Roly Keating delivers his keynote speech at FOCAL
Late last year, I was involved in a research project with the BBC’s Audio and Music Interactive Department. It was about how specialist music fans connected with the BBC with regard to that kind of programming.
You can read what we came up with as a result of that research, but for me, one of the key lessons was the problem of the word Broadcasting as a defining and totalising concept for the BBC – that is, the British Broadcasting Corporation.
Because the BBC’s role, in a digital sphere, is no longer simply about making content and pushing it out there to audiences. It’s about acting as a resource for public media. That’s not to say they shouldn’t do broadcasting – but that the broadcasting should be part of a bigger concept of British Public Media (and BPM’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?).
The way in which the public uses media – including music (which is a media form, a topic I’ve discussed elsewhere) – is no longer simply as ‘audience’. And because of that change, the BBC is heavily implicated in accommodating that change.
Part of that change is about archives. How media are preserved, how they can be accessed and how they can be used as a springboard into new creative works.
I was very interested to see Roly Keating’s first keynote speech since being appointed as the BBC’s first Director of Archive Content. Video of the speech is definitely worth a watch.
Importantly, he says:
[We want to] position the BBC as still, we hope passionately, a broadcaster – still doing those great schedules night after night, still galvanising audiences, bringing people together, being the soundtrack of lives and so on – but being more than a broadcaster: also emerging in some sense… as a resource for the nation.
Keating makes the point that this is a long-term project, rather than a quick fix – and underlines the fact that this will require strong partnerships across commercial and public media industries. I’ll be interested to see the role music will play in this resource – and the extent to which recording companies drag their feet or outright refuse to cooperate with such a venture.