James Cridland

Google speakers go quiet for radio

Indie 88

Welcome back to Radioland, and here’s something seemingly unreported by any of the radio trades - the great Google smart speaker bug of 2025, which wiped thousands of radio stations off these smart speakers for weeks.

As I understand it, here’s the story - Google rolled out new firmware to their smart speakers and Nest displays about four weeks ago.

This new firmware had the side-effect of breaking support for streaming AAC, a format of audio streaming that many radio stations use (higher quality at a lower bandwidth than MP3). So, asking for “Hey, Google, play FM105” resulted in nothing working, as some aggregator apps have mentioned online.

Of course, each affected radio station thought it was just a problem with their own feed, and it seems to have taken some time before radio stations realised it wasn’t just them that was affected: it was others, too. It was a worldwide glitch, and affected every radio station streaming in AAC variants. (Those streaming in MP3 were unaffected.)

Google’s team took a while to reverse the effects of the firmware upgrade (and I understand from some people that it may have been quite hard to convince Google of the severity of the issue). In the meantime, many stations switched streaming codecs to MP3, which continued to work. I believe it’s all fixed now… but for a number of weeks, many stations were unavailable. And as we know, radio is a habitual thing - breaking habits like this is bad for those stations. It’s a good job there wasn’t any emergency or anything.

I know it’s all about Alexa in some parts of the world; but Google’s speaker ecosystem is #1 in Australia and Canada, from research I’ve seen, and quite a #2 in the US and the UK. 150 million have been sold every year. It’s a large amount of listening, given the most popular thing people do with a smart speaker is listen to the radio (or set a timer).

Those I’ve talked to on this have all wanted to stay anonymous, seemingly concerned about upsetting Google. I’d just suggest to the radio industry, as my BBC pass once told me, “great things happen when we work together” - and it’s a concern when one change can have such an effect on us all.

The worldwide radio industry is still a set of small, disparate and mostly unconnected businesses. Spotify is not; and perhaps we should learn from that and collaborate more.

RCS

  • Congratulations to the winners of the ARIAS in the UK, the Radio Academy industry awards. Roy Martin from Radio Today suggests that they’ve lost their glitz - not sure I agree with all of his commentary, but part of the disappointment is that Global, the UK’s largest radio company, still refuses to take part - preferring to pat its own teams on the back. Big shame. Their people deserve the big stage. (Not least, Global’s Heart is now the UK’s biggest radio brand, beating BBC Radio 2 - cause for celebration).

  • In the US, AccuRadio, a heritage radio streamer, has entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, after being harassed by SoundExchange. AccuRadio (which is profitable) has spent over $13.5mn in royalties over the last two decades, and pays its current streaming royalties in full. It’s a peculiar strategy of SoundExchange to go after people who are actually paying - but I hope that the chapter 11 process means cooler, wiser heads at the collection agency.

  • Congratulations to Toni and Ryan, who won a Webby award for their podcast, and picked up their springy trophy last week. As Irene Hulme writes in her own Substack, these were radio stars which the Australian radio industry fumbled, blundered, and lost. Had I been in Athens for Radiodays Europe, one clip you’d have seen would be people queuing in a cinema to meet Toni and Ryan - the show epitomises “human connection and shared experience”. If only radio had been awake enough to get them.

  • I enjoyed taking part in Radiodays North America last week. Broadcast Dialogue has a good writeup of some of the things John and I said on stage. I got the sense that the Canadian radio industry has turned a corner, and is sounding more positive about the future. Let’s hope the CRTC helps the industry, rather than hinders - astonishingly, it took the Commission over a year to approve the sale of some of the Bell radio stations. This isn’t how business works, especially media.

  • Something to listen to - in the On The Media podcast currently is “the second season of The Divided Dial, which looks into radio. This season, the untold story of shortwave radio, a cousin of AM and FM radio that – while less-listened to – nevertheless has the distinct capacity to extend its broadcasts beyond national borders.” I’m still fascinated about shortwave, and the question I have… how many shortwave radio receivers are actually in use? I asked WNYC, who makes the series, and they said: “According to Katie’s research, it’s estimated that 600 million people might have a shortwave radio.” I would so love a source for that!

  • Some follow-ups:

    • CADA’s “Weekdays with Thy” AI voice, from Australia’s worst radio company ARN, appears to have irritatingly been a hit as far as audiences are concerned: her time slot is #1 in Sydney’s DAB+ chart. Except… it’s not as easy as that. CADA is available in many parts of the city on FM, unlike any other station on that DAB+ chart - so, no wonder it’s #1. (And no, the big reveal that it was AI isn’t included in these figures).
    • Last time, I suggested that Canada had changed the definition of a radio listener in PPM markets, down from 5 to 3 minutes. They haven’t - that’s only in the US. As I say in my amended post, I was confused by a piece which was a theoretical “what if”, fueled by Canadian minute-by-minute listening data. Canada hasn’t changed its methodology, and I apologise for the error.

I’m in London for the next week. Mine’s a London Pride.

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