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Elke Tschaikner, Head of Ö1 Music Editorial Office #64 What thought enables free space in the digital? Ö1 remains the largest music producer in this country. Working closely with the editorial team, ORF's technical teams record hundreds of concerts throughout Austria every year to make them available to its broad audience, whether that audience joins in via FM, via live stream or re-listening via app.

Within ORF, all regional studios form a competence network with Ö1 to make the diverse, current cultural life audible to everyone. Whether in Vienna at the Konzerthaus, the Vienna Radio Culture House, the State Opera, the Porgy&Bess jazz club; at the Salzburg Festival, the Schubertiade in Schwarzenberg, the glatt&verkehrt world music festival in Krems, the Klagenfurt City Theater, the Brucknerhaus in Linz, the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music, the ORF Festival of Contemporary Music "musikprotokoll" in Graz or the chamber music festival in Lockenhaus in Burgenland.

Last year was a year for concert and event culture that none of us could have imagined. This year, we - the Ö1 Music Department - were even more present and aware of our central core task than in "normal" years: To produce music recordings throughout Austria, to make new music possible, to support concert organizers and music creators by recording and broadcasting events from our ORF technology. To make music events in the here and now accessible to our audience in the bestpossible quality. Wherever possible, Ö1 produced, broadcast live, streamed, recorded. With a crowd, with a reduced audience, in front of empty auditoriums. Ö1 gave and still gives music a space.

The rooms in which our productions are heard are not only in Austria but all over Europe and sometimes all over the world. Ö1 is part of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), an association of public broadcasters who all document the concertevents of their countries and make the high-quality recordings available to each other in a kind of giant EBU concert exchange. 62 broadcasters in Europe, Israel and Turkey are EBU members, 15 broadcasters in Australia, Brazil, China, Canada, Korea and the USA, for example, are so-called "associate" members of the EBU Music World. Every year Ö1 offers its great concert and opera recordings to theEBU. Broadcasting the recordings (via radio and Internet) is free of charge for all EBU members. The great BBC is always particularly diligent in this regard; ORF, along with Ö1, is usually in second or third place in this international ranking in terms of the amount of concert recordings made available. And even in 2020 the exchange did not come to a standstill, on the contrary: Ö1 offered 159 current concert recordings made in 2020 to the other broadcasters via EBU: 142 concerts from various promoters and 17 opera recordings from the Vienna State Opera, the Theater an der Wien and from the Salzburg Festival. These recordings were ordered via EBU 1,220 times and broadcast a total of 601 times throughout the world. That is approximately 16,000 broadcast minutes. The size of the audience that can be reached worldwide is best illustrated by an example: The Ö1 recording of the opera Elektra at the Salzburg Festival 2020 has been "ordered" and broadcast 18 times so far by EBU member broadcasters. In this case (calculated with the EBU's audience calculator), that adds up to almost 139 million potential listeners.

So it is networks and platforms that have always contributed to the quality of Ö1. And at the same time, it has always been the idea of intelligent, uncommercial and independent curation that accounts for the strength and diversity of this medium. No algorithm can ever replace this quality and openness. Public music production will remain essential, independent of markets, fashions, changing technologies. In the technical-digital development, the quality of ORF recordings will and should continue to set standards. Keywords here are, for example, binaural listening or dynamic streaming, as was already demonstrated in 2020 at the ORF Festival musikprotokoll. In any case, the non-commercial idea behind what we do is what can and will give the colorfulness of contemporary music production its freedom in the digital realm as well. One task for the future will be to expand the networks and platforms on which and with which Ö1 operates, and thus to make the virtual audience space for Austria's music creators even larger.