To the Infinite Dial… and beyond
Welcome to Unmade, written in the UK while you were sleeping. Unless you were staying up late for the Nick Kyrgios thriller, that is. What a game. Wimbledon is looking pretty good this year.
Happy National Almond Buttercrunch Day.
I’m back at the laptop after a musical road trip around the UK. I can report that The Waterboys have very much still got it; The Eagles have just about still got it; and I feel no need to see ABC again.
Before I get to today’s topic, a final reminder… we are now in the last 48 hours of EOFYS – the pre-June 30 festival of capitalism by which companies attempt both the yin of tax minimisation by finding some extra expenditure before the end of the financial year, and the yang of urging others to do the same by buying their products.
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Tim, Morgan Research says for Q1 2022, 17.49% of people report owning a Smart Speaker, so quite a contrast. Also Morgan also says 16.62% downloaded Podcast, again a distinct difference!
It seems plausible that during lockdown people got bored with listening to radio and tried out a few podcasts…then stuck with them when they realised there was an alternative to mass market radio.
But I’m not sure about including “catch up radio” in radio listening. What differentiates that from a podcast? Has this been double counted, I wonder…
DAB is a great invention for places like Europe, due to political and physical geography. Less so in Australia, where different rules apply. At least we went straight into DAB+ but, as you say, the number of extra channels we’ve been given as a result is insignificant if you’ve got any sort of radio/podcast app on your phone.
There’s a fair bit of digging to be done around DAB, I reckon. It’s a good technology where it’s available but it seems to be stuck in the middle between broadcast and streaming
Tim. Mistake. You credited SCA owners as HT&E, of course you meant ARN
Thanks for the heads up Steve – now corrected. In my haste to correct Australian Radio Network to the now rebranded ARN, I had acronyms on my mind and went with SCA instead!