MUMBAI: The ninth edition of the International Radio Festival will be held in the European City of Culture 2018 - Valletta, Malta - from 29th October to 4th November, with the Audio Conference taking place on 1 November 2018, at the historic Mediterranean Conference Centre.

BBC R&D’s Executive Producer Nicky Birch will cover exciting developments in voice-first audio formats, while international radio consultant John Simons will lead a panel on the rise of niche radio services from rock to jazz.

James Keen, the newly-appointed Station Director f­or Channel 103 and Island FM in the Channel Islands, will talk with Andrew Zammit from Malta’s ‘number one hit music station’ 89.7 Bay, about the benefits and challenges of targeting a small island-based audience.

The Conference will also include a celebration of ten years of the UK’s Absolute Radio, with its Content Director, Paul Sylvester; and a look at how audio services are re-inventing radio from Xanthe Fuller, Head of Community at Mixcloud.

Martyn Ware, founder of The Human League and Heaven 17, with a 40-year career as a leading record producer - will be talking about his work past and present, including designing and composing ground-breaking 3D-soundscapes.

Festival Director, Darryl von Däniken said, “These new speakers at our Audio Conference - plus the unique opportunity to ‘listen to how the world sounds’ with our guest stations, from around the world broadcasting, back to their home audiences live from Malta, make the Festival even more unmissable for anyone working in radio, audio or music.”

The IRF specifically celebrates radio’s on-air influencers and their production teams who command the trust and loyal ‘ear’ of billions of listeners around the globe, and is unique in that the conference format also offers invited radio stations the opportunity to showcase their chosen programme formats to attendees whilst simultaneously broadcasting their programmes live-on-air from the conference back to their home audiences, reaching millions of global listeners and making the IRF the largest on-air event of its kind.