The Game – Bauer just lost it
Posted on Thursday, April 7th, 2011 at 6:07 pm. #
In the Starbucks just off the north end of Regent Street in London, there’s a bookshelf.
Anyone can help themselves to one of the books. When you’ve finished with one, you’re supposed to bring it back. Similarly, if you want to leave books there after you’ve finished reading them, you can. It’s a mini book-swapping club. And it works.
It works because everyone plays by the rules. It runs on trust. Some people take, some people give, but overall, the amount of books was fairly static for the two years I went there. It works well. If everyone plays the game.
Similarly, the RadioPlayer is a matter of trust.
You link to it from your radio station website. People can listen to you. But, using the player, they can also find hundreds of other radio stations. It’s a classic case of ‘agree on technology, compete on content’. Some stations will win out of this, as people discover them for the first time. Some stations, with poor content, will undoubtedly lose. But it’ll be good for radio. If everyone plays the game.
Bauer, however, aren’t.
They’re in the RadioPlayer, so they benefit from potentially gaining traffic from others. But according to Radio Today they’re keeping their own players on their websites. They’re taking, but they’re not giving.
Digital Director Iain Clasper is under the impression that it’s size that matters. “The UK RadioPlayer is quite small compared with something like the Kiss Kube”, he says. “Ours is a lot bigger,” he adds, “more dynamic and has more rich content – so we didn’t want to lose that functionality.”
This argument would have some validity, were it not for the BBC’s appearance in the RadioPlayer, which is even more “dynamic”, and has considerably more rich content.There’s the trifling matter that Kiss and Magic are not currently in the UK RadioPlayer at all. And it would be a better argument if Bauer’s big-city radio player was significantly better, instead of being, well, a bit rubbish. And hideous.
“I think we’re different to some of the other participants in that we’re market leaders in virtually all of our markets”, says Clasper, getting back on to the “bigger is better” subject. Except that’s an irrelevant claim – it’s equally applicable to many of Global and the BBC’s services, and doesn’t explain why Bauer wants to take audience from other services but not give any back. Surely it should be the other way, if their market-leader status (shhh, nobody mention Radio Aire) is so high?
Clasper adds: “We had a lot of conversations with [the UK RadioPlayer] but right now we don’t want to give up our existing in-house player strategy within our websites. We are, however, very open to it outside of our websites.” And who wouldn’t be? They’ve managed to get tons of links from other radio station players, but selfishly aren’t playing the game by doing the reverse.
There are lots of great people at Bauer who understand the benefits of working together – of being a good citizen within the radio industry – of doing the right thing by the listener – of playing the game.
I hope Bauer changes its mind.
Are you serious, all stations get links from all other stations!! that is a huge win/win for all concerned and marks Bauer out as real ‘takers’. The radioplayer almost certainly had higher ideal at conception, but will it have to introduce no-follow instructions on links to Bauer, like wikipeadia does?