Radio in the car: and bad software
I bought a new car last week. It’s a little electric MG car - one of the cheapest you can buy in Australia - and it’s a zippy little thing, whisking me around to school pickups and, unnervingly, gym appointments, which are apparently a thing these days.
It has a radio inside it, of course. But.
It has DAB installed, and it also has FM, but no AM band at all. I can’t pretend I care that much - the AM stations are also simulcast on DAB after all… but it’s an interesting omission. Something that I have been writing about and also totally overlooked when researching the car.
Second, the radio doesn’t start when you turn the car on. One of radio’s benefits in a car is, normally, that the next time you jump in and turn the key, it bursts into life. Not this one - it’s a conscious decision every time to turn the radio on. At least, sometimes it is. I’m a bit confused by it.
It is also quite bad UX, too - tuning by ensemble, and while it does decode slideshow if you press a button, it’s useless; giving you a postage-stamp size image that is partially overlaid with a DAB logo. Favourites have a little button, but the developers haven’t realised that DAB broadcasts include the data for “here’s how to show this station name in eight characters” as well as 16. There’s no need to scroll “ABC BRISBANE” round and round, when the data being broadcast includes a method of producing the abbreviation to “ABC BNE”.
So, it was interesting to watch Swedish Radio’s Tomas Granryd today at the 14th Atelier Radiophonique Romand in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. That’s him, above. He was talking about the Connected Car Playbook, an EBU initiative to help make car radios better.
Some of the ideas are great - ensuring that the radio in the car is easy to use, especially when using voice in the car - and that the basics work well (which they don’t appear to on my car radio, for example).
Some of the ideas are a little more self-serving: that if you ask for a piece of on-demand content from a radio station, that it must play within the radio station’s own app: forcing user registration and randomly different UX on car drivers.
Even so, it’s good to see that the EBU is talking with car manufacturers to make the in-car radio experience better. I hope that they’re not just talking to Volvo, Renault and Volkswagen, but also talking to comapnies outside Europe, like Toytoa, BYD, Polestar and SAIC, the company that makes my MG.
This is nice - Richard Berry lectures about radio in the University of Sunderland, and during the break, puts a radio station on. And then this happened…
New RAJAR radio listening figures in the UK came out last week - new Midas next week, by the way. Adam Bowie’s analysis includes the interesting fact that the average age of a Global or Bauer listener is 46. That seems quite high for companies that heavily promote their “youth” brands of Hits Radio and Capital. Matt Deegan’s post is also worth reading, as ever, pointing out that there are ten (ten!) new brand extension radio stations being measured this quarter, not including the BBC’s new services. And one shouldn’t forget Radio Today, which does a lot of analysis that people forget exists for some reason.
Finally, another speaker today was Marco Derighetti, the boss of Swiss public broadcaster SSR. His stations all left FM at the end of last year, and are now only on DAB; he was asked plenty of the same old anti-DAB questions, but seemed upbeat and confident. As well he might: the data here in Switzerland shows that FM accounts for only 17% of radio listening in this country; and just 8% only listen to FM.
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
- Radiodays Europe, Athens, Greece (Mar 9-11)
- Radio Days Ireland, Dublin, Ireland (Mar 27-28)
- Evolutions, Chicago IL, USA (Mar 31-Apr 3)
- Radiodays North America, Toronto ON, Canada (May 7-8)
- The Podcast Show, London, UK (May 20-21)
- Podcast Movement, Dallas TX, USA (Aug 18-21)
- Radiodays Asia tbc (Sep 1-3)
- Pennine Radio’s 50th birthday! In Bradford! But I can’t tell you the date!
- PodSummit YYC, Calgary, Canada (Sep 19-20)
Supporters
Thank you to the supporters below, plus Greg Strassell, Sam Phelps, 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.
I’m on Bluesky as @james.crid.land or on Mastodon as @james@bne.social
My website has more detail about who I am, and what I do, and whether I can help you further.