Is radio dead? A futurist thinks so...

Greetings from a relaxed holiday weekend; and many thanks to my Patreon supporters, without whom I’d not be able to have put this week’s together. If you help - thank you; if you don’t, please do consider the price of a cup of coffee a month (or more!)

My stuff

• The future of radio is still content-focused, according to… me. So that’s nice. From Radiodays Europe.

• I was interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Feedback programme (live from my desk in Brisbane after a 26 hour flight home). This section was pre-recorded, and is all the better for it: some, dare I say, less good questions were edited out before transmission. (As I often say, ’live is lazy')

• Is radio dead? This futurist thinks so - I looked at one of the speeches, by a futurist, at Radiodays Europe.

• I do enjoy putting together the very short Podnews podcast. Give me two minutes, I’ll give you the world of podcasting. This one is relatively indicative of how they go, complete with slightly gratuitous talking-up-to-the-post. If you’d like a podcast news bulletin for your radio station - can’t think why, but still - I’d be happy to talk: I also produce a weekly version, which is about four minutes, every Monday.

• Is your station producing daily briefings for the Amazon Echo? I’m getting tons of traffic from mine.

United States

• Nieman Lab covers lots of data around pledge drives for public radio stations in the US. (UK and Aus stations might learn from some of these).

• A free Alexa skill for your radio station, anyone? (At least, the Facebook share I saw of this promised it would be free…)

• A tech website reports that actually, radio has a bright future. I had to sit down.

• Is Radio Missing the Mark in Podcasting? A question from Blubrry, a podcasting company, who’ll be at the podcasting section at the NAB Show this year.

• Artists & Musicians Are Wasting Time With Social Media but email is good, says Music Think Tank. It’s good to be where your listeners are, I’ve often said: but it’s interesting how little focus email gets. For radio, most “VIP emails” are glorified ad sheets. I’ve always felt it a strange way to reward your P1s.

• Death of AM: Latino Public Radio becomes internet-only, leaving the ailing waveband.

• Death of AM: Twin Cities Radio: KLBB 1220 AM Plans Final Sign-Off

• Interesting piece pointing out public aervice broadcasters rely on services like Facebook - but many public service broadcasters do a damn good job of giving them lots of free airtime too.

• Doug Erickson invites radio to ‘start spreading the news’ about how popular it is. He’s right. Interestingly, I was chatting to a major market breakfast host the other day, and let slip that nine-out-of-ten people listen to radio every week. He was AMAZED it was so popular.

• Actually quite thoughtful tips for running a radio station. Unsure of the first one, mind - would love to see the maths.

• Typical tech news - a random opinion asserted as fact. Today: Spotify apparently ‘more powerful’ than radio. It’s not. I’ve not seen any research, even from Spotify, claiming that.

• These are a nice idea - headphones for your phone or music player that also give you FM radio.

• For those waiting for the death of radio: NPR maintains its, er, highest ratings ever. Ah. Keep waiting… :)

  • Interesting comment on Twitter about NPR’s revenue. While not comparing like-with-like at all, it gets about the same money as BBC Radio 4 every year, you might be interested to know.

• Lazy Buggles headline all about smart speakers. No, they won’t ‘kill the radio star’: they’ll strengthen it. For now, anyway. (Though I can’t help feel that the current Facebook furore might dampen enthusiasm for an always-live microphone in the house).

United Kingdom

• Pub radio station. Nothing could go wrong.

• Sir Ken Dodd had a very close bond with BBC Radio Merseyside

• Radio Caroline Returns to Its Roots (interested in radio from boats? Interested in AM? This story has it all!)

• The first BBC Podcast Commissioner was announced last week: it’s Jason Phipps, The Guardian’s current Head of Audio.

• It’s not too late to be the BBC’s Senior Problem, according to the BBC Careers website. I could do that job.

• Interesting data around US media consumption, and radio listening time over the last five years.

• A fascinating read, this, about where (music) radio is headed and what it needs to do to survive.

Elsewhere

• Canada: a piece on Roundhouse Radio in Vancouver - good to hear it’s still going., though it gets surprisingly bad press within the industry.

• Canada: Calgary broadcaster looks back at four decades on radio

• Israel: I don’t know anything about VocaVu other than being shown it. Some interesting automated audio sharing; not entirely sure how public-ready this technology is, though.

• France: RTL in Paris switched studios recently. Here’s the first link from Neuilly sur Seine; and a guided tour of the old RTL France studios

• Australia: The Australian Commercial Radio Awards are to include podcast categories for the first time, reports podnews.

• Australia: ‘Finally, a digital radio that sounds good and has AM’ - clearly not at the same time though! It turns out that the Tivoli Model One Digital has AM in it, as well as internet radio, DAB+ and FM… as long as you live in Australia. I nearly went out and bought one on the spot, before I realised that it’s AU$449 (245 quid!). (I don’t own a single AM radio, except the thing in the car).

• Uganda: 20 radio station licences have been suspended for… promoting witchcraft. Suddenly, Ray Hadley seems quite benign. <- joke for some older Australians

• Ireland: (kind of) - Nails Mahoney, radio coach, speaks at TEDx about asking questions

• Austria: Good writeup about Radiodays Europe

• South Africa: a radio presenter gets forcibly removed from her final show on SABC. A good talent coach would have told this presenter how to behave.

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