Radioland, with James Cridland - radio futurologist

Last year, Chris Evans was the presenter of the most listened-to breakfast show in Europe - The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2. The BBC earns most of its money from a television licence fee, currently US$195 or so, which households in the UK have to pay if they have a television. This licence fee (and the sale of programmes to other broadcasters) pays for the whole thing - so there are...

Try to listen to the new season of Fortunately, a podcast from the BBC, and you’ll be told you can’t. It’s a show that BBC produces which never makes it on the radio. Instead, it follows the same genre as many podcasts do: two friends chatting over a coffee with a special guest. The “friends” in this case are Fi Glover and Jane Garvey, two broadcasters who share the s...

Standards are boring - but they are there for a reason   Tune in to many FM stations with RDS signals in France, Italy or the USA, and you’ll notice that some stations try putting some now-playing information over the 8-character radio station name. Watch, and it slowly scrolls through a song name, or - worse - some advertising. It’ll normally scroll once every two seconds, due to...

  I’m swearing at my smart speakers a little this week.   I’ve a few Google speakers in the house, including a Google Home Hub - the one with a little screen on it. It’s great as a radio from my point of view, since it has a decent-ish speaker on it (better for voice than music, though). It’s good for radio, since it has a good big screen that contains a logo and...

  Radio in the car - a better experience   About 50% of all radio listening happens in the car (the figure’s lower in countries like the UK, but higher in places like the US).   In many ways, radio’s best in the car. Radio - the original multitasking medium - lets you concentrate enough to drive your 1,300kg (2,800 lb) metal death-machine along busy streets alongside sof...

New technology: bad for radio?   Automation Killed The Radio Star , says the latest blog from Dick Taylor, a US radio writer.   Two things about this.   The first is the use of a lazy Buggles headline. Radio is still very much alive, with 9 out of 10 people in most large countries listening every week. Nothing has killed anything.   I collect lazy Buggles headlines. The song wa...

It was interesting seeing one of the pieces of news coming out of Radio Alive, the radio conference in Australia, recently: the Australian radio industry are putting together a Podcast Working Group “to spearhead the development of the growing podcast industry in Australia”.     Their press release says: “Broadcast radio is highly regulated and audience measurement...

I still remember my first look round a radio station. In spite of writing to Signal Radio in Stoke-on-Trent and being ignored (shame on you, Signal), Radio Aire in Leeds held an open day, and I got to look round the studios. I remember being amazed by the equipment, and was astonished at how great the jingles sounded on the decent studio monitors; and the equipment everywhere.   Do you need a...

New technology enables us to delight our listeners even more - particularly, radio operators are now offering more choice than ever before.   In Australia, Southern Cross Austereo have been doing a crafty job of launching additional brand extensions for rock and sport station Triple M, and top 40 channel Hit - so listeners can now enjoy Triple M branded stations playing modern rock, or classi...

Why are you in radio anyway?   I had a conversation a while ago about FM RDS, that thing which tells you what radio station you’re listening to on a big screen in your car, so you don’t forget. For some reason, this US radio company that I was talking to didn’t have RDS. The fundamental question from the radio guy? “Yeah, but how can I earn money from it?”  ...

Some clips of some of the best speakers at the radio ideas conference. Support the show. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

The secret to achieve a growing radio industry could be as simple as this   I’m writing this in London, where the doors are (as I type) just about to open for Next Radio, the radio conference that I run here with my friend Matt Deegan. It’s a positive radio conference with an uplifting feel.   Go to a radio conference in the US or Canada, and there won’t be very many sm...

Talent plus brand = success? So, Chris Evans, the current presenter of adult-contemporary BBC Radio 2’s breakfast show - the largest breakfast show in Europe, by cume - has announced that he’s leaving the station later this year.   He’s off to Virgin Radio, where he’s going to do the breakfast show.   Side note: it’s the same “Virgin Radio” brand...

Naming your own radio station: what’s yours?   “If you could own a radio station, what would you call it?”, posted a man called Nick in a radio discussion board on Facebook the other day.   Now, this Facebook group is mostly comprised of people complaining about how words are being pronounced in radio news bulletins, or photographs of car registration plates that vaguel...

Can a smart speaker replace a kitchen radio?   Last week, a small fluffy bundle arrived in our house. We now have a small puppy - she’s lovely, thank you - and the effect to my radio listening has been interesting.   Next to the sofa was a jumble of wires - something to charge an iPad, some USB-C connectors to charge laptops and mobile phones, and a different USB connector to charg...

Is object-based media in your future? “Object-based media” sounds very techie. But as I stumbled across a BBC Research & Development web page last week highlighting where they've got with it, I am reminded how powerful the idea is (and how much it could play a part in the future of radio).   So, what is object-based media?   If you're recording a radio program, typically...

iHeartRadio - the future of radio? iHeartRadio has done something clever this week.   In the US, the iHeartRadio app contains a bunch of features - not just live radio streams, but podcasts, algorithmic radio stations and (if you pay for it) a music service much like Spotify.   A few weeks ago, it added a feature that brings it up to parity with Spotify - its own version of “Discov...

I’m six foot four, something that I’m acutely aware of in two situations: first, whenever I’m on an economy airline flight, and second, whenever I’m on a subway train in Asia.   Those useful straps from the ceiling - normally out of my way in the US and Europe, are all fighting to slap me in the face in subway trains in places like Japan, where the average height is 5&...

I spent last week at Podcast Movement in Philadelphia - a conference with 2,300 delegates, it dwarfs any radio conference I've been to. This was a well-run conference: running to time throughout, with ten different tracks that delegates could go to. Reflecting podcasting's diverse nature, some tracks were basic advice about how to promote your show, or what to do in your podcast intro. Other track...

Re-thinking and reinventing   Two stories last week made me think. First, this off-the-cuff tweet from a radio station in Scotland, having a day of “ going retro ” by… playing CDs. I shared this in a Facebook group, and it wasn’t long before the comments descended into Monty Python’s Yorkshiremen sketch. “Retro? I’ll give you retro,” said someo...

At last - a chance for global podcasting measurement?   James Purnell, the ultimate boss of BBC Radio, blogged late last week that ‘ we need an industry chart for UK podcasts ’.   He’s understood that the iTunes chart isn’t a chart at all, which is gratifying: that it’s a trending list, “which is great for audiences but content creators and distributor...

I was in the sunny German city of Nuremberg last week, as the guest of the lokalrundfunktage. The state media regulator for Bavaria helps run a big, impressive conference with a surprising amount of people there.   The most impressive thing to me was that I was speaking at 1.30pm, and everyone turned up at 1.25pm. As you might know from conferences, the concept of people being early is&hellip...

Last week, US broadcaster Entercom decided to pull its streams off TuneIn, the radio aggregator. From now on, the stations will only be available on Entercom’s own radio streaming website, radio.com; and the radio.com smartphone app.   David Field, the company’s CEO, said “We are committed to making Radio.com a leader in the digital audio space”. Seemingly, this is the...

Google Podcasts - friend or foe to radio? The radio industry has been slowly incorporating podcasting into its mix: both as a useful way of promoting some of our key talent, and increasingly as a way to get closer to clients by producing branded podcasts for them. Increasingly, sales teams are representing podcast networks as well as radio stations.   Last week, we were handed a gift from Goo...

TRANSCRIPT:   Jamie Dupree is a radio reporter with Cox Media Group in the US, for WSB: and two years ago he lost his voice.   As a story on the BBC will tell you … he’s got it back. Kind of. A company based in Scotland has sampled his voice from a set of recordings: and he’s now back filing full reports for the company with the aid of voice synthesis.   The techn...