Switzerland to switch off FM; and Lazy Buggles

• Just 5,250 households take part in TV measurement in Australia. TVBlackBox got into one to have a look.

  • In 2016, there were 9.2m households in Australia; and almost three times the number of households in the UK (in 2017, there were 27.2m). Yet UK television research by BARB uses the same size panel - just 5,300 households. I’m sure the statistics works nonetheless. (RAJAR use 2,000 different people every week).

• Switzerland are turning off FM radio in 2024, which I think is slightly ahead of schedule. They’re the second country to commit to a switchoff of FM. (I suspect it’ll be complicated by local language broadcasts from France, Germany, Austria and Italy still being available on FM.)

  • As a reminder, Norway was first - here’s their report from March this year. The précis? Not a disaster. Not a massive success. 68% listened to radio daily in 2016 before the switchoff; an almost identical 67% listen to radio daily in 2019 - though weekly figures have dropped a little. Or, to compare, weekly radio reach in Norway and the UK are virtually identical.

• I’m looking forward to being in Prague for the ASI Conference - always a highlight of my year. If you’ve any interest in the above two stories, you should be coming.

• My latest blog post (this is the podcast version) is asking whether visual augmentation is a good thing for radio. Listen over here, and sorry for not bothering to edit out the link to David Lloyd this week. Naughty James.

• Interesting to see, often repeated in podcasting forums, advice to “use a dynamic microphone if your room is quite echoey”. So does a dynamic microphone, rather than a condenser, pick up less room noise? No, this is nonsense: it’s not the microphone you use, but the way you use it.

• Finally, nice to see a PD try their hand at something new: I heartily recommend ABC Australia’s Unravel podcast, which this season (called “Snowball”), is a story investigated by none other than triple j’s Ollie Wards. And he’s got his reasons. It’s a great, well-told story with more twists and turns than Bank underground station (which is quite a lot).

Video Killed The Radio Star is 40 years old this month.

Never mind that video didn’t kill the radio star - 9 out of 10 people in most countries listen to the radio every single week - it’s still used as a lazy headline or a lazy first paragraph; and radio seems to collectively shrug its shoulders at this repeated false allegation. Want some examples? Here are a few just in the last few months…

• “Before video killed the radio star” - a #lazybuggleslede on a story about a precursor to MTV, a show called PopClips.
• TV Insider randomly claims video killed the radio star in a story about doing something viral on the internet. #lazybuggleslede
• Popsugar, an entertainment website, says that music videos have been around since video killed the radio star @lazybuggleslede
• Writing a story about a radio presenter playing golf? It’s entirely irrelevant as well as being untruthful and lazy cliché, but I bet this Kansas City website can manage a #lazybugglesheadline.
• 9 Things That Will Be Obsolete Soon starts with a #lazybuggleslede, claiming that radio is already obsolete.
• The New Straits Times starts this opinion piece about politicians with a #lazybuggleslede, yet 95% of peninsula Malaysia listen each week.
• Video killed the radio star, lazily concludes this column about sports referees, printed in The Star in Malaysia. Star Media also, oh, run two highly successful radio stations in Kuala Lumpur. (I was there only a few weeks ago, in fact).
• A piece in Campaign Middle East waxes lyrical about the incredible power of radio. But I bet you can’t guess what headline the lazy subeditor gave it. #lazybugglesheadlines
• Best keep the last word to Trevor Horn, who wrote Video Killed The Radio Star: “Video did not kill the radio star. Maybe he had him down for a couple of minutes but he came back up again swinging and he’s still healthy.”

Thank you to Rupert Brun, Barrie Stephenson, Cleanfeed and Richard Hilton for your continued support.

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