
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
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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