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
United States
- Radio Host Gives Birth On Air – goodness. I wonder how they’d have covered this if something had gone wrong?
- Latest Triton Digital webcast metrics. Always an interesting read. Of note: the figures follow a fairly regular peak at about 10.00am (and again at 2.00pm); highlighting that online streaming radio still follows the “log in, tune in” behaviour that I noticed in 2002, and a bump after a lunch hour. As ever, more evidence that radio is habit-based media.
- Radio’s intimacy is one reason, says the New York Times, why allegations of sexual harassment are magnified. There’s also been a lurid story – the first of many, I’d suggest – in Australia as well.
- Very interesting listen about the emergency alert system in use in the US. (Interesting, too, how little I know of equivalents in the UK or Australia).
- Television advertising sales in the U.S. fell 7.8 percent to $61.8 billion last year. Not sure US radio is doing this badly.
United Kingdom
- A new radio station went on-air yesterday, Delux Radio. I’ve asked for clarification of the stats in this press-release, reprinted with a degree of caution by Radio Today. Notably: “Delux Radio, operating in beta mode since November 2017 … claims over half a million listeners to its test streams”. Brilliant if so.
- The Guardian covers UK community radio. This article quotes a cost for getting onto a small-scale digital licence that I’m not entirely sure I recognise; and also quotes that the sector has “a total of 3.5 million local listeners”. The last time I looked into this, I estimated the figure as being – at best – 646,000.
Australia
- A brand new kids station on DAB+ Digital Radio and online went live this week – ABC Kids listen. Clever branding – their TV channel is “ABC Kids”, and their radio app is “ABC Listen”. Not that clear in the press release, but it’s replaced the ABC Extra special events channel. Next, I’m hoping SBS Radio rechristens “SBS Radio 4” as “BBC World Service” – which is what the channel does 50 weeks of the year. I’d humbly suggest this would attract more listeners to DAB+.
- The Daily Mail suffers 17% YoY audience decline – oh dear. Sadly, these are only Australian figures.
- ICYMI: Kyle Sandilands is the subject of the Game Changers podcast this episode. It’s well worth a listen for anyone into radio.
Elsewhere
