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 sends his weekly newsletter with this note:
Almost 20 hours in an aeroplane and a bus to get to Banff in Canada: and the same to get back again. Great seeing some Canadian friends once more. Was a fan of Steve from the CRTC (Canada’s broadcast regulator), telling the audience to be optimistic about the future of their medium. The future’s bright for those with unique content.
United States
- Interesting to see iHeart being used as an actual radio station brand in the US. (And, here’s the station page in media.info). Parent company iHeartMedia was in the news a fair bit last week, including a story about them getting into the podcast game, doing stuff for entrepreneurs. It isn’t all good news, though – they were also fined lots of money for sending SMS spam to listeners. Abusing your audience rarely pays dividends. There’s a similar piece of action pending against CBS Radio, too. (In other news: SMS?! Is it still 2004?)
- Wal-Mart Radio – now with morning DJs, for staff morale. There’s something interesting about in-store radio.
- Some great online competition ideas in Paige Nienaber’s newsletter last week. You should get it.
- Visuals on your radio station lead to higher audience figures – some nifty data showing that the richer your user experience, the longer audiences stay with you.
- Will Siri & Alexa Kill NPR’s “All Things Considered?” – Fred Jacobs proves “Betteridge’s Law”: that any headline that is in the form of a question can always be answered “no”.
- FM Activation in Smartphones: A Three-year Review – this is good stuff from the NAB in the US.
- Stats: US jobs in media. Fascinating erosion for newspapers.
Canada
Australia
- Audiences on traditional platforms giving strong warnings, says Michael Mason, boss of ABC Radio. “Broadcast radio is still where the greatest numbers are but we need to be wherever audiences expect to find our content.” – he’s a bright man. There’s that multiplatform future that I keep talking about.
- Impressive video showing how Omny are doing decent consumption data on their podcasts (albeit only on their players)
- A lovely plug for my newsletter, thank you, radioinfo.com.au!
Elsewhere
- Television comes out fighting with data against YouTube – this is really impressive data, and clever co-ordination
United Kingdom
- Congratulations to the Queen’s favourite radio people who got honoured in her Birthday Honours. She listens to some surprising stuff.
- Random car corner:
A week of high atmospheric pressure gave some listeners – like this one, just leaving Heathrow – their chance to listen to Dutch DAB+ radio
Devon and Cornwall Police’s Twitter feed. Possibly not the kind of publicity this radio station brand really wanted. (An ARV is an armed response vehicle.)
As Ian Deeley points out, this Renault van’s radio managed to get images out of the BBC iPlayer Radio app, which is pretty impressive. More impressive would have been if it had DAB inside, but small steps.