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 Cridland’s articles
- Live radio is lazy radio – I can’t help but feel that my column this week might annoy some people. (Let’s hope they read it first!). It’s kicked up some interesting comment on the various sites that I write for; some people arguing against everything being voice-tracked (not what I’m asking for), and others understanding what I’m saying a little more. It’s even got me into a Spanish podcast. This video shows nice segues using RCS Zetta, and rather underlines the point – to just mash songs and sweepers together while live simply can’t produce the same effect. And, of course, some bits of radio should be live – don’t, for example, pre-record travel news days in advance…!
United States
- Radio still does pretty well for music discovery (if you look at all age groups, at least)
- WLIR probably deserves credit for breaking, among others, Prince – says Newsweek
- Interesting interview about how radio stations need to (commercially) adapt. Some bright ideas.
- US television news anchors all reading the same script. This looks vaguely horrifying, until you remember that its the same as national TV, just much less efficient
- Amazon Music Says Number of Subscriptions Doubled In the Past Six Months – notable how quickly this is growing. Driven by Echo?
- Corporate FM – on Amazon Prime, a movie about US radio’s consolidation. Personally, I think it’s wonderful that people care this much.
- TagStation Unveils Interactive, Visual AM/FM Radio – uses hybrid techniques to add visuals to the in-car experience
- TuneIn launches a new subscription service, just for Amazon Alexa devices
United Kingdom
- An actually amusing April Fool’s stunt from Heart Sussex, worth a watch…
- Great research from DAX about digital audio advertising. Really good to see Global doing this kind of thing.
- Interesting new regulation from the EU – a German subscription to Netflix, for example, has to work everywhere in Europe. This might have ramifications for the geoblocking that happens in many parts of Europe, including – for example – radio match commentaries for football.
- The BBC started live broadcasting of Parliament in 1978. Here are some clippings from the time from Andy Walmsley.
- Interesting to see a podcast using binaural sound. Seems obvious, really, but somehow this seems a new thing.
- The Guardian snootily disregards the Radio X top 100 – interestingly, I’m told Radio X has 40% female listeners, so not quite as laddish as you might think, and the chart is compiled by, genuinely, what listeners asked for. How very dare they.
Australia
- They don’t make radio station websites like these any more… (except this one, that is) – wow
- Live radio is lazy radio. And here is one brilliant video from @TimLeeOZ showing exactly what you can do by NOT being live. Awesome.
- Live radio isn’t lazy if you’re doing traffic news. Pre-recording traffic bulletins is an astonishing breach of trust…
- 2DayFM dumps ads between 9am and 3pm daily – this is quite a thing if you’re a commercial station. Depends if it leads to more cluttered breakfast/pm drive though…
Elsewhere
- France: La Maison de la Radio – a day in the life of Radio France, from 2013. Worth a watch, says a correspondent. (Also on iTunes apparently)
- Belgium: the benefit of digital means more new formats – like this rock station
- Norway: Smart speakers are supposed to be the future of radio; but this looks MUCH more interesting.
- Spain: I think I’m in this podcast, and I hope that Tommy has been nice about me.
- Denmark: is the country going to switch off FM soon? Looks possible. Yet a comment on Twitter told me that Denmark will vote against FM switchoff. So apparently it isn’t as possible as you might think.