With one of the lowest take-up rates of digital audio broadcasting (DAB) radio of anywhere in the UK, Glasgow might appear a strange place to hold the Radio Festival. But inevitably there was only one issue at the top of today's agenda - DAB.
At around this stage at last year's festival, Ralph Bernard - then still chief executive of GCap Media - made an impassioned plea for a switch-off date for analogue radio.
Today the prospect of that date seems as far away as ever. John Mottram of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said:
We believe the market is not yet ready for a switchover date.We believe the potential consumer backlash could damage the growth of the industry in the short term.
A backlash, eh? That is the last thing commercial radio needs.
But Mottram admitted that the status quo could not continue forever:
We believe that in the context of a difficult commercial market the additional cost of simulcasting [on analogue and digital] cannot be sustained indefinitely by the industry.
So what to do? Well, members of the Digital Radio Working Group (DRWG) were on hand today to expand on its interim findings published last week. Its full report is due towards the end of this year.
As we all know there is nothing wrong with take-up, with more than 7 million sets out there. The problem for commercial operators is how to make DAB pay.
Some interesting research reveals why people buy into DAB: 75% say the extra digital stations; a similar amount want better sound quality (they are going to be disappointed); with 53% say they like its ease of use, which is fair enough.
Another 25% highlighted the text and information services. Really? I have never stared for longer than five seconds at the text panel on my digital radio, mostly because it scrolls so slowly I feel my life draining away.
Peter Davies, Ofcom's director of radio policy and broadcast licensing says better DAB coverage is "absolutely essential", as is getting DAB into cars, where 20% of all radio listening takes place.
It doesn't help that other countries are adopting different technology to DAB - France has opted for DMB audio, Germany and Australia for DAB Plus.
However, this is not necessarily a disaster for the UK, because new sets can be produced with a common chip that will work across Europe and that could then encourage car manufacturers to come on board. We just need to get on with it.
The big problem, however, is that it takes between three and six years from car companies agreeing to incorporate DAB in cars to DAB installed vehicles actually rolling off the production line. Six years? Uh-oh.
There are 34 million UK registered cars, don't you know, of which around 170,000 to 200,000 have the "capability" to listen to DAB. Of the 2.4 million new car owners in the last year, 20,000 chose DAB out of around 750,000 who could have had it. So there is still a rather long way to go.
Laurence Harrison, director of consumer electronics at Intellect, the trade body that represents the technology sector in the UK, says the lack of a harmonised European market is "crucial" to DAB's future.
He also pinpoints the lack of a strong, co-ordinated marketing message from the BBC and commercial radio - one for Tim Davie, presumably - and the lack of a digital radio road map.
"Manufacturers work best when working to a clear road map," he says. We're back to that switch off date again.
Intriguingly, Harrison says another option that had been explored was taking VAT off the price of new digital radio sets. I would have thought most of them were cheap enough already, but anyway it didn't happen.
The problem for the radio industry is that Gordon Brown is unpopular enough already without announcing that he is about to turn off everyone's analogue radio sets.
As the DCMS's Mottram concedes, Brown isn't going to close down FM. Indeed, last week's DRWG report posited a future in which FM became the home of community radio.
"What we are saying is we have a plan in place that allows us to migrate to a digital future," said Mottram.
In the meantime, commercial radio is going to have to continue to bear the cost of broadcasting in AM, FM and digital with no firm date for analogue switch-off in sight.
With a host of digital radio stations having shut down over the last 12 months, and no official launch date yet for Channel 4's belated radio operations, has DAB moved forward since Bernard made his plea for government help 12 months ago - or backwards?
