James Cridland

AI radio stations, and Sydney's radio goodbyes

Excited about this sponsorship

Above: I was a proud sponsor of the Independent Podcast Awards a few weeks ago

The NYT shares a story about OFF Radio Kraków, a radio station in Poland (run by Polish Radio, the Polish equivalent of the BBC). It apparently turned all-AI, and AI presenters were used to present programmes, including an AI-generated interview with Wisława Szymborska, a Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet who died in 2012. It lasted for a week, to some uproar, but then closed.

But, is there more to this story than meets the eye? Quite possibly. The station - on DAB+ and online only, not on FM - had “next to no listeners” (data from 2019, the last I can find, gives it an audience share of 0.2%), and so desperately needed some kind of trick to keep it going. The complaints were drummed-up by Lukasz Zaleski and Mateusz Demski, two former presenters of the station: but they weren’t replaced by AI; they were replaced by non-stop music, in August. (Lukasz Zaleski did one show a week for the station, and was paid $62 per show). So, there isn’t even a “humans being replaced by AI” story in here.

In short, it was just a stunt. A clever one, but a stunt, nevertheless.

RCS

In Australia, it’s the end of the ratings year shortly, and announcements are being made about who stays and who goes. Three big Sydney radio names are going.

After a radio career since 1953, 2SM’s John Laws retired (again), and did his last show on Friday.

2GB’s Ray Hadley, who’s been on radio since 1982, announced he would do his last show on Dec 13.

And 702 ABC Radio Sydney’s Richard Glover retires this December, after 26 years. (I’ve spent some time with Richard - you couldn’t ask for a nicer, more humble person. What a treat).

This amount of change is quite big for one market. The excellent Ashley Jones from USQ suggests that it’ll mean a slump in the ratings. Only, I’d suggest, if listeners don’t know where to go: but many radio companies can’t afford the kind of marketing they once did.

  • Fun fact from Adam Bowie - in the UK, there are 967,000 people who listen to podcasts, but don’t listen to any radio. (12.6mn people listen to podcasts each week as a whole.)

  • Mick Ord wrote a piece for the bulletin of the Voice of the Listener and Viewer about BBC Local Radio. Find it here on page 6.

  • In his newsletter, Eric Nuzum received around six different questions on open vs proprietary access to podcasts. “The worst impact on the open RSS feed is that it just makes things confusing for listeners. They just want to find the shows they want where they expect to find them–and get lost (and then disinterested) when we start putting obstacles in their way.” … “Also no podcast or even podcasting company is big enough on their own to undermine Apple and Spotify’s positions in podcasting. Individual companies and networks don’t have the leverage they wish they did. When they try to throw some weight around, at best nothing happens, and at worst they only harm themselves.” My views are over here; and I have at least one person at a public service broadcaster telling me that they were asked uncomfortable questions about that station’s exclusivity as a direct result. He just told them that I was wrong. That’s always a possibility!

  • A discussion on Facebook reminds me of “Radioline”, a premium phone service from British Telecom in the early 1980s. In most big cities, if you dialled 8069 then for 5p/min you could listen to your local commercial radio station. Some stations even managed to get their MW wavelength - Radio City was available on 194 in Liverpool. I do remember realising that you could add the area code in front to listen long-distance to those stations: 0782 8069 was Signal Radio, anywhere in the country. I didn’t listen for very long. 5p/min was a lot.

If you like trip reports that have nothing to do with radio at all, you might like my recent trip to Venice.

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Where I am speaking next

I’m done for this year, but…

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