Radioland, with James Cridland - radio futurologist

Over at https://james.crid.land/update/chris-evans-breakfast-show-podcast is the links and the text, where I talk about a new podcast I foundThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

The links and more are over here: https://james.crid.land/update/radio-on-a-radioThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

You'll find all the links and things over here: https://james.crid.land/update/global-female-voicesThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

You'll find all the links over here - https://james.crid.land/update/language-pleaseThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Read this over here: https://james.crid.land/update/who-owns-inside-radioThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

All the links are all over here: https://james.crid.land/update/swiss-dab-fmThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Links and more over here: https://james.crid.land/update/podcasts-radio-deezerThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Links and more at https://james.crid.land/update/radiodays-africa-sessionThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Jono Coleman OAM died last week. Best known in the UK for the Virgin Radio breakfast show with Russ Williams, he was also on GLR, Heart 106.2, LBC (no, really), BBC London 94.9 and tradies favourite FIX Radio.While the BBC snootily relegated him to a local news story (and called his co-presenter “Russell Williams”), Jono’s death was quite rightly big news all over Australian media, with obits on 9 News, ABC Australia and many others.Here’s an hour of him looking back at his life on David Lloyd’s excellent Radio Moments, with the quote: “I’ve been a very, very lucky little fat bunny.”Jono Coleman was a professional right to the end; the same probably can’t be said for Rex Hunt, a commercial radio sports commentator who decided to drop a commercial break so that he could interview Robert DiPierdomenico, an apparently renowned AFL footballist. Called by the boss and asked why, he ranted for some minutes on-air, before, it seems, “taking leave of his duties at 3AW to focus on his family”.While we’re on the subject of Australian commercial radio, here’s a little clip of Kyle and Jackie O, now officially the #1 breakfast show in Sydney.The BBC’s Annual Report for 2021 came out. Usually pounced on by lazy journalists to highlight how much Gary Lineker is paid, Jake Kanter has pulled out a few other data points from it. Particuarly, 1,240 people lost their jobs at the BBC last year.talkRADIO, a UK talkback station, is being promoted as now available on the TV - streaming only, presumably to get round some...

Links and things are at https://james.crid.land/update/care-about-your-outputThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Links and full text is at https://james.crid.land/update/radio-numbersThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

https://james.crid.land/update/conferences-cars-trust has links to all the stories mentioned here.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Goodbye, and keep listeningA 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

I'm over at https://james.crid.land This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Why don't programme directors pull more ads? And why are some of them still so bad?This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

I'm over at https://james.crid.land and so should you beThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

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.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

I'm at https://james.crid.land This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

It's 40 years since Trevor Horn wrote this songThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

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...

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.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

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.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Cockroaches, eh? Radio is a bit like them. Kind of.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Radio is consumed differently on headphones than speakers. Here's new data.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Music logs can help presenters if done rightThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

4KQ - an AM station - is doing well in BrisbaneThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Hearing the voice of your listener Johannesburg, South Africa, is a place like no other to hold a radio conference, and I was privileged to be at Radio Days Africa recently on their tenth anniversary. Radio is an important part of life in Africa generally. Radio reaches people who cannot read or write; and plays the part of an educator in many parts of the continent. Here’s the excellent Steve Martin from the BBC talking about radio in Africa from 2013. It’s a good overview in how progessive African radio stations are, as well as how they think about radio in a different way to many of us. But radio in Africa is also, partially, stations like 94.7 in Johannesburg (tagline: “You love Johannesburg - we love you”), who sound as polished as the big top 40 stations you’d hear elsewhere. However, it was Bérard Duprès from the Seychelles Broadcasting Company that got me thinking a little. He began by explaining where the Seychelles were - they’re here in case you didn’t know - and spoke about the stations that the SBC run. One of the things Bérard showed was the radio station’s app. Obviously you can listen to the radio station on it, but you can also send a voice message to the station in high quality audio. The station uses a product called Fabrik, made in South Africa, which acts as a kind of private WhatsApp for the station, who are then able to edit and broadcast the messages. It’s a simple and straightforward way to get more voices on the air. They’re not alone. Radio X in the UK is using a rather less private WhatsApp - well, they’re using WhatApp itself - to get messages into the studio for Chris Moyles. And they seem to be having great fun with it, even if most of the callers want just to say the word willy and bum. For radio stations everywhere, though, services like this makes it really easy to remain real and relevant to your audience. For SBC, who run radio stations that broadcast to over a hundred different islands off the coast of East Africa, it’s a great way to hear directly from your audience. For Radio X, it’s a very good way to hear them swear at you. Getting proper, decent audience audio on the air has never been easier. If you don’t have this function in your radio app - what’s stopping you? Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Radio TOK FM is one of the most listened-to radio stations in Warsaw, Poland, owned by Agora Radio Group. A news and talk station with over 40 journalists, the station is doing something unusual: charging for podcasts. Jarosław Śliżewski, the company’s Chief Digital Officer, says that six years ago, a decision was made to focus on on-demand content. Now, listeners pay a monthly fee to gain access to over 65,000 pieces of on-demand audio from the station, including catch-up shows and exclusive digital-only content. Pricing is set at US$3.90 a month for access via the web, though over half of their subscribers pay US$5.20 which gives access on mobile apps, too. (That’s the same as Spotify charges in Poland, incidentally). The company already has more than 17,000 paying subscribers - a figure that has grown 60% year-on-year. “Every day, we produce about nineteen hours of new content for radio broadcast,” Jarosław tells me. “Additionally, about two hours a day is produced exclusively for online use, like bespoke podcasts or extended versions of live programmes”. Some of the original podcasts are broadcast on the radio, too. They work hard on the service’s metadata, with all content described and tagged, and about 40% of the content is automatically transcribed (thanks to a Google DNI grant). The app contains personalisation, as well as playlists; you can “follow” specific topics, presenters and programmes. While the station is present on Apple Podcasts and other similar platforms, they use these as marketing material, containing clips of the full content that is only available through the paid-for service. Podcasting, and on-demand content, is clearly growing; and the growth in Radio TOK FM’s paying users since 2013 has been steady. “Digital income is becoming a more significant component of TOK FM’s profits,” Jarosław adds. Radio’s future certainly looks like a mix of live and on-demand content; and perhaps Radio TOK FM is leading the way.Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

At the recent Podcast Day in London, I was asked to share three of my favourite podcasts, and as always I decided to slightly subvert the brief to really be three podcasts that we can learn from. Reasons to Be Cheerful, with Geoff Lloyd and Ed Miliband, (produced by Emma Corsham) was my first choice. Ed Miliband used to be the leader of the Labour party in the UK, and he came across as a deeply awkward, barely human and really quite unlikeable person. But the intimate nature of podcasting has changed all that to me - he's good fun, nerdy, self-aware, and endlessly inquisitive, and the podcast itself is a great listen. Perhaps that's why most of the US presidential candidates are doing lots of podcast appearances at the moment: it’s easy to overlook what podcasting has to offer to help really get to know someone. They’ve just launched a spin-off, Cheerful Book Club, where Ed interviews non-fiction book authors: that’s worth a listen, too. Podcast number 2 - is, well, mine: the Podnews podcast. I know, shameless. Now I don't actually want you to get it - the newsletter is better - but I'm mentioning it for two reasons: first, great advice for any podcaster is to keep things simple. There's no interviews, no features, just a quick rundown of the news every day: it works well and is very scalable - you can even record it on a phone. So, resist the temptation to chuck everything in. Second, it highlights the power of news briefings. This podcast gets at least half of its total downloads from Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa's news briefings services. They are a massive and relatively untapped market for podcasters and broadcasters alike. You should look into them. And the third podcast? Death in Ice Valley - it's a true crime podcast - is awesome. It was a podcast I was genuinely excited for every single episode release. I didn't even want to read the episode titles in case they had a spoiler in them. Wonderful thing. There are maybe three things we can learn from this - first... the space it gives its subject. It's gloriously unhurried, in a way that radio typically isn't. Second... they COULD have recorded all ten episodes at the same time: but they didn't. They spent time and energy on a community on Facebook, and built in feedback from the audience in every episode. It made a real difference to the series, and it's something I'd highly recommend. And third - for those of you working in public radio, this just goes to show that a collaboration like this, between two big public service broadcasters, can actually work. The ABC in Australia and the CBC in Canada are also working together on cross-promoting their podcasts. There's plenty we can do if we work together. If you're a fan of this, podcast, they’ve just taped a new, live, show, which is released on June 24th. There’s plenty we can learn from podcasting. I’d love to hear more that are worth learning from.Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Apple are making some changes. You’ve probably heard about iTunes going away. In truth, this means little - iTunes “went away” on iPhones a long time ago, and this latest change is just replacing iTunes with three separate apps on the Mac. If you run a Windows machine, iTunes continues as normal. Apple have asked you not to talk about podcasts “being on iTunes” for the last 18 months anyway. But there are also some changes to Apple Podcasts categories - the genres and names you use to navigate through podcasts. And those changes, which I list here, are substantial. I calculate around 70 new categories and 30 renamed or removed ones. The changes take place “in late summer”, which probably means the first week in September when the new operating system is normally released. Now, Apple is responsible for nearly 90% of all podcast listens: because Apple’s database powers many other podcast apps, from Overcast to Pocket Casts, Player FM to Castro. Almost all podcast apps have used the original category list: but as far as I can discover, Apple didn’t talk to a single podcast app developer before announcing these changes. Every one will have to rebuild parts of their app in response. They also didn’t talk to a single podcast hosting provider before announcing these changes. This was a complete surprise to them, and many hosting companies have privately expressed anger to me: “we’re scrambling,” one says, “we don’t get a head’s up”. Every one will have to rebuild part of their publishing process within just a few months. The success of podcasting is partly because podcasts are available everywhere, not just on an Apple device. The same RSS feed that powers Apple Podcasts also powers many different services, like Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher. We don’t know what will happen to these services if we change categories just for Apple’s benefit. The iTunes categories were Apple’s own invention, back in 2005, and their changes are good news and mostly well thought out. However, on its own devices, Apple is responsible for just 62% of all podcast downloads — a figure that is falling. In spite of this, Apple has just arrogantly changed podcast categories for its own purposes without consulting any other part of the podcast community that this will affect. This is partly podcasting’s fault. There is no industry association: a place where producers, app developers, podcast hosting companies and ad-tech companies can come together. There are no best-practice guidance documents for things as simple as “how do I display episode notes”, “should I cache audio” and “do I need permission from podcasters first before listing them”: and perhaps there should be. I’m keen that this, at least, changes. However, it’s also an issue within Apple. As is clear from the release of this document, and the abject failure of the company to engage with any part of the podcasting community, it’s clear that they believe that they “own” podcasting. Because… they do not.Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

In Canada recently, I heard a little bit of history - or, so it seemed to me. Radio executives were openly banging the drum for FM chips in phones: an argument I thought was long since dead. You can understand why this discussion is still live in Canada. Some research I did about mobile phone data costs seems to point to Canada being exceptionally expensive for mobile data. In comparison to Australia (roughly the same population and land mass), Canadians pay almost FIVE TIMES MORE for a monthly plan that gives a THIRD LESS DATA. (I put this in capital letters because it still surprises me). Perhaps Canadian radio broadcasters sense an opportunity if FM chips are enabled. I’m not sure there is one, to be honest. As devices, mobile phones already significantly underperform when it comes to live, linear radio (whether streamed or delivered via FM). Research of UK radio listeners, on page 10 of this PDF, appears to show live radio accounting for less than 20% of all audio consumed on a phone. The most interactive device that we own, always within arm’s reach, is not the most ideal device for listening to an unpersonalised live stream, it would seem. It’s also not a great user experience. There are no logos and virtually no metadata when listening to FM radio (and in Canada, like the US and Australia, even RDS signals are exotic in many markets). The very action of tuning into a radio station requires the listener to remember a random number for no reason other than a historical anachronism. The company that got closest to fixing the user experience on mobile, Emmis's NextRadio, wasn't supported by other parts of the North American radio industry, and regrettably has joined Nokia's Visual Radio in the waste bin of good ideas. “But radio is most important in times of emergency”, claim the radio companies. But in reality, if an emergency, or a big news story, happens in the evenings or weekends, recent evidence suggests radio won’t cover it anyway. SMS and app alerts are much more effective at communicating immediate peril, like weather events or fire. If radio had a part to play here once, it doesn’t any more. (The aftermath from emergency, as a community starts putting things together? That’s a very different thing, where radio excels.) In any case, the technology is against it. The antenna used for FM or DAB+ reception in a mobile phone is the headphone cable: but that’s something that doesn’t exist in Apple or high-end Google phones, which use Bluetooth. Bluetooth headphones are a challenge with electronic measurement, too. And the strong AM stations that exist in Canadian metro areas? There’s only ever been one mobile phone with AM built-in, and the reason you don’t know about it is that it was fifteen years ago, and it was rubbish. There’s plenty of evidence that Canadian listeners use streaming rather less than their neighbours in the US. The Canadian radio companies could lean on the CRTC to more effectively regulate the price of mobile data from the cellular networks. But they won’t, because the Canadian radio companies ARE the cellular networks. Indeed, the cellular networks are the folks calling the shots in terms of whether FM chips are enabled or not. If the Canadian cellular networks aren’t pressuring the likes of Google and Apple for FM chips to be enabled - and let me remind you again, they own the FM radio networks - that points to a bigger issue. Let’s use our energy and focus on delighting our audience, not trying to capture a magic unicorn that offers, at...

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!Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

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.Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

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.Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

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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.  Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

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I take a listen to oneSupport the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

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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. Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

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Watch the video in full at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qENEQ1qClUwSupport the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

I'd think they should, in any radio company...Music by Ignite Jingles. Clips from an AT&T video from the 1960s.Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Television, as we know, is changing rapidly - significantly more so than radio. Viewers to live TV are declining, as audiences get more used to on-demand services like Netflix, Hulu, Stan, or iPlayer. So, TV platforms are trying new things. At the beginning of this year, the TV system that I subscribe to - a little Australian set-top-box called Fetch TV - added a new channel. It’s a true-crime channel called Oxygen, run by NBC Universal, and it’s on channel 101. Oxygen is an interesting model - because it isn’t actually a television channel at all. Sure, it looks like a television channel. It appears in the EPG alongside all the other television channels, and it has a broadcast schedule, too, 24-hours a day. If I flick through the channels in an evening, I’ll flick past Oxygen just like every other channel. You can watch it just like any other channel - you can watch a show, then the show finishes, then something else will start. In fact, Oxygen is just a collection of on-demand TV shows. On the TV Guide, it exists as a virtual channel - the EPG slot there to promote the shows available on-demand. When you channel-surf into Oxygen, it isn’t giving you a live TV channel at all - in fact, the show conveniently starts at the beginning. It’s an on-demand service - not a live TV channel. Programming has been chosen based on how well it’ll perform as an on-demand product. What could radio learn from this? Imagine - you tune into the radio, and the first thing you hear is your favourite song. Followed by, yes, the live presenters (at least, recorded live five minutes ago). A radio station that gives you the travel at 8.20am and only at 8.20am, because that’s the time you’re just getting ready to drive into work. A radio station that has everything that makes great radio - presenters talking about the football last night, the ride into town today; but a radio station that has nothing that makes for bad radio - no poorly-targeted advertising, no overplaying of my favourite songs. If we were to think of great music radio as a jigsaw, made from short pieces of on-demand audio content, rather than a live unalterable stream - what would that mean? That “jigsaw” could be assembled just for me, on my mobile phone. And for you, on yours. And a version of that jigsaw also assembled for those listening on FM - with less of the personalisation, but otherwise should sound virtually identical. Is the future for radio something which is devised as a collection of on-demand audio, assembled for each listener… and where the FM transmitter is just another listener? Does radio need a bit of Oxygen?Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Last year, Chris Evans was the presenter of the most listened-to breakfast show in Europe - The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2. The BBC earns most of its money from a television licence fee, currently US$195 or so, which households in the UK have to pay if they have a television. This licence fee (and the sale of programmes to other broadcasters) pays for the whole thing - so there are no commercials or sponsor credits on BBC Radio 2: it’s entirely commercial free, and perhaps that’s why 14.6m people tune in every week. Of course, that’s not entirely true. The BBC does a very good job of promoting its own services. Were they to spend money on similar advertising elsewhere, that would be a very high bill indeed. So there is plenty of promotion of new BBC television shows, and plenty of breathless interviews with big BBC stars who often have something to plug. But that’s fine, and that’s not really “commercial messaging”. Chris Evans left the BBC at the end of last year; and has just started presenting The Chris Evans Breakfast Show on Virgin Radio, arguably one of the smallest national radio stations in the country, with 414,000 listeners. Virgin Radio (a trademark of Virgin, yes, but owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp in the UK) is a commercial radio station: but the Chris Evans breakfast show is entirely commercial free. There’s not a single commercial in the entire three and a half hours. Of course, that’s not entirely true, either. He’s sponsored by Sky, one of the UK’s largest TV broadcasters. There are occasional sponsor credits, but if the first show is anything to go by, there’ll be plenty of promotion of new Sky television shows, and plenty of breathless interviews with big Sky stars who often have something to plug. But there won’t be a single 30-second ad for washing powder, sausages, double-glazing, or anything else - “not for the first hundred years,” said Chris - presumably exaggerating slightly - in his first show. It’s a canny move. If the only thing holding his previous audience back was the prospect of radio commercials, Virgin Radio have removed that objection. And why not. In truth, the loss of commercial inventory from the breakfast show won’t damage the station much: it stands to considerably gain from the marketing and halo effect that its new big star will have. When radio’s online competition has a much lighter ad-load, or no ads at all, it’s a clever move to work to rethink commercial radio’s revenue model. Good on Virgin Radio for giving that a go.Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Try to listen to the new season of Fortunately, a podcast from the BBC, and you’ll be told you can’t. It’s a show that BBC produces which never makes it on the radio. Instead, it follows the same genre as many podcasts do: two friends chatting over a coffee with a special guest. The “friends” in this case are Fi Glover and Jane Garvey, two broadcasters who share the same kind of humour; the podcast itself is recorded in the coffee shop in the “BBC Piazza”, the public space outside the BBC’s gleaming Broadcasting House in central London. Last year, the BBC launched a new smartphone app. Called BBC Sounds, it contains bespoke content like this, as well as radio shows (on-demand and live), and some music mixes. Mistakenly, the app was launched before it had reached feature parity with its predecessor, BBC iPlayer Radio. It’s also not available outside the UK. BBC Sounds requires listeners to register before they can listen, just like Spotify. This offers personalisation opportunities, one would assume; but it also means that some within the BBC have begun focusing on how to increase what is known in technology circles as the “MAU”, the number of Monthly Active Users, believing that this is a key performance indicator of the success of the app. The drive for a higher MAU number isn’t, by itself, a bad thing. Along with measuring the overall time-in-app (which should similarly increase), it’s an important measure of how successful the app is. However, it’s a fine line between encouraging listeners to use the app: and bullying them to. Which brings us back to Fortunately, which started a new season this week but you’ll not be able to listen to it on anything other than the BBC Sounds app. The podcast has been withdrawn from all other podcast apps, and replaced with a plaintive message that “we used to be here but we’re not here any more”. Good business sense, you might be thinking: which is a valid point of view. Except: what business is the BBC actually in? Its core area of expertise is making great radio (and TV) shows. Further, its money comes - in the main - from the UK’s licence-fee payers, who have already paid for this programme to be made. The most important measure of success for the BBC, surely, is how many people consume and enjoy its programmes: and to that end, withdrawing programmes from other platforms is short-sighted. There is a limit to how many apps people will install; and while pulling shows into your own walled garden might be a strategy for some, audiences should really be drawn to your app because it’s really good, it offers great recommendations, and works brilliantly. If you need to bully audiences to install a new app by taking things away from them that they’re already paying for anyway, you’re probably doing it wrong.Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

Standards are boring - but they are there for a reason   Tune in to many FM stations with RDS signals in France, Italy or the USA, and you’ll notice that some stations try putting some now-playing information over the 8-character radio station name. Watch, and it slowly scrolls through a song name, or - worse - some advertising. It’ll normally scroll once every two seconds, due to the way RDS works, so it scrolls really very slowly; and errors on transmission can mean you lose chunks of the data (and thus chunks of the name).   Worse, if you try saving a preset on your car radio, quite often it will store the name currently being transmitted; so there are vast amounts of cars on the road who think they’re listening to “PIZZA” or “RWAY TO HE”.   This doesn’t sound as if it’s a great user experience, because it isn’t. The broadcast regulator in some countries bans this - the UK is one of them. But, more to the point, it is explicitly not allowed under the RDS specification. “PS [‘Programme Service’] must only be used for identifying the programme service and it must not be used for other messages giving sequential information”, the RDS specification warns.   The advent of digital hasn’t fixed this, either.   In Denmark, if you turn on your DAB radio and try tuning around, you’ll notice something odd happening. Bauer have named all their stations starting with a “_” character, so “_Radio Soft”, “_myROCK” or “_Radio 100” are all together (at the bottom of the list), below every other station.   The thought, presumably, is to keep Bauer stations together. The reality is that listeners will only see “myROCK” appear below competitor “Rockkanalen”, and that means that this decision breaks everyone’s ability to tune in alphabetical order - making digital radio much more confusing for everyone. Being fair, the DAB specification only says that this name “shall identify the service”. But even so, where would we be if everyone did this? And why should a listener care - or know - who the overall owner is?   DAB+ in Australia is similarly broken. Travel to Brisbane in Australia (pop in for a coffee while you’re here) and you’ll notice one station on DAB called “1116 4BC” and another called “4BC1116 NewsTalk”. Both these stations are identical, but the owner of this station appears to be spamming every DAB radio set by getting two listings for the one station.   Once more, the DAB specification allows this - you can have more than one service listing pointing to the same subchannel. But this isn’t really very good behaviour. If everyone put two different names for the same station on the multiplex, where would we be then?   The internet, too, is a world of specifications that are barely followed. When submitting a podcast to iTunes, you’re asked for the name and author of a podcast. Of course, some people started adding all kinds of nonsense into the “author” field, to help them appear higher in searches. The nonsense has irritated Apple so much, they’re now kicking podcasts out of their listings who are just spamming keywords into podcasts. Apple cares about the user experience; and it seems some podcast providers just don’t. Good on Apple for saying enough’s enough.   So, I know it’s really very dull - but just occasionally it’s worthwhile reminding ourselves that standards and etiquette are there for a reason.   Will what you’re doing delight your audience? If you’re just wanting to irritate the audience, perhaps...

  I’m swearing at my smart speakers a little this week.   I’ve a few Google speakers in the house, including a Google Home Hub - the one with a little screen on it. It’s great as a radio from my point of view, since it has a decent-ish speaker on it (better for voice than music, though). It’s good for radio, since it has a good big screen that contains a logo and the station’s name - to aid recall if anyone asks me what station I’m listening to.   I also have an Amazon Alexa, which at the moment is on my desk for testing things, but is normally outside.   I use these devices to listen to the radio, as well as to other things. It’s normally a simple job. “Listen to XXXXXX” normally works. Sometimes you have to ask it for “XXXXX on TuneIn” to give it a nudge that it’s a radio station.   “LIsten to ABC Radio Brisbane”, I ask it, and it dutifully tunes in.   “Listen to BBC Radio 2”, and it works just the same.   “Listen to 4ZZZ” however… not a chance.   4ZZZ is one of my local community radio stations. It plays a decent mix of music, has a wide variety of programmes, a decent local news service in the morning, and - all in all - is a lovely listen. When I can get the speakers to play it.   4ZZZ is pronounced “4 triple-zed” here in Australia, and that’s the incantation I’d like to give the speaker. It fails.   “4-zed-zed-zed” would be the most obvious next step. That doesn’t work either.   “4-zee-zee-zee” *does* work on the Google smart speakers. “OK,” the smooth-sounding australian Google voice says. “Tuning into 4-zed-zed-zed on TuneIn”. So it doesn’t understand 4-zed-zed-zed but says it as confirmation. OK.   And I still don’t understand how to do it with the Amazon Echo. I’ve asked Amazon support about it, since 4ZZZ is listed in TuneIn, and they responded agreeing it’s a problem and they’ve escalated it to a senior engineer. A month later, it looks as if it might work, though it responds “Playing 4Z” which isn’t, quite, right.   If you work for a radio station, pop down to your local electrical store and check how easy it is to get your station on a smart speaker using the default listen experience (without installing any ‘skills’). It might surprise you.  Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

  Radio in the car - a better experience   About 50% of all radio listening happens in the car (the figure’s lower in countries like the UK, but higher in places like the US).   In many ways, radio’s best in the car. Radio - the original multitasking medium - lets you concentrate enough to drive your 1,300kg (2,800 lb) metal death-machine along busy streets alongside soft, vulnerable fleshy pedestrians, while you enjoy an unfunny stunt from breakfast show presenters who are such awful people you’d never let them into your house.   Radio’s popularity in the car is clearly important to us as an industry. But the experience of a car radio hasn’t changed much since the original car radio in the 1950s. We have to remember two random numbers to listen to a radio station - a frequency and a preset number. Switching between FM, AM (and DAB) often changes the user experience entirely.   The experience for DAB is especially poor in most cars. My Toyota Prius (yes, I’m one of those) lists stations on DAB by service ID, not alphabetically; and lists ensembles separately.   In the US, HD2 stations offer usability issues in a car. If you want to listen to Bloomberg Radio in San Francisco, you need to tune to 103.7 FM, then wait a few seconds (no, really), then hit the ‘up’ button to find the HD2 signal. A triumph!   It’s good news, therefore, that someone’s trying to fix this on behalf of radio.   Radioplayer, the not-for-profit project that is now in many different countries including Canada, the UK and Germany, showed a research prototype last week in Berlin. It highlights how we in radio want the in-car experience to be.   Tuning is by station name, not by random frequency. Station names are announced by voice before the audio starts (good for your station’s brand awareness). Decent quality logos are on the screen while you listen. And, probably most importantly, there are no “band” buttons - if a station’s on FM, HD2, DAB or just the internet it gets equal prominence. The radio will even switch between FM and the internet if it needs to - and back again.   It’s just a reference design for now: but auto manufacturers already know how important a decent radio is in a car. Hopefully this will give them the information and the data they need to help make a better one.   This is important work for our future - and deserves our support. Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

New technology: bad for radio?   Automation Killed The Radio Star, says the latest blog from Dick Taylor, a US radio writer.   Two things about this.   The first is the use of a lazy Buggles headline. Radio is still very much alive, with 9 out of 10 people in most large countries listening every week. Nothing has killed anything.   I collect lazy Buggles headlines. The song was, of course, the first song to be played by MTV, back in the days when it played music instead of vapid reality television shows. Amusingly, radio outlasted MTV.   Every time we repeat a “killed the radio star” headline, we reinforce the thought that radio is, in some way, in trouble. It isn’t. For parts of the US population, radio is more popular than television!   The other part of Dick’s blog post that I disagree with is the finger-pointing at technology - in this case, automation.   It takes people to use, or misuse, any form of technology. Technology, by itself, isn’t capable of being good or bad.   The postal service is not a bad thing, just because occasionally people send bad things through it, after all.   Automation is capable of getting the best out of your programming. It’s capable of a warm friendly voice overnight, instead of a tone or piped-in programming from the other side of the world.   Automation is capable of polish and tweaks that were impossible in the age of cart machines and turntables.   Poor automation is poor radio, granted - but we’d be foolish to claim that all automation is poor.   New technology, used well, has the potential of delighting our audience, and out of that, bringing ratings and revenue. Used badly, it can have the opposite effect.   But, as is hopefully relatively clear, I’m a fan of what new technology can bring to radio. Including automation.   If anything killed the radio star, it’s the humans who used automation badly. Perhaps radio needs less of those types of humans.Support the show.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy