Pat Welsh
by Pat Welsh
Last week I was proud to be a part of the Live Earth concerts, a series of eight concerts around the world in a 24-hour period on July 7th. In my role as Worldwide Radio Producer for this global event, I was reminded once again of the power of radio, which played a crucial part in this global event. I had the honor of meeting and working with a lot of people from around the world, and I received a real education in the power and flexibility of radio.
The Event
The eight full concerts, in order, were in Sydney, Shanghai, Tokyo, Johannesburg, Hamburg, London, Rio de Janeiro New York (actually Giants Stadium in New Jersey). Additionally, there were other musical events in Antarctica; Kyoto, Japan and Washington, DC. All told, more than 100 acts participated.
The concerts were designed to raise awareness of the global climate change crisis and, especially, to present people with ways that they can make a difference, giving them steps that they can take to help fight it. The radio stations that participated in the coverage all committed to carry messaging about the topic. These messages focused on a list of things that listeners can do in their own lives to make a difference.
We at Pollack Media Group performed a similar function in producing the radio broadcasts for the Live 8 concerts in 2005. This was a much bigger undertaking for everyone concerned. Not only was this series of concerts twice as long, but the concerts themselves carried many more visual elements. People in the stands or watching on TV viewed a series of videotaped messages short films, presenting a real challenge to radio stations and line producers around the world.
Radio’s Role
Radio stations or networks in over 140 countries carried the broadcasts to an estimated Two Billion listeners. But radio’s role was much greater than just carrying music. All of the radio partners committed to running messaging about how to fight climate change.
And when it came time to deliver crucial and timely information about things like taking public transportation to the shows and letting people know about ticket sales, radio was the primary medium that organizers counted on.
The Broadcasts
The shows took many different forms, depending on where you were. In the US, listeners had more choices than anywhere else. Just as NBC and all of its networks covered various parts of the concerts on television, several key radio entities covered the shows from start to finish.
On the terrestrial radio side, Premiere Radio Networks put together four different feeds of the concerts. Premiere created format-specific shows for CHR, Rock, Classic Rock and AAA. On the satellite side, both XM and Sirius carried all eight of the shows. And like Premiere, with its special HD-2 network of Live Earth messaging, Sirius and XM each had channels dedicated to just the topic of global climate change and how to help prevent it.
The International Picture
Our Australian partner, MCM Entertainment put together a network of stations in their country, similar to what Premiere did in the US. They produced two different feeds, a rock and a pop version.
In much of the rest of the world, radio is a much less local medium. In many cases, what we think of as “stations” are really national networks and national brands. Our Italian radio partner, Radio Dimensione Suono (RDS), distributed the show to a network of dozens of stations throughout Italy. They also sent contest winners to all eight shows and they sent some of their talent to report directly from the London show.
In most of the rest of the world, the content of the messaging, as well as the concerts themselves, were produced by Radio Express, a Southern California based producer of programming with extensive contacts in all parts of the world. They captured the audio from the concerts, produced self-contained pods of music and messaging, which they then posted to an ftp site for affiliates to download. This was another instance of where producers had to work around the limitations of visual content in the shows, while still maintaining the integrity of a concert with a large messaging component.
World Space, an international satellite radio company, distributed their broadcast of the concerts to subscribers in 134 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. World Space had a different perspective on the concerts than many of the other radio entities. World Space, with its strong orientation towards the other side of the planet, put specific emphasis on some of the local and regional acts from the east that are unknown in the west.
They were also gracious enough to work around the satellite distribution needs of some of the other terrestrial radio entities. In some countries, the rights holders were public radio networks that are required to deliver all programming via satellite as well as terrestrial stations. In Germany, for instance, World Space granted a waiver to a public radio network, who reciprocated by feeding World Space reports and stories from Around Europe.
This spirit of cooperation was evident throughout. On the technical side, XM provided ISDN feeds of the concerts to any radio partner that needed it. And on the content side, Premiere and a European news network shared the audio from artist interviews they got in London with all of the other radio partners.
July 7th, It’s Showtime
On the day of the show, Tommy Hadges, President of Pollack Media Group and I were in London at the BBC headquarters to participate in the production of the World Feed, the 22½ hour radio and television broadcast that went to most of the world. Our role on the day of the show went well beyond radio. We helped decide which acts and which songs would be represented in the broadcast.
Having had the benefit of working around the world over the course of our careers, we were able to give input on a wide range of artists and songs that don’t get exposure in the US. Since the set lists for many of the artists weren’t released until shortly before they hit the stage, we had prepared lists of possible songs for each artists to prioritize the essential performances that needed to make it to air.
Additionally, our specific radio role meant we had to pass along whatever information we could to radio partners to make sure they knew as far in advance as possible what would be fed. The real stars were the producers of the various entities who had to take the music that was fed, with little advance warning in many cases, preview the performances for obscenities and other content problems, then work to insert radio-friendly content (music and messaging) into their broadcasts in place of video-only content.
The result was a mix of content from concerts on every continent heard by upwards of two-billion people in virtually every country on earth. Radio often gets short shrift when discussing the media world these days. We’re not as sexy as the iPhone, as cool as YouTube or as trendy as MySpace and Facebook, but from Afghanistan to Zambia, radio is still the medium that most people turn to first to get information and entertainment.
Pat Welsh, Senior Vice President/Digital Content, Pollack Media Group, and Producer Worldwide Radio Broadcast, Live Earth, can be reached at 310 459-8556, fax: 310-459-8556, or at Hq@pollackmedia.com.
