Radioland, with James Cridland - radio futurologist

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Something fun is happening in my home town of Brisbane, Australia - some of our radio stations are on the move.

Top 40 station Hit 105 and rock station Triple M lived in buildings in North Quay next to the river, where they’ve been for the last twenty years. They’re moving two minutes’ walk away, up the hill to Petrie Terrace, a new entertainment district with a cinema, restaurants, and next to Caxton Street, one of Brisbane’s oldest entertainment streets with bars, pubs and clubs. It’s just a minute’s walk away from Suncorp stadium, the city’s sports and entertainment arena.

Meanwhile, the AC formatted “97.3”, and hot oldies station 4KQ, just moved from a dumpy building in Stones Corner, an out-of-town location 5km away from the city, where they’ve been for thirty years. They’re moving to a building on Coronation Drive in Milton, overlooking the river and close to both the city centre and to a restaurant district that also boasts the highest concentration of beer breweries, including Queensland’s famous XXXX.

Both sets of people are excited by the move - since, for the first time, they both get actual views of the city.

97.3 gains signage along one of Brisbane’s busiest roads and a significantly better working environment that should help recruitment, particularly in sales; while Hit 105 will be close to a new entertainment venue to be built in the next five years, currently called Brisbane Live. Hit 105 has never been able to see out of the studios before, and, so I’m told, the old building didn’t really get on well with Brisbane’s occasional subtropical rain storms - a tarpaulin and quite a few buckets being pressed into service every so often.

Triple M made the most of the move by auctioning off their rock memorabilia for charity, according to local TV station 7 News.

Radio stations really don’t need to be centrally located any more, of course. You could argue it makes little difference to the on-air sound, whether a station is in the middle of a business park or has prime real-estate in town. Technically, it doesn’t - but it’s easy for an out-of-town radio station to lose ties with the very city it broadcasts to.

If radio’s unique point of difference is that it offers a human connection and a shared experience, perhaps it’s important for the on-air team to live and work in the centre of the city, not in an anonymous building miles from anywhere. Only then can each and every person really feel part of the community they broadcast to.

Moving two stations is hard - moving four, in the same two weeks, is harder still. Here’s hoping everything works!

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There’s trouble for vTuner, the heritage company used by many manufacturers as an internet radio directory.

On May 1, vTuner’s service apparently fell over for eleven hours, and Frontier Silicon, who used the vTuner service for their internet radio modules (used by people like Roberts, Grundig and others) switched just a week later to a different provider - causing great upheaval for listeners, since all their presets suddenly stopped working (and many products needed a firmware update). Bose’s products also have ceased using vTuner’s database, too.

Peter Johnson, vTuner’s CEO, posted quite a rant on the Bose website revealing that the company charged “.40 cents” per product to vTuner, that Tunein has “a pathetic database”, and ends by claiming “What these consumer electronic companies want is free no matter how bad the quality of the service is”, adding that it “now looks like I will need to close vTuner soon.”

That’s bad enough - but there’s also rather larger trouble for TuneIn, who provide an app (which I bet you have), as well as power smart speakers from Amazon and Google.

Sony and Warner threatened back in 2017 to take TuneIn to court in the UK for what they claim is copyright infringement, and if I understand correctly, that court action is taking place this week, with the record companies being assisted by IFPI.

The reported claim is that TuneIn is linking to hundreds of unlicensed audio streams - which could mean streams that simply have no licensing at all, or could also mean out-of-area streams (many non-UK streams are audible in the UK, despite having no UK music licence).

Previous rulings by the European Court of Justice, which still governs UK law until at least the end of 2020, have said that providing an index to unlicensed content is a bad thing, hence why - for example - The Pirate Bay has been banned across Europe.

TuneIn’s own website is also pretty clear that it’s only legal to use TuneIn from the US (1c), and if you want to use it from outside the US, it’s up to you.

If this action succeeds, it probably means the closure of all of these services: and perhaps the end of cross-border internet radio listening overall.

There’s certainly trouble in the world of internet radio directories. iHeartRadio and Radioplayer, which are operated on the radio stations’ behalf, clearly offer a good option - but aren’t, yet, universal (either in terms of territory cover or stations included).

Perhaps this will please radio broadcasters, who wish to exert more control. But that will be bad news for radio listeners. It’s worth watching how this plays out: and, while internet is still a major part of radio’s future, there may be trouble ahead.

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Typically, when I speak at conferences, I start by pointing out how popular radio is. 9 out of 10 of us listen to the radio in any given week - whether you live in Boston Massachusetts, Boston England, or Boston in South Australia. (Probably. The last one doesn’t have radio statistics, but Brisbane’s 9 out of 10 too.)

Podcasting? At best, 2 out of 10; and lower in many countries.

Given the amount of change to the media landscape, why does radio do so well? I think a lot of it is due to habit. We’ve always listened to radio. It’s a habit to wake up to the clock radio, or to turn the radio on in the kitchen. It’s habit - and automatic - that the radio goes on in the car on the way to work.

Radio cottoned on to this in the 1960s and 1970s, when it stopped carrying individual shows like comedy, quizzes, farming programs and special hours for housewives. Radio changed to be a consistent offer, and a consistent listen. You’d always hear the same type of music, and the same type of programming, whenever you tuned in. The same people doing the same timeslots, week after week, month after month.

This is why attempts to unseat radio have been difficult: because you’re trying to break a habit. And, like coffee-drinking, cigarette smoking or a decent beer, habits are hard to dislodge.

Last week came news that the New York Times’s podcast, The Daily, is now doing two million downloads a day. Sure, it’s a far cry from NPR’s Morning Edition, which has 14.9 million people listening each week - but something to consider is that The Daily is succeeding in breaking peoples’ habits. There is a certain amount of the US population that, instead of the radio, now habitually listens to Michael Barbaro’s weird intonation every day. Their habits are being changed by highly produced daily podcasts that are long enough for their commute.

Habit, too, may be explaining why radio has a problem in many countries with younger audiences. They may still listen in roughly the numbers they did before: but they listen for far less time. And if you’ve heard people saying that audiences “grow into” radio listening, I’m here to tell you that, no, that’s not true. All the statistics I’ve seen show that younger audiences don’t magically change their habits later in life - and as they grow up, they continue listening to less radio than their parents.

Habit has been radio’s friend for the last fifty years - enabling it to successfully win the battle against the Walkman, MTV, and other new technologies. But habit could be radio’s enemy in the years to come, as habit-forming content appears elsewhere. Through addictively-great programming and innovative distribution, it’s up to us to keep the radio habit alive.

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

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NAB Show highlights a trend away from studio complexes

I recently went to the NAB Show in Las Vegas - the first time I’d been there for three years or so. I used to stay at The Riviera, a gloriously run down hotel and casino, which had two good things - first, it was a short walk away from the Convention Center, and therefore relatively easy to get to; second, it had an almost acceptable British pub in it, which was a nice home from home. Oh, and it was very cheap.

The Riviera was knocked down a few years ago, though. In its place this year was a lot of building work: the Convention Center is expanding, and where there was once a crappy hotel with awful wifi, there will soon be The West Halls, a place to fill with more exhibitors.

So this time, I discovered a new hotel - the LINQ, which is a monorail stop away from the convention centre. It doesn’t have the opulent fanciness of the Wynn, but it also doesn’t have the prices to match. The best bit of the LINQ is a European-style street off the strip, with a number of decent eating places down it. Spend a little time here, and you can nearly forget about the horrific nonsense of the rest of Las Vegas.

I spent much time in the audio part of the NAB Show, and noticed a small change: equipment manufacturers are making more stuff for home studios, rather than massive downtown studio facilities. Some manufacturers, at least, are recognising that work is changing for those that make great audio. We don’t need gorgeous studios in expensive locations, now that we have high-speed internet.

As one example: Rhod Sharpe, a radio presenter for BBC Radio 5 Live, has presented the same overnight show for the last twenty-five years - much of it from an eighteenth-century house in the US state of Massachusetts. He requires a microphone, a few monitors, a data link, and not much else.

There are more stories of radio stations being happier to leave the studio behind. Filippo Solibello, a broadcaster for Italian broadcaster RAI, sees a studio as a confining place: he much prefers to take his show on the road. He appears to need a microphone, a laptop, and a wifi connection.

Indeed, there are many stations - some on internet only, some on FM or DAB - which exist without having a broadcast centre at all: each show coming from the presenter’s home.

Radio’s unique selling point is a human connection and a shared experience: something that Spotify cannot possibly hope to do. Increasingly, that human connection and shared experience isn’t served by having presenters locked in a brightly-lit studio, wittering on about Kim Kardashian or interviewing movie stars. Better, perhaps, to get out and do stuff - whether live or nearly live - across your broadcast area.

If equipment manufacturers are beginning to notice the trend to home studios, perhaps that’s an opportunity for all of us to rethink how we make radio to keep it relevant for the future.

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I take a listen to one

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In a submission to government, Commercial Radio Australia, the Australian equivalent of the UK s Radiocentre, asks for, among other things, a legal requirement that people shoyld remove links to live radio streams, and podcasts, if the content owners ask.

The reason given is that other places might link to live streams or to podcasts, and therefore people won’t visit radio station websites any more, and therefore radio companies will lose out on the revenue from ad banners on those websites.

Well.

First: there’s no need to get government involved. If you don’t want others linking to your live stream, you can protect it: just ask Netflix, Spotify or even Apple’s Beats 1. If you don’t want others linking to your podcasts, just remove the RSS feed and nobody will be able to link to your podcasts any more. Technology to protect streams and files has been available for at least twenty years.

Second: for an ad-funded platform, it’s absolutely the wrong strategy to limit your potential audience. Your main goal should be to get more listeners to your ad-funded content.

Third: podcasting, in particular, works by a podcaster publishing an RSS feed. This feed is published deliberately to help other websites and apps to find individual episodes — without formal permission being given. The whole point, and success, of podcasting is that it’s open. To bring legal protection against people linking to your podcast is dangerous for the entire medium.

And fourth: “permission from the content owners”  is an interesting one. The content owners of much of radio’s output are the record companies, not the radio stations. The record companies are in perpetual fights with broadcast radio, and will be delighted to learn that you’ve handed them a way to switch off your internet streams.

The press release seems a scattergun list of issues — everything from better ad measurement, asking for less regulation, asking for more regulation, and asking for money. But the legal requirements about links to streams and especially to podcasts are dangerously misguided; and display a fundamental misunderstanding of how the medium works.

Just count yourself lucky you’re not in Australia.

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