James Cridland’s International Radio Trends: Where should a radio station be? And RAJAR Q1 2019
James Cridland
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.
Where should a radio station be? I asked this week in my column. In Brisbane, four of the biggest radio stations in the city are moving studios – all to better locations.
When I was working in radio commercial creative in the early 1990s, all the talk was of the ‘ironing board test’ that had been undertaken 10 years before. Good to see that it’s been done again, with work done around relevant context. It’s easy to forget that radio offers some quite advanced targeting in comparison with print, for example: copy that can vary depending on time of day and even the weather.
RAJAR was in the UK last week. Adam Bowie’s thoughts include the observation that BBC Radio 2’s new breakfast show, hosted by Zoe Ball, is on virtually the same number of listeners as Chris Evans, who left to Virgin Radio. Yet, Evans himself has posted an impressive first set of numbers at just over 1m. Impressive that the BBC managed to magic a replacement million from somewhere.
In a seamless segue, here’s a fun advertisement in Swiss German for getting DAB+ into cars. Switzerland will be the next country in Europe to switch off FM.
Delighted to see the news that the BBC has started producing RadioVIS hybrid radio images for all its radio stations. RadioVIS, which uses the internet to enhance broadcast radio, was something I was heavily involved in way back in 2009. Good to see the BBC finally got there.
I missed this earlier – Numeris is to measure all radio markets year-round starting this summer – quite a change for Canadian radio. Having short ‘ratings periods’ is bad for the listener, and I hope this results in better, more consistent, station output.
talkRADIO is the last Wireless radio station to move into the new building. Their studios look nice – I like the backdrop, though they’ve bafflingly retained the scrolly text on the background.
ViLOR is clever technology from the BBC which removes a lot of studio equipment from their individual local stations, and saves everyone money. This work has just been completed. I’ve heard some negative discussion of it – but nothing like the negative discussion that there used to be about the poor state of local radio’s technology in some studio centres. A good use of new technology.
Interesting thread on Twitter about how people listen to the radio. Yes, the FM/DAB split is quite interesting, but much more so is the almost entire demise of AM. When will stations start switching off, I wonder?
