James Cridland’s Future of Radio: Top of hour idents and #RAJAR

James Cridland, the radio futurologist, is a conference speaker, writer and consultant. He runs the media information website media.info and helps organise the yearly Next Radio conference. He also publishes podnews.net, a daily briefing on podcasting and on-demand, and writes a weekly international radio trends newsletter, at james.crid.land.


James Cridland’s articles

United States

United Kingdom

  • RAJAR, the quarterly radio audience figures, are out. Here’s how to see them. Some good blogs include Matt Deegan’s, where he’s making the not unreasonable point that we really ought to make a date for switchover and stop leaving the public guessing; Adam Bowie, where he’s managed to write an entire update without a chart; a simple but effective look at London from Paul Easton (and a rare look at quarter-hour figures). Adrian Fitch posts a fascinating graph showing what happens when you level the radio playing field and let commercial radio stations have more access to the airwaves. The newspapers were mostly full of top 40 BBC Radio 1’s breakfast show, which has its smallest audience ever; partly due to the fact, one suspects, that KISS and Capital are available nationally these days, but written up as if young people aren’t listening to the radio any more. They are. Meanwhile, satire website The Daily Mash claims that people find listening to static more preferable than Radio 1’s Grimmy; there’s no such thing as static on a digital radio, I’d boringly point out. And an interesting data point: Union Jack Radio, which this week started to sound a little better on DAB+ having been given a few more bits, now has 100,000 weekly listeners. Run by Futuri Media’s #engage platform, according to its release it’s now had 8m song votes in its first year. That is 1.5 votes, per listener, per week – a phenomenally high figure. (It’s a great listen, too).
  • The preceding paragraph was long, wasn’t it? Other than RAJAR…
  • “[if] you respect people’s attention and intelligence, you might be pleasantly surprised”: an awesome article showing things learnt while working at The Guardian in the UK, and plenty of learnings for radio, too.
  • Work Beyond Radio – not heard of this event, but seems a very good idea to talk skills transferability from radio to other industries. We’ve a lot to offer.
  • The BBC does a clever, simple, idea with big stars: it works so well, though. Take a look.

Australia

  • Nice idea: a remix competition for @triplejunearthd – over 1,000 entries. The winner’s not bad either.
  • How to consume media so you know what’s really going on. A nice piece, and I do wonder whether “how to consume media” should be something that people are taught these days. Along with “how to bloody use email”.
  • ABC Calls for Submissions for its One Million Dollar Podcast Fund
  • Think most voice over jobs are in radio? Think again.

Elsewhere

James Cridland