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.
Hello. It’s been quite a month: Podcast Movement, then Radiodays Asia. Podcast Movement was fascinatingly busy. This week, I was due to be in Orlando FL, but it’s turned out to be a bit windy, so I’m staying at home instead (and going to Amsterdam early next week instead).
- Left – Google Assistant plays DJ. Not only does it play the song you want, but (in this example from a user in NYC) it even highlights their next gig. You know, like radio DJs do.
- SiriusXM launches a channel full of fitness cycle instructors. “I thought you’re amazing. It’s so creative,” gushes an analyst from Merrill Lynch in response. Suddenly, the state of some of US radio is a little more obvious – it’s whatever brainless banking analysts like.
- Fascinating how this bit of BBC Radio 4 from 1969 ▸ sounds almost identical to 2019 in style. Fascinating? Or a bit worrying? Is there a missed opportunity with how we do radio news?
- RAJAR, the UK’s audience figures, came out early last month. Here’s Matt Deegan’s take, highlighting Scala’s lukewarm launch (and oddly quoting a lyric from the Monkees). And here’s Adam Bowie’s thoughts, including an overlap graph showing Scala, Classic FM and BBC Radio 3’s audiences.
- Surprising to see the slow decline in Manx Radio’s hours and audience. What happened? That used to be an unassailable station. Also from RAJAR – the most popular radio stations in the UK are… BBC Radio 2. And Island FM.
- “As Media Options Increase, Radio and Podcasts are Go-To Music Sources for Consumers in Canada” says Nielsen (who don’t have the contract to measure radio in the country, incidentally)
- Here’s a clever visual augmentation app for radio from the BBC. It’s the latest in many, many iterations: somehow technologists love the idea of pairing visuals with audio. At Podcast Movement, I saw the Adori platform, which does similar; there’s also Entale – and that’s just from the last twelve months. Fifteen years ago I was playing with Nokia Visual Radio for Virgin Radio. As ever, the difficulty with all these things is a) a rich enough experience while maintaining b) quick production of visuals at scale, and c) convincing people to look at the screen. I’m not convinced we’ve got there yet.
- This tweet is worth a read if you think radio just has to have local studios to succeed. It doesn’t. If you’re a local radio station, and you cover a town which was at risk from a dam bursting, why the hell wouldn’t you do live programming? Astonishing – and if Ofcom had any balls, they’d terminate the licence of this station immediately. Amateur nonsense.
- A change to the TV licence fee in Ireland – it’ll be replaced with a licence fee for consuming publicly-funded content, rather than a fee for a telly-box. Makes sense to me. Interestingly, and slightly oddly, one of the justifications for the TV licence in Ireland (€160, £145, US$175) is that it keeps rural Post Offices open.
- Fun story from Australia, as two cricket fans bid for the radio cricket rights coverage – and won. Good for them!
- Podsights releases “Open Downloads” spec – interesting move. Podcast companies currently have to pay $45,000 to get an IAB seal of approval; but the IAB’s guidelines don’t actually give robust numbers that are identical from each host.
- Rosie Smith and I end up talking about the future of radio with Malaysia’s BFM. I’ll almost forgive the lazy buggles headline. Almost.
- Video Saved the Radio Star – shared without comment
- If you ever needed evidence that radio is becoming more multiplatform, Entercom have just launched a sports radio network… without a transmitter.
- iHeartMedia will start airing its own podcasts on over 200 of its radio stations every Sunday.
- Podcast: “the reinvention of radio” according to this article.
- How sad. Viking FM, a station I worked at with a proud history, is closing down (moving to a city with no affinity to its broadcast area). Disappointing. When I worked there it was the network hub, broadcasting two stations 24 hours a day. It’s now reduced to having one four-hour local show a day.
- German station FFH is the latest to produce four new webstreams that contain content from the main simulcast, but with different music
- Quebecor’s QUB radio introduces customizable morning show – looks intruiging. This is a bit more than the FFH example – you can pick and choose which bits you want as part of the experience.
- In the UK, Bauer Media unveils new online stations and podcast – and Global retaliated only a few weeks later by launching five new stations. There’s certainly a race going on in the UK; strange how the race is to emulate Spotify, rather than to focus on local audiences (which Spotify can’t do).
- Twitter will no longer accept advertising from state-backed news organisations. (BBC, PBS etc is apparently still fine – here’s hoping they’ve a robust definition of “state-backed”, since both the BBC and the ABC take money from government.)
- KFOG radio station going off the air: ‘We knew this was gonna happen’ – it’s certainly the most famous radio stations I know in San Francisco, so it’s sad to see it disappear. Can’t say I ever listened, though.
- AdsWizz & Big Mobile Successfully Track Increase in Store Visits Driven By Audio Ads – the interesting bit in here is that they claim “more than a 90% lift in footfall traffic to their retail locations when individuals listened to their audio ads”, which is quite a claim.