Sony and why we care.

Phew, what a week already, blogging as we do fresh from the #sony nominations where we’d like to think we’re already making our mark. BBC London picked up a fair few awards and for us it was an honour to be involved in their multiplatform nomination for the work on the Tube Strikes – the live streaming straight out of the Jibba Jabba top drawer of tricks!

It’s funny how much we all love a pat on the back, and now our appetite has well and truly been whetted we’ll be applying in our own right next year. But some cynical old fools question why we should even get so excited in the first place?

When we first got into radio, The Sony Awards, were always touted as “the Oscars for Radio” and why we love them even more now is perhaps that mantle’s not exactly fitting. With the Multiplatform and Best Internet programme award now established categories in their own right, the Sony’s are embracing all forms of broadcast and illustrate just how much the industry has now changed.

Radio in 2011 is for some is as much about what goes on around the broadcast, the tweets, the extra video footage, the links to the website. You don’t write in, you text in. The audience is immediate, and timeless, listening live and then listening again.

The Radio of 2011 is also empowering, with programmes like the Answer me this! Podcast and The Hackney Podcast (both featured on our own Pick of the Pods) yet again gaining much deserved  recognition in the 2011 nominations and yet both, straight out of the digital handbook “on how to do radio if you’re not the BBC or Commercial”.

And the multi-media nature of Radio will only continue to grow. Only today have the BBC launched the Radio-player or the “iplayer for radio” and this cross-broadcaster tool will yet again launch radio forward digitally, online and on mobile.

This is only just the beginning. We’re doing some proper nifty stuff with location based broadcast at the moment and the areas of apps are only going to grow and grow the demographic of traditional radio listening.

So why do we care about the Sony Awards? We care because we’re passionate about our craving for radio, because we wouldn’t dare miss out on the latest changes and because we all love a little bit of recognition from our peers, but most of all we care because we’ve got a great big shiny cabinet we quite like the look of on ebay that maybe, maybe just one day might contain an award or two and when it does we’ll be sure to broadcast it to the world.