Slate magazine - a quarter of their revenues come from audio

My weekly column

• How are people listening to audio in 2018? - my weekly column looked at RAJAR’s MIDAS survey (and a few other things)

North America

• Slate say podcasting is now 25% of their revenue - the question for me is whether this money is coming out of broadcast radio’s budgets, or out of that for banner advertising.

• How public radio’s risk-averse culture impedes its chances for success - an interesting piece in Current, and rings a few personal bells. Much of the secret appears to be to know when to just do things and ask for permission later; though ‘public’ radio also has to remember who pays its wages.

• Local radio station switches to all Christmas music, all the time - wonderful quote in here from their press release: a claim that it is “the most dramatic and exciting new musical directions ever under-taken by a U.S. terrestrial radio station”. The station is Santa 100 in Columbus OH. I’m a bit more perplexed why the previous programming, known as Sunny 100, has gone over to 94.7, which was previously a country station. Surely you’d keep Sunny 100 programming on 100.1, and if you’re killing the country station, put the Christmas songs on that? But then, there is plenty about US radio I don’t understand.

• Joe Frank has died. Harry Shearer pays tribute.

• Edison Research and Triton Digital Expand The Infinite Dial Study to Canada - this is good news, since the quality of this research is excellent and it’s very helpful to get data worked out identically in three different markets (US, Australia, and now Canada).

• Smart Speaker Sales Are Growing Faster than Smartphones in the U.S.. By the way, the Amazon Echo launches in Australia in February, and apparently also launches in another fifty countries as well. (Naturally, I’ve ordered one.)

United Kingdom

• How are people listening to audio in 2018? - my weekly column looked at RAJAR’s MIDAS survey (and a few other things). Adam Bowie also writes on these, highlighting radio’s slide with younger audiences.

• Radio folk should enjoy @DavidLloydRADIO’s Conversations podcast. This episode has Steve Penk on it; I think there’s a newer one published in the last 24 hours with Paul Robinson. Beautifully produced. Oddly not a conversation.

• The BBC are taking smart-speakers (and similar) really quite seriously - and are hiring for their new BBC Voice unit.

• A strong licence application to Ofcom for Ipswich, a place I know well. The “monitoring” section on pages 23/24 is eye-opening. I do hope they succeed in winning the licence; though for Ofcom to not re-award a licence to the incumbent is very unusual. I’d hope that, in this case, they’d think hard.

• Radio with pictures. A compelling clip from the BBC.

• “I admire my old BBC colleagues hugely. But some earn far too much”

Australia

• Over the summer holidays, two aussie radio stations played their entire music libraries (it took them 18 days).

• Channel Nine’s Today Show gets called-out for simply copying a BBC Breakfast promo. And they would have got away with it if it wasn’t for you pesky internet.

• Online Audio is valuable, it’s a premium product: Triton Digital’s Richard Palmer. (It’s also the opportunity for the audio industry to reset the low prices that we charge for radio: in the UK, at least, cost-per-thousand is much the same price now as it was in the mid 1990s.)

Elsewhere

• A FM/DAB+ radio with a colour screen and slideshow, on sale in NORMA stores in the Czech Republic for £48 / AUD$84. /via Tomas - TELEKO
• Radio still most trusted medium in Europe according to new EU data. Fake news!