All forms of broadcast.
“Good job I don’t write radio commercials any more,” observes guest columnist James Cridland, who has explored AI in that regard. The result? Synthetic commercial copy, read by a synthetic voice. Click through to hear it. Also: The world’s biggest broadcaster, statistics about Canadian radio, and more. Continue Reading
NPR’s most recent content post on Twitter is dated April 4 — a piece of political news. After that post, Twitter CEO Elon Musk applied this identifying label to NPR’s account: “Government-funded media.” This morning we see a tweetstorm of NPR links to the network’s other social sites and public resources, as NPR quits Twitter and guides 8.8-million followers to other social sites. Continue Reading
In today’s guest column, James Cridland fixes 4ZZZ in Brisbane. An odd choice on BBC Breakfast. A note from Radiodays Europe. An FM in New Zealand is pulled off the air, bafflingly. ABC Australia starts dealing with its ratings slump. Bauer Media announces Rayo. And much more. Continue Reading
It is well established that in-car listening is a stronghold for American radio’s reach. A recent edition of Edison Research’s Weekly Insights series puts numbers to the comparative strength of AM/FM in the car, and compares them with out-of-car listening. Click for details and charts. Continue Reading
A month after announcing upcoming layoffs, NPR has started and possibly completed the 10% workforce reduction. CEO John Lansing calls the action “existential.” The action is NPR’s largest layoff since 2008. Four podcasts will be discontinued. Individual and departmental targets are not specified, but it’s a broad sweep across many functions and types of work. NPM is not affected. Click for more details. Continue Reading
In one of the more delightful recent product releases, TuneIn has unleashed TuneIn Explorer, an interactive map-based radio tuner. As an audio browsing tool, we find it superior to World Radio Map and Radio Garden, two other inateractive audio maps. Click for the review, images, and linkage. Continue Reading
In today’s guest column, James Cridland discusses difficulties with the BBC, and a strike among BBC Local Radio journalists. Then, coverage of the imminent disappearance of AM radio reception in U.S. cars — “Broadcasters relying on AM for their flagship services need to have an urgent plan to fix it.” Finally, James’s list of links. Continue Reading
“Live, local, and powered by AI.” Here, guest columnist James Cridland broaches the tricky subject of artificial intelligence applied to radio — RadioGPT from Futuri Media. James expected to hate it, and surprisingly liked it. There are caveats, though; “smoke and mirrors.” Click through to read. Continue Reading
If broadcast radio felt disgruntled by on-demand listening apps before, now there is a new offense: Spotify has introduced a DJ feature which uses a synthetic voice to create a radio-like presentation of the user’s saved music. It is called AI DJ, and the tool uses generative artificial intelligence to intro and extro a mix of tracks from the user’s library. Click for a launch video. Continue Reading
A packed column this week from James. The CBC will stop broadcasting, in a projected move to all-digital. But the move doesn’t appear to be imminent, and James notes that in Britain the BBC laid out the same intent — they are planting flags in the future. Beyond that coverage, James gives us notes about Australia’s ABC network falling off the internet, interesting facts about the U.S. radio industry, and links to his personal blog.
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Drive Time Metrics (“DTM”) announced this week the expansion of its patent portfolio with the issuance on November 15th, 2022 of its sixth patent, US Patent Number 11502852 B2: In-vehicle Media Content Monitoring and Report Generation, covering what consumers are listening… Continue Reading
An upcoming “Spoken Word Audio Report” produced by Edison Research and NPR, which will be released in two weeks, will document that, according to Edison’s sample of “Share of Ear” diarykeepers, podcasts are now Americans’ primary source of personality/talk (as… Continue Reading