Tagged with radio 1 …

Dec 09 2011
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Arts & Entertainment

Helienne Lindvall: “There’s no point comparing Radio 1 with Spotify”

It’s been a while now since Jon Hopkins tweeted his infamous statement:

Got paid £8 for 90,000 plays. Fuck Spotify.

Before adding:

Radio 1 pay about £50 for each play.

This kick-started yet another debate on whether or not Spotify is actually a fair deal for artists. Songwriter and musician Helienne Lindvall has written a really interesting article for The Guardian (and not for the first time) about the issue of royalties and she also disagrees with Jon Hopkins’ viewpoint on the streaming service:

There is no point comparing Radio 1 with Spotify. One play on Radio 1 goes out to about 9m listeners (100 times more than Hopkins’s streams). One the flipside, Spotify is on demand, radio isn’t. I also find the £8 payment surprising. Though my royalty statements from STIM (the Swedish version of the UK collection society for songwriters, PRS for Music) are quite puzzling and don’t show how many streams occurred for me to get paid what I do, a swift look shows I got £8 in Spotify royalties for a song I know for a fact would not have been streamed even close to 90,000 times – the song was never in the charts, was recorded by a small Swedish band and is quite niche.

Do read the rest of it if you’ve got the time.

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Feb 02 2010
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News, Media & Sport

Fearne Cotton makes a predictable racist blunder

Fearne Cotton

I’ve not listened to daytime Radio 1 for years, purely because it’s absolutely terrible. When they appointed Fearne Cotton for the mid-morning slot, they somehow managed to sink to new lows of talent recruitment, especially when you consider that she made a ridiculously stupid blunder when speaking to Morgan Freeman today:

RADIO 1 DJ Fearne Cotton shocked listeners with a gaffe about “cotton pickin’ ” as she interviewed black actor Morgan Freeman yesterday. Fearne, 27, blurted out the politically incorrect phrase when explaining her name. It sparked an online debate over whether it related to work historically done by slaves in America’s Deep South. She told Freeman, 72: “My first name is F.E.A.R.N.E. – bit of a weird one. “And then Cotton, like cotton pickin’.” A listener remarked: “Maybe not the best way of describing your name to Morgan Freeman!” A Radio 1 spokesman said: “Fearne clearly did not mean anything.” She was talking to Freeman about his new movie Invictus, where he plays Nelson Mandela.

Even though she probably didn’t mean to be a racist, it still troubles me that she couldn’t have picked a better phrase. You know, like…cotton?

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Apr 25 2009
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News, Media & Sport

The week of on-air tirades

Chris Moyles

Radio is a funny world. On the one hand there is nothing better in the daytime than listening to some banter on 5 live whilst getting on with work because the tone of the radio relaxes you – providing you’re not listening to George Lamb on 6music – and is in general very peaceful. But recently this week the air has been turned blue by not one but two on-air tirades and were both were related to recent reports made in the press about the person doing the shouting.

Firstly, there was the astonishing eleven minute monologue made by Chris Moyles on his breakfast show earlier in the week. Earlier in the weekend The Sun went to press with a story that the BBC were going to sack Moyles and replace him with Scott Mills because he was younger (albeit by a single month as Moyles pointed out). The entire rant can be read here and it’s still available on the BBC iPlayer for a couple of days (it happened just after 8am on the 20th April) but here’s an excerpt:

Here are the facts – we ain’t going anywhere. We are staying on the show as long as you want us on here and as long as me and Radio 1 are happy doing it. There are no plans to take me off in September or August or November at all. ‘I am too old for the show.’ What they are doing according to Gordon is get Scott Mills to come in and fill in until they find a replacement. Scott Mills is one month younger than me. It’s such a stupid, stupid article Gordon. What have you done?

Chris Moyles probably wasn’t necessarily in the wrong to use his show as a platform to defend his position because it is his own show but it did go on and on for a while and about five minutes in you kind of think ‘Well OK Chris I get it now but can you just shut up and play a bloody song?!’

If you want to defend yourself on air, do it like Frank Lampard did on London station LBC yesterday, defending judgmental claims by presenter James O’Brien over reports of him being a bad father:

I find it insulting that you’re telling me you would fight tooth and nail and insinuating that I wouldn’t fight tooth and nail.

Sometimes you should think about things before you speak about them because you are speaking about personal people now. Next time I’ll speak to you man to man, forget the radio show, I’ll speak to you man to man about that.

That is how you defend yourself on radio. I’m not a fan of Frank Lampard to be honest but his response was dignified and he should be applauded for that.

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