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
- Will podcasting eat radio?, I asked this week. I’m not convinced that radio companies across the world are doing enough.
United States
- Student-run radio finds a fan
- Here’s why radio in cars – particularly DAB and HD – needs to get better and simpler
- AM radio is doing well in Puerto Rico – at least temporarily
- Some radio stations have just been bought using crypto-currency in the US (see page 4). Because why not.
- ‘Why are listeners choosing Pandora or Spotify over radio?‘ – interesting article, particularly for the comments. Odd, too, seeing such a negative leading question (and one that is currently not actually factually correct) from a radio industry title.
United Kingdom
- Big radio job here, with a big budget and strong talent. Wow.
- What’s It Like to be a Guest on Question Time? – some nice background from Iain Dale
- At PRS for Music, broadcast revenue is up 8.5%. (Curious – that’s significantly higher than commercial radio revenue has increased). Trebles all round!
- Nik Goodman on That Bauer Announcement
- Want to watch some decent (and recent) TV ads for radio stations? Here are some…
- ‘DAB radio was the future … until live streaming and podcasts arrived‘, says The Conversation. Possibly in need of a fact check, this story; DAB’s four times as large as “live streaming and podcasts” in the UK. Bet nobody picks them up on it, though.
- Compare My Radio – surprised to discover this is still going. Very useful tool for comparing UK radio music policies.
Australia
- Lucky listener, unlucky radio station, as a prize goes on the first play of the mechanic. Oops!
- Important biscuit news update, courtesy of the nation’s broadcaster
- I appear to have missed this car crash of an interview on 4BC and 2GB with Alan Jones.
- Imagine if this government inquiry were to happen in the UK with the BBC… and I’m not, for a moment, suggesting it should. It’s curious how much of the Australian government is driven by Rupert Murdoch, even still.
- Earlier, the government gave $30m to Murdoch’s Foxtel, to pay for sports programming (that will be behind the Foxtel paywall). Inexplicably, this isn’t seen as much of a scandal.
Elsewhere
- India: VTION pulls data from smartphones to provide real-time radio analytics to advertisers. This is a clever use of data, if it can be extrapolated to reflect the full audience.
- South Africa: 15 radio stations were taken off-air for not paying their transmission bills. They’re back on-air now.
- TIL there was such a thing as ‘public radio cake week‘ in the US.
- Japan: Today, I was honoured to speak on Tokyo’s J-WAVE 30th Anniversary Special with John Kabila. Special day for Tokyo radio listeners.
- If live broadcast is so important for radio, why do you only have one live broadcast? asks Tommy Ferraz.
- Denmark: WARM – World Airplay Radio Monitor – clever idea for musicians, this: you can monitor individual songs played on the radio.
- Broadcaster? Want to be on DAB+ in Milan, Italy? Here’s how…
- Which songs in your station’s playlists are getting cranked up? – really clever idea, this, by Nobex. Monitor the volume control and all kinds of nice things happen.