Tomorrow morning – that’s Monday – at 0800, we’ll stop test transmissions. Hurrah. Yippee. Marvelous. About time too.
What you’ll hear will be … a bit different. As you may have noticed, it’s not our style to say “Da Daa! Here’s a 24×7 schedule! Like it or Lump It!” I’d like the schedule to be controlled by you, just as much as the music selection is. So tomorrow we’re launching a couple of key lumps for consideration.
AUDITION - where you choose the music
0800, 1200 & 1700 weekdays, 1000 and 1530 weekends
This is our most important show – it’s the heart of the interactivity. We suspect you’re a bit too busy to listen to all 17,626 songs on amazingtunes.com (that’s the total this morning, with 7 more added so far today. It’ll have increased by the time I finish writing this*). But we listen to everything, to check nobody’s stealing music, to monitor for taste and decency, to check PRS membership status – and because it’s damned good fun. So Audition is our selection of ten songs that caught our ear. We’d like your permission to add them to the playlist.
We’ll play the songs and say a bit about the artist/band. If you like a tune and want it on the playlist, go to amazingtunes.com to buy, recommend, play, rate or tag it. As you know, The Big Clever Algorithm then decides what comes out on top. Sales are most important. Musicians like to eat.
We’ve introduced a short URL to make this easier. So the first song is amazingtunes.com/a, the second amazingtunes.com/b and so on. You can also see the current Audition running order at amazingradio.co.uk/audition.
In the first week, we’re just playing ten songs. We could do ten every day, but I suspect you’ll need to hear them more often, to decide if they’re ok to include. We’ll experiment with the numbers, depending on what you tell me. Hope you like it.
LOCAL HEROES - starting with XAN DOWN SOUTH
Every day at 2100
As the only national radio station based outside London, we’d like to be representative of the whole of the UK – unlike all those other stations, who only care what happens in West 1. Or Islington. So Local Heroes will look in detail at the music scene all over the place, starting with Xan down South. Its presenter Xan Phillips, the first new voice on Amazing Radio, is a fantastically-talented presenter, bass player, father and music obsessive (that’s a good thing), who lives and rocks on the South Coast. His show combines music and interview with a number of local bands. We have other shows lined up for the rest of the country – and we’re looking for more presenters to be ‘correspondents’ for their patch. (pc@amazingradio.co.uk if you want to be one of them). We’re also talking to someone in New York, as Amazing Radio is getting a lot of reaction from the USA, and we already have hundreds of artists based there. Ditto mainland Europe, Scandinavia, Asia, LatAm…..
NIGHTBIRDS
Every day, 2300 – 0100
We launched this quietly (geddit) last week, and it’s already caused a bit of a storm in The Guardian, in the States, and in our email traffic. Nightbirds is radio mogadon, a mix of ambient music and – you guessed it – birdsong. But unlike ‘Birdsong Radio’ which Amazing Radio replaced, these are lots of different birds, they don’t loop, you can see what they are on the scrolling text, and if you download them from amazingtunes.com/users/birds, we’ll give ALL the proceeds to the RSPB. We’re just so nice.
Nightbirds is partly an apologetic nod to Terry Pratchett, who is a genius and who deserves his birdsong – but mainly an attempt to make a late night show that’s genuinely different. A word of warning: if you’re not asleep by 0100 but would like to be, you’d better switch off – we get noisy again afterwards.
The next new programme we’ll launch will be a Chart Show, and then a pile of others (particularly some specialist genre shows for the evening, with presenters and everything). But not yet. I’d like your comments on these programmes first please – how they sound, what you think of the scheduling, do you want them longer, shorter, on at different times, more/less often – you know the kind of thing.
And whilst I’m on – I’d like to say a sincere thanks to those of you who have started buying tracks from amazingtunes.com in much greater numbers in the past week. The artists really need this: we really need it too, or we’ll have to a) go off the air, or b) take adverts. Urgh. Thanks also for buying more songs in each sitting, which as I explained in my ‘More is Less’ blog post is much more cost-efficient, because of how banks like to rip people off. Please keep it up!
PC
* four more songs uploaded since I starting writing. Told you so.
