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’ articles
United States
- Spotify has search operators. Didn’t know that. So a search for “year:1967 Beatles” works as you’d think it would.
- Big news for AudioBoom and for Triton Digital as they merge – a larger company run by Triton execs with a good pedigree in audio monetisation. My suspicion is that we will see rather more of these consolidations in the podcast space this year.
- Westwood One Brings the Winter Olympics to Amazon Alexa – a clever idea to stream live to Amazon Alexa as well as partner radio stations.
- Where better to review NBC’s coverage of the Olympics than Reddit? And goodness, they’re not happy. (Mind you, it’s Reddit, and that’s their job).
- “Video may have killed the radio star, but digital music killed the CD”, writes @kentbush in a syndicated column. CDs: 16% of all music. Radio: 51% of all audio, enjoyed by 93% of Americans every week. And on World Radio Day too! #lazybugglesheadline
- Farrago: Robust, rapid-fire soundboard – interesting software for live radio, as well as live podcasts.
- A bit of wonderful radio from the 1960s from RadioINK boss Eric Rhoads (one of his very first air shifts). We never had this kind of radio in the UK, and there’s so much energy and excitement in this, it’s quite infectious.
- It’s… Wednesday. February 14th. This… is… a press release from… The Daily. And American Public Media, who’ve snaffled the NYT’s hit news podcast for a ‘radio edition’. Rightly so. I find the style of The Daily a very refreshing change from news radio.
- RAIN to Produce 2nd Annual RAIN Podcast Business Summit – an interesting looking event to be at if you’re interested in podcasting (and if you’re not, you should be)
- An article from 2013, but interesting nonetheless: someone writes about being a Nielsen ‘tv family’ with a paper diary and everything. Radio’s use of paper diaries normally differs a bit, but it’s interesting to read this.
United Kingdom
- Adam Bowie on Absolute Radio’s application to shut down some of its AM transmitters – he, too, wonders why they’re not going further
- Want an hour listening to the very best radio minds? Enjoy this – a listen back at Next Radio 2017.
- Radio Is Streaming’s Next Frontier – some good futuregazing with actual data from the US, Canada, Australia and the UK. The radio markets are different in each, and there’s a tendency to pit “radio vs streaming” (when in reality most people do both), but this is an interesting take.
- Radio Controlled – a BBC Radio 3 documentary about how radio helped Germans rediscover their cultural identity after WWII
- Betrayed On Entebbe – a cautionary tale to those of us who speak at radio conferences, from Graham Mack. I tend to trust people, possibly a little too much, and – yes – was also let down by this conference last year.
- Brilliant. WorldDAB launches guidelines for in-car digital radio user experience – much needed, and a good piece of work.
- Excitingly, I’m the guest in the latest edition of the Wonder Junkie Podcast with Pete Bailey. We get to talk about the future of radio.
- 10 things I love about you: My decade in radio by Polly James – the great Steve Allen is in the latest episode.
Australia
Elsewhere
