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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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...