Radioland, with James Cridland - radio futurologist

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A lot has happened since November 2014.

At the time, I was working in the roof - quite literally. My office space was in a room that was so illegal, when I bought the house they weren’t allowed to call it a room, even though it had stairs leading up to it.

In the winter months it could be made quite warm, since there wasn’t much of it. The room was the top of the house and you could just about stand up in it, if you bent your head and you stayed right in the middle, where the top of the roof was.

The window gave a view of the rooftops of North London suburbia: a view past some lovely trees which some joyless beaurocrat cut down, over to a park, and beyond it, Enfield - a little country town that had inexplicably ended up rather too close to the rest of London.

It was in this tiny room where I was sent an email from a nice man, asking me to start writing a column for a radio website; and I’ve written a column every single week since then; also producing a podcast version for a few years, too.

I’ve managed to do this every week, almost, in spite of moving 10,000 miles from that little room in North London to a slightly sunnier room in Brisbane in Queensland, Australia, where the radio dial is the same but different; and where as long as I have internet I can still enjoy almost any radio station on planet Earth.

Along the way, people have told me that radio was dying, and sniggered a little at my “radio futurologist” title - but here we are, five years later, with radio seemingly as popular as ever. The Nielsen figure still looks healthy in the US, GFK still looks good in Australia, and RAJAR is good in the UK - although each of them is showing some signs that radio is being kept alive by older listeners, and when our audience starts dying, they’ll do so literally.

We’ve also seen audio being part of our world more than ever before. Podcasting is capturing peoples’ imagination: perhaps the level playing field that podcasting offers has led to a rediscovery of the types of things that audio can do - from complex audio drama to interviews that are given space to breathe.

Podcasting, too, has led to a “pivot”, of sorts, for me. I continue to speak about radio’s future, but my days are now filled more with audio’s on-demand future, too, editing Podnews, a daily, free, newsletter about podcasting and on-demand.

I’ve now written almost five years of these columns. Some of them have been carefully researched over a few days; some typed hurriedly at 11pm; and some I’ve been quite proud of. At a conference last week, I was struck by how many people came up to me and told me that they read these columns every week.

That’s a lovely thing to say - but something I’m unlikely to hear that again, because this is my last column.

I’ve worked in radio for over thirty years now, so I doubt it’ll ever

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I'm over at https://james.crid.land

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Why don't programme directors pull more ads? And why are some of them still so bad?

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I'm over at https://james.crid.land and so should you be

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I once sat at the end of a telephone line, helping people tune into their favourite radio station. This was a real eye-opener. Many don’t even know the difference between AM and FM; and some sets are marked in strange ways to make it really hard to tune in. You probably know someone who have tuned in to their favourite radio station and never want you to touch their set in case they lose it forever.

Radio is, increasingly, available everywhere. But we don’t appear to be telling people where we are and how to tune in. And I find that curious.

For an FM/AM station, reminding people of the frequency you’re on is important: but many stations seem to not do that these days. I get it, localisation on network feeds is hard: but if you can manage it for adverts, you can manage it for station IDs. For listeners on FM or AM, if they forget the frequency, they’ll forget how to find you. This is a bad thing. You don’t want bad things. So, while it might lessen the clutter to just say “on FM”, as some stations do in the UK - LBC, I’m looking at you - it may be actively harming your audience not to give a frequency out.

But also, it’s a good idea to remind people how you can listen on other devices, and how. Because - guess what - someone might not know you’re on a smart speaker. Or available through the telly. Or on DAB+. On on this different HD frequency somewhere.

“On 97.3 FM, on DAB Digital Radio, on the Global Player, on Radioplayer, on lbc.co.uk, on your smart speaker, on Freeview channel 732, on Freesat channel 734, on Sky channel 0124, on Virgin Media channel 919, and on TalkTalk TV channel 627” is clearly not going to fly every single time you want to mention how to tune in.

But one of those in rotation - perhaps alongside the FM frequency - might be a better way to remind listeners that, yes, you’re available that way too. Every hour would be nice.

In my home town of Brisbane, two large AM stations never mention their frequency; many never mention they’re available online; none - not one - mention DAB+. If your listeners don’t know they can listen that way, you’ll lose them.

We know that keeping things simple works on-air. We also know that we need to make it simpler to tune in to the radio. One day, we’ll put these two pieces of useful knowledge together.

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I'm at https://james.crid.land

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It's 40 years since Trevor Horn wrote this song

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Something called BBC Notes was posted on the BBC’s Research and Development blog the other week. It’s a web app “that shows text, images, and links, to enhance the listening experience during live events, live broadcasts, and on demand”.

There are quite a lot of these types of thing appearing. Entale is a podcast app which is trying to do the same - when you listen to, say, Serial then you see the places they’re talking about, and maps, and links to discover more and all of that kind of thing. (It does very well in podcasts about beauty products, I’m told, where you can click stuff to buy).

At Podcast Movement I saw the Adori platform, which does the same kind of thing. It has a nice backend, allowing quick and easy addition of this data into a podcast, and some secret sauce in terms of how it adds the data into the audio file. Secret enough for them not to tell me, anyway.

It isn’t, of course, the first time this has been thought of. Fifteen years ago, I was playing with Nokia Visual Radio, which aimed to add visual augmentation to live radio. I found some screengrabs of it, if you want to take a peek.

There’s also DAB Slideshow, a method of adding an image to broadcasts, used by many different radio stations across the world (here’s a few examples).

There’s a few issues, I think, with all these types of services.

First - is it a rich enough experience? Does it add to the user’s enjoyment of the audio? Would it hold their attention, or offer interesting glanceable content?

Second - is it easy to produce quick visuals at scale, and ideally automated? If it is, does it fulfil the first requirement - that it’s good enough? If I’m broadcasting something about the town of Ilminster in Somerset, is it acceptable to just link to the Wikipedia article about Ilminster; and does anyone find that useful anyway?

...and third - does this give enough value to fundamentally change the user’s experience with audio...

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As Google knows, I’m in Kuala Lumpur today, in Malaysia. Google knows exactly where I am. It knows where I was yesterday; what airline I used to travel here; what news stories I read this morning; what’s in my diary for tomorrow. It knows what music I listen to, what shops I visit, who I email, when I email, how much money I have in the bank, what time I go to bed, what time I wake up, when I have a coffee, what rate my heart is beating. Google knows what medical problems I have, and what medical problems I think I have.

When searching the internet, Google’s results for me are tuned to my interests. They hide things that they don’t think I should read. And Google presents to me every day a list of news stories selected especially for me.

It’s a good job they’re not evil.

Facebook knows where I go, who I talk to, who my friends are. Facebook knows how old I am, if I’m feeling happy or sad. Facebook knows where I live, and using artificial intelligence based on the stories I read and the conversations I have, Facebook can work out how I vote. And Facebook presents to me every day a list of news stories and conversations that it thinks I’ll like, and deliberately hides from me the conversations and the news stories that it thinks I won’t like.

It’s a good job Facebook isn’t giving this data to anyone else.

Radio has a unique power. When I listen to the radio, I listen to people with common interests to me - they live in the same place, or like the same music. But because it isn’t ultra-personalised, like Google or Facebook can be, it can help people see both sides of the argument. It can help people discover stories they otherwise were unaware of. It helps connect people, and instead of polarising people to one belief or the other, helps understanding and harmony.

Radio is incredibly, uniquely, powerful. When used properly, radio is able to bring us together, as communities, as nations, as people. Radio can help our audience feel included in their community and their world; and can have many positive effects on mental health, social inclusion, and understanding of our fellow human beings.

As I sit in Radiodays Asia, it strikes me that we need to remember the power that we all have. The power of radio.

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Recently, I was at Podcast Movement in Orlando. It’s the largest podcast event in the world, I’d think, with a variety of tracks covering almost everything you needed to know about podcasting.

The event grows each year. Podcasting is increasingly serious business, with both Spotify and Google on the show floor this year, and Pandora also being very visible throughout the event (not least, providing rather lovely laptop stickers in every bag).

Apple were at the event, too, but in an invite-only, super-secret session only for the elite few. Arguably, they don’t need to remind podcasters that they exist - though Spotify is strong competition for them. Rumour is that they’re spending money on exclusive podcasts to woo their audience back: I’d argue that they’d be better served by enabling subscription to podcasts, and adding an Android app, but I’m just a writer, not a strategist.

I bumped into Brad Mielke, the host of the US’s Start Here podcast from ABC News. He’s clearly happy and excited about the work he’s doing: and excited, most, about the production value that the post-produced nature of podcasts can bring. “You can convey more with sound than just a straight back and forth interview”, he told me over a disappointing American coffee.

There were plenty of learnings. Martina Castro, CEO of a Spanish-language podcast company called Adonde Media, said to me during a panel that 50% of Spanish-speaking podcast listeners are listening to English content. There’s plenty of space for international growth, it seems.

And that international growth was seen later in the conference, as podcast producer Wondery told us that their hit podcast Dr Death had been launched in many different languages, including Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French and others. As I write this, they appear to have hit the top of the charts in virtually all those countries.

Podcasting appears to be growing up - while retaining its young charm. While big business is most certainly involved, including US radio’s largest broadcasters, it’s also a place where small independent podcasters still have a shot at making a hit podcast in their spare room. The smart money is scaling podcast advertising, so that those independent podcasters - the long tail - can begin earning money to support their work.

There’s literally nowhere else like Podcast Movement: so the organisers are planning two events next year: the main event in Dallas next August, and an event earlier in the year in Los Angeles.

The podcast world is one we can all learn from: as podcasters large and small get together to share best practices and invest in each other.

At a time when many US radio conferences have lost their excitement and enthusiasm, there’s much to learn from what the podcasters are up to.