in the wrong format.  To the user, this makes it look as if the upload hasn’t worked.  It has, but the transcoding hasn’t, so you can’t hear your file.  Worse, the transcoder – which is open source – is a bit of a prima donna.  If it finds one file it can’t deal with, it gets all stroppy, falls over, and refuses to do anything until we apologise, pamper its ego and coax it back to work.   So even the legal, decent, honest and truthful MP3 files suffer.  It’s like a whole class being held back because one bad lad at the back let off a stink bomb.

Simple problem.  Easy solution?  Not likely.  You wouldn’t believe how complicated it is to change the transcoding so it works with non-MP3s, or to make a foolproof error reporting system that people actually respond to.   And as the number of uploads has grown, so the apparent problem has increased exponentially.   We’ve had a developer working on resolving the issue for weeks, looking for the ideal, sophisticated solution.  We’ve now decided to implement something more rudimentary pro tem – on the basis that a good plan today beats a perfect plan tomorrow.  As we all know, tomorrow never comes.

It’s a stupid issue, and the impact has been crap.  We’ll fix it: we’re very sorry it’s been a problem.

There is rejoicing on the streets of Newcastle today.  Crowds have gathered, thousands upon thousands flooding out from shops and offices, from homes and pubs, a spontaneous outburst of public emotion not seen since the death of Princess Di.  Children beamed with joy, grown men wept, mothers clutched their bosoms in maternal pride. Old men compared it with the last time Newcastle United won anything.  (They were very very old).

Experts agreed, this was possibly the most momentous and important event in regional cultural history since the Venerable Bede turned up and asked if he could borrow a biro as he had an idea for a book.  Suddenly the pain of a century of economic hardship and decades of industrial decline melted away.  The impending closure of Corus, the demotion of Newcastle and Middlesborough, nothing mattered in comparison.  The world was a better place: Geordie Joe had won the X Factor.

Just rejoice at that news.

Now can we get back to some real music please?