James Cridland’s Future of Radio: Carolina Classic Hits, the RNIB’s podcasts, Spotify in Ireland

James Cridland is Managing Director of media.info, and an Australia-based radio futurologist. He is a consultant, writer and public speaker who concentrates on the effect that new platforms and technology are having on the radio business. Find out more or subscribe at http://james.cridland.net


James Cridland’s articles:

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Elsewhere

  • Ireland: “Young Irish people listen to Spotify more than most radio stations” – a story which, charitably, is bollocks. “Spotify is more popular than almost all commercial radio stations”, the journalist writes. Not true – not that you can easily check, since the Irish data that this story refers to is not published by Spotify – their site still presents their June 2015 data as new. This is a journalist confusing reach and share again – unsurprisingly, since Spotify appear to encourage this on their own research, which almost exclusively deals in ‘reach’. More young Irish people will use Spotify once a week than a specific radio station: but that’s because a) Spotify is national, and only two music stations in Ireland are national (2FM and Today, both of which beat Spotify in reach according to Spotify); and b) they spend comparatively little time with Spotify, so advertising on the service is hard because it’s difficult to get the right amount of frequency. Popularity isn’t just reach, it’s time spent with a service. Spotify’s data is misleading: and they then get non-media journalists to excitedly write it up to amplify those errors. Don’t fall for it.
  • Canada: How podcasting became the medium for the people – includes an interview with Dave Winer, which is relatively rare
  • Norway: This piece appears to say that listening figures unaffected in Nordland, Norway, by FM switchoff. You might hear this elsewhere. As I understand it, though, the figures are national for all of Norway, rather than focusing on the 4.5% of the population who live in Nordland; and they relate to the month of January, rather than post Jan 11’s FM switchoff. In short – it’s much too early to tell. There’s a session on the #FMexit at Radiodays Europe, which I’m hosting. I hope to learn more then.

James Cridland