21st century radio
As RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research Limited) reports, radio listener figures are up in the first quarter of 2011. It’s clear that radio still remains competitive – but how long can this last?
Online streaming sites such as Spotify, Last.fm and Grooveshark have become increasingly popular destinations because of ‘on demand’ song and playlist selection. However, the modern radio listener still seeks the personal touch, they still want the personalities, the musical filter and the opportunity to discover music through serendipity.
We hit the streets to find out what the new breed of media consumers want (and expect) from modern day radio brands...
Looking to the future, radio needs to adapt into the online space - advanced audience interaction, having a say in what gets played, online profiles reflecting listening habits, and better integration with social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
This does not mean sacrificing what makes radio great, just fine-tuning some already popular services to reach out further to the online generation.
Contemporary Nostalgia
Nostalgia is nothing new. For time immemorial, we’ve chosen to distract ourselves and look for comfort in sights, sounds and ideas from the past. This is as familiar to people as it is to brands – some call it revivalism, some ‘retro’, often treading a fine line with heritage and tradition. But at Crowd DNA we’ve noticed a particular trend for nostalgia among young people and, given their tender age, this is mostly focused on the recent past of the 90s.
In underground youth culture there are good examples of how nostalgia resonates through movements and fashions. The London dance music scene is recycling sounds and ideas popular in the 90s – jungle and garage have rebranded themselves under the ‘future’ umbrella with very few changes to the sound itself. Voicemail ‘hotlines’ giving directions to warehouse parties, though never fading out entirely, have also shown a resurgence. There has been a slow but steady rise in ‘anti-Facebook’ promotion and flyers have become more popular again even though cheaper/free alternatives are available – people are after the personal touch.
Nostalgia is influencing purchasing too. According to Billboard, vinyl album sales are up 55 per cent in the first half of 2011 compared with the same period in 2010. Yahoo reported a 210 per cent year-on-year increase in searches of the phrase ‘blank cassette tapes’ and a 110 per cent rise in users seeking ‘music cassette tapes’.
Young people are the creators at the forefront of this nostalgia revolution. They are taking on the role of the tastemakers and innovators by making their own productions - collaborating with promoters, digital label owners/publishers and pushing their product in the form of their very own micro-brand.It has enabled them to promote their own version of nostalgia without the need for major brands/labels.
So what are the driving forces of today’s nostalgia and why is it so popular among UK youth? We’re living in uncertain times – the recession, the riots, unemployment – in many respects young people feel these more keenly than most. In our latest phase of research for Channel 4’s UK Tribes, we found that young people are feeling real fear that they won’t be able to find a job, let alone develop a fulfilling career. Nostalgia provides a welcome distraction.
But it’s not just today’s challenging times. Young people are actively creating nostalgia because little is really tangibly owned – films, music, photos etc are now digital. This makes them especially keen ‘memory makers’ who love to document everything.
Looking to the past also provides a steadying anchor. In our hyper-accelerated culture there’s a sense that trends are shifting too quickly, with music for example, obscure genres pop up on an almost a daily basis. In a recent study with influencers, we learnt that trends too often get confused with fads and that brands are too quick to jump on this ‘fad bandwagon’, sacrificing integrity for a quick buck – which is detrimental to a brand’s image in the long term. Looking to the past removes the uncertainty and unsettled feeling that myriad passing fads create.
So how do brands fit in? Clothing brands like Fred Perry have built a brand out of heritage and retro flavour and Nike is renowned for re-releasing classic trainers to its fan-boy collector market. The film industry often plays on this concept to profiteer from a successful brand – either ‘re-mastering’ classics or releasing CGI laden pre-/sequels (a few spring to mind). The gaming industry thrives off it too, with re-releases of popular retro games on an almost daily basis to accommodate the new mobile platforms.
However, times are changing and the brands are not in control as they once were - an individual working in his bedroom has taken on the role of the innovator, undermining some of the power that brands and labels have over trends. These innovators are successful as they recognise nostalgia thrives because it is selective – we don our rose-tinted spectacles and pick and choose the elements from the past that make us happy and comfort us. Not everything was good back in the day, but we curate the best bits and mix them up with today’s. Savvier brands will recognise and assist with this curation.
Related articles and further reading
How brands use nostalgia to comfort us
Nostalgia and 70s-90s dance music reissues
Ori Schwarz, ‘Good Young Nostalgia. Camera phones and technologies of self among Israeli youths’
Simon Reynolds ‘Retromania’ – examining the retro industry
Metallica and research project process – the missing link
It's amazing where holiday reading takes you… Somehow we got to reading something on how author/lecturer Silvia Hartmann had modelled the creative processes of Metallica, to gain a better understanding of their 100 million unit shifting success. She discovered that they jam together for hours, meticulously recording everything and subsequently looking for events within the jams with an extraordinary quality to them. They then isolate these events, before looking to build upon them. When Hartmann came to break the approach down into tangible stages, the parallels with developing powerful research projects becomes apparent (if you replace the quest for noisy, grunty creativity with that of achieving commercial advantage, that is)…
- Generate as much material as possible
- Review the material and localise the extraordinary events
- Isolate and lock down these events
- Use the events discovered as a new second level jump off point for generating further material
- Review, localise, isolate and lock down further extraordinary events
- Group the events according to their energetic flavour and matching relationships
- Use the group of events to understand the finished product, and fill in the blanks accordingly
This sounds very much like the approach we aim to deploy on many research projects, chiseling away at the incoming material until we get to findings that genuinely have the power to drive change, then exploring the additional depths achievable through focusing on the most head-turning of findings; with the grouping of events key in terms of presenting organised, structured findings at the project conclusion. It's a sometimes demanding and exacting process but it's one that gets to the evidence-based recommendations that all good research needs to be making. For those about to rock/research, we salute you...
Bauer Media Gets Set To Launch Crowd DNA music research
The fourth wave of Phoenix, Bauer Media's proprietary music research project, is about to be launched to the trade, including lots of findings on how music moves through networks, purchase journeys, how people's tastes in music change and, natch, the role of music media.
Research methods included an expert roundtable, a major quant study, depth interviews across a number of friendship networks and plenty of film material.
We'll get a case study together on this shortly but, for now, here's a link to Bauer Media's press release
And here's one of several videos we've produced for the project...