James Cridland

ABC Radio Brisbane celebrates 100 years on-air

ABC Radio Brisbane's Steve Austin (left) and me

This is Radioland, my radio newsletter.

What is now ABC Radio Brisbane launched on 27 July 1925, at 1pm, with the Market Report, followed by the Stock Exchange and the weather, after which in a display of programming genius, the station, um, closed down until 6.30pm. Rae Allen has written a full history on his website.

It was quite the honour to have been asked to be on the station on its one hundredth birthday. I was asked whether I’d give my thoughts on the output of the station - which I hurriedly declined - but a chat about the future of the station might be fun, I thought. I discovered, on a chilly winter morning, that they’d be broadcasting live from the Queen Street Mall in the centre of the city. A very nice t-shirt has been made, which my wife excellently ordered for me ahead of time as a gift, so I caught the bus into Brisbane to have a chat with Steve Austin. There we both are!

It was a day of celebration, though I did have to mention that “ABC senior management should give you an FM licence”…

RCS

  • Last week, I linked to a video about the BBC moving radio studios from Radio TechCon; this week, this is Bauer Media moving studios - a not altogether smooth move, if I can read between the lines, but a fascinating look into London’s newest radio broadcast centre.

  • Saga Communications in the US is replacing their voiceover talents (for imaging) with AI cloned voices. That has saved jobs, rather than cost them, according to the report. (I use an AI voiceover for the Podnews Weekly Review; “she” reads an ad about 39 minutes in, so I can hardly pass judgement here. Incidentally, that podcast of mine goes through an automated tool that removes “um” and “er” filler words.)

  • A public beta of iOS 26, the next operating system for iPhone, has been made available. I’ve had the developer version for some time, and tried out the Apple Music “auto mix”, run by the company’s AI systems. It’s (mostly) really very good - better than any other streaming service I’ve heard (and, frankly, nicer than many radio stations manage). Hear what it did to my music over here.

The BBC Sounds app is now turned off for anyone outside the UK.

  • If you still have the app on your phone, it’s trivial to get past: a) find a UK VPN, and successfully use the BBC Sounds app on it just once. That appears to reset the holiday clock for a month, and you’ll still be able to use BBC Sounds for now. But, the BBC Sounds app is no longer available in App Stores anywhere outside the UK, so if the BBC want to break it, they just need to update it and check for the latest version.
  • If you just want to listen to live radio, no need for even that - just visit bbc.co.uk/(radiostationname) - like bbc.co.uk/radio2 or bbc.co.uk/radioleeds. Or use TuneIn or Apple Music or anything else.

As far as I can see, the BBC app is just a website wrapper, so it doesn’t work with Apple Carplay or Android Audio. But, that does mean that if you want to see what the “BBC app” is like, then use a VPN and access bbc.com - it’s almost exactly the same experience. The main issue that people have found is the lack of any scoped search for BBC Audio, so a search for “The Archers” results in the top search results being all about sport.

I’m slightly surprised at the copy on the BBC’s subscription webpage (available in the US only). Using a font that isn’t Reith Serif, and in a text size that surely isn’t BBC standard, the page contains a list of the things that it appears, $8.99/month subscribers get unlimited access to - including, er, BBC World Service. It looks very much to me as if the BBC is trying to claim that you’ll need a subscription to access the radio station in the future. It does get government grant funding of £104mn (and £158mn from the licence fee), so I’m surprised that they can put that behind the subscription wall as well.

It’s the lack of catch-up that hurts a bit, especially for those of us not in “good” timezones. As one example, the BBC’s “Today” programme is now unavailable via catchup internationally. However, rejoice: there is a podcast, called “Best of Today”, but there’s been no updates to it since October 2024, so presumably there’s been nothing good on since then‽

Thank you to the excellent Jarrod Gräetz, who sent over five coffees! Now running the Gräetz Media Group, he calls himself an Äudienceologist, which - well, what a ridiculous thing to take a word and add “ologist” to the end and hope you’ll get away with it. Anyway, he’s good and enthusiastic about the future of radio, and worth chasing up.

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

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Selected bits from Radioland are in RadioInfo in Australia, and RAIN News in the US
Lesen Sie außerdem ausgewählte Artikel auf Deutsch in Radioszene

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