Financial Considerations

Rate Cards: In general advertising on the radio is charged at £2 for every 1000 listeners. Therefore the more popular the show is then the more expensive the advert will cost, so if your adverts is more expensive then it will reach a larger audience. This cost is per advert and could therefore vary depending on the time played and how often it is played per week. The radio station will work this out with you and let you know how much it will cost in total. Some examples of this are:

Radio Stations sell adverts in packages like 50 adverts at the time, this makes it more effective because advertisers can buy in bulk. However because of trafficking costs, they will not get a lot of adverts put on most popular spots such as morning. If stations sold adverts individually they will struggle to fill late night slots. That's why they sell them in packages. 

Music

The music that is used in a radio adverts is essential because you cannot just choose anything. There are laws hat state what you can and cannot play which are called copyright, where it is owned by someone else and royalties, where you have to pay someone to have permission to use it. Music has a very important role in radio advertising and without it the adverts could come across as boring, have no ambiance and would make the listeners feel emotionless. The music used will depend on the context of the advert. In the adverts that producers often choose music that works well with the product / service they are advertising however they do not always have a large selection of music because a lot of popular songs have copyrights and cannot be used for commercials.

Something that makes this issue more complicated is that the advertisers and some radio stations are sometimes unsure about what they are allowed to play. This is because the licenses they have to play songs for entertainment do not allow them to be used in advertising. Therefore if the advertiser decides to play music they are not supposed to then the legal responsibility is with them and not the radio station.

Fair use: It is illegal to use copyrighted music when it exceeds fair use which means the core parts of the music has been used. In summary it is illegal to use if you don't have permission or if the song can be recognised.

Licensing: It is possible you can get a license to use the music in the radio adverts however it means you have to get two different licenses. One from the owner of the songs and one from the owners of the copyright of the recording.

The 7-second rule: A lot of radio advertisers will use the '7-second rule' which is that you can include any songs at all as long as it plays for less than seven seconds. However this rule does not exist and copyright still needs to be gained. If any radio adverts use this 'rule' they are breaking copyright law.

Strategies: Copyright law is complicated and expensive to gain the copyright therefore on option is to compose your own music and have it performed by a musician or purchase the copyright but get someone else to perform it and record it.

In college for our radio station we have a catalogue of Production FX and Production Music, this is royalty and copyright free and therefore we can use it in radio advertising. We have not had to pay for the licensing to use these are they do not have copyrights on them. We have a library of music that we have paid for and can therefore use as part of our radio shows.

Production Music

Production FX

Production Roles

Creative Producer oversees the making of a radio show and creates sounds and audio. They also can be board operator/technical operator who may operate the controls for the person who is on the air. They are often in a separate control room which is separated by a window so they can see each other but the noises don't travel into the studio. Some examples of a creative producer's work is jingles or commercial-like audio clips.

Recording Engineer is concerned with the recording, manipulation, mixing and reproduction of sound. Many audio engineers creatively use technologies to produce sound for radio. The recording engineer need to make sure there is sound being broadcast. They must be qualified and understand how to mix music, edit tracks, fade in and fade out the DJ and the music. The recording engineer will have a lots of equipment such as a mixing console and microphones.

A Radio Copywriter writes scripts for radio and they need to know and understand about how people listen and respond to radio shows. They need to know what attracts the listeners. Good Radio Copywriters often have a background in radio production. Sometimes they are both copywriter and producer.

Voice-over Artists is a production technique where a voice that is not part of the narrative is used in a radio show. The voice-over may be spoken by someone who appears elsewhere. In radio, voice-overs are an integral part of the creation of the radio programme. The voice-over artist might be used to remind listeners of the station name or as characters to enhance or develop show content.
http://www.thevoiceovergallery.co.uk/ This a link to a famous voice-over company that is based in Manchester and lots of famous people have come from here.

Production Facilities

There are two ways a radio commercial can be produced, the first is through a commercial radio company such as Key 103 and Capital who will have their own production studios and will be able to produce commercials independently. However other smaller radio stations may employ an independent radio production company, which will have their own radio studios.

An example independent productions company is http://www.radioproductioncompany.co.uk/studio.html

An isolation booth is a small room in a radio studio, which is soundproofed to keep out eternal sounds and keep in the internal sounds and, like all the other recording rooms in sound industry, it is designed for having a lesser amount of diffused reflections from walls to make a good sounding room. A radio presenter along with microphones, is acoustically isolated in the room because the audiences wouldn't want to hear the background noises and so the presenter isn't interrupted when they are on air.

A mixing console is an electronic device for combining, routing, and changing the levels and dynamics audio signals. A mixer can mix both digital and analogue signals, depending on the type of mixer. Mixing console's are used to introduce songs to change the volume levels and to play jingles along with many other techniques.

A digital audio workstation is an electronic system designed for recording, editing and playing back digital audio. Radio stations will have designated workstations that will have software on for editing. There are lots of different software and some that we use on the college radio station are reaper, audacity and adobe audition.

 Reaper is digital audio workstations software, a complete multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing, and mastering environment. Reaper works with almost any hardware and can be used in combination with a vast universe of other software and plug-ins. I used Reaper in college to put all my audio clips together to make  new stories.

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use, multitrack audio editor and recorder for Windows, Max OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. The interface is translated into many languages. You can use Audacity to:

• Record live audio
• Record computer playback on any Windows Vista or later machine.
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
• Edit WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP2, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis sound files.
• Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
• Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
• And more!

I haven't used Audacity as a part of my college work.

Adobe Audition is a digital audio workstation from Adobe Systems featuring both a multitrack, non-destructive mix/edit environment and a destructive-approach waveform editing view. There are lot of new features that Adobe Audition uses these are: 

• Sound Remover
• Advanced Sound Design
• Enhanced Spectral Display
• Preview Editor
• Roundtrip Editing Workflow
• Audio Finesse
• Enhanced Multitrack Editing
• Automatic Speech Alignment
• ITU Loudness Metering

I haven't used Adobe Audition as a part of my college work.