James Cridland’s Future of Radio: HTTPS websites and iHeartMedia possibly bankrupt?

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.


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  • From the archive, October 2015: the BBC announces it is to launch a personalised radio service that switches between stations, “in the next year”. One to file in the “what happened to that?” folder.
    • A Twitter commenter notes that the much-vaunted BBC Music app is apparently shutting down in mid-March. It existed for just thirteen months. Wonder what happened there? We used to see blog posts from BBC execs explaining what they learnt: I hope to see one here.
    • They’ve got the talent at the BBC, though. When I worked at the BBC ten years ago, I remember one of my team showing me a rather excellent private Chrome extension they’d built for a bit of fun at work, which automatically switched away from George Lamb on 6music, and automatically switched back again when he wasn’t on. Crafty! And later, in 2013, the BBC’s own R&D team built (and documented!) their “Archers Avoider”, a way for you to get “instant relief from Pip’s whining and Tom’s business plans”. Heh!
    • A BBC exec once took me aside and told me: “We don’t do things first, James. We do them properly.” It’s one of my many regrets that I was unable to change that mindset and aim for both.
  • Meanwhile, the BBC don’t publish their podcast download figures, but I was able to get some UK figures for 2016 and 2017 from the press office. The increase year-on-year was 12%. I don’t give opinion on podnews, but I do here, so… given the general growth of podcasting, isn’t 12% a little disappointing?
    • That said, I’m very much enjoying almost all of the BBC’s The Boring Talks podcast. I suspect that you might enjoy it too.
  • Buried in this announcement from Ford: a new version of Radioplayer, coming soon to Ford connected dashboards; along with Acast bringing podcasts to everyone.
  • Music Week reports how, apparently, UK radio execs are now running away from a government-mandated FM-DAB switchover. I’m hosting two sessions at Radiodays Europe about the Norwegian experience, and am looking forward to new data.
  • Bauer Media to launch Alexa skills for all 69 of its radio brands

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James Cridland