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.
- Hire people with opinions, says Craig Bruce, wondering why most of Canadian radio wasn’t talking about Justin Trudeau last week. He’s right, as ever.
- FM frequencies can be confusing, as this tweet points out…
- Fred Jacobs points out that – unlike radio – Spotify is good at getting on loads of different platforms, and then promoting all those different places. (As one example, the ABC recently went onto digital TV here in Australia. I’ve heard it mentioned, in a very oblique way, twice on ABC Radio Brisbane – and I listen for 90 minutes a day. I’ve not once heard them mention DAB+ digital radio, or AM for that matter, in the past year. Major frequencies, platforms and ways to listen should be mentioned every hour, every day. If listeners don’t know how to listen, that’s a problem.)
- Good news for Spaniards: live radio is now available on Movistar’s smart speaker, through iVoox. Another great opportunity to get radio on another device.
- BBC Radio 2 Beatles was a pop-up radio station late last week in the UK. I was looking forward to listening live to a little of it, but it turns out that the only way you could listen was through DAB and they didn’t put the live output online at all, only offering catchup. I can’t decide whether this is an interesting new strategy, echoing my repeated doubts about the “primacy of live”, or a mistake.
- BBC Bradford 1Xtra – a perplexing offer of a local service from a national radio station in a city without any dedicated BBC local radio service – was available online (yay!) but not through the BBC Sounds app for some reason. I’m always a fan of a clear strategy from the BBC, and look forward to them having one.
- How well will this radio ad work? Veritonic reckon they can tell just by listening. The old radio copywriter in me shivers about this cold-hearted analysis; but then I remember that there were a number of rules I’d use, mostly internally, to ensure that an ad worked (not least, make sure the client brand was in the spot at least three times).
- Tips if you’re starting a journalism university course from Richard Horsman, someone who’s been there, done that and got the postcard.
- Meanwhile, in TV land, the equivalent of Sky in Australia, Foxtel, is in serious financial trouble (though most NewsCorp newspapers won’t report on it). The banks are coming for their money, one major shareholder pointedly isn’t helping out, and (not in this story) 20% of their customers are on cable, a service Foxtel is turning off in the next 18 months, which adds more risk.
- Stationhead is an app that lets you record music radio shows yourself and publish them to the world. It uses your listeners’ Spotify account to play the songs. I’ve always thought this was an interesting idea, and good to see someone playing with the idea.
- A podcast about making radio, Fantastic Noise, is back for season 2.
- Apple Music on Android (yes, it’s a thing) adds live radio stations, Android Auto support, as well as Chromecast support. Not quite sure where they’re getting their radio station list from. You might want to check you’re there.
- What a splendid sentiment from Sean Ross.
- This – from Petersfield Community Radio ▸ – is the perfect example of a great product, produced by a radio station without any transmitters or even studios.
- An Oriental PsyOps Mystery – the story of Radio Spark, a station broadcasting into China