James Cridland

Triple J's Hottest 100; and Apple's stations

The #1 was Chappell Roan

Triple J, the ABC’s youth station, celebrated its fiftieth birthday last week. The Sydney Morning Herald writes a potted history of the station, but suggests it’s doing badly in the ratings and, well, more opportunity to bash the ABC. (It isn’t mentioned that the SMH is owned by Nine Networks, which has a radio business that competes with the ABC).

Former breakfast host Wil Anderson says “The ABC should not make any decisions with ratings in mind”, which is nice but misguided. No, of course there should be “ratings in mind” with all of the ABC’s decisions. An unlistened-to radio station is bad value for money and should be closed, no matter how worthy its aims might be.

It also ran its Hottest 100 last weekend. My twelve year-old was captivated, and insisted on listening. (Luckily for her, Taylor Swift made it into the chart for the first time, and Chappell Roan was the #1, a decision she agreed with). We had Triple J at Next Radio 2018, explaining what the big deal was, and what their learnings were - not least, “don’t do OBs”.

You know how big a station’s event is, when Dominos Pizza sends you an email containing “special offers for your listening party”. And, for the doubters about radio’s future out there… the #1 this year got the highest number of votes ever; so did the #2; and every song in the top four would have won the countdown last year with the number of votes received.

RCS

As proof, perhaps, that “live and local” isn’t the strategy to follow, the local television channel London Live went off the air earlier this week. It’s ten years old, and produced plenty of live and local programming in its earlier days.

But, London is too big to be “local”. I blogged about my experiment in hyper-local websites last year: mine focused on one postal area in London, N14, and there are 121 of those.

Something talking about N14 is hyper-local. But, living in London for fifteen years, I only ever visited Croydon twice; I never visited Hounslow until I stayed in a cheap hotel near there last year; and there are plenty of other parts of London to which I have no knowledge or interest.

I wonder whether the “live and local” mantra really works in a big city like London?

Apple added three new radio stations, Apple Música Uno, Apple Music Club and Apple Music Chill. You might justifiably suggest that Apple’s radio stations really aren’t that exciting - listening figures are unknown, but name anyone who’s heard something recently on Apple Music 1, its flagship service, go on, I’ll wait.

However - using Apple Music last year, I was impressed at the wealth of on-demand shows that exist in that service: searching for Taylor Swift or The Beatles gives you a number of deep-dive shows that play the songs, but also tell you things you didn’t know about the music. When thought of as “ways to generate unique, additional content”, the Apple radio stations seem to be a bright idea: you don’t get that with Spotify, after all.

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…

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