Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
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...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
A friend of mine has treated himself to a subscription to Scientific American, and is currently excitedly reading the archives, which come with his purchase.
Back in February 1941, the magazine published a piece about the introduction of FM radio. It attempts to predict the future, but then adds this caution:
“The...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
I spent last week, partially, at the Worldwide Radio Summit in Los Angeles. This is the most interesting US broadcast radio conference I’ve been to - focusing much more on music programming than on business, sales and technology. My congratulations to the AllAccess team who put this together.
Seeing and hearing the assault of commercial messages when I landed in Los Angeles reminded me of the...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
I’ve been thinking of a different type of newspaper website.
Along the top navigation bar you’d find a section detailing all the journalists. You could read their biographies, and see photographs of them.
There would be a full section talking about where you could get the newspaper. Probably a list of different stores, maybe a nice map.
There would be a competition section, because it...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
Podcasting and online radio is all very well - but, as anyone will tell you, the numbers are small. More than that - it’s hard to get people to find your show, too. It’s rather easier to get people to listen to you if you’re on the radio.
If you want to play music, it gets harder still. You can’t play music in podcasts (well, full music tracks that anyone’s heard of), so the only real way to play an hour’s worth of music that you...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
Last week, during the holidays, I did a lot of driving. It turns out that Australia, my home country, is quite big: and a trip from Melbourne to Orbost, which looks tiny on the map, is actually four and a half hours.
I’d claim that I listened to a lot of radio while I was driving that distance; but my four year-old wouldn’t hear of it, and so I was “treated” to the entire available work of My Little Pony on...
Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland
In a bar in Canada, two men jabbed their fingers at me - in a friendly way - and asked me a simple question. Where is the best-sounding radio in the world? What a great question.
I avoided the answer. We discussed it a bit. And I think we got broad agreement on what helps make great-sounding radio and the things you need.
First - the question expected a country as an answer. I don’t think that’s...
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