Media consumption from New Zealand; iHeart adds music discovery playlist
Well, since we last spoke, I went to Vancouver for the day, which was nice. I’m currently flying to Chicago (and if you’d like to catch up while I’m there, Wed/Thu daytime, just hit reply.) Then, thankfully, I’m not due on a plane for a month - making my way to London for the Next Radio conference. If you read this newsletter, you’ll love the conference - a day with like-minded people, in central London. You should come!
Worldwide
Ireland: A celebration of Irish pirate radio
That super-efficient online targeting for your advertisers? Um, it isn’t. In fact, it’s less effective than just guessing. /via @adcontrarian
Spotify Is Pulling Away From Apple Music - an interesting graph, lest you believed the hype that Apple’s winning this. (Apple Music is available on Android too, incidentally)
Global Breakfast Radio - it’s breakfast time somewhere in the world: this is a website that helps you listen
Media consumption data from New Zealand. Radio gets 1.5 hours a day from kiwis. (The UK figure is 2.6 hours a day).
ShakeMe™ Ad Format Gaining Traction with Another Successful Campaign with Strong Results - this is a very interesting piece of tech, allowing listeners to just “shake” their mobile phones to be sent more information on the ad they’re listening to.
What does Spotify know about you? Everything, it turns out.
United States
Podcasting advice: a talk from Podcast Movement, with Rob Walch from Libsyn. Good watch; lots of stats and explanation.
NuVoodoo Study Reveals Startling Insights For Radio - the reason you hear the same songs on the radio all the time? Listeners apparently believe it’s to keep radio’s music licensing costs down.
A moan about no more jazz on a radio station; but a lovely phrase in the middle of it: “My sense is that if you don’t know something exists you’re not going to look for it.”
Interesting - iHeart has added a “discovery weekly” type playlist to their app (in the US). For many people, that functionality is the only thing keeping them subscribed to Spotify.
A new advertising space that really is the pits. /via @splicenewsroom
United Kingdom
Congratulations UK radio - growing faster than any other ad medium. Yes - even the internet.
Meanwhile, another set of RAJAR ratings are out. Very little hype with this quarter: digital listening hit that magic 50% figure last time (and actually went down slightly this time around, though thankfully for all concerned, remains about 50% and is up year-on-year). Weekly reach has fallen from 90% to 89.2%. Here’s Matt Deegan’s blog and Adam Bowie’s blog, which tell you all you really need to know.
Always important when doing research to keep abreast of the technology you’re researching.
Another UK online radio station crashes and burns, with £4m of debt. Is there a UK online radio station who has business success? I’d love to hear about it if so.
More consolidation in the North of England, as Global encircles Bauer again, buying 2BR
Australia
Interesting to spot Aussie radio making TV. (Also interesting to give equal billing to YouTube as well as ABC’s own iView product)
Australia appears to be the home of the unfunny radio stunt. Here’s a classic of the genre, retold by Adam Hills.
From Australia’s youth station triplej, a very good piece of research into young people. This is really good stuff: the opportunity of a ton of press stories, great audience research, and a good way to align triplej as ’the good guys’ looking after their audience. (Their CD, Ollie Wards, is speaking at Next Radio in London - you should come!)
A man called Matt visits a Facebook troll - this is an interesting bit of video from (a) TripleM in Australia.