James Cridland

Bluesky and your radio station

A blue sky on Niue island

There’s quite the stampede, at the moment, for Bluesky accounts. It’s a social media network that isn’t owned by Elon Musk, nor Mark Zuckerburg; and it seems to be adding a million users a day at the moment.

Bluesky is supposed to be decentralised. It uses a thing called the ATProtocol, and you can set up your own server, but in practice, it’s unlikely anyone will until Bluesky itself starts boosting bad things and censoring good things - there’s little benefit otherwise.

But - if your radio station wants to get onto Bluesky, one thing I’d very much recommend is to use your domain name as your nickname. So, instead of being known as @hot97.bsky.social you can simply be known as @hot97.com - which is verifiably you, and much easier to read out on-air in promos and things, when the time comes. (If you’re already on Bluesky, that’s cool - this will just change your nickname and you’ll keep all your existing followers.)

The same goes for you, personally: especially if you profess to knowing a few things about technology. It’s a three minute job for you, or whoever looks after your domain name.

You can follow me at Bluesky as @james.crid.land - and why not follow @radio.today and @mattdeegan.com and @mattcundill.com and other people who have sorted this out.

RCS

Another week, another radio listening survey release in Australia. On KIIS, Kyle & Jackie O posted worse figures both in Melbourne and in Sydney; yet the rumours are now relatively persistent that K&J will also be simulcast in Brisbane early next year (not least, a morning’s output of the show that weirdly included Brisbane in the weather forecasts, and a description of Kyle as a “Brisbane boy” - he is! Apparently, this show will be telescoped into a demo tape for Brisbane ad buyers.)

K&J posted a 5.2% share for breakfast. This time last year, the local show was posting 7.9%. (To put that into context, the #1 music station is Fox at 10.0%; the #1 speech is 3AW at an astonishing 22.5%.)

The knee-jerk reaction to K&J’s failure to rate in Melbourne is that the show isn’t “local”. But I think this misses the point. While the show has, indeed, failed to play the “local” game - with Kyle even being slightly derogatory to people in the city - it’s also failed to play the rest of the game for any new show. The great Steve Martin, my programme director at The Pulse, was reminding us every day that new listeners are joining all the time - so you have to remind people who you are and how your features work. K&J did that - for half an hour, at 6am, on their first day; and from that time have given virtually no affordance at all to their new audience, never explaining who the bewildering set of voices are on the air, and their back stories. You’ve been thrust into the Sydney show, with no hand-holding to the half-million listeners every day joining them in Melbourne. It’s this that is at fault (and the lazy sex talk that also acts as a distinct turn-off). It’s not, I’d argue, the loss of local.

Brisbane talkback station 4BC, however, appears to be determined to prove me wrong. This time last year, weekends on 4BC included local programming, including Spencer Howson, and had a 6.5% share. This year, they’ve been rebroadcasting a show from Sydney, and the weekend share is down to 4.4%. For a talkback station, perhaps local is a more important part of the “real and relevant” output - since most of the topics should be about the city where you are. I’m still not convinced that, for a “breakfast with the stars” type music show, locality is the most important part.

  • I was in Los Angeles last week. I’m always interested in what Uber drivers listen to. For the record, one drove to stony silence; one drove to an HD4 music station that was in something like Arabic; and the other two drove to their own collection (possibly Spotify). Interesting to see nobody listening to any of the mainstream stations.

  • In Los Angeles, Spotify launched Spotify for Creators, essentially a shot across the bows of YouTube. If you create a lot of video content, it might be worthwhile checking out their new “Spotify Partner Program” - which could earn you additional revenue for your content. After all, if someone is in Spotify, they’re probably into their music as well, so a good audience for you.

  • Thank you to JC Kean - “Keep up the good work, James! Appreciated here in the States.” - for buying me a coffee this week. Hello to Karol Stryja, who points out the whole country was talking about OFF Radio Kraków, which I covered last week. Great stunt, as I say! Thanks, Gavin Watson, for the coffee - “Always enjoy reading your newsletters James!” - and to Martin Corben, who tried to buy me a coffee but the link didn’t work for him. This is an alternative!

Want to supercharge your radio show? Here’s a £1 week-long trial of Show Prep - from a world class radio consultant and the best show-prep writer in the UK. Great for UK stations, or for English-language stations everywhere, too. (ad)

Where I am speaking next

I’m done for this year, but…

Supporters

Thank you to the supporters you see on this site, plus Richard Hilton, Emma Gibbs, Jocelyn Abbey and James Masterton for being regular supporters.

If you’d like to support my work in any way, you can BuyMeACoffee - become a member to give regularly or just give a one-off coffee, or five. Here’s where to do that. Or, alternately, here’s a way direct with Stripe.

Please do follow me on Mastodon, too: I’m @james@bne.social there. I’m much more active there than anywhere else. Though I’m on Bluesky as @james.crid.land as well.

My website has more detail about who I am, and what I do, and whether I can help you further.

My newsletter is supported by:

Previously...