James Cridland’s International Radio Trends: When should you ignore the data? And the UK’s new RAJARs
James Cridland
James Cridland, 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.
Ed contacts me with The CPN Project, an interesting-looking project. Funded by the EU, it “offers news organisations transparent & easily integrated software to personalise their content.” It works in English, Dutch and Greek, and looks interesting: lots of user-testing and open results from their work.
David Phillips is one of the cleverest people I know (and certainly one of the nicest-dressed). He works for the Canadian audience research company NLogic, and this recent edition of the Sound Off Podcast ▸ is worth a listen – a quite compelling argument for ignoring what the data says and using your gut, as well as a peek into Canadian broadcasting.
Jon Sopel thinks that the impartiality required by the BBC can make for quite boring content. I think I’d partially agree with that: the BBC News website is functional but quite dull – but I think you can make some interesting content (not least, Brexitcast.) It’s quite a balancing act.
How’s radio going in the US? Pandora earnt $1.6bn in revenue; SiriusXM satellite radio earnt $6.1bn, according to their financial results. (The reason I quote these two? It’s radio. Isn’t it?)
A long read about Magic, the national radio brand in the UK. I suspect someone at Bauer saw the FT’s coverage of LBC and wondered if they could get a bit of that; and Cat Martin ‘magically’ pulling this out of the hat. Nice piece: I’ve also enjoyed watching a bit of video content from the breakfast show trying to find a particularly velvet-voiced train announcer.
As an aside: does anyone know when you say “iHeartRadio” and when you say “iHeartMedia”? Is there a cheat-sheet or some easy-to-follow rule? I’ve asked the PR team, but either a) they hate me, b) they didn’t get the email, or c) they don’t know. Here’s hoping it’s b).
The UK’s new radio figures are out. Lots of good news – but curious that none of the coverage or think-pieces I’ve read about these RAJAR figures mention that they’re new record low figures for radio listening (in terms of reach and hours listened). There’s lots of good stories – but I worry for the UK industry’s complacency.
