James Cridland’s Future of Radio: Pandora’s stalled; podcast SEO; BBC global figures up

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


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  • Must read – Podcasting SEO. It’s a thing, and this is an exhaustive list of how to do it. Run a podcast? Read this. There’s a bunch of amazing stuff in here.
  • Pandora released their quarterly results. Reading Musically’s reporting, I grabbed the headline figures: revenue last quarter US$297m. Lost US$115m. Actually, once you remove the payoffs and other stuff they’ve only lost $57.4m, so that’s okay. Er. Here are the actual results from NASDAQ – interesting is that it shows a 29% increase in revenue (year-on-year). Remarkable when you consider that their product isn’t in growth: their cume is essentially static, and their TSL is only up by 4% year-on-year.
  • Pirate radio is growing in the US, apparently. It’s an interesting thing to point out to those that believe that the internet is going to be the only way we listen to radio: why aren’t pirate radio stations using that, then?
  • 5 Things I Love About The LG G5 – in this review of a mobile phone, you’ll never guess what #5 is /via George Byers
  • A good and thoughtful essay about podcasts, and the things the medium still has to overcome, from Alex Carter.
  • Digital audio continues to boast impressive growth in the US – some handy stats. In many countries, this would be a story about radio’s multi-platform success, but oddly in the US they’ve failed to gain the halo effect from their platform-centric definition of radio.
  • Do Music Streaming Services Pay Musicians? Yep. A Lot, says XAPPmedia
  • This Is The Best Time To Be A Media Operator & Entrepreneur says Rafat Ali – some nice anti-doom-mongering
  • Ignore the title of this – it’s really the “7 myths of radio“, and a good read from Jason Barrett
  • Loving this clever feedback mechanism from Soma FM
  • Interesting idea – a ‘speed listening app‘. I’ve been trying speed-listening, and managed to cope quite happily with 1.4x for a few podcasts on a plane back from Sydney.

Elsewhere

James Cridland