James Cridland’s Future of Radio: Death of AM, and modern radio’s honesty

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’ articles

• Digital-first radio – my weekly column this week

United States

• Infinite Dial 2018 contains good news for radio, says a Forbes blogger. Look for the subhead “radio isn’t dead, it’s just moving online”. Indeed, it isn’t dead – just going multiplatform.
• File this under ‘Death of AM’: GatesAir Suspends Sale of AM Transmitters (they can’t get the bits).
• iHeartMedia Files Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, finally. Sounds as if they’ve essentially halved their debt by doing so, which I think means that they might now be able to start slowly repaying it. All a bit of a distraction, if you ask me, which you didn’t.

United Kingdom

• Of interest… PURE’s DAB car radio adaptor is a third-off right now at Amazon. Cheap way to add DAB to the car. That said, they’ve made the decision not to ship to Australia for some reason.
• I love this. A great blog post about modern radio’s honesty from David Lloyd. And yes, exactly, that’s one big difference between radio now to radio twenty years ago: a lack of cheesy radio voice, and instead an authentic sound of someone like you. (There’s a question in my mind whether making radio sound more accessible is always a good thing, I suppose: do we want our radio stars to sound “just like us”, or do we want a bit of showbiz in our lives?)
• In terms of telly, this is interesting: is banning RT really the cleverest thing to do? A good piece from Martin Campbell. (I reckon that if the British banned RT, it could very easily escalate into other countries banning BBC World Service.)

Australia

• Titled SCA shows how to add 7.6% to your reach without really trying, this piece is really highlighting SCA’s rebranding of their digital radio stations, which has added a further 7.6% of listeners. DAB is big in Australia, though you’d not know it from listening to many of the radio stations, who barely mention it.
• In terms of sales, DAB+ digital radio grows 24% to 3.8m units in past year – good news for the future (particularly for AM services).
• Good to see that the ABC have now got all their local radio stations online. Their versatile app, ABC Listen, gets all of these; doubtless other services will do, too.
• I don’t know much about Siri, but this article (excitedly talking about the ABC’s arrival) seems to highlight it’s a bit rubbish for live radio. Another disappointment from Cupertino. (I wonder what people see in them?)
• In this week’s episode of Polly James’s podcast ►: “Australian Radio” with Kyle and Jackie O’s producer

Elsewhere

• A radio conference in Johannesburg that’s interesting-looking, particularly since it focuses on commercial media, it seems.