Radiocentre's 2025 - and closures as we move into 2026

Normally, I’d wait until next week to send out the first Radioland of the year. But there’s already too much news, so… here we are! Happy New Year.

• I’ve long been impressed at Radiocentre in the UK - a vibrant trade body for the radio industry which is probably a good reason why UK radio is so well thought-of and successful. They’ve published their Annual Review 2025, which is only two pages but there’s a lot there. If you’re not in the UK, can you say that your own trade organisation has done as much as Radiocentre has in the past year?

• Streamz 100.5 is a new station in Montgomery AL, USA, which is choosing its entire playlist based on music streaming stats for the city. The station says this is a first-ever; its using a service called StreamStats from Bridge Ratings. If the data is filtered for the age-group that the station is aiming for, then it sounds like an interesting way to produce a music policy - though if it just offers the same music you can get on your streaming device (but with horrible ads and no way to skip the bad songs) then I wonder why you’d tune in?

• Christian O’Connell’s new “national” breakfast show starts on Sydney’s GOLD 101.7 later this month; but he did a week in Sydney (just for Sydney) before Christmas. A bit of a baptism of fire, given his week was directly after the atrocity in Bondi Beach - but Christian is a professional broadcaster who knew how to pitch things. He posted some content from it on his Facebook page - and the whole thing is available as a podcast. You’ll recall that smut-master Kyle didn’t even bother going to Melbourne before his launch.

  • Clearly, ARN is missing a trick by not putting this show onto 97.3 in Brisbane (it will, though, be on DAB+, which a third of Aussies use every week in the cap cities). Gold would be a clear market leader given an FM frequency, but instead ARN is using Kiis 97.3 to compete against two other top 40 format stations on FM, leaving the only oldies FM outlet to the tired, sports-infused, dad-rock Triple M, and nothing else grown-up for anyone over the age of 35. Gold 97.3 is the obvious choice. As a Christmas present, ARN, I’ve got gold973.com.au for you, all safe and sound for when you launch.

• In Canada, Numeris published some listening trends for Q3/25. There’s more listening to radio at home (Edison Research says similar about at-home audio listening in the US).

  • Average weekly hours per listener is also listed in this data; most markets are up.
  • Radio streaming accounts for around 12-16% of total radio audience through the workday. (Here we are in 2025, and live radio hits a peak of 16% of total radio listening. Does Radioplayer Canada / iHeartRadio Canada / etc get only 16% of all mentions on-air? I bet it doesn’t.)

• I was interviewed on ABC Radio Brisbane and ABC Radio Perth about AM’s future, and the ABC’s Radio Perth switching to FM. You can listen - and watch!

• Spotify added a playlist mix feature. I tried it, to discover that it’s fatally flawed, sadly.

Classifieds

• Supercharge your radio show with world-class prep: the right show prep delivered to you on time, EVERY day, without fail. Grab a £1 week-long trial of Show Prep and stop chasing round looking for things to use on your show, running out of time before the show, and trying to sight-read the newspapers!

Closures

My, the end of the year means a lot of closures.

• MTV closed down its music channels. Its last song: Video Killed the Radio Star. Karma! The BBC interviewed Ray Cokes from MTV Europe - he used to get 2,500 letters every day! While the last ten minutes of Absolute Radio on 1215 was spent with a beautifully crafted piece of audio, the last song played on MTV’s music channel just faded away, and was replaced with a rotating logo with some scrolling text - the first part of which said “Default text”. If MTV meant anything to you, it certainly didn’t mean anything to its final owners.

• In Ireland, RTÉ Pulse, RTÉ 2XM, RTÉjr Radio and RTÉ Radio 1 Extra all closed. Here’s closing audio from 2XM (alternative/indie - last track Joy Division’s Transmission); and Pulse (dance/hiphop - last track: Ultracynic’s Nothing is Forever). Also, closing audio from Radio 1 Extra, which perplexingly ends with a back-announce of the just-finished show by a continuity announcer, then a few seconds of some rubbish jazz, followed by “THIS STATION IS NO LONGER BROADCASTING”. A graceless finish. The stations were additional services for DAB, but RTÉ closed its DAB services in 2021, and these services have only been online and via TV since. Notably, RTÉ Gold continues.

• A lovely last column from Perry Michael Simon, an excellent writer about radio who will be missed. He says he’ll happily be bought lunch by anyone in South Florida; I don’t know him well enough to ask, and anyway when I’ll be in Florida in a week or so, he’ll still be more than two hours drive away. But I hope he enjoys not having to write The Thing every week; he’s one of those that cares about the industry.

• AM switchoff news - in Colombia, sports/talk national format Antena 2 went off-air on Dec 31. Its owner, RCN Radio, is also switching many of its other AM services to FM, and/or switching AM frequencies for “Alerta” (its local network) and La FM (national talk). Earlier in the year, it made a significant reorganisation of its stations, removing many local brands. Founded in 1949, RCN Radio is a commercial broadcaster, owned by a company that also owns soft drinks, textiles, a football team, car dealers and farming equipment.

• In Thailand, 1,993 community FM frequencies were placed up for auction. The government raised just over US $2mn from the auction, with 2,237 companies participating. The most expensive licence in the country was 94.5 in Chaing Mai, which went for US $44,500 for a five-year licence.

  • In Pattaya, the English-language Fabulous 103 FM were only allowed to bid for two frequencies (neither of them 103). One of those licences went for US $25,000 to another bidder. The station says that the process has made a third of all stations disappear: from 1 January they’ve been online-only.
  • Unconnected (I think), in Bangkok, Tero Radio has closed after 35 years, according to an announcement on its website. “Due to shifting trends in media consumption, we have faced significant challenges that have made it impossible for us to continue”. They ran four stations including Virgin Hitz, more recently just “Hitz”, and I visited their studios in 2010. The Thai radio industry is predicted to drop from $76mn to $73mn in ad revenue for 2026; but it’s also a difficult market to operate in - FM signals are owned by the government, and when I visited in 2010, the operators of the stations had to pause every hour for state news.

I also blogged about getting Linux to work on an old MacBook, a review of the electric car I’ve driven over the last year, and a review of an email forwarding solution, because of course I did.

Where I am speaking next

• Podfest, Orlando FL, USA (Jan 15-18) Where we’ve been - and where we’re going: A look back at where we’ve come from, including last year’s podcast news and trends, to help us understand how podcasting is changing and how we should be changing with it. Plus, a look forward to what to do in 2026.

• Radiodays Europe, Riga, Latvia (Mar 22-24) 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.

• The Podcast Show, London, London UK (May 20-21)

Supporters

Thank you to @grtdane for ten (10!) coffees. “Good to see someone covering the subject I love, we can’t put James on the Cover Of the Rolling stone but we can do better than Dr Hook did by buying 5 copies for their mothers, I’ve bought 10 for James,” they write. I know nothing about who they are, and buymeacoffee isn’t telling me. So thank you, and please get in touch!

Also, thank you to Bennett Kobb, who contacted me with a lot of information about the US’s National Public Warning System, which covers 90% of the US population (assuming that the US population own AM radio receivers). I plan to write a little more about this shortly.

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 Mastodon/fediverse as @james@bne.social - or you might find me on Threads or BlueSky.

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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