Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
“What do you think of voice-tracking?” came a voice in Q&A after one of my presentations in New Zealand.
The question came from a man wearing a t-shirt. The t-shirt was black, with a community radio logo on the front, and on the back, in bright white capital letters: “CORPORATE RADIO STILL SUCKS”.
Voice-tracking has a bad reputation; and I can understand why. It’s been used, in many...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
Belfast in Northern Ireland is a city of regeneration and investment. I walked from the train station into the city, noting new buildings and renovated ones. The city appears to be a prosperous place. New brands have poured into the city in recent years.
There’s another new brand in Belfast: and I was on my way to see them. Q Radio has been broadcasting across parts of Northern Ireland...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
The UK “Minister for Digital”, Matt Hancock, delivered a video address in last week’s “Drive to Digital” conference in London.
The conference is organised by Digital Radio UK, the lobbying group working for DAB digital radio in the UK. DAB is free-to-air broadcast radio through an antenna, much like FM but only digital. It offers listeners far greater choice, removes the...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
Last Monday I was at Next Radio, the radio ideas conference, in London. It’s something that Matt Deegan and I have run for the last seven years: a place where incredible people come together and speak about the radio and audio industry.
So, that’s why this column will be quite short this week: because I’ve been on aeroplanes and in hotel rooms tapping away at Keynote...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
Last week, I was in Sydney in Australia for the Australian Podcast Conference, OzPod, which was an enjoyable experience. Lots of independent podcasters, rubbing shoulders with folks from the Australian ABC who announced that morning a $1m fund for podcasters.
I was doing an overview of podcasting over the last twelve months. This was a job that was relatively simple last year - take some UK and US...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
The biggest news this week is a master of doom-mongery, "New Report Shows Why Radio Must Adapt to Digital Age". You’ve probably seen it - it’s been copied and shared on social media a fair bit, particularly being highlighted by those who delight in being rude about the current US radio operators.
In...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
I tend to look at a lot of radio station websites and newsletters every day as part of my job. This is interesting and head-scratching at the same time.
There’s a strange thing about radio newsletters. People sign up to them because, by and large, they’re fans of the radio station: at least, they’ve interacted with the radio station in the past.
A good newsletter offers the chance to grow...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
I wrote a long article for the Radio Magazine in the US recently about “Australia’s largest radio station” - Coles Radio. It’s the radio station you hear when you walk around a Coles supermarket, the most popular supermarket chain in Australia. It’s available on DAB+ in metropolitan areas of the country too, so you can listen at home...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
Recently, my columns have been quite full of numbers and figures and statistics, so instead, this week, I’d like to do some thinking aloud instead.
I have a theory. It has almost no science behind it - yet; and probably very little proof - but nonetheless, I think it’s true.
I think that, for live radio, we should be focusing on getting our output on speakers, not headphones. Our...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
Sit in front of Twitter and watch @tonyblackburn’s account on a Saturday morning, and you’ll see something a little unusual.
Tony Blackburn is probably the most well-known radio presenter in the UK. On-air since 1964, he joined the BBC 50 years ago: in a video released last week, he tries to find the radio studio he first used in Broadcasting House. He was the first radio presenter...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
Here’s a useful pub quiz fact: Slovenia is the only country in the world with “love” in its name.
For a week in June, Slovenia was also the home of some of the most popular radio personalities on social media, anywhere in the world. Not bad for a country with only two million inhabitants.
Here’s how they did it.
Hitradio Center’s...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
Radio is going multiplatform. Whenever I speak, wherever I speak, that’s the key piece of information I’d like the audience to remember.
AM and FM are ways of getting our audio to our audience - but they’re not the only way. There’s satellite, there’s DAB and HD, there’s the internet, and there’s other ways too.
Nowhere is this more the case than the UK, where radio listening to AM...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
This week, Google launched its Google Home smart speaker in Australia. It’s been some time coming - the UK and the US have had it for a while - and it’ll be joined, at the end of the year, by Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s HomePod.
On the face of it, you might think these devices have little to do with radio. But you’d be wrong. They could be the way radio gets back into our living spaces.
In the...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
In the UK, the curiously-named “Three” mobile phone network has just announced something called Go Binge. It’s a new service that lets you watch Netflix, listen to music service Deezer (and SoundCloud) but these services won’t come out of your monthly data allowance.
In Australia, Optus offers...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
I watched a TV show on-demand the other day. It was a quite aggravating experience.
Before the show started, there was an ad to get the TV network’s app on Apple TV. I was watching on a smart TV anyway, so there didn’t seem much point in trying to sell me something I didn’t need.
Then, in the first ad break - which started four seconds into the second part of the program - I saw an ad to...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
There are a group of people that make a surprising difference to the quality and creativity of radio programs across the world.
Yes, of course, Content Directors are important. A good producer perhaps more so. And, of course, good listeners. We all need those.
But, last weekend, I spent two days in a room full of other people.
These people work at your radio station, even though quite often they’re hidden away in a...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
Recently, RAJAR - the UK's radio listening research company - released their own "share of audio" figures as part of their MIDAS research, showing what kind of audio that the British put into their ears.
Of course, radio is the most popular type of audio: 77% of all audio listened-to is live radio. That's the headline figure from the UK: and similar research in the US, Canada and...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
I’ve had an interesting few days in Qingdao, China - taking part in a special radio day before the Asian Media Summit.
Asia is an interesting radio market, with some countries having very advanced commercial-sounding stations, and others where controls on private broadcasters have only relatively recently begun to be lifted.
Technology is different in China, and a little challenging - China...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
In households across the world, a not-so-quiet revolution is going on. People are talking to their houses, and their houses are talking back. Well, not their houses exactly, but a little piece of plastic in their houses - an Amazon Echo or a Google Home.
In countries where these voice assistants are available, these are rather taking off. In the US, Jacobs Media’s TechSurvey, which questioned radio...
And get the facts right too!
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
This week, with the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester England, we saw another reminder - should we need one - of the benefit of radio in an emergency: and of its localness.
During a terrorist incident, mobile phone networks can quickly become overloaded. Worse: in the immediate aftermath of an incident, false facts abound. In this case, there...
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