James Cridland’s International Radio Trends: Channel switchers and TuneIn

James Cridland

6 years ago

James Cridland, 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.

Here’s why people switch channels (in the US). Radio in many parts of the world haven’t had to worry about this, with regulators ensuring that there weren’t competitors per format: but that, just like everything else, is changing.
A good rant about why the Google tax in France for linking to news stories doesn’t work. Read this for the parallels for radio – especially radio broadcasters who pull off TuneIn and services like them.
Oh, and talking about broadcasters coming off TuneIn… here’s the latest move from the BBC who are doing just that (in the UK). The BBC have claimed that they don’t get listening data from TuneIn (or Google Podcasts). But since the streams (and the podcasts) come directly from BBC servers, this is nonsense – they get the same data from TuneIn that they do from any other third-party app. (In fact, TuneIn offers more). Do they really want to remove all streams from all third-party apps?
In terms of balance – here’s why the BBC is right not to support outdated versions of iOS or Android – because they are a privacy nightmare.
Congratulations to the UK’s Christian O’Connell (and Sue Carter, his boss, who spent much time in Irish and UK radio) who have made Gold, his Melbourne station, become #1 in the ratings. The Brits might have something to teach Aussie radio after all…
Ever wondered how rotten US radio is? Here’s a price list if you want to get onto KCAA in California. An interview will cost you $75. Your song? $50.
I love data on music – especially this sort of thing which highlights trends on how long it takes to get to the chorus.
Our ears have Automatic Gain Control built-in, it turns out.
And, here are new songs being apparently made by AI – Spotify-developed tool used for Skygge AI-powered ‘American Folk Songs’
A little look back at how radio once was – Radio in North West Queensland in the 1940s and 1950s