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:
- Carolina Classic Hits Shows How to Get the Most Out of Automation – my piece for the Radio Magazine
- The UK is deregulating commercial radio – here’s what you need to know – my weekly column which is a little clickbaity, no? My podcast contains a bit of audio, too.
United States
- Large US report about podcasting. Included – “podcast listeners listen to significantly less radio”; “the podcasting gender gap may be closing”, “half of podcasts are downloaded less than 175 times”; “on-demand audio and podcasting suffer from an industrywide lack of measurement standards to deliver audience insight and enhance revenue development”; and it might all be a bubble.
- Interesting male/female split in US radio.
- Clever – WeTransfer advertises online radio stations while you wait to download a file. /ht Jonathan Marks
- Happy 95th birthday, UK radio. Here are the celebrations where it all started, in… Chelmsford.
- Eddy Cue: Apple is ‘working on new features’ for podcasts – ooh. Wonder if payment is one of those?
- Some nice stats about US podcasting – and also about ratio of speech-vs-music listening, which I’ve not seen before.
- A useful and interesting webinar from Google AdSense. Less ads can mean more money. Viewability is really important. As a direct consequence, I’ve fiddled with the advertising on my own media.info – including removing two adspots entirely – and I’m looking forward to seeing the results. Particularly, I’ve removed the ‘page level’ ads, which are mobile-only horrible sticky ads on the top or bottom of the page: I’ve been running those for a while, but the actual revenue they make is negligible. (This webinar is actually from Australia, but the information is relevant everywhere).
- A history of Winamp. What a great piece of software that was. And is. Apparently many radio stations still use it on-air!
- Some US stats about radio listening in-car. Spoiler: it’s stable.
- HD Radio recommended as standard for US, Canada, Mexico. Makes pragmatic sense for these markets.
- Very good news from the otherwise static US radio market – Entercom 2016 Net Revenue Up 12%. Good for them.
- Carolina Classic Hits Shows How to Get the Most Out of Automation – my piece for the Radio Magazine
United Kingdom
- The BBC have announced a brand new television channel for Scotland. They’ve also announced two new radio stations for Scotland, except they haven’t really – they’re splitting BBC Radio Scotland into music and talk outputs at some points in the day. There are 5.25m people in Scotland; there are 16m people in the UK aged between 15-29, who recently lost BBC THREE because of cost-cutting. A theory I’ve espoused before now: the BBC’s entire content strategy is based on ensuring the corporation’s own political survival.
- “How RNIB Is Successfully Growing Digital Audio Accessibility” Excellent article about podcasts from Clive Gardiner. For non-UK readers, the RNIB is the Royal National Institute of Blind People.
- Why subscription models probably won’t save journalism. #positivestoryoftheday – but then, a Twitter response points me to these fascinating alternative future for news subscriptions. Some good ideas in here; particularly, dynamic pricing.
- As Norway goes digital, what of FM’s future?
- Exploring film soundtracks with Radio 2 and BBC R&D – more clever stuff
- Channel 4 News editor: Facebook is paying us a ‘minuscule’ amount for our 2 billion video views
- From the 1970s, the then boss of Radio 1 talks about jingles.
- 19 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Working In Radio – a Buzzfeed listicle that has actually had some research.
- BBC to close their travel news website. Entirely unrelated, a community radio group I’m in this week started hurriedly asking around for sources of travel information. (Inrix has a special deal).
- Fascinating tweet from David Lloyd – in 1962, The Times writing an anti-BBC piece. Who’d have thought.
- In an era of fake news radio is not a luxury – it’s a necessity (says Robin Lustig)
- Can Radio Survive in the Era of Self-Driving Cars? (Radio’s listening is much lower than you think in-car, in fact)
- Getting louder: a view of the programmatic audio landscape in the UK
- New thing from Radiocentre UK – a monthly podcast about commercial radio. It’s quite good, though not quite sure who it’s aimed at.
Australia
- Protest outside the ABC about cuts to radio. Imagine protests about a website or newspaper. This is why radio’s so brilliant – people care about it.
- Really really really good post about lessons learnt from working in a startup, from Omny Studio’s Matt, who leaves the company to go and work for Telstra, the Australian telco (think AT&T or BT, but with much, much worse customer service)
- This is nice – a “Twitter moments” collection of community radio news in Australia this week, compiled by the CBAA.
- Nice and on message “at home with” Nova’s Kent ‘Smallzy’ Small – including a nicely-placed DAB radio in this feature
- A plane crashed in Melbourne VIC last week. Big story. ABC News Radio staff were, if this piece is to be believed, told to simply fade up the audio of ABC News 24 television instead. Gosh.
- 8% of online banner advertising in Australia is wasted on fraudulent publishers and bots. (Surprised it’s so low, actually).
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.