Tim Davie, Heart, AI traffic - and ACMA again

This is Radioland, my radio trends newsletter.

“I’m really sorry, James, but I won’t be able to see your talk tomorrow.” That was the last time Tim Davie, the Director General of the BBC, spoke to me - at a public service broadcasting conference in Canada in 2024.

Earlier, Tim had started his speech in a self-deprecating way, saying that at overseas conferences like these, he has to explain what “Director General” means, since virtually nobody knows. Apparently, the usual reaction is: “What, so you’re in charge of the whole thing?”

Later that day, he came to find me, to apologise for having to leave early the next morning. That’s the BBC’s CEO, the man in charge of (by some measures) the biggest broadcaster in the world, who spent time to come and find me, an insignificant guy who writes a podcast newsletter for a living, and this newsletter for fun. That made me feel quite special.

Having worked at the BBC at the same time as Tim Davie - I was in two meetings with him during my entire career - I welcomed his appointment in 2020. He’s impatient to get stuff done, aggressively clear-minded, and doubtless has made mistakes - but he’s good thing, a decent man, and he’ll be missed at the BBC.

The real crisis in public service broadcasting is that there is no-one immediately obvious who’d replace him. And, to be honest: who’d want to?

(Also, see David Lloyd)

And no, if you’re expecting me to opine about the BBC’s current crisis, there’ll be none of that.

I’d just gently point out that:

• the public of the UK pay £3.8bn a year for the BBC
• 84% of UK adults use the BBC every week
• 70% of them think it does a good job
• 62% still believe BBC News is trustworthy, in spite of all other media sources telling them otherwise every single day.

If Donald Trump really thinks that he deserves $5bn of the UK public’s money because he was badly edited, he needs to ‘give his head a wobble’, if I may quote a UK broadcaster.

• In Australia, SCA has launched a radio station called Heart. If you’re expecting to be able to “turn up the feel good” and enjoy a version of the vibrant Heart from the UK, then you’ll be disappointed: it’s a non-stop music service, promising interruption-free music with no talk - as long as you don’t count the constant voiceovers between every song as either a) talk, and b) interruptions. As below, I’m speaking at Radiodays Europe next March about the future of radio, and as part of that, I’ve opinions about this sort of thing.
  • Want to listen to 30-minutes telescoped of SCA’s Heart? Here you go - a fun game is to count the number of different positioning statements. I count nine.

Classifieds

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• In the US, podcasting is “probably the hottest category of media right now”, according to iHeart CEO Bob Pittman. iHeartMedia announced its financial report for Q3/25. Podcast revenue grew +22.5% year-on-year to $139.7mn. About half of iHeart’s podcasting advertising revenue came from iHeart’s local sales force - that figure was 11% in Q3/20. Podcasting contributed a record 14% to the business’s revenue; “We believe we have the most profitable podcasting business in the United States.”

  • The “multiplatform group”, which runs the radio stations, saw revenue down 5%. The company announced an additional $50mn of savings for next year.

• I covered AI-powered news last week, not particularly positively, but in the UK, Bauer are now producing AI-voiced travel news bulletins, working with INRIX. Bauer produces seemingly 100 different versions of Greatest Hits Radio (oldies), and around 40 versions of Hits Radio (top40). Theoretically at breakfast, this system could deliver more than three hundred properly local travel bulletins in an hour. As I understand it, the news is still humanly-produced, just uses AI voices. For what it’s worth, this is precisely what AI is good for - leading to better, more local, information. Impressive. Here’s some audio:

• In the UK, J-ET, the UK radio trading system, has added digital audio trading (including podcasts) to its tool, working with Global’s DAX and Bauer’s AudioXI. J-ET has been digitally trading linear radio since 2002, and handles more than 98% of national radio sales in the country. And in the US, the opposite: Ad-buying platform StackAdapt announced an integration with iHeartMedia to incorporate broadcast radio into its programmatic ad-planning tools.

• In Canada, TuneIn has been acquired by Canadian broadcaster Stingray for as much as US $175mn. TuneIn maintains live radio and podcast databases used by companies like Apple, Google and auto manufacturers, but has made multiple layoffs over the past few years, and removed the ability for podcasters to submit new podcasts into its database in February 2024. I’m quite excited to see new life breathed into TuneIn (though I’d note that TuneIn’s ads are sold in the US by iHeart - Stingray is a competitor of iHeart in Canada.)

• In Australia, ARN issued a trading update warning that profit for this year is likely to be down -27%; and that October ad revenue is down 10% year-on-year. In June, radio competitor SCA reported +5% in year-on-year revenue while ARN reported at the time a 7% decline in revenue. You’d have to assume that the MadFudgingWitches campaign against Kyle & Jackie O - which has resulted in more than 540 advertisers withdrawing from the show - is having some effect. ARN says it’s to make more cuts; meanwhile K&J are still trousering $20mn a year. Speaking of which…

ACMA has acted against Kyle & Jackie O! No, wait, they’ve proposed action against Kyle & Jackie O. The action they’ve proposed is that ARN has to follow the existing rules as a licence condition. (No, literally, that’s it.) It’s now up to ARN to respond to ACMA’s proposal by December 3, and then ACMA will think about their response, and then, presumably next year, ACMA will formally suggest that ARN now must follow the rules.

If this seems utterly pointless to you: as I understand it, ACMA actually lacks any authority to do anything unless it’s a breach of a “licence condition”, and the existing CRA Code of Practice isn’t actually a licence condition, it’s just a gentleman’s agreement of what commercial radio will do. (Here’s the Commercial Radio Codes of Practice, and the Community Radio Codes of Practice for good measure). You might ask yourself why the Australian industry’s codes of practice aren’t de-facto licence conditions, as I did, but who knows. I’ve asked ACMA about this via their public email address and got no response - and if they have a press office, it’s very well hidden from the press.

Anyway, judging by Kyle’s reaction, it seems this could be quite serious. Now he’s being told to follow the rules Kyle is incensed, calling them “fake complaints”, and threatening to leave. We can only hope.

Meanwhile, radio “expert” Wade Kingsley, who supports this newsletter, agrees with Kyle, and thinks that any attempt to curb the obscenities he feeds his audience - 16% of whom are kids - is “censorship”. I’d agree, if Kyle wasn’t using public spectrum - he can do what he likes online. But if you have been gifted public spectrum, which is there for everyone, you should at least attempt public decency.

(And ARN is gifted it. Commercial radio normally pays for access to public radio spectrum under the Commercial Broadcasting Tax, which is AUD $51,000 a year for high density areas - £25,000 or USS $33,236. This year, though, there’s no charge for reasons of “temporary relief”, which reminds me of the contents of one of Kyle’s segments.)

Thank you to Radioland reader Henry for three (three!) coffees. “I discovered your newsletter inadvertently and your coverage of the shifting BBC landscape has kept my interest. Thanks for all you do!” Thank you, Henry - that’s good of you!

Where I am speaking next

• Radiodays Europe, Riga, Latvia, (Mar 22-24, 2026) The future of audio is people-powered: The way people consume media is changing. James Cridland, the radio futurologist, takes a look at global trends in radio and on-demand. How will we listen - on which devices? How can we make our output truly unique? How do we do it in a resource-efficient way? And what part does video play in the future of audio? In this wide-ranging session, bringing together data from North America, Asia, Australia and Europe, we’ll learn why the future is bright - as long as we understand why our audience comes to us in the first place.

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.

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I’m on Bluesky as @james.crid.land or on Mastodon as @james@bne.social - tip, use the second one.

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

Selected bits from Radioland are in RadioInfo in Australia, and RAIN News in the US
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