At Radio Alive
At Radio Alive, the newly-rebranded radio conference in Australia, I sat through some well-produced discussions in the main room before discovering a DAB+ session was going on in a side room.
“Less than 10% of radio listening in Australia is via the internet”, said the CRA’s CEO, Joan Warner, and shared some more Aussie DAB+ stats. DAB+ is being expanded here in Australia, though in private chats afterwards with people familiar with the project, it seems the slowdown is to do with the regulator and law being achingly slow.
Ford Ennals from Digital Radio UK was there, too. He’s keen – along with many others, it seems – that retailers stop selling analogue-only radio receivers. DAB+ is in almost every new car in the UK: but here are the overall figures for all the cars on the road. The user experience isn’t very good either – “Two thirds of people didn’t understand how to find a station on their digital car radio” said Ford Ennals of their research.
Chris Johnson from RadioApp had some nice data from the app’s first twelve months, and lots of other data that I’ve written up for an article shortly in Radio World. Joe D’Angelo from Xperi shared this example of the complex metadata events in a typical hour of radio. It’s more than just a logo if you want to do it right.
Meanwhile, Nick Piggott from RadioDNS showed some nice shots of the new hybrid radio. inside an Audi A8. Finally, Clive Dickens (ex of Absolute, still at Jack Oxford, also at 7 Network) said that “catch-up radio is not a thing” when it comes to the future of radio. He’s right – for most music radio programming.
James Cridland’s articles
- …a piece about voicetracking. “Used badly, voice-tracking and automation can make cookie-cutter radio which doesn’t look after your listeners. But then, we can do that quite adequately with live human beings if we’re not trying, too.”
United States
- Yikes. WBAI’s future isn’t looking great, as an apparently unpaid transmitter bill threatens the station
- For Radio To Live It Must Embrace Technology says this Forbes columnist. This isn’t the usual dumb technology journalist moan – much of it is quite justified complaints that existing technology like FM RDS is used poorly or haphazardly.
- South Florida’s Sun Sentinel writes an op-ed saying Hurricanes highlight need for radio-enabled smartphones
- A great piece from Lisa Laporte on how to get advertising for your podcast in my daily news briefing for the podcast and on-demand industry.
- Some Sonoma County radio stations silenced by fires
United Kingdom
- Happy birthday LBC, celebrating this week. Here’s a fabulous history website.
- In 2016, Iain Lee did a tour called Iain Lee Vs Radio. You can now watch the DVD, free, on YouTube. It’s a good and rambly wander through some fun clips from UK radio.
- Both The Sun and The Times carried a nice big well-branded ad for Iain Dale on LBC when he interviewed British Prime Minister (at the time of typing) Theresa May. He got the front page of the papers the next day, as the Maybot failed to answer a quite incisive question. A successful piece of radio if your main competitor takes it and uses it as a story.
- The BBC is renegotiating their music rights contracts. grabs popcorn
- Capital promotes their new breakfast show on the London Underground. /via Matt Deegan
- Interesting to see a local UK radio station investing in print
- Some good looking roles at the excellent Wisebuddah
- A good writeup of Next Radio in Radio World magazine.
Australia
- Network show saying nasty things about a local advertiser? Just censor the output… except it isn’t really as simple as that. It turns out that the output could be contempt of court, and Triple M Orange (and owners Southern Cross Austereo) wasn’t too keen on taking the risk. Makes for a less exciting story though. The station’s response, on Facebook, got quite some comments.
- New and crafty piece of tech for commercial radio trading in Australia
- Mitch Fifield refuses to explain Foxtel cufflinks gift days after media reform bill passes Senate – earlier this year, Foxtel (the equivalent of Sky or DirecTV) were given AUD$30m to help cover some minority sports on the pay-TV platform.
- New “share of audio” data from Australia. Radio’s up.
Elsewhere
- South Africa: Tellytrack Killed The Radio Star #lazybugglesheadline – something to do with a TV racing channel making radio coverage less interesting.
- Gibraltar: 78% say they listen to the radio every week. Here’s new data from the rock.
- New Zealand: I enjoyed watching the radio, on Three and Radio Live. This product works well on both. I was there for the #acab2017 conference in Hamilton, NZ. Fun bunch of people!
- Nice Virgin co-promotion in the UAE. One of the difficulties of Virgin companies is that they aren’t actually owned by Virgin, and therefore don’t normally work very well together. Virgin Radio and Virgin Mobile in this case, though, did a fine job.