Radioland, with James Cridland - radio futurologist

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I’m six foot four, something that I’m acutely aware of in two situations: first, whenever I’m on an economy airline flight, and second, whenever I’m on a subway train in Asia.

Those useful straps from the ceiling - normally out of my way in the US and Europe, are all fighting to slap me in the face in subway trains in places like Japan, where the average height is 5’7” (171 cm) or Malaysia, where the average is 5’4” (164 cm). Those hand straps get a lot of use - just not by me.

Where I see discomfort, others see opportunity - and so it is that a new Japanese organisation called Wakino Ad Company has spotted that commuters holding on to hand straps is an...advertising opportunity.

Yes, the good folks at Wakino are hiring Japanese models with your ad in their armpits. This from a country where people have even rented out their thighs for advertising before now, so maybe it’ll catch on. The first advertiser is, it turns out, a laser hair removal company.

Radio’s ad model is, in the main, still based on 30-seconds of someone shouting at you, followed by five or six more people shouting at you, then a nice jingle and back to the music. We’ve typically been pretty bad at maintaining the price for these things, too, so the interruptions have grown longer and more often.

On visiting the United States in the mid 2000s, one broadcaster proudly told us that his station had 47 minutes of commercials every hour in the breakfast show. Yikes.

Re-thinking how the revenue model works is a challenge; but we need to keep thinking.

I’ve nothing particularly to base this on, but I have a feeling that the days of the six-minute-long advertising stopset, (and the banner ad, for that matter) are going away. We should be focusing both on increasing revenue AND on reducing the amount of spots sold. This isn’t just a rate integrity issue - it’s a programming issue, too.

African radio has done some clever re-thinking, as Steve Martin from the BBC told the Next Radio conference in 2013 - selling funeral announcements, hiring a village hall, and even moving all the commercials into one hour in the late afternoon (which astonishingly works).

I’d not recommend any of that - and certainly wouldn’t go for advertising in armpits - but any ideas for replacements for the long advertising stopsets would be welcome.

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I spent last week at Podcast Movement in Philadelphia - a conference with 2,300 delegates, it dwarfs any radio conference I've been to.

This was a well-run conference: running to time throughout, with ten different tracks that delegates could go to.

Reflecting podcasting's diverse nature, some tracks were basic advice about how to promote your show, or what to do in your podcast intro. Other tracks were rather more commercial in nature, delving deep into cost-per-thousand, targeting and analytics.

Exhibitors offered everything, from microphones and mixers to hosting companies and guest-booking services. The conference hotel was packed, with a bar that was buzzing throughout. The thoughtful organisers had done a lot to encourage a diverse community spirit, even laying on childcare to those that needed it.

It was also different for other reasons: it was wildly positive.

Podcasting is still pretty small, even in the US. It's 4% of our total audio consumption, say Edison Research, and less than a fifth of the population listen to any podcast over the average week. Smart speakers are not being used for podcast listening to any degree. Google has only just woken up to podcasting. Revenue is small - the total US industry earnt just $314m last year.

Radio, on the other hand? 58% of audio consumption (including satellite); 93% of the population listen every week; and smart speakers are having a significantly positive effect. Revenue? 43 times larger, at $13.8bn in the US last year.

I bumped into a number of people who go to both conferences. All remarked how positive the podcasters were - and how negative the radio conferences are.

Is it the whiff of freshly-raised VC money? Is it that podcasters are younger than radio folk? Is it that they’re just more enthusiastic about the medium?

I believe there is plenty to be positive about for radio. In many countries it’s celebrating best-ever revenue, and best-ever audiences.

That’s why Matt Deegan and I run a radio conference every year - it’s called Next Radio, and it’s on 17th September this year in central London. You’ll enjoy over 25 positive speakers, with great ideas for radio and podcasting. You can buy tickets at https://next.radio

But in any case - when radio has far more audience, and far more revenue… why aren’t our conferences far more positive? Perhaps that’s something we can learn from podcasting.

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Two stories last week made me think.

First, this off-the-cuff tweet from a radio station in Scotland, having a day of “going retro” by… playing CDs.

I shared this in a Facebook group, and it wasn’t long before the comments descended into Monty Python’s Yorkshiremen sketch.

“Retro? I’ll give you retro,” said someone, before talking about cueing up 45s. “You had it easy,” said someone else, discussing editing on reel-to-reel.

I remembered my first full-time radio gig, doing afternoon drive at The Pulse in Bradford.

During a typical hour, I’d be playing a mixture of CDs and 45s; filling in full PRS returns, including record company and catalogue number. Each needed the levels setting and cueing to a suitable point. Every segue was, of course, live; selecting the right jingle or sweeper was up to me.

I’d be running to the fax machine outside the studio, where the AA would send over barely-legible hieroglyphics about travel issues (“A58 WB of Keighley TTL expect delays”) and essentially blind-reading these on-air.

The ads would be on individual carts which all needed fetching and putting away at the back of the studio; my news was at a clock-start at the top of the hour; without a producer I also needed to answer telephone calls and run contests myself. And somewhere in the midst of all this, I had to somehow work out something cogent to say.

You can sometimes understand the viewpoint of the former presenters in the group - who mostly appear to be driving trains, it seems - that radio isn’t what it once was. It isn’t. When the music and the ad breaks are all available at the push of a NEXT button, you can concentrate on other things; and the output should be (and almost invariably is) better.

The other piece of news was this piece of work by BBC News Labs, rethinking and prototyping online news story formats. It’s a good piece of work, informed by data.

It suddenly struck me that much of the structure of radio hasn’t changed from the days of 45s and carts.

We only got network news at the top of the hour twenty years ago, so that’s when we needed to take it. Many of us still break for news at the top of the hour, though, even if there’s no technical need for that any more (and plenty of evidence that news consumption is changing away from a “cram as much as you can” news bulletin).

We’ve moved away from carts, but we’re still selling thirty-second ads, clumping advertising stopsets together, and shoving many of them to the back of the hour for some reason. (Try setting your alarm clock to 6.45am to discover how bad this sounds).

There are plenty more thing we do in radio that haven’t changed in thirty years: a horrid old news jingle ‘because tradition’, using callsigns rather than a sensible brand, and the utter pointlessness of travel news.

I love the idea of rethinking things. Much of the time, that process reveals that it’s always done that way for a reason; some of the time, it hits on something new.

We should do more of it, don’t you think?

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James Purnell, the ultimate boss of BBC Radio, blogged late last week that ‘we need an industry chart for UK podcasts’.

He’s understood that the iTunes chart isn’t a chart at all, which is gratifying: that it’s a trending list, “which is great for audiences but content creators and distributors want to know reach and value.”

He writes that there’s no industry standard for a podcast chart; but there is an official top 40 for music; a sales chart for books; and of course an established “chart” for live radio (called RAJAR in the UK).

A few weeks ago, in a German radio conference, I asked what the weekly penetration figure was for radio - already knowing the answer. They don’t have one. I know that 90% of adults listen to the radio every week in the UK; that 93% of adults listen every week in the US; but Germany doesn’t have a similar figure, since they’ve never worked out radio audiences on a weekly basis. (86% listen to the radio on a daily basis in Bavaria, Germany, by the way).

Dig a little deeper, and there’s a myriad of differences between every country’s radio audience figures. Some use electronic pagers, some use websites, some use paper diaries; some are based on calling people at home; some revolve around knocking on doors. Some countries use more than one method.

In the UK, most radio stations are measured across their own unique transmission area. In Australia, there are distinct survey measurement areas (which your radio station’s own transmissions may only partially cover, or wildly exceed).

Ireland’s public numbers are based on “listened yesterday”, smoothed over a year’s worth of survey data. The UK is mostly driven by overall reach, a figure that the US calls cume. AQH is a standard currency in the US, but unheard of in most parts of Europe. Australia mainly uses share.

Norway measures radio in the same way as TV, but in most other countries, the two broadcast media are measured quite differently. The UK has an “other” column to indicate listening to radio stations who aren’t in the survey; Australia pretends they don’t exist. Some countries measure radio from 6am to midnight; others measure full 24-hours; others still measure 7am to 7pm.

I mention all of this because - yes - we need a proper chart for podcasting, and I’m delighted that the BBC is interested. It has, until now, refused to release its own podcast figures, claiming they’re “for the purposes of journalism, art or literature”.

However, podcasting is, by its very nature, global. We don’t need individual pieces of analysis for individual countries, working under different rules and different definitions. We need one standard way of measuring podcasts - wherever you are.

The IAB in the US have a standard methodology for measuring podcast downloads, which many podcast hosts are compliant with. That, at least, measures download figures in a consistent way; and podcasters moving from, say, Spreaker to Megaphone, will notice that the download statistics they’re given are roughly similar. That’s really helpful. We don’t need a new standard for that.

For actual consumption, NPR is working on RAD, an overly-complex measurement system designed to measure ads. It requires podcasters, hosts and app developers to all change their workflows to...

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I was in the sunny German city of Nuremberg last week, as the guest of the lokalrundfunktage. The state media regulator for Bavaria helps run a big, impressive conference with a surprising amount of people there.

The most impressive thing to me was that I was speaking at 1.30pm, and everyone turned up at 1.25pm. As you might know from conferences, the concept of people being early is… well, it just doesn’t happen. Except in Germany, it appears.

Earlier in the day, research company Kantar TNS revealed some data for Bavarian radio listening, and it’s interesting to take a peek at it, since it reveals some interesting trends.

It says that 15% of people use DAB in Bavaria in a typical week - that’s up by over a quarter year on year, and for the first time, DAB is more popular than internet listening, at least in terms of total reach.

That’s quite a change for Germany. DAB had a bit of a poor launch in the country, where they originally used a different set of frequencies, L Band, to the rest of the DAB countries at the time. Some receivers coped with L Band - most didn’t. And because L Band was a higher frequency that was worse at penetrating buildings and, you know, trees, and things - it resulted in pretty awful coverage. So, as a result, DAB didn’t really catch on. They’ve fixed all that now, and you can see the results.

DAB is up… radio through internet, cable and satellite is relatively static… but FM use has decreased: down by almost 5% year-on-year. It seems to me that if DAB didn’t exist, the German radio industry would be in a rather bad place.

The figures also show the average age per radio platform - an interesting set of figures I’ve not seen reported before. The average age of FM is 49. DAB is almost identical, at 48. Internet radio is a whole ten years younger - which, as you might guess, means that listening over satellite or cable is rather older. As ever, this points to being on the right platform for your audience. Satellite or cable attracts the older folk; internet attracts younger ones. Common sense, you might think - but with limited budgets, worth considering.

What’s certainly clear from these figures is that radio is continuing on its trajectory to be multi-platform. Less than half of the UK’s listening is to FM/AM radio; Germany’s not there yet - not that these figures are entirely comparable - but certainly well on the way.

As if to underline the multiplatform nature of these figures, I was interviewed after my keynote speech on a local student radio station, then on camera for Facebook, and then for a podcast.

While the Germans may have been astonishingly punctual for my keynote, my train back to Munich was delayed by 40 minutes. Well. Nobody’s perfect.

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Last week, US broadcaster Entercom decided to pull its streams off TuneIn, the radio aggregator. From now on, the stations will only be available on Entercom’s own radio streaming website, radio.com; and the radio.com smartphone app.

David Field, the company’s CEO, said “We are committed to making Radio.com a leader in the digital audio space”. Seemingly, this is the way he’s going to achieve it.

I’ve said before that we should lessen our reliance on TuneIn. The radio industry doesn’t own it, after all: and, by and large, they don’t particularly care about us. However, I’ve never advocated pulling your stations off TuneIn - because that’s the wrong thing to do.

Pulling your stations off TuneIn isn’t financially clever. The bulk of radio station revenue comes from radio listening, not from internet activities. If you can increase your total listening hours by 10%, then, roughly speaking, you increase your revenue by 10% as well.

PwC published a piece recently showing their predictions for the growth of radio in the Australian market. There’s plenty of growth in internet - but even by 2022, the company reckons that internet activities will be just 17% of total radio income.

Put simply, the best financial strategy for your radio station is to get more people listening - to make your radio station available in as many places as possible. That’s where the money is, and that’s where your focus should be.

Pulling your stations off TuneIn isn’t clever for your listeners, too.

TuneIn is the default radio provider on many smart speakers and connected televisions. Sure, you can build your own apps for those, too: but that’s expensive and is a sure-fire way of losing focus. It’s unlikely that your own teams are going to be talking to as many hardware companies and car manufacturers as TuneIn are. It’s really hard to be all things to all people.

When your stations are removed from TuneIn, what will your listeners do? Sure, some of them will go and download your own app; but many of them won’t - and will find a new station to listen to. I hate to break it to you, but there are many more stations playing “your easy favourites from the 80s, 90s and now”, you’ve not really got the monopoly on that.

Forcing your listeners to abandon an app they’ve chosen (presumably for a reason) is certainly a brave test of brand loyalty.

Moreover, forcing listeners to choose a provably worse app is a questionable choice. TuneIn on the Apple Store has a rating of 4.6; the Radio.com app has a rating of just 2.7. On Android, Radio.com’s app has an average review of 3.5, while TuneIn’s app has an average review of 4.4. Why would you force me to choose second-best?

The strategy for radio apps is, I’d suggest, relatively clear.

Make your stream available on every single possible device, and in every single possible app. Your radio station is the most monetisable asset you own. Appearance here is valuable for station trial, and essentially free marketing.

But then use your own data, programming and intelligence to make your own app the best listener experience. A feast for the eyes as well as the ears - better artwork, talent photos and connections, higher quality streams; perhaps skippable segments, personalised advertising, unique content and fewer ads.

Be everywhere. But instead of bullying your audience,...

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The radio industry has been slowly incorporating podcasting into its mix: both as a useful way of promoting some of our key talent, and increasingly as a way to get closer to clients by producing branded podcasts for them. Increasingly, sales teams are representing podcast networks as well as radio stations.

Last week, we were handed a gift from Google: as the search giant finally got into podcasting in a big way. They finally launched their podcasting app - Google Podcasts; and it’s already installed in hundreds of millions of Android phones.

This is important because Android represente over 80% of the global market in smartphones; and even in strong Apple countries like the US and Australia, Android still has around a 50% share.

Even now, 74% of Americans don’t listen to podcasts; so proper, inbuilt Android support is a significant doorway to making podcasting a mass media: something that has been eluding the industry for a while.

Part of the issue with podcasting has been that podcasters have had one simple place to link-to for Apple Podcasts. That’s guaranteed to work on any Apple iPhone or iPod Touch; because the Apple Podcasts app has been pre-installed for many years.

Now, we’ve the equivalent for Android phones: a link to play a podcast on Google Podcasts will, on an Android phone, just work. The podcast app is part of the Google Search app, which is installed on every new Android phone.

Additionally, Google have added a few Google smarts. First, the app itself - you can install an icon for it from the Google Play Store - has recommendations in it, as you’d expect; but they’re based on your listening. I listened to one episode of Christian O’Connell’s breakfast show from a radio station in Melbourne, and it recommended other podcasts I might enjoy (including Ricky Gervais’s show from SiriusXM). It also recommended more podcasts from the MouthMedia Network, a podcast publisher I’ve also listened to.

Probably the most interesting step is that a Google websearch now highlights podcasts, with a little ‘play’ button. That allows frictionless listening directly from a search result: so if you search for anything you’re interested in, you might get audio as well as a web page.

All this leads to the inevitable question: is a significant addition to the podcast landscape like this going to erode radio listening?

Or is it a great opportunity - allowing on-demand radio, in the form of podcasting, to reach many more people?

In any case, if you need it, I’ve written an FAQ about Google Podcasts, and what your station should do next, over on my podcasting newsletter website, Podnews.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Jamie Dupree is a radio reporter with Cox Media Group in the US, for WSB: and two years ago he lost his voice.

As a story on the BBC will tell you… he’s got it back. Kind of. A company based in Scotland has sampled his voice from a set of recordings: and he’s now back filing full reports for the company with the aid of voice synthesis.

The technology isn’t 100% perfect, but it’s certainly well on the way; and that’s - of course - interesting to radio.

If consistency is one thing that makes radio work - and most radio programmers agree - then it’s an obvious next step to have not just consistent music but consistent radio presenters. Indeed: the same radio presenters, twenty-four hours a day.

There are, already, radio stations like this. I wrote about the excellent, tight-sounding Carolina Classic Hits a while ago, which has the same radio presenter on-air twenty-four hours a day. The station sounds great, with crunch-and-roll links and an almost relentless up-tempo sound: and Rick Freeman has been on the air every hour of every day since 2012, thanks to a bank of well over 5,000 voicetracks.

But recording voice-tracks only gets you so far. What if you could go a little further. If voicetracked weeks in advance, your favourite radio personality can’t talk about yesterday’s World Cup game. But with this type of technology he can.

Indeed, this could even make famous radio presenters come back from the grave. (Indeed, this has already been done: Bob Monkhouse, a UK comedian, famously did a TV ad for prostate cancer awareness, four years after he died of the disease).

A number of years ago, I saw a presentation by a German radio company, who’d added a personalised clock alarm to their radio app. You’d wake up in the morning to hear the breakfast radio presenters say “Good morning James!” - clever, but it turns out that you only need record a hundred first names to cover the vast majority of your audience.

With voice synthesis, personalised radio could be something else.

“Now, here’s a great new song from Taylor Swift: and you’ve ten minutes, James, before you need to leave for work, so crank this song up while you get ready!”

“Should be a warm day today, but maybe some rain this afternoon. In your task list it says you need to visit the dry-cleaner, so maybe you want to do that this morning?”

The opportunities are endless.

And for television? Well, the technology to produce fake videos - perhaps to make Barack Obama say something he didn’t really say - is already out there - and getting much more realistic.

The preceding column was written by a human being. At least, this week it was.

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Transcript:

NPR’s audience is up.

“The average weekly broadcast audiences of the top 20 NPR member stations continue to grow — from 8.7 million in 2015 to 11.2 million last year”, says an article in NiemanLab. They’re on record highs in terms of total audience.

NPR’s mobile apps are growing in use, too; and paid station membership - part of NPR’s funding - is also increasing, as is revenue overall.

Broadcast radio listening by 25-44 year-olds to NPR programming increased by 26% in 2016 (the company didn’t split ages out in their 2017 release). That’s a significant growth; but it’s also listeners who don’t typically listen to talk radio of NPR’s type.

So what’s making younger audiences listen to NPR?

Obviously, the news is one thing. That’s a large part of NPR’s output in any given week; and there’s certainly evidence that all news media has seen an uplift since the election of President Donald Trump. Whatever you might think of his politics, he’s certainly been newsworthy.

Another thing, though, is NPR’s distribution strategy. Their programming is, literally, everywhere. From podcasting to smart speakers, NPR is almost omnipresent on a connected device.

Podcasts are an obvious part of NPR’s strategy. They’re easily the world’s largest podcaster. Some programs make it directly onto podcast, while there’s a digital-first strategy for some programming - not least ‘Up First’, NPR’s daily podcast, which according to Podtrac is the third most-popular podcast in the US.

A second is their use of smart speakers. Amplifi Media report that between November 2017 and March 2018, NPR member-station streaming from Amazon Echo more than quadrupled; and Amazon and Google smart speakers account for over 16% of weekly total listening hours for NPR member station streams.

Their NPR One app is another important part. A personalised, skippable news radio stream, it delivers a different form of ‘radio’ which is much more suited to an interactive device like a mobile phone. It will, undoubtedly, gain them different listeners than a linear stream.

Back in the mid 2000s, when I was running Virgin Radio’s digital strategy, 20% of our superfans told us that they’d first heard the radio station online; and then found us on additional platforms, too - like broadcast radio. Digital undoubtedly added to the station’s audience figures.

NPR’s success seems to back that up. Be available on as many platforms as you can: and uniquely tailor your product for each of them if you’re able. If fusty old public radio can manage it….

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Article is here: https://medium.com/@JamesCridland/are-we-moving-to-an-all-ip-media-future-377802e03dd5

Music by Ignite Jingles

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