Cridland: Personalisation for broadcast radio

Radio Tomorrow with James Cridland

Earlier this week was Next Radio, a radio conference that I’ve run with Matt Deegan for the past five years. As ever, there were a large amount of radio ideas and information, from many different countries. The ever-present march of personalisation appeared to be quite a trend going through the day.
 
Personalisation, of course, for live radio is quite difficult. But it isn’t impossible.
 
Dominik Born from TPC in Switzerland outlined a clever thing called musicBan – a proof of concept for radio stations who want to offer some of the type of personalisation that you expect from other services – notably, the skip button.
 
Listening to live, simulcast music radio, when you hear an artist you don’t like, you can simply skip it. Instead, the service pulls a track from YouTube instead, and opts back into the live broadcast once the song has finished playing.
 
Additionally, if you want to ban an artist from ever appearing (I vote Nickelback for this honour), then you can do just that, too. As soon as the software detects that Nickelback is playing – presumably from the playout system information – it switches away from the live audio and plays something better. (Which in the case of Nickelback is almost every other piece of music ever recorded).
 
musicBan is a clever idea – since it’s taking the personalisation that you expect from the internet, and enabling that for radio.
 
The station gets statistics, of course; on which songs are being skipped more than others. It’s a way of getting useful feedback from audiences; though one would hope you’d never play a song a listener would want to ban anyway.
 
It probably won’t instantly make broadcast radio compete with music jukeboxes like Pandora, but as a way of adding some rudimentary personalisation, it’s certainly food for thought.
 
You can watch his entire session here (it’s only six minutes long).
 
James Cridland will be speaking at the Australian Commercial Radio Conference on The Gold Coast, Friday October 9, 2015. 
 

About The Author

James Cridland is a radio futurologist, and is Managing Director of media.info, a companion website to radioinfo and AsiaRadioToday.

He has served as a judge for a number of industry awards including the Australian ABC Local Radio Awards, the UK Student Radio Awards, and the UK’s Radio Academy Awards, where he has also served on the committee. He was a founder of the hybrid radio technology association RadioDNS.

James is one of the organisers of nextrad.io, the radio ideas conference each September, and is also on the committee of RadioDays Europe. He writes for publications including his own media.info, Radio World International and RAIN News.

James lives in North London with his partner and a two year-old radio-loving toddler. He very, very much likes beer.

Radio Tomorrow is a trade mark of Radiowise Productions Pty Ltd.

 

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