Bruce Springsteen – Rocky Ground
New track from Springsteen’s 17th studio album ‘Wrecking Ball’. The Boss plays 4 big shows in the UK, Summer 2012 – in Sunderland, Manchester and at the Isle of Wight Festival in June plus Hard Rock Calling in July.

The Enemy – Saturday
Great track from the Coventry 3-piece’s 3rd album ‘Streets In The Sky’ released this week.

Linkin Park move up to our A-list.

The Role
Reporting to the CFO, you will work closely with the commercial and technology teams. You will be responsible for the development of Absolute Radio’s business systems, with a particular focus on sales processes and applications, allowing more detailed analysis of yield, impressions and impacts.

Responsibilities include

• Day-to-day maintenance of the existing business applications, including liaison with and management of suppliers and developers. Contractual and financial monitoring of our relationships with existing applications suppliers.
• Perform analysis of department processes, document and redesign workflow where appropriate.
• Identify inefficiencies across existing system and implement any necessary changes
• Gathering and documenting the business requirements for new sales application projects.
• Project management of sales application projects through the entire project life cycle.
• Establishment of project documentation and co-ordination of project meetings.
  Collaborating with sales staff to gather all requirements to formulate business specifications and translating those into application functionality.
• Developing and executing test plans along with the development and delivery of training to users.
• Working with key users to continually improve business processes.
• Understanding the long-term business objectives and suggesting technical strategies to meet those objectives, introducing innovation to business processes through technology.

Skills, Experience and Knowledge

• Significant (3+years) business analysis experience and good project management experience as well as strong organisational and planning skills
• Previous experience of working with online trafficking, optimisation and reporting tools
• The ability to form good, effective working relationships with all levels of project staff, a record of producing accurate detailed reports, work to agreed standards, able to use initiative, work with minimum supervision and deliver to agreed timescales.
• Able to analyse and discuss requirements with business users and other IS team members in a clear and concise way and an understanding of all phases in a development project lifecycle.
• Some technical experience and understanding of MSSQL Server and reporting tools would be advantageous.
• Previous experience of business process reviews, application integration, data warehousing, and change management would be an advantage, as would experience with our specialist radio applications, including GES Planit, V3 and Planit Traffic.

Experience of working for a media company or in a media sales environment would also be advantageous.

If you would like to be considered please send a full CV to:
Caroline Hinton – Head of HR, Absolute Radio
One Golden Square, London, W1F 9 DJ
Or e-mail: caroline.hinton@absoluteradio.co.uk
Closing Date: 08 June 2012
Absolute Radio is committed to equality of opportunity for all.

Absolute Radio’s Technology department are looking for an Applications Specialist to join the team

The Role
You will be part of the team responsible for the maintenance and development of Absolute Radio’s application systems, with a particular focus on the content management system as well as databases, internal webservers and applications supporting the Sales, Programming and Interactive Content teams.

Responsibilities include

• Development of new applications, primarily on a Linux/PHP platform using the Zend Framework, to support Absolute Radio’s business processes.
• Management of existing in-house developed systems, including handling incidents escalated to you by your manager, Technology team or Lead Applications Specialist.
• Day-to-day management of existing business applications, including the Intranet, podcast systems and statistical reporting tools.
• Basic management of the Internal Unix server infrastructure and the MSSQL database backend to support your own application’s requirements.
• Providing support to the Interactive Content teams, particularly ensuring that applications which are developed in PHP for the Absolute Radio website are optimised and content delivery to our hosting platform is effective and resilient.
• Due to the ‘live nature’ of the business, it will be necessary to respond to out-of-hours calls from time-to-time where appropriate.

Skills and Experience

• Must have 3+ years object orientated PHP development experience.
• Solid knowledge and experience working with and managing UNIX systems.
• Must have passion for new technologies and development practices.
• Must have worked within an object orientated framework, ideally Zend Framework. Other framework experience considered alongside a desire to learn Zend.
• Degree-level candidates are preferred, but for candidates with the right skills and experience this is not essential.
• Certification in MSSQL Server a benefit, but not essential.

If you would like to be considered please send a full CV to:
Caroline Hinton – Head of HR, Absolute Radio
One Golden Square, London, W1F 9 DJ
Or e-mail: caroline.hinton@absoluteradio.co.uk
Closing Date: 08 June 2012
Absolute Radio is committed to equality of opportunity for all.

Absolute Radio and Abbey Road Studios, the most famous recording studios in the world, will welcome Paul Weller for the second in a series of music events – The Abbey Road Acoustic Sessions with Absolute Radio.

The live partnership kicked off with an exclusive performance with American indie rock band, Fun, from New York City. Now Studio Three at Abbey Road Studios will host an intimate session with Paul Weller on 29th May. Listeners will be given the chance to win tickets to the event at absoluteradio.co.uk and the session will be played out on Absolute Radio as a Sunday Night Music Special including exclusive audience Q&A.

Studio Three is perhaps best known as the location of many of Pink Floyd’s great recordings and more recently recordings from Florence and the Machine, Paul McCartney and the final recording by Amy Winehouse. Future sessions over the next twelve months will feature both signed and unsigned bands performing in front of a small audience in the studios and a specially refurbished space in the studios bar.

Abbey Road Studios are the home of recordings by many British artists that sit at the very core of Absolute Radio’s playlist including Radiohead, Oasis, Kate Bush, Depeche Mode, Travis, Florence and the Machine, Sting and Paul McCartney. The studios also have an established reputation in the world of film with Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lord of Rings and The King’s Speech amongst the award-winning scores recorded there.

Read what Music Week are saying about us here

Since the term was first conceived in 2004, podcasting has had its advocates and doubters. For millions of podcast users it’s enhanced the way they enjoy audio content, meaning they can listen again to radio programmes they’ve missed or specialist bespoke audio content created for an online audience. It’s also allowed thousands of people around the world the opportunity to create and share their talents, opinions and whims.

At Absolute Radio we now call it ‘Audio on Demand’ and if you consider how quickly it has grown – we see it as a massive opportunity as we continue to redefine radio.

But there’s always been three questions which have kept cropping up…..

1. What actually defines a podcast?
2. Do people actually listen to it after they have downloaded it?
3. How do you monetise this premium content?

Thousands of potential users have been turned-off by the name and the fear of cables, synching and downloading. The fact is that there are now so many ways to enjoy Audio on Demand content through TVs, internet radios, streamed through Smartphone apps, on mobiles and on desktops that the days of podcast ‘downloads’ may soon be behind us.

There’s also been the fear that users ‘download’ the content, but don’t listen, at least not to all of it. When we talk to agencies and clients about Audio on Demand this has been one of their major concerns and consideration. When you are trying to monetise this premium content, there has often been reluctance amongst clients to invest in something which may never have been consumed.

The team here at One Golden Square has always embraced Audio on Demand content – with both Frank Skinner and Dave Gorman topping the iTunes podcast chart. To move our thinking forward we’ve undertaken some detailed research into our Absolute Radio podcast community and developed a new strategy to ensure we’re sharing wider insights with our clients about this premium advertising opportunity. Going forward, they will invest in ‘per ad-impressions’ instead of ‘per download’, fitting perfectly with our innovative InStream initiative which targets the advertising based on the demographic of our online audience. As growth in mobile podcasting continues, this will counteract the amount of partial downloads if people lose connectivity.

In our research (sample: 324 Absolute Radio podcast users) 49% of respondents have been listening to ‘podcasts’ for more than two years. In line with the Industry’s MIDAS research – comedy, TV & film and music are the most popular genres. The BBC remains the most popular source of content with 72% subscribing to at least one of their programmes. Importantly, 85% say they listen to ‘all or most’ of the podcasts they download and 95% say of the ones they listen to, they listen to ‘most’ or ‘all of it’.

At the moment, we’ll be concentrating solely on our audio podcasts which form more than 80% of our 22000 episodes, however we are looking at new ways to dynamically insert advertising opportunities into our video podcasts of full length music, comedy and movies interviews.

With this in mind, we’re going to be inserting two commercial impressions per podcast – one ‘pre-roll’ at the start and one ‘mid roll’ half way through – and charging clients based on the number of times those ads will be heard by UK listeners, with each opportunity to listen called an impression.

The total number of UK Premium audio impressions delivered so far in 2012

January Total: 678,096

February Total: 687,619

March Total: 694,622

To calculate these new accurate Audio on Demand impressions we’ve taken the following into consideration:

• We only now count UK listeners not worldwide downloads
• This is now audio only content and therefore these figures don’t include video content
• This takes into account listeners who may download but don’t listen
• This takes into account listeners who only listen to ‘all or most of the episode’
• This takes into account incomplete or multiple ‘download attempts’, especially via mobile

We believe this new strategy gives Absolute Radio the most accurate method of calculating our podcast audience and the most robust plan for commercialising Audio on Demand content. We hope this trailblazing plan will be monitored by other providers to give stakeholders an industry wide standard for developing this exciting and engaging platform.

Sunday 13th May really was Super for Rock ‘N’ Roll football as the programme helped to break all of Absolute Radio’s mobile and online usage records. (See image above which plots usage of the app at 4pm on Sunday across Manchester – the cluster in the middle being the City of Manchester Stadium)

On the day when Jim Proudfoot commentated on the dying dreams of Manchester United and Russ Williams described the ‘Etihad Euphoria’, we had 50,000 unique users on our mobile apps, beating the previous record which was another big day for Rock ‘N’ Roll football as QPR beat Arsenal 2-1. Unique website visits were also up by 37% on an average Sunday.

These figures come on the back of a great set of RAJAR numbers for Wrighty, Russ, Jim and the team. A quarter of a million people now listen to Rock ‘N’ Roll Football on a Saturday afternoon each week with listening hours up by 45% year-on-year. We’ve seen more than a quarter of a million Rock ‘N’ Roll football apps downloaded and more than a million page impressions on our online matchday centre.

The season ended with the boys picking up a Sony Award for Best Sports Programme (…this was Super Sunday, Season One). Over the last year we’ve chatted with Harry Redknapp, Frank Lampard, Jack Wilshere, Rafa Benitez, Alan Pardew plus who can forget Joey Barton’s on-air rant about Wembley stadium and the England team. We commentated on Thierry Henry’s last ever Arsenal goal and AVB’s last ever Chelsea game. We’re proud to be a show which is all about ‘Football Entertainment’ and we’ve also had the likes of Noel Gallagher, John Lydon, James Corden, Kasabian, Coldplay and Kelly Jones talking about their love of the beautiful game.

If we could sum up 32 games, 40 weeks and more than 180 hours of programming in 5 minutes how would we do it? Well, like this……

….Rock ‘N’ Roll Football returns sooner than you think.

See wider overview of Rock ‘N’ Roll Football Live Scores App usage at 4pm on 13/05/12 below

RAJAR Q1 results are starting to sink in so we thought we’d give you a quick re-cap.

Three million listeners for the Absolute Radio brand is a real milestone, especially as we are only three years old. Christian O’Connell has gained 50,000 new Breakfast listeners this quarter and 200,000 over the year and three Sony Radio Awards, not a bad week! The summer is looking great for us, especially as Johnny Vaughan joins Absolute Radio to celebrate the arrival of the ‘greatest show on earth’ to Great Britain.

This quarter we have also seen the ‘Radioplayer’ effect on radio listening via the Internet, with 10% of Absolute Radio’s listening now online. This is a real example of the internet increasingly ‘redefining radio’ and the challenge to commercial radio is how to monetize this new digital listening. We’ve developed and successfully launched our InStream business model and product and we now encourage our Commercial Radio counterparts to do the same.

To hear our Chief Operating Officer, Clive Dickens, give his views and reaction from Rajar day – see below

We’ve teamed up with Metro, ShortList Magazine and Spotify to promote the nationwide release of what’s set to be one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters, Men In Black 3.

Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, aka Agents J and K respectively, are back, for the latest instalment in the hugely successful MIB franchise, ten years after the last film.

The radio partnership will encourage listeners to solve Men In Black 3 case files for the chance to win an out of this world prize; an all expenses paid trip to Orlando, Florida for two people.

The lucky winners will experience what it’s like to be an alien, during a visit to the Kennedy Space Centre, where they’ll enjoy an up-close tour, lunch with an astronaut, unlimited access to exciting exhibits such as IMAX Space Films, Rocket Garden, Robot Scouts, Mad Mission to Mars, Astronaut Encounter and much more!

This exciting prize also includes flights, car hire for the duration of their stay, accommodation at the four star Hilton, Orlando which is located within easy access to popular Orlando attractions, dinner at the Sci-Fi Dine-in Theatre restaurant, with vintage ’50s “convertible” tables, and clips from ’50s and ’60s sci-fi and monster flicks playing on the big screen, plus £500 spending money and travel insurance.

Check out our absoluteradio.co.uk where you will also find a trailer of the movie with links to Metro.co.uk where full details of the Men In Black 3 competition case files will be found.

Men in Black 3 is out in ODEON cinemas from May 25th in Real D 3D.

Read what Media Week are saying about us here

The Absolute Radio Network has posted a strong performance this RAJAR, significantly increasing its reach by over half a million listeners (25.2%) year on year – and up 164,000 listeners’ quarter on quarter to almost three million listeners (2.978 million).

The multi Sony Radio Academy Award winning Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show has gained almost 50,000 new listeners this quarter taking it to over 1.2 million.

The Absolute Radio station has maintained its audience at 1.6 million this quarter (+0.8%) and up (+15.6%) year on year. The station’s hours have remained steady year on year (+0.4%), but dipping quarter on quarter (-6.1%) to 10.5 million hours. Absolute Radio Network’s hours have grown to nearly 21 million this quarter (20.935), up +11.3% quarter on quarter and +18.8% year on year.

Our COO Clive Dickens said

3 million listeners for the Absolute Radio brand is a real milestone, especially as we are only three years old. Christian O’Connell has gained 50,000 new Breakfast listeners this quarter and 200,000 over the year and three Sony Radio Awards, not a bad week! The Summer is looking great for us especially as Johnny Vaughan joins Absolute Radio to celebrate the arrival of the ‘greatest show on earth’ to Great Britain.

77% of Absolute Radio’s total Network listening is now via a digital platform, rising rapidly from 71% last quarter – against an industry average of 29.2%.
Source: RAJAR / Ipsos – MORI / RSMB, period ending April 2012, all stations and groups results are reported on their specified reporting period and TSA.