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
- The UK radio industry is on the up. Why? And what can other markets learn?
United States
- Apple have missed the boat for Christmas, with their HomePod smart speaker now being released in “early 2018”. Much of audio use on these speakers is to live radio.
- Understanding public media’s most engaged podcast users – some great new research from Edison Research linked from Podnews. Interesting seeing how super-users use podcasting.
- Voices on the radio are a crucial part of life, but they’re being lost. – a piece from the Washington Post, waking up to radio’s long-term archive problem.
- iHeartRadio adds another 200 stations to its app. I still US radio’s strategy here – “put all our stations in an app run by our competitors” – a bit strange, but it is a very capable app, and at least offers a good alternative to TuneIn.
- People watch Netflix at work and in public bathrooms, according to this story. Nice.
- Community Podcasting in Community Radio, a podcast from Radio Survivor.
- Lots of fascinating data about US audio consumption, including smart speakers
- Joe Pyne Was America’s First Shock Jock
United Kingdom
- Sony and Warner launch legal proceedings against TuneIn in the UK – if this website is to be trusted, the story appears to be that TuneIn is facilitating access to unlicensed music streams. That could mean a set of bedroom-radio stations without any licensing; a set of radio stations hosted on a third party that claims it’s covered music rights but hasn’t; or even streams from US and Australian radio stations which haven’t bought music rights for the UK (music rights holders want payment in the country of consumption, not transmission). Given that TuneIn is an edited service – i.e. stations are editorially listed, not automatically – they probably can’t claim a common-carrier defence. One to watch, if it’s true.
- Industry reacts to BBC local radio changes, including Richard Horsman calling it “a new hope for Cinderella. From the headlines, the changes are a removal of the much-maligned networked evening show, a reversal of some planned cuts, and a desire that Local Radio should be aimed at “everybody”. I don’t suppose the listeners care about the networked evening show, but it’s a hot-button within the industry; the removal of targeting is, I hope, actually allowing local managers a bit more control of their own station sound – Radio Humberside is (or should be) a very different listen to Radio Manchester or Radio London. BBC Local Radio has a 6.8% share.
- Some nice history of BBC Radio Sheffield, which celebrated its anniversary recently.
- Why local radio is thriving (slightly spoiled by a lazy antique radio photo)
- The history of radio, according to the BBC in 1962
- Some powerful radio just here from Eddie Mair last weeek on PM – and some reaction via Twitter.
- “Young listeners are helping LBC break the BBC’s stranglehold on speech radio” – a good piece on LBC’s rise in the UK. Newstalk radio, in the form of stations like LBC and the rise of podcasts – the New York TImes Daily podcast is #2 – is a format to watch, I suspect.
- Video killed the radio star – lazy Buggles headline nonsense
- Who’s Listening and How – David Lloyd writes up the RAJAR Ltd MIDAS survey, something I always mean to do and never do. This is required reading.
Australia
- Navigating News and modern media – very good and quite shocking article, showing how newspapers operate these days
- Good thoughts on available tools for radio from technology journalist Trevor Long
- Australian ABC to reorganise internal teams – lots of change, moving from a platform-focused organisation to a content-focused one. This is a great move, assuming that platforms specialism isn’t lost; as far as I can see, the ABC have safeguarded against this.
- A lazy Buggles headline from a radio industry website in Australia. It doesn’t make it any less excusable if you put a question-mark at the end!
Elsewhere
- Sweden: IS militants hack into Swedish radio station in Malmo, take over broadcast. (I suspect we’ll see more of these in future, as it becomes clearer that you can easily hack radio broadcasts in many cases)
- Early Soviet radio broadcasting – the wireless that wasn’t, actually, wireless. Fascinating.
- Great news for Canada, as Radioplayer Canada makes it to the Amazon Echo as a launch partner.
- Singapore: SPH to launch two new radio stations – a business and finance radio station, Money FM, and a Chinese infotainment station aimed at 45+ (Hao FM). Singapore shut their DAB broadcasts in December 2011.