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.

• Broadcasters meeting podcasters? Goodness.

• 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.

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