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.

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James Cridland’s articles

• Radio station swag – what works?
• I also properly added a podcast events calendar last week in podnews. You can add it to your own Outlook/Google/Apple calendar too. I wonder if there’d be any interest in a radio version?

United States

• Spotify wishes to park its tanks on the lawn of radio – by launching a car music player. The company has been testing this with a small percentage of its users, at different price points; it apparently comes with a 4G service, which makes it really simple to use. Quite an ambitious plan.
• Podcast killed the radio star – a prime example of a lazy Buggles headline by The Michigan Daily. (93% listen to the radio in a week. Just 17% to podcasts).
• To give Apple their due, they’re still trying with Beats 1. Giving a random model and TV presenter a show on the radio does appear to rather highlight the “management plaything” nature of Beats 1, though; hardly the super-credible service it was set up to be.
• Careful what you tweet. Just one tweet changed an entire radio station’s format in the US.
• Top ten earning radio stations in the US. Three AM-only stations are in the top 10. Another two “AM-muchlies”. Rather shoots down my AM-is-dying argument, you might think.
• (US) Local Radio Now A Top 5 Local Ad Platform, reports RBR. Oddly the story this is attached to gives no further details on the headline; but does say that digital revenue is increasing nicely, while traditional revenue declined by 2%. The relative volumes, however, mean US revenue overall is down 0.2%. (It’s up in many European countries).
• SiriusXM pays much more than US broadcast radio to play music. But as ever, the record industry wants more.
• Some interesting new personalised music playlists in Pandora. This overcomes one of the blind spots that I had while using Pandora: how do I start a station that might surprise me?
• Changes at a Seattle NPR station. Justified by management as “mov[ing] away from filling time” – which comes back to my theme of the tyranny of the transmitter. Out job isn’t to feed the transmitter; it’s to produce great content, no?
• Google Research has invented a way of taking a video of two people talking, clicking one person’s face and only hearing them. boggle
• Benefits of digital mean you can launch niche radio services like these Chinese language services for people in the US.
• Spotify overtakes Pandora (in one metric at least) in the US. Pandora seems increasingly like yesterday’s tech.

United Kingdom

• An interesting decision from BBC Radio 1: have a weekend schedule on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. While some stations have run different PM drive shows on Fridays for a while, this is a new idea – with plenty to commend it. It will also obfuscate the radio listening results, since RAJAR doesn’t publicly split out Mon-Fri; and it should flatten pay and talent expectation for the future (though contracts probably means savings won’t be immediately apparent). This is a clever piece of thinking.
• Lovely complaints about “the new look Radio 2” in 1971. Nothing so unsettling to listeners as change.
• This is a brilliantly clever idea: the UK’s (classical) Classic FM launch a specific stream for students, Classic FM Revision. So simple, but so smart.

Australia

• Kyle Sandilands and the mystery text message: what a lovely piece of radio this is. (On a hot-CHR station, no less).
• Sound quality doesn’t matter? Apparently it’s more complicated than that, particularly when it comes to believability of facts.
• Is live radio lazy? Peter Saxon follows up on my initial article; and Wayne Clouten from BPR also weighs in. “Great live radio is and should be bloody hard work and if it isn’t, don’t get upset if someone calls you lazy.”

Elsewhere

• Canada: All round good radio guy Larry Gifford shares the news of his diagnosis with Parkinson’s Disease.
• Ireland: Revealing Q&A with Nova CEO Kevin Branigan – a good piece. It surprises me how old-fashioned Irish radio is, but that’s an over-eager regulator for you.
• Canada: Edison Research publish Infinite Dial Canada. Lots of juicy data, as Alan Cross notes.
• Netherlands: from 2015, Tommy Ferraz writes suggesting that radio should consider less live segments for better opportunities in the future.