James Cridland’s International Radio Trends: TuneIn court case; and buses

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.


  • TuneIn loses copyright lawsuit filed by Sony and Warner in the UK – interesting and worrying for the internet as a whole. TuneIn has lost the court case because it was linking to radio stations available overseas, who didn’t have UK music licences. Copyright law means that music licences are required wherever the stream is consumed. This is a mad ruling: because TuneIn was merely linking to a stream address. If that stream wasn’t properly geolocked, that’s the radio broadcaster’s fault, not TuneIn’s fault, surely? And does this mean that Warner/Sony will come after me if I link to the website for FIP, who don’t have music licences for the UK or other markets?
  • And you think you get great gigs: not as cool as being the voice of your local bus! Congratulations to David Lloyd (and this is a great opportunity for your local radio station to be part of the community)
  • All shows on Macquarie Sports Radio have been axed, with the exception of live commentaries (“calls”). The station’s on AM and digital in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. AM radio isn’t having a great time of it in Australia, it seems to me – with one or two notable exceptions.
  • For presenter training, demo tapes, or just really unpopular radio stations: presenting the random request generator, a neat bit of promotion from Devaweb
  • Andrew Pierce to return to the radio. Except not on the radio: on Mail+, a new paid-for service for Daily Mail readers. All attempts by newspapers to do an online daily radio show have failed, and sadly I don’t expect this to be any different.
  • Edison Research have a new study coming out shortly that just looks at spoken word…
  • Spotify data can be really helpful to radio programmers, says this story (and common sense)
  • Norway, where they turned off most of FM a few years back, has fans of the new DAB broadcasts after all. (Even so, I know that even writing this here means that I’ll get angry emails by the hate mob)
  • A good look at Week in Westminster, a long-running (very long-running) BBC Radio programme.
  • I wrote my last weekly radio column last week. I hope I made the right decision to keep focus on what I do!

James Cridland