Apple’s new iPod Nano – the saviour of Radio 1?
Posted on Thursday, September 10th, 2009 at 4:05am. #
The iPod Touch (above) and iPhone may be where the geeks are at; but the iPod Nano is a much more popular music player. Actually: it’s the world’s most popular: over 100,000,000 have been sold (yes, really, it’s that much). And I’d wager that the Nano is owned by younger people than the expensive Touch/iPhones – because it’s smaller, more robust, and needs no contract.
The surprise is in the press release announcing the new one today, just in time for Christmas:
iPod nano now has a built-in FM radio with live pause and iTunes Tagging. Live pause lets iPod nano users pause and resume playing their favorite FM radio shows. iTunes Tagging is great when users hear a song they like, they can simply tag it, and then preview and purchase that song when they sync to iTunes
This is the first consumer unit that I can think of that does ‘live pause’ for FM. (In the UK, we’ve plenty of DAB radios that do it – but not FM.) This is great news. It’s a new feature added to FM radio, delivered by Apple.
The images and video on Apple’s website appear to show a big screen with a frequency on it (yawn), but some RDS-delivered(?) information. “This is the world-famous KROQ”, says one of the screenshots, which presumably means it’s using RDS RadioText, the long description that few stations bother with in the UK. Now’s the time to check what your RDS encoder is putting there – or better still, add a live dynamic feed like your DAB’s DLS text (“livetext”). You are creating dynamic text at least, aren’t you? And now’s the time to work out how you can monetise this. Many stations have already monetised DAB DLS text. Is this monetiseable too? Can it push up yield?
iTunes Tagging is “currently available only in the US on radio stations that support iTunes Tagging” – so we’ll not be seeing it here for a while. It’s bad news for radio companies and for the consumer, since it’s proprietary to iTunes – so I can’t buy my MP3s from Amazon, and radio stations are locked in to iTunes – indeed, they can’t even sell anything that’s not in the iTunes store (Beatles, anyone?). iTunes Tagging is rubbish for stations playing live music, rubbish for stations playing something out of the ordinary, rubbish for feedback from commercials or features, and rubbish for speech stations. It’s not what the radio industry needs, or wants – though it’s undeniably better than nothing.
The functionality in the (albeit nascent) RadioTAG application for RadioDNS has been carefully designed to be much more open than iTunes Tagging (it works on any music store; supports podcast subscriptions, fact sheets or commercial opportunities too); so you’d expect me to be nothing but negative about Apple’s effort. I’m not, though. I’m delighted.
Because RadioTAG is now much easier to explain. “You know that iTunes Tagging? It’s like that, but better.” (Or in the case of the UK – “It’s like that, but it works here, too”.)
So today is a good day for radio. A new iPod Nano with a built-in FM radio can only be good news. One that offers live-pause is good – adding features users will be familiar with. One that introduces the idea of tagging, albeit in a flawed manner, is good too. Thank you, Apple, for introducing FM radio to a new set of fans.
(One word of caution, though. Let’s not run away with this. The iPod Nano has sold 100,000,000 units – since February 7, 2005. That’s roughly 5,000,000 units per quarter. That’s big. But Nokia sells 100,000,000 units a quarter – most with FM radio chips inside them. Apple might be big, but Nokia is way bigger. Twenty times bigger, in fact.)
Ian Deeley
Trevor Greene
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