Lest anyone try to convince you otherwise…

More people listen to the radio now than ever in the past ten years
Source: RAJAR – Q2 2010

90.6% of us consume radio every week: that’s more than any media except television
Source: RAJAR – Q2 2010

Radio is popular with young people: 72% of 15-24 year-olds claim it’s part of their daily routine
Source: RAB ‘The Big Listen’ – 2009

69% of 15-24’s agree that “radio gives me ideas of what music to load on my iPod”
Source: RAB ‘The Big Listen’ – 2009

75% of 15-24’s say that radio is the number one place to discover new music
Source: RAB ‘The Big Listen’ – 2009

48% of UK smartphone owners have installed a radio application to their phones
Source: ‘Radio Futures 2010’ RAIN/Vision Critical – 2010

31% of UK smartphone owners listen to radio on their phones every week
Source: ‘Radio Futures 2010’ RAIN/Vision Critical – 2010

82% of all listening of any sort is to radio (including listening to our own music or online services)
Source: BBC Eartime Research, Radio Academy Podcast July 2010

Any more? Pop them (sourced, please) in the comments… this might be a useful resource…

The NAB and RIAA (bizarre combination) have insisted that new mobile phones come with an FM chip inside them, and are forcing Congress to make this a law. I must confess that bullying manufacturers to include radio leaves me cold: radio’s relevant and much loved by everyone, and that’s why it ought to be in your new gadget. Steve Safran’s lostremote comments “This is a reactionary and absurd response to the new media marketplace”, meanwhile Radio InSights points out that “Robo-radio, voice tracking and tired programming isn’t going to persuade a listener to switch her cellphone from email to the radio” (though neglects to note that actually, a listener can switch her cellphone from radio to email without losing the radio…)

Mind, Radio InSights are being a little overly rude towards Mark Ramsey. I’ve criticised Mark in the past for being too American and insular; but they’ve gone a little overboard on a critique about one of his recent posts, imho. They do have a point; but argue against the point, not the person, chaps.

Talking about Mark Ramsey, he posts an interesting polemic about The End of Local – which argues that “local” mostly doesn’t matter. “I – the consumer – don’t care where you are. I only care that you care where I am. And that you give me what I want wherever and however I want it.” This is an interesting read for those of us in the UK, where recent changes in legislation have meant a dramatic decrease in the localness of some commercial radio here. While the anoraks don’t like it, I do quietly point out that not being local doesn’t appear to have damaged BBC Radio 2 an awful lot.

Absolute Radio are crowing about appearing in the Nokia Ovi store TV advert. I’ve a lot of time for Absolute (and am currently consulting for them); but the only thing I can see in the TV ad is a curious unfamiliar purple fast-forward icon. If you’re not using your proper logo in your app, you’re missing a trick, in my opinion. That’s not to take away from the fact that Absolute’s been recognised by Nokia as a good brand to use alongside YouTube and Tesco, incidentally: which is excellent news.

The future of radio is multiplatform, as I regularly boringly say, and NPR have just released a bunch of research that underlines that: showing hour-by-hour figures for each platform. Interesting reading.

MediaTel have a new report out, ‘The Changing Face of Audio Consumption’, and their blog makes some bold claims: “In the entertainment area, the role of radio has been superseded by the internet, and the rise of MP3 players” (really? how so? Evans, Moyles, Just a Minute, Geoff Lloyd, etc listeners might disagree) “With analogue radio switch-off announced for 2015″ (er – no, it hasn’t been); and quotes and ‘analysis’ seemingly thrown together without any cohesion. I hope the report’s better than the blog posting.

Using Wikipedia as content for your website can be a great idea, but sometimes – just sometimes – it’s not. This screenshot of a widget from the BBC Music website is almost inevitable. If BBC Music had correctly credited Wikipedia, the headline wouldn’t have been “BBC Website WIN!” but “Wikipedia WIN!”, and it’s hardly likely that anyone would have screen-shotted a Wikipedia vandalism. Of note, however: the BBC Music cache of Wikipedia is refreshed automatically on every Wikipedia edit; so when a similar vandalism that day was cleared up within three minutes, so would the BBC Music version have been: if you didn’t do what Patrick Sinclair did and written a bot to monitor Wikipedia changes (details), then you might have simply grabbed the Wikipedia page at the wrong time, and that vandalised version could have been there for weeks.

The clever folks at BERG have done a clever tool for the BBC which overlays events onto the UK – probably better to click through to see a rather breathtaking example: what if the Pakistan Floods were centred on London? Notwithstanding the rather patronising way that the tool defaults to W12 7RJ (that’s TV Centre), it’s an impressive tool to help people visualise the news. Mind – If they were thinking straight, they’d have linked to W1A 1AA, which is BBC Broadcasting House – a very central location that many people would have seen, rather than TVC, which is out of the way in an otherwise rather dreary location.

If you’ve an Android phone, you might enjoy Tasker which is a very clever app indeed: it allows you to program your phone to do things automatically. Very geeky, very powerful. Recommended.

Radio or audio types might like Myna, which is an online audio editor. I’ve not tried it – preferring Audacity – but you might find it right up your street.

And irreverent consumer site Bitterwallet has inexplicably given a big puff for ‘World’ World, the internet’s collection of places called (something) World.

It’s really complicated and it’s hurting my head, but chances are, you’ll see this in three places: either an email update sent by my blog, or on my website itself, or in my shared items.

If you’re reading this in my shared items, you’re following me at james.cridland@gmail.com – stop that immediately, because this’ll be my last shared item in this account.

You’ll be wanting to follow me at james@cridland.net instead now. Chances are you probably are already, thanks to the wonder of Google.

For the rest of you, apologies for wasting your time. I instead would like to share the above graffiti with you.

It’s nearing the end of Sunday, so I’ll only give you three things to read this week. You might end up reading this on Monday, after all, and then you’d be really supposed to be working.

Australian DAB

The RAJAR figures last week coincided with the first year’s figures from Australia’s DAB+ broadcasts. I’d link to RadioInfo.com.au, but it has mandatory registration, so instead, I’d mention that “…after just one year on air at full power in Australia’s 5 largest capital cities, digital radio has hit another milestone. The latest Survey 4 data shows there are 523,000 people listening to digital radio in an average week and three times the predicted number of digital radios in the market at nearly 150,000, according to manufacturing and sales data.”. These figures are moderately uncomparable with anything RAJAR produces – RAJAR measures hours (time-spent-listening) and not reach (cume), and measures DAB in households, rather than total sales.

It might be interesting to compare, however, the sales figures with a similar point in the UK: a ‘similar point’ being the year of 2004, the first full year that DAB sets had dropped below 99-quid, and the first full year that additional DAB stations were beginning to be promoted by the BBC and commercial broadcasters. The Australian sales are an equivalent (in population terms) of 435,000 UK sales; we actually only sold 346,400 radios in 2004. The Aussies are showing us how it’s done. (And it’s nothing to do with DAB/DAB+).

Red mist

For some reason, this ‘outrageous BBC spin‘ appears in my Google shared items. What concerns me is quite how ANGRY people can get about a simple news story.

Tweetdeck

And those of you on Android might like to play with Tweetdeck for Android: which, despite its over-large screen font and almost complete lack of options and features, is rather a capable little thing: pulling together Google Buzz, Twitter, FourSquare and Facebook. I disliked it almost immediately after I downloaded it; but overlooking the rather fugly user interface, it’s a really very nice client – particularly capable with being offline (where it stores a ton of information and lets you reply, keeping the response until you’re back in coverage).

I’ve had a rather good day, all things told: it’s not every day that you help launch a pretty clever new service.

Radio’s still the best place to discover new music. 82% of all our listening-time is to the radio, according to the BBC’s Eartime research – time that also includes listening to your own music collection or online services. 75% of young people (15-24s) say that radio’s their number one place to discover new music, according to the RadioCentre’s Big Listen research. And the list goes on.

Which is why I’m quite excited by FlowSongs, a new service launched by PURE, who I’m working with at the moment.

Listen to any radio station on your PURE connected radio – on FM, DAB, or online (because the future of radio is multiplatform) – and when you hear a song you like, just press the FlowSongs button. The radio tells you what the song is (what album it’s from, too): and, if you like it, you can buy the song there and then. The way it works is clever, since it uses audio recognition (to make sure it works on all 12,000+ radio services available).

What’s clever, too, is that the song you buy is both downloadable as an MP3, but also streamable on your radio as well: just select the song on your set and away you go. It means the music you purchased is always available, which is kind of as music should be, really. After all: I’ve bought it, shouldn’t I have access to it on devices I own?

This is a world first – both in terms of technology and rights – and is just one of the cool, clever things that hybrid radio can do. And while I’ve not been able to blog about it for the last three months or so, I’ve been itching to tell people about it.

The future of radio’s multiplatform: and now, your radio doesn’t just introduce you to new music, it helps you buy it, too.

Next, I’d like to order a pizza by hitting the button during a pizza advert, please. Can you do that for me too, PURE?

The programme team on this station wants to hear from you, dear listener. “Post a comment below, send the team an email, tweet or message the show on facebook” says a message on this radio station’s website.

I thought about posting a comment (I really did), then wondered whether it would have more effect if I tweeted, or went onto Facebook. So I didn’t do anything. As a result, this show – the flagship show on this radio station I’m listening to – has just one comment: looking lonely on the page. (There are probably more comments on Facebook, twitter, or via email, all of which could be aggregated here.)

Are you confusing your users, or listeners, by giving them too many options?

–

Listening to the show, the presenter says that he’s uploaded tons of photographs on Facebook about what he got up to yesterday. They’re nowhere on the station’s website, in other words. He promotes his Facebook page by reading out the URL twice in succession. He doesn’t mention the station’s official website at all.

Facebook should, of course, be used – but it’s an addition, not a replacement, to your online activity.

Are you – or your presenters – confusing your listeners as to where their online destination should be?

Hello, lazy Sunday morning – and hello, stuff to read.

This week was the new RAJAR figures – great news for radio, as we know. Matt Deegan has some thoughts, as does Adam Bowie. Paul Easton has some whizzy graphs for the London market.

A while back, I wondered aloud whether radio presenters should promote their own Twitter accounts on-air. I said that they shouldn’t – and I still believe it. Phil Edmonds seems to agree, and gives a few examples. A radio station to get into legal hot water from a radio presenter’s tweets? I give it a few months.

Phil also points out, gently, that he’d have liked to have used an image of David Cameron in Absolute Radio’s studios, but couldn’t find a suitably licensed photograph, so had to use one of the BBC’s instead. If you’re taking press shots, slinging them onto Flickr and licensing them correctly is probably a good plan to help us bloggers. And it’s not as if Absolute Radio aren’t all about sharing: they had the BBC round this week (I recognise some faces in the photo!)

Talking about Flickr photos, this one is mine. I added that to a BBC list while I was staff, which means they don’t have to credit me, which is a bit of a shame; would be great if they’d be able to use the wealth of Creative Commons too. (Hey – that’s an https:// link to a BBC programmes page. Wonder how long they’ve supported that?)

Austereo’s Corey Layton shares a good billboard, seen in the US, about the dangers of tailgating; while Fred Jacobs points out that social networking is much more popular with women than men: so why are the UK’s women-focused stations not actually very good at this, I wonder?

I discovered a neat service called followup.cc this week. If someone emails you to ask to do something on tuesday, forward it to tuesday@followup.cc and it’ll remind you, by email, on Tuesday morning. Very simple, very straightforward: might help me get to inbox zero one of these years.

Absolute’s Llia and Tony share this rather excellent selection of angry, irascible memos from Tiger Oil. These are an excellent collection of completely insane communications from boss to staff; well worth a read.

You can follow my shared items by following james.cridland@gmail.com in Google Reader (I really ought to move accounts shortly) and I’m currently following over 100 people back, so thanks for giving me something to read! I wonder whether the new Amazon Kindle I’ve rather foolishly ordered will work well with Google Reader online?