New (ways of using) Media

Mobile Music at #momobxl – debrief by the AWT

Sunday, November 1st, 2009 | New (ways of using) Media | 1 Comment

Tags: ldbk, mobile radio, momobxl, new ways of, online radio, radio, radio20

Mobile Music at Mobile Mondays Brussels

Friday, September 18th, 2009 | New (ways of using) Media | 1 Comment

For more ideas, visions or questions about the future of radio, here is the slideshow that Julien Mourlon presented a few days ago at Mobile Mondays Brussels.

I must admit that the whole thing lacks a bit of structure but basically the main ideas are:

- Slide 1: As the title suggests, this is a follow up to the radio manifesto published in collaboration between Cleverwood and Laid Back a couple of months ago with a focus on how mobile devices could help us re-think radio.

- Slide 2: As soon as the Laid Back project started on local radio stations in Brussels back in 2002, I realized that Internet would be the perfect place to promote our activities. In 2008, after experimenting around newsletters, websites, podcasts, blogs & social networks, we decided to launch our 24/7 online radio station on the radionomy platform. But a simple audio stream wasn’t enough and that’s why we decided to release the LDBK players in order to give our listeners a brand new radio experience.

- Slide 4 is a presentation of the four main features of the LDBK desktop player: easy access, additional info, viral interaction and pop up window announcing special content.

- Slide 5: More and more listeners tune in to online radio stations and the usage of mobile internet is also increasing. Mobile devices are the new walkmans. I don’t think, we should make too much distinction between streaming and downloading as dematerialization might make the music business shift from selling access to selling copies. If that happens, it could mean a new role for the next radio generation.

- Slide 6: Imagine you are listening to some music/radio on your mobile. When you enter your car, you decide to output the sound on your car loudspeaker. Then, back home, you could do the same on your kitchen, living room or bathroom audio system (see for instance the Sonos system). At each location switch, your mobile is involved and gives you more info about what’s playing and the ability to interact with the host of the show, the other listeners and your network.

- Silde 7: Let’s find new ways of packaging digital music. Basically I could be whatever coming with a code… (scan the QR code and you’ll see what I mean)

- Slide 8: Next to “selling” music, we should also allow listeners to play with it. More and more people (or brands) are using online services to present their music tastes through playlist or recommendations.

- Slide 9: While playlists lack editorial content, Radionomy just released a prototype called the smart player. Pick a music stream, select news providers, link it to your facebook account, you’ll end up with a mix of music interrupted by an automated voice reading those RSS feeds. It’s a good idea to allow listeners to configure their own stream, to break the linearity and make radio more “on-demand” but I would prefer the use of native audio RSS over the text to speech currently implemented.

- Slide 10: Now let’s bring the previous experiment one step further. What if we would have access to various audio RSS feeds and that we could cue them one after the other at will. Those feeds could be professionally produced or coming from our networks (think blip.fm or audioboo.fm). This way I could offer to my favorite doctor her dream car playlist: first the traffic news (make sense since you are about to figure out what way to go and this should interact with your gps system), then the weather forecast, international news and finally some music.

- Slide 11 is a list of recommendations for traditional radio stations to become strong brands in the online world.

Now it’s up to you : please challenge us, give us a call, ask questions, react on our various online presences where we started discussions about the radio (facebook, linkedin, radio20.be…).

Tags: ldbk, mobile mondays, radio, radio20

Discussing the future of radio in The Word

Friday, September 18th, 2009 | New (ways of using) Media | No Comments

Future Airwave in The Word magazine

Yesterday morning I had the nice surprise to find the USB issue of Belgian lifestyle magazine The Word in my mailbox. This special edition (subscribers only) entitled “Universal Stereo Boombox” features (among other nice content) a piece about Citywurl founder Billy Palmier, an interview with Stonesthrow‘s mastermind Peanut Butter Wolf … plus an article about LDBK radio and more specifically the work we did around our players.

View full size
Article by Nicholas Lewis – Picture by Yassin Serghini
From left to right: Anthony Janssens (Datasmart), Geoffroy Delobel, Ali Nassiri (Central Design) & Julien Mourlon

Tags: ldbk, new ways of, radio, radio 2.0, radio manifesto

Video might have killed the radio stars… what about Internet?

Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 | New (ways of using) Media, cleverwood trends session | 1 Comment

What started in 2002 as a weekly radio show on a local radio station kept on evolving throughout the years. If I am still proud to produce shows for FM radio stations (thanks to FM Brussel and 057 radio for giving us this opportunity), I also decided in March 2008 to create an online radio station on the Radionomy platform as a way to expand the Laid Back project.

So far more than 20 deejays and numerous guests collaborate on LDBK and help us broadcast 24/7 the best in urban music from the last 40 years. But our goal with LDBK is more ambitious than being a jukebox. We want to make the best use of the new technologies in order to shape the future of radio.

In December 08, willing to balance my DIY experience with some “corporate” views, I collaborated with Cleverwood to organize a conference about the future of radio. Many meetings, brainstorming sessions and prototypes later, we released – together with Central and Datasmart – the first public version of the LDBK desktop player.

Next to the desktop player and it’s upcoming iPhone version, I also wanted to explain the theory behind our experiments. Hence this manifesto listing 11 recommandations on what could be done to offer a new radio experience to listeners.

Download the Radio Manifesto (pdf version)

Slideshow FR – Slideshow NL

Each point of this manifesto corresponds to a group of functionalities we might consider adding to our players. Let’s take #10 for instance: “Listening to the radio doesn’t require 100% of the listener’s attention. But once you catch their attention you’d better give them something nice.”

This pop up – implemented in th latest version of our player – appears when we have something more to offer to our listeners be it an exclusive article, a free track on download or an invitation to participate to a contest/game.

To test the latest version of the LDBK player or share your vision on the future of radio, leave us a comment or join me on the radio 2.0 network.

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Manifesto:
Layout – Diane d’Andrimont
French translation – Olivier Beaujean
Dutch transaltion – Jurgen Noel
Text – Julien Mourlon in collaboration with Fabian Tilmant

Players:
Programming – Anthony Janssens
User Interface Design – Ali Nassiri & Geoffroy Delobel (Central Design)
Concept – Julien Mourlon

Top picture:
“Retro Radio” by Francis Bourguoin

Tags: new ways of, radio, radio 2.0