James Cridland’s Future of Radio: Radio that makes you feel better, first on Twitter, Global is medium of the year

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.


Today’s newsletter is accompanied by a note from James: I hit my Patreon target a few weeks ago, and so I’m delighted to be able to spend a bit of time coding this newsletter. It now has a website of its own, and this week’s is also on the web. The site’s searchable (though that’s a little pointless currently given there’s only one newsletter in the system), has RSS and all that, and hopefully looks and works well. Shout if you see anything odd going on. And thank you for supporting me on Patreon – I really appreciate it. Particular thanks this week to the folks at Triton Digital, who are a new supporter.

James Cridland’s articles

United States

  • YouTube to Launch New Music Subscription Service in March “according to people familiar with the matter”. It already has one (YouTube Red); it had one (YouTube Music Key). Also, see Google’s bewildering range of instant messaging services: Messenger, Duo, Allo, Hangouts, Google Chat, Google+ and Google Spaces. For a company with lots of clever people in it, Google sure is strangely poor at marketing.
  • The trendy young Matt Deegan knows who YouTubers are, as he posts the company’s showreel for the year. If you don’t, and you do media for under 30s, then I think he’s telling you to get with the program(me).
  • Book: Encyclopedia of Radio Promotions – a neat, useful creative brain jogger from Paige Nienaber, which you should buy.
  • The looming end of the smart speaker – not sure I agree with this, but it’s useful to see an alternative point of view.
  • Fascinating. via Matt Deegan, “Artwork Personalization at Netflix” – they even personalise the thumbnails for programmes depending on what genres you watch.
  • Well, I thought the TuneIn logo was nicely designed and was flexible and recognisable. They’ve changed it to this thing (which is too big for a Twitter logo, so that just says TI). Perplexing. I note they’ve also stopped using the complicated terminology “follow” to add a station to your favourites; the button is now marked “favourite”. Oh, and if you had any old “Follow” buttons on your website, they still display but don’t actually work any more.

United Kingdom

Australia

  • Visual Radio in 2009: Sea FM on the Gold Coast was broadcasting their breakfast show on the telly.

Elsewhere

James Cridland