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 sends his weekly update with this note:
We get Pandora here in Australia – the only other country that gets it, I think, other than the US. It’s been nice rediscovering it after quite some time away from it – the system still had my login details in it when I returned.
I discover that while the phone app has adverts in it (which aren’t too numerous or annoying), if you use Pandora on a Samsung TV or via Chromecast, it’s entirely commercial free. Which is great news for me, but possibly not so good news for their investors.
Why Google Play Music can’t have such a good algorithm for surfacing music, I don’t know. Isn’t that what Google’s supposed to be good at?
James Cridland’s articles
- AM radio – what’s its future? I take a look at the worldwide trends, and not sure it’s good news. The audio version has a demo of DRM’s audio quality, and a random clip of Steely Dan.
- Norway’s Tunnel Vision – my article for the Radio Magazine’s DRU looks at how they plan to cover tunnels with DAB+, and a pun as a headline that probably won’t work very well for SEO.
United States
- Cars: Ford is Improving its FM Radio with Dual Receivers – I thought they mean dual antennas, but no – it’s a system which does actually use two receivers, which is good. Nice to see auto companies still investing in making the FM experience better. Meanwhile, Where’s radio in the Honda Civic 2016 US model? is a sobering piece from RAIN that some car companies don’t get it yet; and this article from the Indianapolis Business Journal also highlights that radio is fighting to be heard among multiple car-dashboard options. And it gets worse: in the Tesla or the BMW i3, AM radio isn’t there at all. Here’s why Electric Cars Are Ditching AM Radio
- Right now, 1,700 AM stations are using 1,900 FM rebroadcasters (‘translators’). Death of a waveband?
- Nice piece covering a new LPFM station: “When people say ‘radio is dying,’ they mean that the big companies are playing the same music and news”
- A program from KPFA about the past, present and future of radio
- Lazy Buggles Headline. Again. This one does have a comment box though; I left a comment but it’s not been approved.
- Radio On Its Deathbed? Elvis Duran Speaks Out
- L.A.’s Smallest Radio Station, 97.5 KBU, Broadcasts Out of Teenager’s Bedroom in Malibu Home /via Valerie Geller
United Kingdom
- A nice hacker project that puts a Bluetooth receiver into an antique radio… I’d be quite keen to do this myself one day
- (UK company) AudioBoom launches distribution partnership with India’s Saavn – interesting to see deals being done outside EU/US
- George Orwell complains the BBC is being dumbed down. In 1942.
- A good article highlighting that most comms teams forget about radio. This is the story we should be telling, repeatedly.
- A genuinely awesome piece of coding: Pages from Ceefax. A faithful recreation of yesterday’s tech, using today’s news stories. I love this.
- Exciting news from a few ex-colleagues at Tadah Media.
Australia
- Omny Studio ‘first’ to get statistics from Apple’s Podcasts app – fascinating. I wonder how they do it?