Changing consumer behaviour doesn’t just affect TV, the nation’s widening audio habits will impact traditional linear radio too. In fact, it already has.

You often hear that “young people don’t listen to the radio”. That is very provably false. Today’s RAJAR figures show that 75% of 10 to 18s listen to the radio each week, on average consuming over an hour a day. I think that, in today’s world, that’s pretty remarkable. However, that’s not to say there aren’t some serious warning lights flashing.

If you flash back 20 years ago, 91.4% of 10 to 18s were listening to the radio. It was 2.5m more than the 5.1m today (some down to the radio, some down to population changes). But if you look at the average amount of listening per listener, it renders those demo changes moot.

In Q2/2005 all radio listening for 10 to 18s had an average hours of 14.7. Today in Q2/2025 it’s 8.1 – about half.

Some say not to worry and that people grow into radio.

Four years ago, I looked at how average hours changes over time. I worked out that the amount you listened to the radio when you were 15 stays the same through the rest of your life.

I was interested to look again with the new data.

If we take someone who’s 30 to 38 today, their average hours today are 15.7. If we flash back 20 years when they were 10 to 18 it was 14.7. That’s pretty close.

If we take someone who is 50 to 58 today, their average hours are 24.5, when they were 30 to 38 it was 22.7. Again pretty close.

Commercial radio makes its money based on hours of listening. The less there are, the less money they make. You can already see some of this in today’s data. 15 to 24s average hours show a similar story to my 10 to 18s. It’s 10.3. If those youngsters coming through continue to stick at 8, when they become 25 to 34s then that demos hours will drop 40% (it’s currently 14.1) and as they go to 35 to 44s it’ll be 45% of the currently delivered 17.8.

Demographic and listening habit changes are hitting some stations hard already. BBC Radio 1 had 3.08m 10 to 18s tuning in in 2005, now it’s less than a third – 927k. Even if you strip out the population change, their reach of 10 to 18s in 2005 was 36.9%. Now it’s just 13.7%. They listen on average for 3.4 hours now vs 6.1 20 years ago.

The chart below shows Capital FM in London and the proportion of hours they get from each demographic. 20 years ago the biggest were 25-34s. But there are fewer of them now, and they listen to the radio less. So now the central demo is 35 to 44s with 45 to 54s not far behind.

It’s not just the demographics, the product is being shifted older.

Yesterday in the 1pm hour Capital played 15 songs, with just 5 of the tracks released this year and a further 3 from 2024. You would have also heard Avril Lavigne’s Complicated (2002, that’s 23 years old) and Justin Bieber’s Beauty and the Beat (2012, just 13 years old).

Back on the same day in 2010, Capital played 13 songs in the hour. 10 were from 2010 and the other 3 were from 2009.

No Avril Lavigne song appeared on Capital’s top 5000 airplay chart in 2010. This year, Complicated’s the 149th most played track, whilst Sk8r Boy is at 140 and I’m With You at 309.

I don’t blame Capital for going where the hours are. It’s been pretty successful for them. My worry for them and the other commercial radio groups is that they aren’t really doing anything to reach 10 to 18s particularly and less and less for 15 to 24s. Following the money today just guarantees more of a problem later on.

If radio doesn’t create and support teenagers and young listeners with audio products today, then it’s hard not to think they’re sowing the seeds of their later destruction.

Even at the BBCm their new launches Radio 1 Anthems and Radio 1 Dance will likely super-server 25 to 34s. Plus they wanted to launch a 55 plus station! If anyone should be doing the very hard and difficult work of reaching young listeners it should be the BBC.

Kids TV has seen investment drop significantly from commercial operators (only last week Sky Kids stopped commissioning new material), teenage TV has disappeared from the screens and provision of youth audio has been steadily dropping. I can’t see the BBC or commercial radio even bothering to make a teenage podcast. They have all given up.

Media operators can’t grumble about the YouTube threat and behaviour shifts of younger audience when they’ve clearly abandoned making any content for them.

Total Hours

Back to the numbers… Across all the Capital stations they now deliver 48.9m hours, the Heart brand 82.8m hours and Smooth 50.3m hours. Global as a whole do 282m hours a week.

Over at Bauer, looking at the networks, Absolute’s on 34.1m, GHR’s on 65.9m, Hits on 45.8m, Kiss on 15.7m and Magic on 18.5m. Bauer overall are delivering 227m hours a week.

Both Global and Bauer’s total numbers are supported by other partners – a whole host of stations for Bauer and Communicorp stations for Global.

For Bauer though, one station is providing real benefit – Boom Radio. This quarter they delivered a stonking 11.1m hours. This is more than the whole of the Virgin Radio Network (9.3m) and pretty close to the main Magic station which delivers 11.3 and Gold with 11.6m

If anything, Boom’s success shows the power of average hours, they’re now delivering 15.7 per listener and for 55 plusses it’s 17.8. They’re also slightly insulated from the average hours trouble of the current 10 to 18s by about 50 years.

BBC

A quick look at the BBC and the reach for their national popular music stations have continued to face declines over the last year. They have been hit with an inability to launch new stations, whilst their competition went launch crazy.

Radio 2 at 12.6m is their lowest reach figure in over 20 years. Now, it still makes them the biggest single station in the country whilst Heart needs nine stations reach figures combined to just pip them with 13.0m listeners.

If you’re after some more details on the numbers rather than a Matt rant – then Adam Bowie’s rounded them up and Radio Today’s got all the headlines.

AOB

The Media Club podcast is on holiday at the moment. We’ll be back with an episode from the Edinburgh TV Festival at the end of August. In the meantime I caught up with Ofcom’s broadcasting boss to talk about consumer behaviour changes and want it means for broadcaster. Have a listen or watch!

p.s. You can tell the picture atop this blog post is AI – firstly it’s young people listening to the radio – and secondly, did you spot the random arm?

A double day for radio news as the winners of the UK’s radio awards – the ARIAS – coincide with the release of Q1/25 of the radio ratings. Both are covered on my podcast – The Media Club – with a bumper episode out later today.

Congratulations to BBC Radio 3 for being Station of the Year, Forth One for winning Best Local Radio Station and Goalhanger for becoming Audio Brand of the Year.

The UK radio industry is in a unique position as radio sectors go. It’s a very consolidated marketplace, with the ‘big three’ – the BBC, Bauer and Global now accounting for 86.9% of the UK radio market. It’s also incredibly multi-platform too. 73.3% of radio is now listened to ‘digitally’ – with 42.1% being through DAB and 28.5% being streamed – both much bigger than analogue’s 26.7% share of the market.

But the nature of the sector makes me think a lot about how to measure radio success today.

I’m very much struck listening to Melbourne’s Radio Wars – an excellent podcast that looks at Australian radio, with a focus on a breakfast battle in Melbourne. It shows how local shows are competing against a beamed in national show – that of Kyle & Jackie O. This is with a backdrop of their main radio groups moving towards much more national programming, but a seeming over-reliance on FM (and AM) signals. For a market that’s so creatively ahead, it seems strategically and structurally to have one foot in the past.

The idea of a battle for a single city’s ratings is a discussion that’s long gone here in the UK. Even the idea of winning the London breakfast battle seems a bygone concept as our London breakfast shows are now often the basis for national operations.

For the UK commercial radio groups, it’s the ‘network’ totals that are more important than the station ones. And networks aren’t just the same station in different places, it’s the collection of spin-offs that orbit the hero brand. These networks are sold to advertisers. You’re not buying Heart, you’re buying the Heart Network, with impacts delivered on Heart Musicals and 80s as well as what’s going out on 106.2 in London.

The battle between Global and Bauer is over who can deliver the most hours to the agencies and be must-have on schedules. A decline in the local hours because of networking, is often more than made up in new audiences on spin-offs, whilst at the same time banking significant cost savings from closing buildings and employing fewer people.

The net result is very little changes to total audiences – 87% of the country listen to some form of live every week for an average of 20 hours. Additionally the profitability of UK radio groups, seems pretty strong.

The spin-off stations have supercharged commercial radio against the BBC, moving commercial radio’s share of all listening to 54.9% and its share of 15 to 44s to 67.4%. Even for 45+, traditionally a BBC heartland, commercial radio and the BBC are now neck and neck, both at 49.3%.

The issue with the spin-off stations is whether they’re just a sugar hit? Can the networks grow the relevance of some of these individual parts to make material differences to their network (and not just to off-set declines in the heritage parts).

The chart below shows this quarter’s total hours alongside last quarter’s and a year ago for some of the main networks. There’s a lot of flat stations and some with precipitous declines. Now this is part of the problem of increased competition. You need to work harder to maintain your audience, let alone grow it. Also, some demos (the young) are harder to deal with than others.

The growth around Global’s Heart has been impressive, as is Capital’s performance, Smooth has seen solid progress too. It’s early days for Classic’s new spin-offs to reenforce its brand whilst LBC and Radio X are broadly going in the right direction.

Bauer’s GHR is up and Absolute is flat-ish, the rest has seen significant hours erosion. This survey is before GHR 70s and 80s and Hits 90s and 00s hit the airwaves – it will be interesting to see what affect they have. For Hits the question is whether it will offset any churn following the de-localisation of their historic FM network at roughly the same time.

Over at News UK, record performance for talkSPORT and talkSPORT2 has helped drive the ‘talk’ network, offsetting underperformance from Talk Radio.

The Virgin Radio network finishes 12 months under 10m hours, seeing a large year on year decline. Indeed its total hours are now just a smidgen ahead of independent oldies station Boom Radio which generated a phenomenal 9.5m hours. I would imagine the cost per listener difference between Virgin and Boom is significant.

For networks that are under-performing I think Boom is a good lesson. It has an audience focus, creative programmers and is hungry for success. It also spends a decent proportion of its income on marketing – which is relatively invisible if you’re under 65. It doesn’t RAJAR its two spin-offs, I’m interested to see what it does with them now that the challenge it faced from Radio 2 Extra has been seen off.

I think there is a question whether there are too many spin offs and not enough programmers. Are the stations a little threadbare to deliver the next wave of audience growth? Has a lack of marketing and investment harmed some of the parent brands, making it even more difficult to (re)-grow audiences? And where are the ideas that can drive new station formats that can generate 10m hours? Why’s that being left to the independents.

Global and Bauer have done a good job of grabbing the low hanging fruit, whilst definitely catering for some unmet audience need. They’ve been able to do this whilst the BBC has been somewhat stymied from competing in the same space. We’ll see if Radio 1 Anthems, Dance and Radio 3 Unwind redress some of the balance. However for the battling commercial groups – the real opportunity is surely trying to ‘do a Boom’ – devising something new that has real resonance (and hours) rather that just try to defend heritage brands with more of the same.

If you’re after a more detailed line-by-line interrogation of the figures, Adam Bowie’s done a great job here. Check out Radio Today’s coverage here.

The excellent Octagon from Hallett Arendt helps me process RAJAR numbers – they can help you too!

RAJAR, UK radio’s audience figures are out, and as always it’s great to see a snapshot of how stations are performing, but also it’s good to note the changes in listener behaviour.

Whether you’re in radio, music or podcasting, we can never forget that we’re in the audiences business. Public service, commercial or doing it for fun – our focus surely has to be on delivering value for the people that consume our and our colleagues’ work.

UK radio has been on a long march to consolidation in ownership alongside an explosion in new stations driven by the growth in listening to DAB Digital Radio and streaming. Analogue listening (AM/FM) now only accounts for 27.8% of radio’s consumption here. Indeed, streaming radio is neck and neck with analogue (with a 27.0% share). Listening on a DAB Digital Radio leads the pack, 35.9m radio listeners tune in that way, and it accounts for 42.7% of listening.

This change in behaviour has led commercial radio’s big groups – Bauer and Global – to really jump on station expansion, particularly spin-offs from their existing brands. This quarter sees at least 10 new stations publish figures for the first time, including Greatest Hits Radio 60s (with 386k listeners) and Heart Love (201k).

This has had a significant affect on the BBC. In the last ten years, the BBC has gone from reaching 65% of the UK through radio to 55%, its share of listening has been similarly affected dropping from 54% to 44%. The corporation is trying to fight back, pushing to launch spin-offs like Radio 1 Anthems, Radio 1 Dance, Radio 3 Unwind and a Radio 2 oldies station on DAB. They’re currently stuck in the regulatory quagmire.

What’s interesting with the BBC proposals is they’ve identified that to be successful with audiences who don’t use the BBC, they have to ape commercial radio’s model – less speech and more niched opportunities.

They’re right in their analysis, though I’m not sure it’s the best argument for a public broadcaster.

Radio isn’t a one-size fits all medium. People listen for lots of different reasons, in different places and catering for many different need states. Historically, the market was made up of music-intensive stations (like Absolute 80s), music and chat services (eg Radio 2 and local radio) and all speech stations (like Radio 4).

I think we’ve definitely seen a switch to much more focused music products – Heart (best ever reach of 10m), Smooth (2nd best ever numbers at 6.5m), GHR (biggest commercial station by hours) all have very low speech content (and have replaced stations that were a little more chatty) and at the same time there’s been an explosion in speech services – the expansion of LBC (in this book, Nick Ferrari celebrated his highest ever numbers at 1.5m), Times Radio (up 23% this quarter to 604k listeners), talkRADIO etc. Trying to be successful and broad is more difficult as there’s often a station to scratch a particular itch right now. We no longer need to pick ‘the least worst option’.

BBC Radio 2 remains the country’s most popular station with 13.6m listeners (up year on year and quarter on quarter), but someway below the 15.5m it was doing ten years ago. BBC Radio 1 is down to 7.5m (from 8.1m last quarter, and slightly up year it on year) though it was doing 10.5m ten years ago.

There’s often a cry about younger listeners abandoning radio, well since RAJAR started up again post-pandemic (Q3/21), reach for 15 to 19s is up from 2.1m to 2.4m and 20 to 24s from 3.7m to 3.8m. Even if that just tracks with population increases – it’s not bad. How much are they listening? Well, that’s not bad either. For 15 to 19s, the amount’s grown from 23.6m hours to 24.6m for the older 20 to 24s – it’s gone down from 44.3m to 40.5m, but if I looked at last quarter, that was 46.6m – so it’s basically static.

The challenge for younger listeners isn’t radio’s decline – it’s that they’re pulled lots of different ways. Algorithmically-led music taste (driven by apps like TikTok) means trying to be everything to everyone is very difficult.

Commercial network Kiss is clearly grappling with these changes too. It’s main station (shorn of it’s FM frequencies in London and beyond) drops to 1.08m listeners (down from 1.6m quarter on quarter and 2.3m year on year). This sounds pretty dire until you see that its new Kiss Dance spin off racked up 720k listeners, alongside 190k for Fresh, 2.1m for Kisstory and 530k for the new Kisstory RnB. I think it’s a fascinating challenge to think of what the Kiss ‘brand’ is now.

The consolidation of stations has been aided by government regulation, with the latest Media Act removing local programming requirements. Global have chosen to create versions of Heart, Smooth and Capital for England, Scotland and Wales resulting in the loss of many jobs.

If you look at Heart, all but one of the regions grew the audience of their local drive-time shows, year on year. This was not an under-performing bunch of people. Indeed Heart South’s Rich Clarke added 120k hours in a 6.2m TSA and Heart West’s Ben Atkinson added 160k hours in a 4m TSA. Meanwhile in London there was just 62k growth for their drivetime show in a 12.7m TSA.

The cost savings from the local teams will be significant, but shutting buildings will save even more money. According to Radio Today, Global’s sites at Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, Wrexham, Milton Keynes and Fareham will all close.

The Heart Network – the main Heart made up of all of these regions/nations generates 58m hours, its spin-off stations like Heart 80s and Heart Musicals collectively generate 23.2m hours – with significantly less investment and resource. These spin-offs may currently generate half the hours of the Network, but I’d imagine at significantly less than half the cost.

The BBC has an excellent opportunity to benefit from the removal of lots of local brands, but its efforts at BBC Local Radio have not been particularly successful. A small glimmer of hope for them this quarter is their ‘Local Radio in England’ total has, year on year, plateaued at 4.8m. In the last 10 years its audience has dropped 30% and the hours of listening its delivered are now down 40%. It has a lot to try and recover.

Australia

It’s interesting to compare the UK with Australia. They’re going through a similar transformation with many regional and capital city stations now under the Hits or Triple M banners, Nova in all the capital cities as they’ve always been and ARN looking at bringing together their capital city stations under a KIIS or Gold banner.

ARN recently signed a ten year $20m/year deal (that’s £10m/year in UK money) with their Sydney breakfast talent Kyle and Jackie O. They added them to Melbourne with a view to taking them to the other capital cities. Melbourne has not gone particularly well (do check out the excellent Melbourne Radio Wars podcast to keep track of the shenanigans), putting the move to any others on hold.

One of the challenges for ARN is that KIIS (and some differently named stations in the same KIIS network) when executed locally have a different music mix and feel. The lack of harmonisation and extreme nature of K&J content (that Sydney are used to and no one else is) has made it difficult for ARN to make their strategy work. And it has to. They’re on the line for $200m that they’ve promised to K&J.

Had this been the UK, the option would have been to create a new station for the show on DAB outside of Sydney (similar to what we did with Chris Moyles on Radio X). Australian DAB is actually pretty successful, but it lacks the focus and understanding of the radio groups. The importance of their historic analogue stations has left the groups unable to be as fleet of foot as their UK counterparts. Even today they could add the Sydney KIIS as ‘KIIS’ outside of Melbourne and Brisbane and start to build a nationwide K&J home. It need not get in the way of future changes to FM stations, but it would at least give them a run up.

Back to the UK

With previously local networks, spin-offs and new stations it can be hard to see who’s the biggest. If we look at stations/networks over 1m listeners, here’s the table based on total number of listeners (that’s reach or cume):

It makes BBC Radio 2 the biggest station, and Heart the biggest commercial radio station.

If you look at listening (hours or share) then BBC Radio 2 is still the biggest station, and Greatest Hits Radio is the biggest commercial station.

Radio 1, despite its bad book, is bigger than Capital, Capital Dance and Capital Xtra are bigger than Kiss, though Kisstory is bigger than all of them. Heart 80s is the number one eighties station, as it’s bigger than Absolute 80s, meanwhile Radio X and Absolute Radio are neck and neck.

If you want more RAJAR chat (AND WHO DOESN’T!), then Adam Bowie (who also writes a blog post about RAJAR) is joining me on The Media Club podcast this week. It’s out on Friday, so why not follow it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts in preparation. Also joining us on the show is audio fan, and PR supremo, Megan Carver.

For more RAJAR detail, Radio Today is also a good place to look. And, if you’ve been forwarded this by a friend or colleague, why not subscribe!

Thanks to Hallett Arendt who’s excellent Octagon software allows me to analyse RAJAR data so quickly.

All this week I’ve been posting (part 1, part 2, part 3) about why podcasters, particularly those producing long-form conversations, should think about their podcasts as shows and deliver them in the places and platforms that today’s consumers want to get them. Of course that should be in Spotify or Apple Podcasts, but shows should also be retooled to work on video platforms like YouTube.

As I talked about yesterday, retooling your production process for video can be a challenge, but it also opens up lots of questions about monetisation too. The platforms are very much marching to the beat of their own drum and not yours. So, what do you need to think about?

Well, everyone’s mileage varies, depending on what type of business model they have. If you don’t have dynamically inserted ads, or the revenue from it is pretty small, then you’re pretty fortunate. If you do, everything gets more complicated.

One of the real benefits of podcasting has been the evolving ad model. If you use a network like Acast, Audioboom or DAX, when you upload your show you mark where you want the ads to go, alongside deciding if you want there to be pre-rolls (before your content) and post-rolls (after it). Taking all of this together, shows normally have at least three ad breaks, with around three ads in each break.

As a content creator you don’t have to worry about the ads, the network sells the ads for you (alongside other podcasts) and dynamically inserts them into your show. Each listener could get a unique set of ads depending on where they are and when they download the show. The networks tend to sell a mix of spot-ads – 30 second commercials – and live reads (sometimes called sponsorships). Live reads are where the host reads out a sell for a sponsor. Normally now, whether a spot ad or a live read, the message is inserted dynamically into the episode for the listener.

The podcast app is generally quite dumb. It looks at an RSS feed for each show and that includes a link to (usually) an MP3 file on a server. It merely goes to that link and downloads the file. The clever bit is done on your network’s server. When the file is requested, the network stitches together your episode with the relevant ads and sends it back to the app for you to listen to. This is often called ‘pass-thru’ as the app gets a new file each time for each user. It doesn’t store it on its own servers as that would mean everyone would get the same mix of ads as the first time it was downloaded, also if that happened, your network wouldn’t know how many downloads there were and how to charge the advertisers.

In the early years, a few apps, including Spotify for a while, didn’t do pass thru and content creators caused enough of a stink for them all to give in. Often their reasons were good ones, they perhaps wanted to give a better experience by streaming files from their own servers rather than third party ones. But anyway the practice fizzled out. This meant that anyone listening to your show on any app got dynamic ads and a podcaster could earn some money.

Some shows are popular on all podcast apps, some are more popular on specific ones. Spotify, for example, tends to do better with younger shows and Apple with older ones. However, generally, about 70% of a show’s listening comes from Apple or Spotify with the remaining coming from apps like Pocketcasts, Overcast, Castbox or Amazon Music.

Google’s foray into podcasting most recently was with Google Podcasts, a very good, simple, Android app. Last year it entered the Google Graveyard as the platform wanted to push podcast listening to its YouTube Music app. At the same time it wanted to make what I’ll call Normal YouTube, ie the video one, a home for podcasting more generally.

YouTube has always had success with big podcasters, particularly those who started on the platform. Audio-only podcasters comprise a large number of creators often making long-form material every week. They’re a perfect target for YouTube. That’s exactly the type of material they would like, in video form. They also have an established ad network in YouTube Ads that can monetise that video content.

One of its challenges is YouTube Music and Normal YouTube are quite different products that use the same catalogue as material. They decided to treat podcasts in a similar way to music. Content owners are encouraged to upload their material, audio only with an image is fine, though they’d rather you put full video on, and just like music, they added some special metadata to signal to them that you are a podcast. On a simple level this is so they can put podcast search alongside music search.

The main thing YouTube wants you to do is replicate your RSS feed on their platform. You can do this two ways, the first is you upload your episode as a video file. This could be a full video experience or just the audio with a static image. You then put it in a special podcast playlist. You can do this manually or there’s an automated option.

The automated option takes your RSS feed and when YouTube sees you have a new episode it converts it to a video, with a static image, and adds it to a podcast playlist.

The second option is easy, but the least useful. Normal YouTube’s content discovery algorithms use a ranking of the likelihood a viewer will watch some content. It uses all the signals it has ranging from the thumbnail click thru percentage, to watch time to decide what it promotes. A thumbnail based on a static episode image, a less engaging title and then a video with no, er video, is unlikely to give an episode enough points to be promoted.

However, that’s not to say it’s a pointless exercise, you’re still available in search, and for people who’ve subscribed to your channel’s feeds. For people that know you and want your content, or for those who maybe have subscribed in the YouTube Music app, it’s a way to deliver on the promise “get us wherever you get your podcasts”.

The New York Times’ The Daily uploads most of its videos with static images with not great thumbnails and they do about 10k of views a day. Now bear in mind they’re one of the world’s biggest podcasts. Where they did a regular episode, about the Presidential Transition and Musk, in full video (though still with a poor thumbnail) it did 50k. YouTube, and its users, like full video.

One of the challenges with YouTube are its advertising rules. It does not permit any ad products that it sells itself. So for podcasters you can’t ‘burn in’ a 30 second spot ad (as they sell those) but you can do a sponsor-style live-read. When you add your RSS feed (for auto importing) it instructs you not to do it if your feed has dynamic ads in. If you ignored this and pasted the feed in any way, YouTube would go off and grab it, with your dynamic ads, and then convert it into a video. However, the video wouldn’t have pass-thru. It would have literally taken a single episode with whatever was in it and then provided that to all users in video form.

So we’re at our first quandary. If you’re someone who makes money from the dynamic ads, your listeners on YouTube won’t get them, so as a default any YouTube views won’t be monetised. If you have 1,000 subscribers at 4,000 hours of watch time (over a year) then you can join YouTube’s ad programme, which will give you a RPM of between £1 and £4 per view. This is likely less than the CPM from your podcast network. However you might have higher views, they might do a better job of filling the ad spots – it’s hard to know as it depends very much on your channel.

Your podcast network may also have some rules about whether you can put the content on YouTube in the first place.

Potentially you may move a higher paying listener from the podcast to a lower paying listener on YouTube. But then again you may bring in a new audience on YouTube and make some new money. I think it’s more likely to be the latter, but that’s hard to know.

If you do go down the YouTube route, to maximise your chance of success, you may need to replicate the strategies successful channels use. This tends to be more single topic content, with engaging thumbnails and titles and good quality, well-produced video. To do well you may need to rethink the structure of your content and decide whether that will run across both YouTube and podcast, or whether you create differentiated versions.

The opportunities on YouTube are significant, but they do require some thought. Auto-importing your podcast feed and hoping for the best, whilst at least getting your content into their system, the chances of it being particularly organically successful on Normal YouTube is fairly slim.

Meanwhile over at Spotify they’re also very keen to get you uploading video for your show.

At the moment you add your RSS feed to Spotify Creators for your audio show and it lists your podcast in their directory, respecting pass-thru for your audio ads. To add video, once it’s seen you have a new episode it will list it in Spotify Creators, you then select the option to upload an MP4. It then processes it pretty quickly and the video then appears on your podcast channel. When a user hits play they get the video version, or they can minimise that and get the audio version – great! Well…

At the point you upload the video version, Spotify stops using the audio on your regular RSS feed and instead takes the audio from your video. It does this partly so that people can flick between the audio and video versions. If it didn’t it might find it hard to match the two. However, by doing this it means it no longer takes the RSS audio version with your dynamic ads, so no more audio ad revenue from Spotify.

So your decision to upload is whether you think it’s more important to deliver a video version to Spotify’s users, or more important to get the revenue from your dynamic ads.

If you don’t make much money from the ads, or don’t have them, the decision is obviously much easier. All being equal – why wouldn’t you give users the options of having both video and audio? But clearly the money, particularly for larger shows, would be quite the thing to give up.

Spotify themselves have just announced a new partner programme. If you have 10,000 streamed hours on Spotify in a month and at least 2,000 unique listeners and are in the US, Canada, UK and Australia, then you can join. This will give you 50% of the revenue of any ads sold plus a yet-to-be-defined income from Spotify’s premium customers based on how much they stream from your shows.

It’s much more akin to YouTube’s partnership system than the traditional audio ad network one. There is a catch though, you need to host your show with Spotify (or its enterprise platform Megaphone).

So your choice is either stay with your current network, and decide whether or not to offer video for free and lose the ad money (or stick as an audio-only show). Or move to Spotify and get money from traditional podcast ads on other platforms, managed by Spotify alongside getting video-specific money from Spotify for this new partner programme.

If I was making an ad-funded podcast that had both audio and video, I would be open to this option. But my core questions would be:

1. Whether Spotify could match the audio ad money my current network was providing (for all the people listening on Apple Podcasts etc). In other words, how good were their audio CPMs?

2. What’s the additional revenue I’m likely to generate from the new video partner programme on Spotify

3. And would one and two be more than I was getting at the moment

If I chose to do the Spotify thing, I’d probably be choosing to do the YouTube thing too, especially as I’d already done the really hard bit of making my show in video form.

If the numbers add up, and I’m sure it’ll vary person to person, network to network, this could be a good thing. My show would be available in audio and video in all the main places where people want to get it, and I’d have two sets of ad income – one from Spotify and one from YouTube.

If the numbers don’t really add up – let’s say you’re getting a really good CPM from your audio only ad network, then you’re in a bit of limbo. You should probably still do YouTube, as I would imagine the revenue is mainly additional, but for Spotify, if you’ve got a decent amount of audio listeners, and no way to monetise the video, then you’re probably a bit stuck.

The Spotify Partner Programme is less than a week old, so it’s too early to jump to many conclusions. Is this the final version of it? What will their CPMs be like? What will users think about video on Spotify, will they use it? Of course, it opens up lots of questions for ad networks like Acast and Audioboom, they can only sell ads to apps that take their ad-injected feeds.

In the old pass thru world, it was easy for podcast creators, they made one audio show and let the ad network do the selling. This is quite different to the web, where websites have ad networks competing for ad slots in constantly running dynamic auctions.

In the new world you can choose to keep your podcast audio only, it will be easy, and your ad network will continue to do the heavy lifting, but will you find your growth limited on a audio-only platform that faces more competition for consumer’s time from the video platforms?

Alternatively you may re-tool your show to be audio and video and take your luck by splitting your ad inventory a couple of different ways? You may have more potential to grow, but it requires more work and effort and you are somewhat at the mercy of what Spotify and YouTube do in the future.

I wish there were some easy answers. Sadly, there are not. What should you do? Well it depends! Personally, whilst the monetisation options start to shake out, I would work to re-tool your show to work in both video and audio. If you’ve got a limited budget, what can you do step-by-step to get there? Similarly how do you build out your other platforms, things like social and web/email. Your best chances will come from having flexibility. The best chance of success will come from delivering the right content on the right platform to the right consumers – you can never go wrong by doing the right thing for them.

That’s it from me. This is the 4th part of a series, the other parts are here: part 1, part 2, part 3. Do subscribe to get more posts about the podcast, streaming and radio world.

If you want to follow my podcast, The Media Club, all the details are on its website.

Previously on Matt on Audio I said.. “I don’t think it’s any surprise that I’m suggesting if you make an audio-only podcast that could be visualised, then you should be thinking how it can be adapted to suit both audio and video environments. I’m not suggesting a pivot to video away from anything else. As I said before, if you’re making long-form conversational content, of course it should exist as a podcast in audio-only places, but I think it would be strange to maroon it there whilst consumers elsewhere would like it too.”

Working alongside the rest of the team at my marketing agency Podcast Discovery, the past year has seen us talk to lots of creators, from big media companies and podcast-first operations to individual talent. Video, both short-form and long-form has been a constant topic.

Some built strong video operations from the start, others have added it to what they do, whilst other companies are still finding the best way forward. Some shows have eschewed video completely. We had great fun working with the Penny 4 team on Up In Smoke, a drama podcast with Mei Mac and Adam Buxton. It used no video assets at all. However with the right mix of PR, platform relationships and really great content, the show sat in the number one position in the Fiction charts for most of November and December and had weeks in the top 50 overall too.

The nature of the show meant it wasn’t able to be filmed – that would be like making an expensive Netflix series. It was also designed to demonstrate the team’s skill at audio – they were already well known for video. But also it demonstrated successful IP that could be translated to screens. In other words they had a plan.

We’ve also worked on quite a few shows where the video and audio is treated in similar ways. Pod Save the UK, made by Reduced Listening and part of the Crooked Media network, was like many of their shows – full video from the start. When the show was being built, delivering for both was at the forefront of everyone’s mind. Initially sitting with the established Pod Save the World on YouTube to drive awareness and sampling, it now sits on its own channel that we launched shortly after the general election.

Having access to good video really helped establish the show on social media. At the launch, the host Nish Kumar was well known. It was important to demonstrate this was his podcast, and showing fans what they would get from him on the show was important. His co-host was a newcomer – Coco Khan. The video meant we could demonstrate their great chemistry and introduce them as a new duo.

I think if you want to see the best modern take on combining video, audio and social in the UK, you have to look at what The Fellas Studios are doing. Set up in 2020 by YouTubers Callum Airey and Joshua Larkin, they’re the people behind The Fellas Podcast, Saving Grace and Dad V Girls After Hours. These shows skew younger, do well on YouTube and Spotify with some audience elsewhere too. They are not your traditional ‘top show’ on Apple Podcasts.

They’ve built a great studio set-up for their shows, which really shines on YouTube and socials and they’ve kept a youthful feeling that very few other UK shows have. You can even watch their weekly behind the scenes show, if you want to understand more about their operation. They’re very much a podcast company, but they’re not obsessed with audio. Outside of Goalhanger, they’re probably the only people in the UK that have managed to launch a number of shows successfully, at scale.

We re-tooled a show close to my heart this year – my own! The Media Club had its roots as The Guardian’s Media Talk starting in 2006 (!) before becoming its own stand-alone thing in 2014 as The Media Podcast, produced by Rethink Audio.

I took over as host in 2021. We’d been producing a video version of the podcast since April 2023 – but it was very much a visualised version of the podcast that we put on YouTube. In other-words the video was sort of incidental to the show, we had filmed what we had already been making. The main benefit was that we had clips to use on social media, it was more about the marketing than having a video show.

Last year we wanted to re-brand, the name, The Media Podcast, wasn’t brilliant for SEO (or cut through!) and we needed to update the artwork and really think more about the show format. We were also keen to ‘dog food’ a re-brand and look at the issues when reformulating a show.

One of the challenges lots of creators find with ‘always on’ shows is to have the time to do this work. After 10 years it was probably due a rethink and a polish. We used our brief summer pause to re-brand the show The Media Club, update all of the socials, build a new website, give it a new look and tweak some of the format points. The other big thing was to think more about the video side. The key challenge was really a production one. The show is recorded on a Thursday afternoon and then comes out at Midnight. We needed the edit to remain quick. For the video side to work, we needed to use a proper video environment with minimal set-up time – it needed to be ready to work. We found a great studio in Podshop that had the look we wanted – a trendy living room that matched a media club in its feel. Generally we’re ready to go in fifteen minutes and we’re practiced enough that the show follows a prepped running order and recorded ‘as live’ without the need to do too many pickups. The show is relatively simple with three camera angles, a host, guest and wide, so the producer does a live vision mix. Changes for pace and relevance happen in the edit.

The show is edited in Descript and exported for audio. The video is then cut automatically by Descript, and tidied up by the Podcast Discovery team who can use the isolated shots to fix any vision mixes. They then export the final versions for YouTube and Spotify. Audio comes out at Midnight and the video version is ready by Midday. The video team then makes the short-form clips too.

Within the resources we have, the show works as a video experience. It looks like it’s made for people watching. It seems high quality and worthy of someone’s time. It is perhaps not entirely optimised for YouTube. We keep in things like introductions, though we’ve shortened them significantly, something you probably wouldn’t do if you were only making a YouTube video. There is, like all these things, some compromises.

At the same time, for the thousands of regular listeners, I don’t think they notice that much of a difference. It still very much works as an audio podcast.

So what has been the effect of the changes? We changed a few things at the same time, so some of the benefits are likely to come from a variety of the alterations. The re-brand, though, gave us a reason to think about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. Getting off the treadmill of always-on to do some strategy was worthwhile. The changes we made to the look of the show on all platforms and a tidy up of the format made the show better. The increase in visual quality of the full video episodes and the short-form have made what we do look more professional. Whether people consume the full thing or not, there’s been a significant uptick of people talking to me about the show and a lot of that has been driven by how it looks.

Listening on the audio platforms (the RSS-fed ones) has increased since the rebrand. Growth has replaced a static listenership. Long-form video consumption has more than doubled since before the changes and some episodes have had 10x previous viewing if they catch a nerve.

We’ve been adding the video versions to Spotify. Now this is an audience that was previously audio-only, so I was fascinated to see how they would interact with the video. They were clearly happy with the audio, so there’s no reason for them to come to the show for the video. Generally around a third of the people who consume the show on Spotify see at least 1 minute of video and collectively it accounts for about 20% of the total time spent on the show.

I think this is pretty good, and higher than I thought it would be. I think it shows that you can’t make assumptions about the audience and how they want to consume what you make.

Our rebrand is designed to make the show platform agnostic. The Media Club, no longer The Media Podcast, is a weekly show about the media. You can listen to it or watch it, we’re happy if you do either. We are not making the decision for our consumers. Indeed, for some people, giving it 45 mins a week isn’t possible so they just watch the clips, or they subscribe to the newsletter.

The newsletter, sitting on a Substack at themediaclub.com, delivers a weekly edition explaining who’s on the show and the topics. It also has the links to all the stories we talk about, that we used to just send to the contributors. And you know what, I’m fine if people just want to get the newsletter for the links if the show doesn’t fit in with their lives.

The Media Club is niche, but it’s a multi-media brand. Video, Audio, Social, Email. We reach interested media folks on platforms relevant to them.

The other thing I’ve noticed since the changes, alongside more people talking to me about it, is that many more industry PRs have got in touch to get their bosses on, and the show will likely be better for it. That’s driven particularly by the high-quality video. Whilst the scale of the audience hasn’t changed that much and neither has the content, the perception has really altered.

Another big reason to do all these changes to The Media Club was that we wanted to see the specific implications of moving to include video so we were better equipped to talk to our Podcast Discovery clients.

As well as the things above, we learned a hell of a lot about the big decisions you need to think about with regards to RSS vs YouTube vs Spotify Video and how that can affect monetisation and marketing.

Let’s talk more about that tomorrow in the last part of this series. I’ll see you then!

This is part three of a series about video and podcasts. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here and the final part here.

Previously on Matt On Audio… The move to video for podcasters isn’t because audio is dead or dying – of course people are always going to want something that works just in their ears – but because consumer behaviour has been changing and video is the platform that many users, particularly young ones, are using for personal, speech-based content.

Simultaneously, in the same way that Serial and Apple Podcasts on the iPhone defined what podcasting was for many people in 2014, in 2024 the press showing video of Joe Rogan or Call Me Daddy and endless clips of people speaking into microphones on TikTok, has defined what podcasting is today.

Consumers don’t define podcasting by platform – broadly listening to an MP3 file on a phone – but by content type – people having long-form conversations (on whatever platform). For many of these people, because they grew up with YouTube and see this content on YouTube, they regard podcasting as something that is video-first.

Of course, many audio OGs look at this with horror! We should defend podcasting as an audio medium. By doing video we are losing the key things that made (audio) podcasts successful. There’s also very valid discussions that (audio) podcasts aren’t just chat shows. There are documentaries, dramas, things that would be unable or very uneconomic to make video versions of – which of course is hard to argue with.

My friend James Cridland, from the excellent Podnews, in his Podnews Weekly Review podcast, thinks podcasters should concentrate on what he sees as one of it’s core USPs: “Entertainment for your ears while your eyes are busy”. He thinks that the medium should very much be audio-first.

I don’t think audio is going away at all. Audio podcasting is popular, with about a quarter of the UK tuning in. If I was making something that was a long-form conversation, I think you would be mad not to make it available as a podcast.

I do have some worries though, about putting all my eggs in the audio-only basket. Firstly, non-TV video consumption has been growing fast, from YouTube but also from TikTok and the like. Consumers are spending large amounts of time there. The mobile nature of much of this consumption whether on a train or a sofa can more obviously eat into time previously allocated for audio-podcasts. I would worry about doubling down on entertainment for your ears while your eyes are busy. Podcast and radio’s success has often come from it being background consumption. The challenge with mobiles is that much of the consumption is video, which comes with its own audio through the same headphones. Any active mobile use significantly reduces podcast consumption. Sure, you’re less likely to consume video on a run or in the car, leaving that to podcasts (or owned music) but why should we be retreating to leave podcasting in just certain environments?

Audio-only podcasting does also seem to have a growth problem. Whilst there’s always new shows that launch and do well and there’s some big hitters doing phenomenal numbers at the top of the charts, many historic shows have been plateaued. They’re finding it hard to grow new listeners. Now, this is partly the result of increased competition and also a lack of focus on marketing. Previously that wasn’t something most shows had to worry about. The sector’s growth meant a rising tide carried all ships. If the influx of new listeners has perhaps slowed and there’s more competition, the fight for people’s time is going to be harder.

Most people create content because they want it to be consumed. Podcast creators are focused on their listening numbers, but they also get excited about TikTok views, social shares, or someone writing about their work. They’re excited when more people get their stuff. Now, of course, there needs to be discussion about getting value (cash or otherwise), but getting people to listen, watch or read is all good.

Now podcasting has been an efficient way to make content, distribute it and monetise it. But as I talked about yesterday, a separate group of people were doing something similar in the YouTube world at the same time and more recently, another bunch of folks were making short-form video for socials.

Most podcast creators are in the long-form conversation business. They came to audio as it was the easiest, or most efficient for them, way of producing their material. The audio ecosystem allowed that to be catalogued and distributed relatively easily to consumers through apps like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Additionally ad-networks like Acast or Audioboom allowed them to monetise these conversations.

To me, the choice of podcasting for most creators is rarely about audio. It’s more about it being an efficient system for content creation and distribution.

The fundamental challenge though is new audiences that previously gravitated to audio-only podcasting have been redirected to places that deliver video content. Video content consumption is also in more environments – the living room’s big screen, tablets and mobiles in and around the home including in bed, the screen at work and the mobile in environments in which you wait – like a bus stop, a train journey, the doctor’s office.

Also, for many, video content is no longer just something that you give your full attention too. How much scrolling do people do when they’re watching TV? How many people have a YouTube video running in a second tab (or second screen) whilst doing some work? Video is starting to occupy the background listening need-state that podcasting (and radio) have always owned.

I’m also not saying that no audio is consumed in some of these video places, or that there aren’t great audio environments like a smart speaker at home, driving a car, walking the dog etc – but audio faces a strong competitor in the battle for people’s time.

If you are in the long-form conversation business, I think it’s essential to be focused on your potential consumers and how they spend their time. To be successful, you need to distribute your content in the ways that best appeal to them and make them more likely to consume it. If you’re trying to sell a product, you want it to be in every store and not just in Sainsbury’s (no matter how successful it is doing there).

If someone does not listen to podcasts but watches YouTube videos in your genre, should you be trying to teach them to try podcasts, or should you put your content in a place they are already visiting?

I don’t think it’s any surprise that I am suggesting that if you make an audio-only podcast that could be visualised, then you should be thinking how it can be adapted to suit both audio and video environments.

I’m not suggesting a pivot to video away from anything else. As I said before, if you’re making long-form conversation content, of course it should exist as a podcast in audio-only places, but I think it would be strange to maroon it there whilst consumers elsewhere would like it too.

Now I completely understand that adding a full video episode to your output is likely to be a complex thing from both a production perspective and likely from a monetisation one too. There’s definitely significant implications if you go down this route.

So tomorrow let’s talk about some examples of where video has been added to podcasts and what the effect’s been. I’ll see you then!

This is part two of series about video and podcasting. Read part one here and part three here.

I spent a lot of time in 2024 talking to podcasters about video. Some are angry, some are excited, lots are perplexed.

YouTube’s push into being a home for podcasters and Spotify’s desire for podcasters to upload video versions of their episodes are gravitational forces that seem to be dragging podcasters, willing or not, into switching on the cameras.

On the more refusenik end, there’s a discussion about the brilliance of audio (for listeners and creators) and the desire not to kowtow to the big platforms. There’s often talk of ‘defending’ audio and that it’s a special medium of its own.

For those excited by it, video offers a way to reach more audience, specifically driven by YouTube’s content discovery algorithms. It also offers another stream of cash either through video ads, or Spotify’s as-yet, under-explained, subscription revenue share. Plus I think there’s also probably a bit about ego too – looking good on a screen.

My own podcast background is from doing it for big radio groups, doing it for smaller audio startups, running the British Podcast Awards and now with Podcast Discovery, talking to lots of people who want to grow their show.

When we did the Awards it became very clear that podcasters’ objectives are very much not aligned. ‘Podcasters’ were doing it for many different reasons. We often referred to the Awards as a very big, broad tent. It ranged from people making shows for fun in a kitchen to massive media organisations, from small businesses appealing to a niche to high-value talent wanting to own their audience directly. Some weren’t bothered about the cash, others saw it as a way to escape the nine to five, a few were using it as a route to develop a new creative business whilst others saw it as a new platform to monetise their fans.

I think it would be really hard to create a trade body for podcasting because why people are doing it is so varied. It would be difficult to get them to agree on what the body should do! A key part of the initial rise of podcasting was that individuals could create a show with very few barriers to entry. Today, if someone doesn’t want to do video, that’s fine. There’s lots of ways to execute a podcast and build an audience. Doing that purely in audio is not going to go away.

At the same time, anyone would be mad not to think that the world, and consumers, do change. A stand alone iPod was transformative and a design classic, but the job it did was more important than the device it was on. A thousand songs in your pocket was a more successful proposition than the concept of a click wheel. Yes, there are still some people that are searching eBay so they can get a replacement, as for them it was the perfect device for listening to music, but most people have moved on. As I describe media use below, and to stop me having to continually point it out, that just like the iPod not everyone consumes media the same way – I’m trying to describe what the larger groups of people do – please don’t get offended by your edge case – “well, I listen to shows on my smart fridge I’ll have you know!”

I don’t think video podcast viewers are the natural successor to audio podcast listeners. I haven’t seen much evidence that audio listeners wholesale move their consumption to YouTube once they’ve ‘seen the light’. The success of the audio podcast is often about how it fits into someone’s day. For many it’s an accompaniment that does not require full attention. It leans into what radio’s learned, that being a background medium is a superpower.

Whether the device plays video or not, it’s a screen that’s not often on. Most likely in a pocket, or on a car dashboard. In the UK, RAJAR’s MIDAS report suggests that podcast listening is more likely to come at the expense of people’s owned music than it does for radio listening. In other words, one non-linear background media has partly replaced another.

For me the much bigger question is how people get into listening to podcasts. I think the first major interaction with podcasts were three interlinked events. The stand alone podcast app for the iPhone came out in June 2012, the year in which smart-phone penetration hit 50% and seven years after Apple put podcasting into the iTunes app. By 2012 there were a decent number of shows – many from people consumers have heard of – if you pressed that new podcast button. Then in 2014, Serial, was the first cross-over mainstream hit. For many people they could now hit that button, and tune into something they had heard a lot about, for free, on a mainstream device connected to the internet.

But you have to remember that the iPhone was an expensive device and Serial was an intelligent product. It also appealed to people well-versed in listening to something. Podcasting started out, post-early adopters, as something a little older (at least 25+) and up-market.

In 2014, at the same time, new creators Pewdiepie, Jenna Marbles, Zoella, Vsauce and Stampy were enjoying huge YouTube success with younger and less well-off audiences.

The original vlogging – individuals talking to the camera – alone or with their friends has many similarities with what was happening in audio-only podcasting. Their separate successes were more about demographics on platforms than it was about the content they created. Indeed both platforms had loads of material that wasn’t chatting. Dramas and documentaries on podcasts and lots of clips of media on YouTube. Indeed many older audiences were following a link to a video on YouTube, whilst younger consumers were subscribing to their fellow content creators. But these younger audiences were basically doing the same thing on YouTube as older audiences were doing on podcasts, hitting subscribe on their favourite shows.

So both have been chugging along quite happily for the last ten years. So what’s changed? Well, in the YouTube space many of those vloggers have grown up and transitioned into more traditional podcast formats. Some people were always there or thereabouts. A bit of Googling finds the first episode of The Joe Rogan Experience on his YouTube channel. It’s a live stream and as one of the commentators says it’s like “watching cavemen discover fire”.

Rogan was video-first from the start and whilst he had an audio-only hiatus whilst taking Spotify’s money, it’s his spiritual home. Whilst not to my taste, the show is hugely popular and still generates outsized press coverage. What the show is, where it is and how it looks, leads many consumers discovering ‘podcasting’ through Joe Rogan to link the two. A podcast’s a video thing, right? As Serial taught people what a podcast is in 2014, Rogan does the same in 2024.

It’s not just Joe Rogan of course. In the US shows like Impaulsive, self-described as “The world’s greatest, most thought-provoking, mentally stimulating podcast in the history of mankind…” do a million views an episode, whilst not troubling the Apple Podcast charts. Other shows like The Pat McAfee Show are again, something different. It’s a TV show streamed on ESPN+, his YouTube channel and released as an audio podcast. It gets half a million views on YouTube and is the number 10 sports podcast in the US.

Both of these could easily be dismissed as not proper podcasts, but they’ve claimed the word podcast and are teaching new-to-podcasting consumers that a podcast isn’t something that’s driven by a platform, it’s a type of content – people having a discussion – that you can watch. It doesn’t mean you can’t get it elsewhere, but the core visual, is er, visual.

This seeing is believing concept is only heightened by social media. The last few years has seen the transition away from text-based social media – Twitter, Facebook etc – to video based ones – TikTok, Instagram Reels etc. People are spending far more time in these places, and younger audiences are native consumers of it.

As an aside, social clips reinforce the idea of a podcast as video. Conversation, into large visible microphones, instantly makes people think – podcast. There is some talk about trying to wrestle the word podcast back to audio. That battle is lost. The audience does not see podcasting as a particular medium, they see it as a content type. People talking into a microphone.

If you hang out in the podcasting subreddit, you’ll see lots of posts about people starting shows asking the same questions over and over again about what gear they should use. In the last year ‘what microphone should I use’ has been replaced by ‘what camera should I use’. New, youthful creators see podcasting as ‘people talking into a microphone’ rather than making an MP3.

Anyway, back to phones. Fundamentally they’re interactive, always on devices that give high levels of engagement. The entire world is accessible through them. Ubiquitous connectivity means they can be a lean-forward filler of any available time. Of course, a phone can do lean-back as well, with audio accompanying a run etc, but its sweet-spot is lean-forward.

Again, in RAJAR’s MIDAS survey you see time and again that linear radio performs poorly on mobile devices. It’s an active, choice-based medium. People use it to find what’s relevant to them, web searches, TikTok feeds and even podcasts are all personal. There’s not a shared experience between people’s phones. Radio, in a shared space, is often the ‘least worst option’ for the people consuming it – it’s designed to be mass appeal, consumed by many.

Podcasts, as a personal medium, do well on a phone too, but it competes with a little bit of everything, all of the time – the ease of the internet, YouTube, Netflix, messaging – all often more active engagement than an audio show. But I think it’s less about the device, and more about people’s availability and what their hierarchy of consumption is. Where they are, and what suits them for that moment.

The emergence of podcasting was a confluence of technology (for both making and listening) and general internet connectivity. It built on the fact that people were comfortable with the concept – “it’s a bit like radio programmes delivered to your phone” – and it occupied radio’s great selling point – working as a background medium and it was free! It was accelerated by the (relative) ease to make audio content. It’s awareness was driven by talent jumping on board (again, relatively easily) and using their channels to promote their shows, word-of-mouth from passionate fans and publicity around break-out hits – Gervais, Serial, Rogan, My Dad Wrote A Porno, Shagged Married Annoyed.

Fundamentally though, it was media that could be inserted into an already busy media diet. Walking, travelling and personal time with the headphones in. In 2005 to 2015 radio had failed to occupy this place due to noisy FM reception issues and inadequate streaming. Podcasting’s competition was owned-music, saved to a device. It grew fast.

Meanwhile the growth of internet video consumption during this time, the early days of vlogs and YouTube, was driven by its own unique environment. Firstly it was tethered. Computer-based consumption and later broader devices through wifi at home. Similar to podcasts it was personal. YouTube was rarely watched by people together. It may well have been shared, but consumption was usually solitary. Individual laptops in bedrooms whilst others in the household consumed video on the big TV.

The last ten years has seen YouTube remain personal but it has become untethered. It still occupies key real estate at home, but ubiquitous connectivity means for many people, particularly the younger ones, it now sits in a place that audio podcasts occupied for older audiences. You only have to walk down a train, or past people on a platform to see that “travelling and personal time with the headphones in” is now often dominated by video.

Before podcasts and video, the Metro newspaper, launching in March 1999 was an instant hit, it delivered a new product to cater for a need and distributed it to the right places. Its success wasn’t entirely about the content – though it was timely and well designed for the audience – its success came from catering for a human need in a specific environment… and delivering.

So what does this all mean for audio podcasters today? How should you think about what you make and how you distribute it and where does video fit in? Read about that in part 2 here.

The changes to the UK’s radio regulations kicked in last week. Local radio stations are now freed from their format restrictions, have been given complete flexibility on any local programming, and services in the country’s ‘nations’ no longer have any additional requirements. The only committments that remain are those around providing local news.

A sensible decision as local monopolies have disappeared and digital competition for listeners and advertising has supersized, or a terrible indictment on the country’s commitment to local content? Perhaps somewhere in between.

The final nature of the country’s commercial radio networks is now up to the people that run them – Global, Bauer, Communicorp, Nation and News UK – as well as the handful of remaining local radio operators.

Changes can be made in network programming, but also down to the transmitter level – which will broadcast what?

Money drives much of the decision making, from staffing costs to running buildings but they’re also thinking about how audiences are changing, what advertisers demand (or understand) and how stations sit alongside their competitors.

First out of the gate with a change is Bauer Media who are removing the regional afternoon shows from Greatest Hits Radio, meaning that Kate Thornton will be replacing Heidi Secker, John Marshall, Mark Collins, Andy Goulding, Martin Starke, Scott Temple & Holly Day, Steve Priestly, Tony Wright and Stuart Webster.

This afternoon show is second only to Ken Bruce in the ratings in both reach and share. Reach is below, but its share of 7.3% is higher than the station’s average – 6.1% and only Ken Bruce at 8.7% beats it.

Of course, it’s not just the presenters that make it a success – the music, Ken’s lead-in, brand environment etc are important too, but it’s hard not to feel sad for a group of people that clearly have been doing something right.

Looking at its overall figures, the network was down a fraction quarter on quarter, but up significantly year on year, as it added more stations to its network. As the changes have settled, it will be interesting to see how it does going forward. The press release says it’s “the most listened to commercial station in the country and has 7.4m weekly listeners” – this is based on its hours of 64m. More people tune in to Capital and Heart, however, with 7.5m and 9.7m reach respectively.

It’s hard to look at the Kiss and Hits numbers in London, as Bauer has replaced the Kiss London RAJAR Entry with a Hits London one that combines Kiss’ analogue audience with Hits’ digital one, even though it was barely on-air on the quarter. I had a go at piecing it together but it was tough. It’s likely Kiss in London would have seen a decline, probably to the point where Capital Xtra London is likely neck and neck, or even a little ahead. I similarly found it difficult to decode the broader Hits Radio network which combines recently rebranded stations, differently branded Scottish stations and a pure play version of the network too. Bauer suggests its reach is 7.2m.

Kisstory remains the stand-out part of the Kiss brand, delivering 2.3m reach (stable q-on-q, down from 2.5m y-on-y) and 9.1m hours vs the regular Kiss at 1.6m reach (down from 2m q-on-q and 2.5m y-on-y) – who suffered from losing attribution of analogue listening in London and the regions too. Nationally the mostly digital Capital Xtra leads it, marginally, at 1.7m its best figures since 2019.

Poor figures for Magic with reach down to 2.2m nationally (from 3.1m a year ago, and 2.6m last quarter) and in London a year on year drop from 1.5m to 1m. It’s going through a recently instigated programming change with a music shift at the moment no doubt to try and adjust this direction.

Absolute celebrates its highest ever network figure at 5.7m, though the main station falls a little back this quarter and is around 400k down year on year.

Looking at the two main radio groups, Bauer’s reach is pretty flat over the quarter and the year, but its hours have dropped. Global, on the other hand, has seen sustained growth and a significant hours jump.

Both groups have altered their national digital line-ups recently, with big changes for Global as they add 12 new stations. It will be interesting to see how that plays out in future RAJARs.

Late last month Bauer issued a press release talking about the business – “In Audio, Bauer is pursuing a growth strategy based on a lean broadcasting business and investing in digital audio offerings, as well as enhancing efficiency and collaboration.”

It’s a surprisingly honest line. There are lots of excellent things about Bauer’s business and something like Greatest Hits’ speedy evolution clearly shows a great ability to innovate. I think the challenge for much of the non-spin offs – the core stations like Absolute Radio, Magic and Kiss – is they lack any real investment. I haven’t seen any marketing for them, and there’s clearly a talent bill reduction – shown by Frank Skinner and Ronan Keating’s departure. It would definitely fit the ‘lean broadcasting’ description above.

A lack of marketing, reduced talent, combined with a significant proportion of airtime being given over to networked contesting makes growth for these services significantly harder to deliver.

For my radio fan side, this of course makes me sad. On the business side of my brain I understand it. Radio is massively more efficient than it used to be and changes that “enhance efficiency” make them much more profitable businesses. Premium rate revenues are a big part of that. But there can be a dangerous situation where stations rely more and more on them. If you make the radio stations less listenable, any short term gains will soon be outweighed by a declining audience (and then revenue).

At the moment in the “Rayo Network competition” across all the stations, they’re giving away an impressive £400,000. However after a few years of non-stop cash giveaways, it can seem pretty unremarkable on-air, especially as the mechanic has been streamlined to “register and wait for a call” no doubt to remove friction to generate more £2.50 texts. There’s not a lot of passive entertainment value there for listeners whether they choose to play or not.

Global

Over at Global, as mentioned above, some sustained growth across the group with decent year on year progress for all of its main networks, except for Classic FM (with perhaps its worst reach number for a few decades). Capital and Heart are particularly impressive.

Widening the look to the brands, to take into account the spin-offs, you can see the significant impact they made, particularly on the hours side:

BBC

The BBC has done pretty well this quarter. Radio 1 and 2 seem to have stabilised. Radio 3, 4, 5 and Sports Extra did well. Radio 3, had its highest ever hours.

The story for local radio in England remains poor. I’m sure it’s still recovering from changing so many shows, but I don’t hear about much marketing, or adesire to try and benefit from commercial radio’s evacuation from local programming.

AOB

If you haven’t caught it, do check out my podcast – The Media Club. Watch it on YouTube and Spotify, listen to it on Apple, Amazon Music and everywhere else you get podcasts. This Friday me and Adam Bowie will be catching up about RAJAR. You can read his blog analysis about this quarter here. There’s also more data at Radio Today.

Thanks to Hallett Arendt who’s excellent Octagon software allows me to analyse RAJAR data so quickly.

What have I missed? Leave it in the comments.

I get to quickly review the RAJAR data by using the excellent Octagon from Hallett Arendt. Go check it out if you need to do that too!

With some of the quarterly results of the RAJARs – the UK’s radio ratings – there just seems to be plenty of good news. It usually coincides with the population update. This time around the population universe is up to 57.6m from 56.3m and radio listeners are up to 50.8m from 49.9m which means there’s more people to play with!

Before we get to that though, a quick look at the platforms. DAB has its highest ever reach with 71.4% of the UK (that’s 36.2m people) tuning in. AM/FM is listened to by 55.3% and 29.4% consume through a smart speaker. When we look at share – the amount of listening – DAB is the largest with 42.8%, AM/FM’s hit a new low at 26.3% with DTV at 2.7%. 11.1% of listening is through a phone, the web or internet radios whilst 17% of all listening is through a smart speaker (a new high).

The changing nature of consumption means DAB is pretty essential for radio stations now – if you don’t show up on that dial, the available time people can give to you is very low. Whilst anyone can be on smart speakers, its essential that stations stay top of mind. With presets you can occupy a place on a radio, but with voice listeners have to remember to ask for you.

I think for smaller radio stations, especially ones that are an occasional listen, significant thought has to go in marketing touch points – newsletters, social, outdoor etc – to remind people you exist and to provide a value proposition – a ‘why’ to tune in.

A change of presenters is one way to attract attention for radio stations. We’ve talked much about Ken Bruce swapping from BBC Radio 2 to Greatest Hits Radio, but at the beginning of this quarter, Radio 1’s Jordan North crossed the street to start on the Capital Breakfast Show.

Jordan isn’t on Capital Scotland and their Welsh-language opt-out, but is still across most of ‘Capital Network UK’. The figures for his 6am to 10am slot show an increase quarter on quarter and year on year from 2.6m to 2.9m – but this data includes two quarters – the one before he started as well.

Looking at the data for Capital London – which is measured on a single quarter – you can see a q-on-q increase from 654k to 792k and similar for the year on year figure. He seems to have definitely made an impact. It’s also helped Capital’s total listening too, with y-o-y reach up nearly a million from 6.01m to 6.99m. Q-on-q they’re up from 6.2m.

Over at Radio 1 you would expect them to have seen a bit of an impact, but they’ve had a pretty good book, with the station jumping q-on-q from 7.3m to 8.1m (y-on-y is up from 7.6m).

Comparing the 6am to 10am time period Greg James (who’s on for most of that) has managed to grow his audience from 3.8m to 3.9m, no mean feat with competition from his ex-colleague. However over on Jordan’s old Drivetime slot the growth has been even more substantial – up to 3.3m (a q-on-q increase from 2.8m and y-on-y from 3.0m).

Over at the other main youth station Kiss, Radio 1 and Capital’s strength has not been helpful. It’s down to a reach of 2m (a nearly 300k drop q-on-q and nearly 500k y-on-y). 150k of that quarterly loss is in London. The Kiss Network’s reach remains relatively stable over the last year, a little down, but still delivering 4m. The hours drop from 21m to 17.8m will hurt though.

Kisstory is now bigger than the main Kiss with a weekly reach of 2.3m (up on the quarter, down on the year) and its hours of 9.6m is ahead of its stablemate’s 8.0m. Kiss suffers from younger audiences listening to the radio less and is not helped by little marketing from Bauer and an events focus on Kisstory.

It’s also has to contend with competition from Capital Dance which is now bringing in 1.1m listeners a week and 5.4m hours.

Older Stations

There’s an interesting battle happening between the slightly older targeted stations – Magic, Greatest Hits Radio, Smooth and BBC Radio 2.

GHR’s entry upset much of this older end, with Radio 2 dropping from 14.5m post-pandemic to 13.3m now. It impacted Smooth’s reach, but with a music policy change, as well as some marketing, they’ve seen a return to growth. Similarly Magic was hit initially and then saw some slow growth. A schedule change, and a lack of marketing to support it (and as of yesterday the loss of Ronan Keating on Breakfast) puts it in a difficult position.

GHR though may have peaked, it saw its national reach drop slightly from 7.6m to 7.5m. I think this means the other stations now have a chance to reset and see where they can find space in the market.

So what are they all doing? Well, usually these write-ups are quite text based for something that talks about audio! You might not be a regular listener to BBC Radio 2, Magic, Smooth and GHR – but could you guess what they sound like? I’ve compiled a mix of the music from the 8am hour yesterday, can you guess which is which? I’ll reveal the answers below.

Number 1:

Number 2:

Number 3:

Number 4:

When we look at the reach profile for each station – the percentage of audience in each demographic, it’s an interesting mix…

Radio 2’s the oldest – with half of its audience over 55, and GHR a little older than Smooth.

I’m not a regular listener to any of those stations, but as a 45 year-old, gulp, I’m probably in the demo for most of them. I felt that GHR seemed quite old sounding, the lack of any contemporary songs is noticeable. I thought the Smooth Radio mix was pretty good, significantly more upbeat than it used it to be and it didn’t feel as old, it has definitely been reinvented as a solid AC. Magic is obviously a mix of contemporary and classics and very listenable. Radio 2 had the highest number of songs unfamiliar to me – particularly the country-infused ones – and was surprisingly contemporary when you look at the demographic mix. Their repositioning to better cater for the 35-45s is certainly noticeable but I feel for the oldies.

So what were they all? Well, Number 1 was Radio 2, Number 2 was Magic, Number 3 was Smooth and Number 4 was GHR. Is it what you thought? Tell me in the comments!

Elsewhere

Over at News UK, talkSPORT is celebrating its best ever reach with the network delivering 3.7m listeners. Times Radio is still pretty stationary with 478k reach, now overtaken by the audio feed of GB News with 518k. The loss of Matt Chorley to Five Live is probably unlikely to help. talkRADIO saw its reach fall back a little to 690k (from 757k) not helped by a constantly changing schedule in the wake of all of the Talk TV machinations.

The main Virgin Radio is up 8% to 1.6m and the network as a whole up 14% to 2.1m. Irish import Ryan Tubridy is up to 503k, a q-on-q rise from 457k and y-on-y from 488k. Chris Evans delivers 900k across the network, up marginally q-on-q and up from 863k y-on-y.

Radio X has delivered its highest ever reach of 2.3m. Moyles delivers 1.2m and Johnny Vaughan’s over 1m for the first time. A best ever result for the Absolute Radio Network too – now reaching 5.6m.

Another best ever for Fun Kids – its London 10+ reach is 142k.

Over at BBC Local Radio in England I imagine a sigh of relief with numbers stabilising, if not really growing. They’re up around 100k q-on-q to 4.8m (but down from 5.5m y-on-y). What’s that looking like across the schedule?

A quick glance would suggest that the many breakfast show changes have hit the network hard, with mid-mornings performing a little better. The least affected is the most regionalised – afternoons. Late evenings seems quite challenged too.

Also check out Radio Today’s round up and Adam Bowie’s analysis too.

Data analysed using Hallett Arendt’s Octagon

The latest radio audience figures in the UK are out and there’s lots to be cheery about. First, radio listening is up, with total weekly reach increasing by nearly half a million listeners – resulting in 89% of the population tuning into linear broadcast radio each week.

People are surprised when I explain that this many people tune into a medium that’s over 100 years old, but contrary to popular belief, we are in a golden age of audio!

The combination of stations, the formats and styles they cover, the talent they have and the platforms it’s delivered on – when taken together – provide a great, free, bundle for UK listeners.

Alongside this there’s a strong and growing range of on-demand content through podcasts – again with excellent talent covering a broad selection of topics. Let alone easy to use streaming services and audiobooks getting more accessible.

Part of the reason that UK radio has maintained its success is that the linear product has developed over the years to really take advantage of new platforms.

AM and FM radio listening has now dropped to its lowest level ever – just 27.0% of time spent listening. Indeed, its now fallen behind online radio which accounts for 27.8% of listening. DAB Digital Radio continues to provide the bulk of consumption at 42.6%.

I also think the investment – in the content, marketing and distribution – of DAB stations has also helped super-charge the success of these brands on smart-speakers too – a platform which now delivers 60% of that internet listening.

People often think that in-car listening is what drives radio success, actually its main location is in-home. Pre-pandemic it accounted for around 59% of total hours, post-pandemic it was 65% and it’s now settled down to 62% (I guess as a significant number of listeners spend more of their week at home).

At home listening is mainly tuning into a box – be it a DAB radio, smart-speaker or old FM set. A speaker pumping out entertainment and company in the background is a key reason that linear remains strong.

Where linear radio does badly is on a device like the phone. According to RAJAR’s MIDAS study, only 4% of listening to linear radio is through a phone. The phone is a brilliant media device as it can access a huge amount of material – TV, podcasts, games, the web, music – but it’s a device driven by active, lean-forward, personalised curation. That’s why at the other end of the spectrum, 76% of podcast listening (according to MIDAS) is carried out on a phone.

So, for linear radio, all hail the magic box. The speaker in the background. That 89% of the country use to be entertained and informed.

But, what are they listening to?

When All Radio is strong, lots of stations end up being quite strong – or at least stable too.

Scouting through the data there are quite a few stations that have gone up for technical reasons as well as content ones.

A big headline is likely to be the success of Greatest Hits Radio – up to 7.6m from 6.7m – nearly a million! This isn’t all down to the power of Ken Bruce. Bauer’s restructuring of its networks has meant that lots of stations have changed how they’re reported and it’s confused much of my simple brain. The departing Wave 105 has been added into GHR (we’ll never see its final, stand-alone figure) and FM frequencies from the old Gem 106 and Lincs are in there too, plus I think expanding some TSAs may have an effect as well. It’s puzzling. But I think it’s now the new, final, baseline for the network.

Many of the individual GHR stations are up, but London has taken a hit, dropping 22% as it loses 316k listeners.

Similar to what’s happened at GHR, Bauer have re-branded many local ILRs as Hits Radio, in RAJAR they’re labelled their new names rather than what this survey measures – their old ones. However, the new overall Hits Radio figure includes these rebranded ones, the Hits Radio Brand includes those plus the Scottish and Northern Irish station and Hits Radio Network includes all of that plus the Greatest Hits Radio network. Confused? Yes, I am too.

Global likes grouping stations together too. The Heart Brand has 12.3m listeners, whilst the Heart Network has 9.4m. The former includes the decade stations and Heart Dance. The latter is the one with Jamie and Amanda on Breakfast (oh, except for in Scotland…). See it remains confusing!

When we look at the biggest hybrid local-national networks, here are the winners:

• Heart Network (UK) – 9,441k

• Greatest Hits Radio – 7,686k

• Capital Network (UK) – 6,242k

• Smooth Radio Network (UK) – 5,804k

• Hits Radio – 4,533k

  • + Hits Radio Scotland – 1,464k

Of course this is no longer the be all and end all for commercial radio – some single stations – are pretty large too. These are the ones over two million listeners.

• Classic FM – 4,400k (down 249k q-on-q)

• talkSPORT – 3,390k (up 309k q-on-q)

• Magic – 3,069 (down 354k q-on-q)

• LBC – 2,547 (up 80k q-on-q)

• Kiss – 2,293k (down 55k q-on-q)

• Absolute Radio – 2,236k (down 124k q-on-q)

• Kisstory – 2,089 (down 279k q-on-q)

• Radio X – 2,069k (up 56k q-on-q)

Over at the BBC:

• BBC Radio 1 – 7,309k (down 20k)

• BBC Radio 2 – 13,228k (down 52k)

• BBC Radio 3 – 1,995k (up 219k)

• BBC Radio 4 – 9,204k (up 87k)

• BBC Radio 5 live – 4,889k (down 355k)

• BBC Radio 5 Sports Extra – 971k (down 581k)

• BBC 6 Music – 2,548k (up 29k)

• BBC Radio 1Xtra – 786k (up 68k)

• BBC Radio 4 Extra – 1,505k (up 41k)

• BBC Asian Network UK – 542k (up 94k)

Pretty stable all round for the national networks, but with a nice increase for BBC Radio 3, as it returns to its baseline of around 2million listeners. Will Sam Jackson’s new schedule and a Proms season help it push upwards?

For BBC Local Radio, the English network has dropped to 4.7m (from 4.9m last quarter and 5.3m a year ago).

Whilst some individual stations have seen growth (year on year, Oxford up 27%, Cambridgeshire up 12% and CWR up 13%), there’s lots of big drops. Berkshire, Devon, Kent, Gloucestershire, Merseyside, Norfolk, Northampton, Sheffield has seen their reach drop over 20% year-on-year. BBC Radio Bristol’s reach has dropped 58.4% year on year (and its hours 73%!).

Many of these stations are seeing the fall-out from large simultaneous changes to presenter line-ups over a rocky year of change. It will be one to watch whether this is the bottom or not.

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Some news, just announced, that the BBC is preparing to launch some new national radio spin-off stations that they would like to broadcast in DAB+ on their national DAB Digital Radio multiplex.

Due to their public service nature, to achieve this aim the corporation will need to pass a Public Interest Test from Ofcom to ensure that they are not crowding out commercial stations and that they’re value for money etc.

The stations planned include an enhanced version of Radio 1 Dance with more commissioned programming, rather than just repeated shows (as the current online version does) and a souped-up version of BBC Five Live Sports Extra using some of the BBC’s sports podcasts.

The new stations are un-named at the moment, but will include:

• Another Radio 1 spin-off station focused on new talent, and playing classic tracks from the past 20 years from artists Radio 1 has championed. Anthems-ish?

• A Radio 2 spin-off for the over 50s with UK music from the 50s to 70s. Radio 2 Boom it seems.

• A Radio 3 spin-off playing calmer classics and choral works. Radio 3 Smooth?

There’s full descriptions in the BBC’s press release.

As I mentioned in my blog post last week, the BBC has probably been ill-served as listeners moved to digital listening with having a station line-up preserved in aspic, whilst commercial stations have launched a raft of successful spin-offs. Of course the BBC did significant work to encourage digital radio take-up when it launched 6Music, 1Xtra and BBC 7 (now 4Extra) at the beginning of the 2000s.

All of the stations they have suggested make sense at first glance when thinking about gaps in the BBC’s provision, but perhaps less so when thinking about gaps in UK radio provision.

Commercial radio has been unhappy with the launch of Radio 1 Dance and felt so strongly that Ofcom messed up the process that they sued them, though lost the case last year. Global with Capital Dance and Capital Xtra and Bauer with Kiss (and its spin offs) felt targeted. I’m not sure this is likely to change with this announcement.

It’s been well-documented that Radio 2 has been trying to re-align its programming to make the station a little younger. That, alongside BBC Local Radio’s odd demographic changes, has definitely left a gap open on the older end. But it is one filled particularly by Boom Radio – but also Smooth, Gold and Greatest Hits.

In Norway, the public broadcaster had a similar issue with their main P1 station, they then launched P1+ for older listeners (often bringing back older talent too) it’s now the number one station for over 65s. Maybe this should be a Steve Wright-fronted vehicle?

Radio 3 is high-culture, but low-listening – as it has always been. It’s difficult to bring new listeners into the fold, so an easier, smoother way in is probably very sensible. The Controller of Sam Jackson also has a strong commercial radio and music industry background, so he’ll know what he’s doing.

The commercial radio owners of Classic FM, Smooth and Scala may have something different to say however.

The row, and there will be a row, will be between those who argue that licence-fee payers should have a range of BBC stations that appeal to them (that they pay for) vs an argument that there is no need for the BBC to do something that, arguably, commercial radio already does.

There will be the additional question about where the money comes from to run this. Whereas in reality I don’t imagine any of these will be that expensive, especially when run alongside a strong parent station, there will be questions about whether the BBC should be spending more money on these national stations when it’s cutting back on local provision.

When I heard that some new stations were slated to be launched, I did worry that one of them would be a reformulated CBeebies Radio (available on BBC Sounds) which would compete with my own Fun Kids. Whilst bringing more focus to children’s radio would be good, the scale of their ad-free operation and promotional power would have left me very worried.

Whilst I feel that the Globals and Bauers of this world should be able to stand-up against the BBC’s competition, I do worry about someone like the independent Boom Radio. They have made a big success financially and in ratings by doing something different and putting their own money with their mouth is. To see the BBC create a service for this audience seems a little off.

It’s also interesting that the Public Interest Test is for the DAB+ broadcast, not for the stations, as they plan to launch them all on BBC Sounds later this year anyway.

Like I’ve said though. Two things can both be right. Yes, the BBC should cater for all licence-fee payers but yes, they should also be careful about who they tread on whilst doing it.

AOB

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This week the panel discuss the changes at Channel 4 and what the future could look like for the broadcaster. With the latest RAJAR figures released, they examine some of the headline grabbing stats and ponder what might be driving some of the falls for BBC speech radio, and of course the media quiz returns. This week it’s Superbowl ads!

Bur before we get there though, are you someone that has something to do with music or podcasts? If you do MIDiA Research are keen to ask you a few questions. One respondent will win $1,000 and everyone gets a copy of either their State and Future of Music or Music’s Podcast Potential report. Fill in the survey here.

Wow, two live reads in a row.

I remain intrigued by groups making big changes and the impact it has (or doesn’t). Radio and its audiences have changed so much over the past few years, it’s difficult to tell what will happen when you do something big.

Global relaunched the Scottish incarnations of Heart and Capital in May last year, but the latest figures show little change so far, with both reach and hours marginally down year on year.

Over at Absolute in May 2021, it lost its FM frequencies to Greatest Hits Radio and then it’s AM frequencies were turned off in Jan 2023 making it a digital-only station. Its FM change happened during the COVID RAJAR related pause, so if we look at the pre-COVID RAJAR of Q1/2020, it had a particularly good book, delivering 743k reach and 5.5m hours and now in London, digital-only, it’s delivering a 561k reach and 2.9m hours. Greatest Hits, meanwhile, has a 1.4m reach and 7.7m hours in the capital. Not a bad decision!

In April, Lincs FM became FMless as it surrendered its analogue output to Greatest Hits Radio. Its reach is now 141k (down from 239k) and hours from 3m to 1.1m. Meanwhile, Greatest Hits Radio Lincolnshire, now on FM, is delivering 150k reach and 1.5m hours. Collectively that’s 2.6m hours – so down overall. But perhaps it’s early days for both.

Early days too for Gem 106 who are on a similar path. They gave up their FM to GHR at the beginning of Q4 but are measured over 6 months. Their last full RAJAR in Q3 gave them a 264k reach and 2.1m hours, so far this quarter they’re marginally down to 240k and 1.9m hours. GHR is up a little 174k to 188k in reach and 1.2m to 1.4m hours. We’ll know more of what happens next quarter.

Interestingly for Lincs and Gem, they are due to change again, being re-branded alongside most of Bauer’s heritage ILR stations in England as Hits Radio. We’ll see how this changes their figures further, later in the year.

Changes like these remain a sore point amongst radio fans, who feel the removal of local radio makes the medium seem somewhat reduced.

The birth of local radio, and its later financial success came much from regulation and the lack of media competitors (both radio and otherwise) for listening and for advertising revenue than it did the sparkling content.

I remember sitting in a client meeting with UKRD and hearing the Station Manager proudly stating that they weren’t running any national ads from (sales house) First Radio Sales (FRS), much to their annoyance. He was pleased because the local yield was around a £10 CPT per spot, whereas the national was £1.50. FRS were annoyed as this was a large station that they couldn’t deliver to their clients.

The station was able to do this because it had strong local advertisers, many of which couldn’t go elsewhere to reach a local audience – hence the price. Nowadays, whilst car dealers and double glazing companies are still good local radio targets, stations are competing with local targeting on Google and Facebook. It’s very much not the monopoly it was.

The changing nature of the ad market combined with the explosion in competition for listeners’ time means its harder to be able to afford a lot of local programming when your yield has been significantly reduced. Cutting the number of buildings and staff and delivering less local content, even if it reduces ratings, and broadcasting national material with some local opts is a much more profitable option for radio groups.

At the moment, a new bill is going through parliament that would mean radio groups would no longer have to provide any local programmes, providing they still deliver local news, travel and weather etc. This will mean it will be up to radio groups themselves whether the local content is worth the continued investment (for advertisers as well as audience). I am sure there will be some changes to the status quo – though I don’t necessarily think it will mean local programmes will disappear from all of the networks. We will see however.

For the big commercial radio groups, the changes to the local business model have happened alongside changes to the national one – all driven by consumer behaviour.

DAB Digital Radio now delivers 42.7% of all radio listening hours. Smart speakers deliver 14.7% which is over half the total hours from AM and FM radio. The digital platforms, when taken together, reach 86.5% of radio listeners and account for 72% of all listening hours. This huge digital reach means the stations listeners can choose have been widened massively.

Commercial radio’s business is driven by delivering hours to advertisers. Whereas previously the worry was about individual stations losing listeners and hours, now groups look towards the appeal of multi-station networks.

In Q1/2017, after many stations rebranded to Heart, they delivered Global 63.2m hours a week. Today that locally-delivered network, alongside their digital spin-offs generates 77m hours.

The people that invented the spin-off strategy was Absolute Radio. Clive Dickens, faced with a rebrand that hadn’t seemed to have gone to plan and an empty national digital radio multiplex, launched Absolute 80s as a hail mary. It worked. Not only delivering new hours to, at that time, the stand-alone Absolute Radio business, it also helped connect their main Absolute Radio with more listeners too. At the beginning of 2010 it had 13.6m hours, the network now delivers 33.1m for Bauer – a transformation.

If we look at BBC listening hours over time, like many stations, it’s no surprise that they’ve dropped. There’s more competition after all. But the BBC’s lack of development of its own networks, stymied by commercial radio and government, means the decline is not something they can do much about.

On top of all of that, the BBC has had to deal with significant cuts to its funding whilst still required to deliver more content on more platforms. Also like many media organisations it’s looking to choose to invest more in its digital products so legacy operations will take a hit.

No one’s happy when something’s taken away that they like, but I find it hard to disagree that the BBC needs to ensure its broader digital offer is developed.

One of the things that has been hit by cuts is BBC Local Radio. The bosses have decided to regionalise some elements – afternoons for example – and nationalise some evenings and weekends. The decision making about the structure and line-up of the local stations has taken a long time, already disrupting schedules (and staff morale) before the changes started to kick in at the end of last year.

In the last year BBC Local Radio in England has dropped its reach from 5.6m to 4.8m. It’s similar across all day-parts:

With many local stations reporting over six months, I imagine the worst is still to come.

Fundamentally, right now, I don’t think these drops are particularly about the replacement of local shows with regional or national ones. This will be more about listeners losing presenters that they are used to, and on a more speech and company station this will have a greater impact than on a music brand, and prompt churn.

With all radio (or any products) perception can drive experience whether or not it has a basis in fact. In 2024, even a nearly entirely networked service like a Viking FM can use technology to appear, to many listeners, that it remains a local radio station. Split sweepers and presenter links, phone numbers, local news, weather and travel can all give the appearance of a local station. GWR was achieving this is the 90s after all too.

It seems mad that the BBC, trying to integrate local, regional and national programming into a local station environment, hasn’t managed to use all the techniques commercial radio has been using for over 30 years. As I hear it, it’s variable station to station whether shared local shows can split news/travel/weather and many of the regional and national shows don’t even have splits on station names or the ability for presenters to drop local links.

If I was tasked with delivering a new kind of localised radio, getting the technology to do it would be at the top of my list. ViLOR was a great technology for local radio stations but it isn’t what these new types of stations need.

Oddly with these network changes I think there’s actually the opportunity to do a lot more localisation and enhance elements of the local service with the right tech stack. It would at least have given me some good news if I had to defend my changes to a select committee.

I’m not as vociferous about these BBC Local Radio changes as some. Strategically I think much of what they are doing is correct. I share colleagues views about disagreeing how it’s been done, especially when local radio’s budgets remain – to my eyes – pretty healthy.

As all the examples from earlier in the post show, you can’t deal with today’s radio world without reimagining how we deliver great audio for listeners. You also can’t do it on old technology and thinking.

Personally I would have merged local radio with Five Live but maybe that’s another blog post!

Demographics

I think it’s always useful to look at radio’s demographics, particularly to battle away incorrect perception. Civilians are still surprised when I tell them that 88% of the population listen to some form of radio each week and collectively they listen to a billion hours of it too.

There’s also the classic that young people don’t listen to the radio any more. Also not true.

That’s not to say there aren’t things to be concerned about. 15-24 reach is continuing to drop a little, though it’s not particularly precipitous. The amount they listen to has stayed pretty steady (though it’s significantly less than other demographics).

As I’ve touched on before, the focus of radio groups has tended to be on stations with older listeners. Greatest Hits and Smooth are the ones with big advertising campaigns. I don’t see any for Radio 1, Kiss and Hits. Capital’s not marketing as much as they used to. It’s sensible – older is where the hours are – and that’s where you make your money. But I continue to worry that the radio industry doesn’t care about younger listeners as much as it should.

One station that’s done well over the past few years is for the oldies, Boom Radio. This quarter though it’s fallen back a little, its reach is now 627k, last quarter it was 662k. It’s still up on a year ago, when it was 531k. However a Boomer tells me that it was the under 55s that dropped, and that it has record 55+ listeners! See – those pesky younger listeners causing problems for everyone.

AOB

• Remember that survey I mentioned at the beginning. Do you have something to do with music or podcasts? Then fill it in and you could win $1,000 and everyone gets a copy of either their State and Future of Music or Music’s Podcast Potential report. Fill in the survey here.
• If you’re reading this, you should be a media person, so do please give my podcast – The Media Podcast – a try. It’s weekly and it covers radio, TV and journalism and has some brilliant insightful guests. I’ll give you your money back if you don’t like it. Check it out here.
• Want more on RAJAR, Adam Bowie does an excellent round-up of who’s up and down.
• If you’ve been forwarded this email from an enlightened colleague – do subscribe yourself – it’s free.

It’s RAJAR time again. Thanks to Hallett Arendt and their brilliant Octagon software I got to run all of these numbers on Wednesday so I had something hopefully interesting to show you today.

Bur before we get there though, are you someone that has something to do with music or podcasts? If you do MIDiA Research are keen to ask you a few questions. One respondent will win $1,000 and everyone gets a copy of either their State and Future of Music or Music’s Podcast Potential report. Fill in the survey here.

Wow, two live reads in a row.

I remain intrigued by groups making big changes and the impact it has (or doesn’t). Radio and its audiences have changed so much over the past few years, it’s difficult to tell what will happen when you do something big.

Global relaunched the Scottish incarnations of Heart and Capital in May last year, but the latest figures show little change so far, with both reach and hours marginally down year on year.

Over at Absolute in May 2021, it lost its FM frequencies to Greatest Hits Radio and then it’s AM frequencies were turned off in Jan 2023 making it a digital-only station. Its FM change happened during the COVID RAJAR related pause, so if we look at the pre-COVID RAJAR of Q1/2020, it had a particularly good book, delivering 743k reach and 5.5m hours and now in London, digital-only, it’s delivering a 561k reach and 2.9m hours. Greatest Hits, meanwhile, has a 1.4m reach and 7.7m hours in the capital. Not a bad decision!

In April, Lincs FM became FMless as it surrendered its analogue output to Greatest Hits Radio. Its reach is now 141k (down from 239k) and hours from 3m to 1.1m. Meanwhile, Greatest Hits Radio Lincolnshire, now on FM, is delivering 150k reach and 1.5m hours. Collectively that’s 2.6m hours – so down overall. But perhaps it’s early days for both.

Early days too for Gem 106 who are on a similar path. They gave up their FM to GHR at the beginning of Q4 but are measured over 6 months. Their last full RAJAR in Q3 gave them a 264k reach and 2.1m hours, so far this quarter they’re marginally down to 240k and 1.9m hours. GHR is up a little 174k to 188k in reach and 1.2m to 1.4m hours. We’ll know more of what happens next quarter.

Interestingly for Lincs and Gem, they are due to change again, being re-branded alongside most of Bauer’s heritage ILR stations in England as Hits Radio. We’ll see how this changes their figures further, later in the year.

Changes like these remain a sore point amongst radio fans, who feel the removal of local radio makes the medium seem somewhat reduced.

The birth of local radio, and its later financial success came much from regulation and the lack of media competitors (both radio and otherwise) for listening and for advertising revenue than it did the sparkling content.

I remember sitting in a client meeting with UKRD and hearing the Station Manager proudly stating that they weren’t running any national ads from (sales house) First Radio Sales (FRS), much to their annoyance. He was pleased because the local yield was around a £10 CPT per spot, whereas the national was £1.50. FRS were annoyed as this was a large station that they couldn’t deliver to their clients.

The station was able to do this because it had strong local advertisers, many of which couldn’t go elsewhere to reach a local audience – hence the price. Nowadays, whilst car dealers and double glazing companies are still good local radio targets, stations are competing with local targeting on Google and Facebook. It’s very much not the monopoly it was.

The changing nature of the ad market combined with the explosion in competition for listeners’ time means its harder to be able to afford a lot of local programming when your yield has been significantly reduced. Cutting the number of buildings and staff and delivering less local content, even if it reduces ratings, and broadcasting national material with some local opts is a much more profitable option for radio groups.

At the moment, a new bill is going through parliament that would mean radio groups would no longer have to provide any local programmes, providing they still deliver local news, travel and weather etc. This will mean it will be up to radio groups themselves whether the local content is worth the continued investment (for advertisers as well as audience). I am sure there will be some changes to the status quo – though I don’t necessarily think it will mean local programmes will disappear from all of the networks. We will see however.

For the big commercial radio groups, the changes to the local business model have happened alongside changes to the national one – all driven by consumer behaviour.

DAB Digital Radio now delivers 42.7% of all radio listening hours. Smart speakers deliver 14.7% which is over half the total hours from AM and FM radio. The digital platforms, when taken together, reach 86.5% of radio listeners and account for 72% of all listening hours. This huge digital reach means the stations listeners can choose have been widened massively.

Commercial radio’s business is driven by delivering hours to advertisers. Whereas previously the worry was about individual stations losing listeners and hours, now groups look towards the appeal of multi-station networks.

In Q1/2017, after many stations rebranded to Heart, they delivered Global 63.2m hours a week. Today that locally-delivered network, alongside their digital spin-offs generates 77m hours.

The people that invented the spin-off strategy was Absolute Radio. Clive Dickens, faced with a rebrand that hadn’t seemed to have gone to plan and an empty national digital radio multiplex, launched Absolute 80s as a hail mary. It worked. Not only delivering new hours to, at that time, the stand-alone Absolute Radio business, it also helped connect their main Absolute Radio with more listeners too. At the beginning of 2010 it had 13.6m hours, the network now delivers 33.1m for Bauer – a transformation.

If we look at BBC listening hours over time, like many stations, it’s no surprise that they’ve dropped. There’s more competition after all. But the BBC’s lack of development of its own networks, stymied by commercial radio and government, means the decline is not something they can do much about.

On top of all of that, the BBC has had to deal with significant cuts to its funding whilst still required to deliver more content on more platforms. Also like many media organisations it’s looking to choose to invest more in its digital products so legacy operations will take a hit.

No one’s happy when something’s taken away that they like, but I find it hard to disagree that the BBC needs to ensure its broader digital offer is developed.

One of the things that has been hit by cuts is BBC Local Radio. The bosses have decided to regionalise some elements – afternoons for example – and nationalise some evenings and weekends. The decision making about the structure and line-up of the local stations has taken a long time, already disrupting schedules (and staff morale) before the changes started to kick in at the end of last year.

In the last year BBC Local Radio in England has dropped its reach from 5.6m to 4.8m. It’s similar across all day-parts:

With many local stations reporting over six months, I imagine the worst is still to come.

Fundamentally, right now, I don’t think these drops are particularly about the replacement of local shows with regional or national ones. This will be more about listeners losing presenters that they are used to, and on a more speech and company station this will have a greater impact than on a music brand, and prompt churn.

With all radio (or any products) perception can drive experience whether or not it has a basis in fact. In 2024, even a nearly entirely networked service like a Viking FM can use technology to appear, to many listeners, that it remains a local radio station. Split sweepers and presenter links, phone numbers, local news, weather and travel can all give the appearance of a local station. GWR was achieving this is the 90s after all too.

It seems mad that the BBC, trying to integrate local, regional and national programming into a local station environment, hasn’t managed to use all the techniques commercial radio has been using for over 30 years. As I hear it, it’s variable station to station whether shared local shows can split news/travel/weather and many of the regional and national shows don’t even have splits on station names or the ability for presenters to drop local links.

If I was tasked with delivering a new kind of localised radio, getting the technology to do it would be at the top of my list. ViLOR was a great technology for local radio stations but it isn’t what these new types of stations need.

Oddly with these network changes I think there’s actually the opportunity to do a lot more localisation and enhance elements of the local service with the right tech stack. It would at least have given me some good news if I had to defend my changes to a select committee.

I’m not as vociferous about these BBC Local Radio changes as some. Strategically I think much of what they are doing is correct. I share colleagues views about disagreeing how it’s been done, especially when local radio’s budgets remain – to my eyes – pretty healthy.

As all the examples from earlier in the post show, you can’t deal with today’s radio world without reimagining how we deliver great audio for listeners. You also can’t do it on old technology and thinking.

Personally I would have merged local radio with Five Live but maybe that’s another blog post!

Demographics

I think it’s always useful to look at radio’s demographics, particularly to battle away incorrect perception. Civilians are still surprised when I tell them that 88% of the population listen to some form of radio each week and collectively they listen to a billion hours of it too.

There’s also the classic that young people don’t listen to the radio any more. Also not true.

That’s not to say there aren’t things to be concerned about. 15-24 reach is continuing to drop a little, though it’s not particularly precipitous. The amount they listen to has stayed pretty steady (though it’s significantly less than other demographics).

As I’ve touched on before, the focus of radio groups has tended to be on stations with older listeners. Greatest Hits and Smooth are the ones with big advertising campaigns. I don’t see any for Radio 1, Kiss and Hits. Capital’s not marketing as much as they used to. It’s sensible – older is where the hours are – and that’s where you make your money. But I continue to worry that the radio industry doesn’t care about younger listeners as much as it should.

One station that’s done well over the past few years is for the oldies, Boom Radio. This quarter though it’s fallen back a little, its reach is now 627k, last quarter it was 662k. It’s still up on a year ago, when it was 531k. However a Boomer tells me that it was the under 55s that dropped, and that it has record 55+ listeners! See – those pesky younger listeners causing problems for everyone.

AOB

• Remember that survey I mentioned at the beginning. Do you have something to do with music or podcasts? Then fill it in and you could win $1,000 and everyone gets a copy of either their State and Future of Music or Music’s Podcast Potential report. Fill in the survey here.

• If you’re reading this, you should be a media person, so do please give my podcast – The Media Podcast – a try. It’s weekly and it covers radio, TV and journalism and has some brilliant insightful guests. I’ll give you your money back if you don’t like it. Check it out here.

• Want more on RAJAR, Adam Bowie does an excellent round-up of who’s up and down.

• If you’ve been forwarded this email from an enlightened colleague – do subscribe yourself – it’s free.

Find out with guests Jake Kanter (Deadline), Ella Sagar (The Media Leader), Charlotte Tobitt (Press Gazette), Faraz Osman (Gold Wala), Megan Carver (Carver PR), Adam MacQueen (Private Eye), Jamie East (Daily Mail) and media writers Scott Bryan and Tara Conlan. Oh, and producer Steven D Wright is our traditional harbinger of doom.

Also on the programme: Top Gear is being rested by the BBC – but for how long? Writer Scott Bryan and Charlotte Tobitt (Press Gazette) consider the protections needed to make the car show viable again.

All that plus we follow the latest twists and turns of the Telegraph sale, TikTok pranks that went too far… and, in The Media Quiz, we guess the biggest winners of the week.

Also on the programme: Channel 4 say they are “picking up the pace” on commissions. But is it enough?  All that plus Jamie Lang has big podcast ambitions, a rare win for local radio and, in The Media Quiz, we weigh up the good news from the bad. 

Joining me with loads of media news and analysis, Megan Carver (Carver PR) and Jamie East (DMGT Media).

Also on the programme: BBC Studios enters the audio market, as does James Corden… and why Carol Vorderman becomes the first casualty of Lineker’s Law.

Joining me is media writer Maggie Brown and Heat Magazine’s Boyd Hilton.

Also on the programme: Boris Johnson heads to GB News; Jess Brammar to the top table at the BBC… and a new radio service appears in Gaza. All that plus, in the media quiz, we set the record straight. Love our look and sound?

Tell your colleagues and bosses about the show and secure that promotion:

Media news and analysis, with guests journalist James Ball and Ann Charles (Radio TechCon).

Also on the programme: fifty years old, and commercial radio is in rude health, if the RAJARs are any indication. We unpack the findings.

Plus, what’s it really like for freelancers in the TV commissioning slowdown? We speak to one director, Anna Collins, frustrated at the way they’ve been treated.

All that plus, in the media quiz, it’s time for the return of… The Elevator Pitch.

I’ve been writing these things for a long time- over 15 years. I’ve found I’ve become less concerned about the horse-race and the swaps between number one and number two, and instead I’m much more fascinated about the broader changes in listening behaviour and the results of bold decisions – good or bad.

There is no doubt that the Ken Bruce-enhanced Greatest Hits Radio, built on the basis of a strong music format that found a gap in the market plus an aggressive FM acquisition/conversion roll-out (alongside some other great talent) has hit the mark.

In the latest figures it shows a reach of 6,583k listeners, 55.9m hours and a 5.5% share of the market. This is up the best part of 800k reach from 5,787k last quarter and a then 4.7% share. Its average hours of 8.5 (up from 8.2) shows its listeners really love it too.

This surge puts it ahead of the Heart network, which whilst stronger on reach (8.5m), its weaker average hours of 6.3, means GHR takes the true top spot.

Since the Ken departure, all eyes have been on Radio 2. It took a bit of a beating last quarter, but even though Mr Bruce has had another ratings bump, there hasn’t been that much change at his old home.

As I’ve previously mentioned, the nature of GHR’s network – a mix of small, medium and large stations – has meant there’s a delay for all the figures to flow through. We won’t get the full picture for a whole year. Radio 2, though, reports every quarter, so they took the hit straight away.

This time around it stayed pretty static across the daytime schedule:

Breakfast

A message from my colleague Lloydie James Lloyd, made me ponder the challenges for breakfast shows. Generally a strong breakfast offer finds its share of audience above the station average. For most stations, Breakfast should be the engine that drives the rest of a station forward. Capital Breakfast, across the country has seen its share below the station average for the past year, with this quarter no different. Afternoons and Drive meanwhile, are ahead.

It’s a similar story for Heart, and even though Jamie and Amanda are the biggest commercial radio breakfast show with 3.8 million weekly listeners, its share tracks lower than the station (whilst other dayparts remain ahead).

It’s a similar story with Kiss and Magic, with breakfast under-delivering (though Kiss had a good overall book in London, with a return to over 1m reach – up from 900k last quarter).

Radio 1 and Radio 4 manage it. Radio 2 nearly does. A good commercial example is Mylo and Rosie at Pulse 1 in Bradford/Leeds – a 3.2% share at Breakfast vs the 2.1% average, something they’ve consistently done over the past year.

Back in London, Smooth doesn’t manage it, Nick Ferrari at LBC matches it and my quick look shows only Moyles ahead with his breakfast share at 2.2% vs the station’s 1.6% (it’s similar for his national figures too).

The radio head in me just thinks there’s room in London for a big hitting mainstream show. All the big pop stations have seemingly abandoned stunting, big ideas and any breakfast-related marketing. Are they missing a trick? Both Greg James and Moyles, whilst lacking in much above-the-line attention either, are still putting out big ideas – is this why they’re leading their stations share? Perhaps with Roman Kemp apparently off, there’s an opportunity for a selection of breakfast re-shuffles.

Platform changes…

Bauer’s strategy for GHR to occupy as much FM spectrum as possible has meant the conversion of some of their FM stations, booting their old services to be DAB only. GEM in the East Midlands has just had that treatment, but at the beginning of the year they moved Lincs FM off of FM. This is the first complete survey since the move.

Overall its reach is down to 163k (from 246k pre the change) and hours down from 2,654k to 1,586. But overall I think that’s a good performance given the situation. Looking at the platform breakdowns, DAB is in the lead. But there’s significant use of smart speakers too (54k reach).

Smart speakers are a great boon for stations if listeners can remember the name of what they want to listen to (it’s not great for new launches). But in this Lincs FM scenario, a high recall of a heritage brand, a large number of devices in home, and a real reason to use them (the loss of FM) has shown how well they can do.

In other news…

It’s still early days for Global’s re-localisation of Heart and Capital in Central Scotland – but the figures are going in the right direction. Capital’s up from 377k to 384k and Heart from 346k to 380k

Goodbye to Jack FM in Oxford. Its three radio stations go out on a high, with a combined reach of 62k and 380k hours, up on the last quarter. It’s always tough when the end is nigh, but listening to the stations as they merge into GHR, it seems they’ve managed to maintain their personality and focus though what must be a tough situation to work in.

Well done to my team at Fun Kids. We’re in RAJAR, but it doesn’t measure our core audience, only the ones over 10. So we choose to just measure it in London. There, our 10+ listeners – 111k – make us bigger than Scala, Kerang, Kiss Fresh and Heat from Bauer; Smooth Country and Capital Chill from Global, all of Virgin’s spin-offs, talkSPORT2 and GB News as well. A nice result.

Thanks to Hallett Arendt, who produce Octagon, brilliant software that let’s me interrogate the RAJAR figures.

Last night I had a lovely evening at City University hearing about the British Podcast Awards winners, followed by a glass of wine and chatting to the journalism students (including those doing a Masters in Podcasting) who had come along to hear about what it takes to make an award-winning show. Remember that as you read this blog I wrote on the train home!

I’ve been writing these things for a long time- over 15 years. I’ve found I’ve become less concerned about the horse-race and the swaps between number one and number two, and instead I’m much more fascinated about the broader changes in listening behaviour and the results of bold decisions – good or bad.

There is no doubt that the Ken Bruce-enhanced Greatest Hits Radio, built on the basis of a strong music format that found a gap in the market plus an aggressive FM acquisition/conversion roll-out (alongside some other great talent) has hit the mark.

In the latest figures it shows a reach of 6,583k listeners, 55.9m hours and a 5.5% share of the market. This is up the best part of 800k reach from 5,787k last quarter and a then 4.7% share. Its average hours of 8.5 (up from 8.2) shows its listeners really love it too.

This surge puts it ahead of the Heart network, which whilst stronger on reach (8.5m), its weaker average hours of 6.3, means GHR takes the true top spot.

Since the Ken departure, all eyes have been on Radio 2. It took a bit of a beating last quarter, but even though Mr Bruce has had another ratings bump, there hasn’t been that much change at his old home.

As I’ve previously mentioned, the nature of GHR’s network – a mix of small, medium and large stations – has meant there’s a delay for all the figures to flow through. We won’t get the full picture for a whole year. Radio 2, though, reports every quarter, so they took the hit straight away.

This time around it stayed pretty static across the daytime schedule:

Breakfast

A message from my colleague Lloydie James Lloyd, made me ponder the challenges for breakfast shows. Generally a strong breakfast offer finds its share of audience above the station average. For most stations, Breakfast should be the engine that drives the rest of a station forward. Capital Breakfast, across the country has seen its share below the station average for the past year, with this quarter no different. Afternoons and Drive meanwhile, are ahead.

It’s a similar story for Heart, and even though Jamie and Amanda are the biggest commercial radio breakfast show with 3.8 million weekly listeners, its share tracks lower than the station (whilst other dayparts remain ahead).

It’s a similar story with Kiss and Magic, with breakfast under-delivering (though Kiss had a good overall book in London, with a return to over 1m reach – up from 900k last quarter).

Radio 1 and Radio 4 manage it. Radio 2 nearly does. A good commercial example is Mylo and Rosie at Pulse 1 in Bradford/Leeds – a 3.2% share at Breakfast vs the 2.1% average, something they’ve consistently done over the past year.

Back in London, Smooth doesn’t manage it, Nick Ferrari at LBC matches it and my quick look shows only Moyles ahead with his breakfast share at 2.2% vs the station’s 1.6% (it’s similar for his national figures too).

The radio head in me just thinks there’s room in London for a big hitting mainstream show. All the big pop stations have seemingly abandoned stunting, big ideas and any breakfast-related marketing. Are they missing a trick? Both Greg James and Moyles, whilst lacking in much above-the-line attention either, are still putting out big ideas – is this why they’re leading their stations share? Perhaps with Roman Kemp apparently off, there’s an opportunity for a selection of breakfast re-shuffles.

Platform changes…

Bauer’s strategy for GHR to occupy as much FM spectrum as possible has meant the conversion of some of their FM stations, booting their old services to be DAB only. GEM in the East Midlands has just had that treatment, but at the beginning of the year they moved Lincs FM off of FM. This is the first complete survey since the move.

Overall its reach is down to 163k (from 246k pre the change) and hours down from 2,654k to 1,586. But overall I think that’s a good performance given the situation. Looking at the platform breakdowns, DAB is in the lead. But there’s significant use of smart speakers too (54k reach).

Smart speakers are a great boon for stations if listeners can remember the name of what they want to listen to (it’s not great for new launches). But in this Lincs FM scenario, a high recall of a heritage brand, a large number of devices in home, and a real reason to use them (the loss of FM) has shown how well they can do.

In other news…

It’s still early days for Global’s re-localisation of Heart and Capital in Central Scotland – but the figures are going in the right direction. Capital’s up from 377k to 384k and Heart from 346k to 380k

Goodbye to Jack FM in Oxford. Its three radio stations go out on a high, with a combined reach of 62k and 380k hours, up on the last quarter. It’s always tough when the end is nigh, but listening to the stations as they merge into GHR, it seems they’ve managed to maintain their personality and focus though what must be a tough situation to work in.

Well done to my team at Fun Kids. We’re in RAJAR, but it doesn’t measure our core audience, only the ones over 10. So we choose to just measure it in London. There, our 10+ listeners – 111k – make us bigger than Scala, Kerang, Kiss Fresh and Heat from Bauer; Smooth Country and Capital Chill from Global, all of Virgin’s spin-offs, talkSPORT2 and GB News as well. A nice result.

Thanks to Hallett Arendt, who produce Octagon, brilliant software that let’s me interrogate the RAJAR figures.

This isn’t even the first time YouTube’s been in the podcasting space, and their involvement has always beguiled podcasters. They’ve consistently been unclear about their podcasting plans, refuse to follow how other listening apps work and they want to take a cut of podcasters’ money too.

However, YouTube does provide a real opportunity to podcasters – they reach a different audience to many existing podcast apps – and can provide a new way to make money. But if you’re a podcaster you’re going to have to make some decisions.

YouTube vs YouTube Music

The first thing to get to grips with is that YouTube and YouTube Music are two different apps. The first is what most people recognise as ‘YouTube’, a video viewing experience. The second is an app more akin to Spotify – bringing together music, music videos and now podcasts. Just like other music apps, there are playlists and you can listen when the app’s in the background (if you subscribe).

YouTube and YouTube Music use the same source for all of their content – regular YouTube channels – with a few special features. Musicians can create special playlists called ‘Releases’ that group together, in old money, Singles and Albums. This provides some extra metadata so YouTube and YouTube Music can better categorise the ‘videos’ that the artist uploads. It’s the same for podcasters with Podcast Playlists.

Wherever you get your podcasts

If you want to get your podcast into YouTube and YouTube Music you should think of your YouTube channel as your content management system. Any regular YouTube channel can house podcasts, you just need to tell YouTube which of your videos are connected to your show.

But before we get to what you upload, lets ask why.

First things first – being on YouTube is necessary to deliver on the promise of the phrase ‘wherever you get your podcasts’.

Podcasters love saying the line ‘wherever you get your podcasts’ but often they’re really just thinking about Apple Podcasts and Spotify. To do it properly to maximise your chance of reaching all listeners you need to be on every podcast app.

James Cridland at Podnews has an incredibly comprehensive list. Is your show on JioSaavn? It’s popular in India and Asia. Are you on TuneIn? It may get your show onto more smart speakers. Being everywhere is a good idea.

In all surveys of podcast users YouTube comes out very high – usually in the top three of podcast apps. OG podcasters may exclaim “‘but how can that be? most podcasts aren’t on YouTube”. That is correct, but there’s a number of big ‘podcasts’ that have come from that world that skew the figures.

Joe Rogan built a big audience by putting his full shows on YouTube. Nowadays it’s just clips. But they’re frequent. And for many of his YouTube subscribers who just watch his clips, they would say they’ve been ‘listening’ to his podcast. At the same time many long-standing YouTubers now have podcasts. They may be available on Spotify or Apple, but it’s no great surprise that lots of their YouTube fans watch their podcasts on YouTube, just like their other videos.

This results in a somewhat skewed perception of a what a podcast is. Podcast originalists may talk about audio and something delivered via RSS, whilst young consumers think of a podcast more of a form of content – people having discussions around a microphone. Many new young podcasters don’t even bother with a traditional podcast app – they’re happy enough to just have their podcasts on YouTube (most of their favourite creators are there anyway).

I tell people that it doesn’t matter what you think a podcast is, you need to consider what your audience thinks one is.

For many listeners, YouTube and YouTube Music are podcast apps, and therefore as such you need to get your shows there otherwise you’ll be missing out on listeners. Wherever you get your podcasts really does mean WHEREVER your listeners get their podcasts.

What should you put on YouTube?

A challenge for many podcasters is wondering what should they upload. For YouTube and YouTube music you have to upload a video rather than audio. An MP4 rather than an MP3. As it’s video you need to think about what you’ll show on the screen.

There are broadly four options.

1. A static image.
2. An audiogram – basically similar to a static image but with some graphical movement.
3. An animated or more visualised version of your episode
4. A TV-style version of your podcast.

A static image video will mean you can jump the first hurdle to get your podcast on YouTube but this is where the difference between YouTube and YouTube Music become apparent.

YouTube vs YouTube Music

As mentioned, one app is about video consumption and the other is about music/audio consumption. Having a static (or lightly visualised) video is fine, mostly, for YouTube Music. The ‘lyric video’ is something similar from the music world. It provides glanceable pictures, but the focus is the soundtrack, for many podcasts it’s similar. YouTube Music is, like Spotify and the like, often used with the screen-off.

The problem though is that what you upload to your YouTube channel goes to both YouTube and YouTube Music.

There’s a much bigger bunch of users who are using YouTube’s video product (on the web, mobile or TV). And these people quite like there to be proper video. YouTube’s discovery algorithm is based around watch time. Successful YouTube videos are great looking, but are also built around keeping users engaged throughout.

Your static image podcast video will not be visually engaging, so it will fall foul of the YouTube algorithm. Your video will be there. But it won’t be surfaced to anyone new.

The NPR podcast Code Switch does alright. It’s around 100 in the News chart on Apple Podcast – it would have tens of thousands of listeners per episode. On YouTube it gets, on average, the low hundreds of views. If you look at the videos they’re just static images. They have jumped the hurdle and made the show available, but there’s little new engagement with the show. It will likely be pretty much invisible to most YouTube users.

NPR’s Fresh Air is a bigger show (Top 50 in the main Apple chart) but it also has a better YouTube experience. Proper cover images, and the videos themselves are more audiogram like. It gets views in the low thousands.

Finally its podcast Louder Than A Riot (not troubling any Apple podcasts chart at the moment) is audiogram-based but it lives on the NPR Music YouTube channel (home of Tiny Desk Concerts and more) – and over 8 million subscribers. It does 10k to 20k an episode.

My team at Podcast Discovery work with US podcasters Crooked Media on many of the visual elements of Pod Save the UK alongside UK production company Reduced Listening. For that show podcast video is an important part of the offering. But Crooked’s original podcast – Pod Save America (a top 50 US podcast) does very well on YouTube. Hundreds of thousands of views per episode.

To do this it takes a much more YouTube native approach. A big focus on thumbnail art and fully produced video episodes. It’s creating output that does well in both the YouTube world and the YouTube Music world.

A final example is the New York Times’ The Daily, one of the biggest podcasts in the world (in 2020 it was doing 2 million an episode and it’s top 3 in the US). On YouTube it’s doing less than 20k an ep with a static image.

Does that mean I have to do full video like Pod Save America?

Well, it depends. If your aim is to just get your show into YouTube so existing subscribers can find it, then no. Following the NPR/NYT examples above shows that those static videos will be enough to be listed. But to grow an audience, be discoverable, and prosper on YouTube then you need to focus on the things that make regular YouTube videos do well – good thumbnails, engaging titles, solid descriptions and engaging, high-quality video. Ideally on an existing well-used channel.

Setting up your podcast on your YouTube channel

Okay, so you’ve decided what kind of video you’re going to upload, how do you get it onto YouTube?

Firstly you need a YouTube Channel. If you don’t have one, those are free to create.

Then you need to create a podcast playlist. Log into studio.youtube.com for your YouTube channel and select the + Create button at the top of the page. This will show you a few options:

Unsurprisingly you select the final option that probably shows you these two things:

In YouTube parlance, a ‘podcast’ is really just a special playlist. If you select the first option it creates a playlist that looks very much like the regular ones you see in YouTube except you associate it with your podcast ‘square’ image. It also tells the YouTube back-end to list your show in the ‘podcasts’ section of YouTube Music. If you select the second option you can convert an existing playlist that already has your podcast episodes videos in.

Some people though, when they select the New Podcast button will see a slightly different list, with a third option:

The ‘Submit RSS feed’ gives you the option of pasting in your podcast’s regular RSS feed address. If you do this YouTube will grab your audio (in the same way Apple or Spotify) do, turn it into a video – with a static image – and then upload it to one of their special podcast playlists.

The reason not everyone sees this is that YouTube are gradually rolling it out to channels, but it’ll get to everyone eventually.

So, is this the perfect solution for people wanting to just jump that first hurdle? Well, no.

YouTube want their cut

If you go to submit your RSS feed to YouTube it provides this guidance:

In other words if your RSS feed contains spot advertising then you’re not permitted to submit it. If you just have host-read ads then you’re fine.

This is problematic for the vast majority of shows. Most podcast hosts (Acast, Audioboom etc) give creators one RSS feed that they then go and submit to the likes of Apple and Spotify. This includes the content but also the dynamic advertising that pays for it.

These are feeds that YouTube doesn’t want. Why? Well, it sells spot advertising itself. Its rules (for all videos) are that you can’t sell any advertising types that it already sells. Like 30 second spot ads. It’s also why they allow host-reads, as that’s not something they can directly duplicate.

This raises (at least) two problems. First for many creators even if they wanted to give an ad-free RSS feed to Spotify they don’t have one, as their host doesn’t provide it.

Secondly, do you want YouTube to have an ad-free version of your podcast? Maybe that’s what you offer to paying subscribers? Or perhaps you don’t want to move people from listening with ads on Spotify to not hearing them on YouTube – thus depriving you of revenue.

Of course, what YouTube wants you to do is provide an ad-free version, and then use its own YouTube advertising to replace your ads with their ads (where they keep half the money). This is dependent on you having enough views, subscribers and watch time to be able to join their advertising scheme (generally 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the past year).

But this raises a question of the deal you have with your existing podcast advertising partner. You may not have the rights to do a supplementary deal with YouTube.

My team at Fun Kids use Omny to do our podcast ad-insertion. And excellent they are too. In fact they give us an ad-free feed for all of our shows that we use for our subscription service Fun Kids Podcasts+. We could use that feed to service YouTube. But that would strip out all ads including our host-read ones. Like most people we use the ad-insertion technology to do spot ads and live reads. So really from Omny I now need three feeds – with all ads, with only live reads, and then no ads at all.

The arrival of YouTube and their rules will mean that all hosts will likely have to spend time and money revising their systems to provide all the different options creators might need to work with YouTube.

The other reason YouTube hasn’t decided to make an exception for spot advertising in podcasts is because of the challenges of pass-through.

If you submit your show to most apps, they include your podcast in their directory. But when you hit play it pulls the (generally) MP3 file from your hosting company’s servers. This is good for podcasters as your host inserts the relevant ads in a split second and then delivers it to a listener. This means someone in London, UK gets a different ad to someone in London, Ontario Canada.

When YouTube turns your MP3 into an MP4 it gets your audio once and produces a video file based on that. Canadian or British users will get the same content. There’s no way for YouTube to ‘pass through’ different ads or other content to their video viewers.

So what’s the best way to service YouTube?

Right now I think the best way to service YouTube is to, disappointingly, upload your videos manually to the podcast playlist. This means using some software to convert your MP3s to MP4s, but it then gives you the flexibility on how the videos look and also what advertising they include.

In Summary

The very long length of this blog post I think highlights what a pain it is for podcasters to get on YouTube. Both strategically and practically.

To do YouTube well means that podcasters will have to change their work flows and monetisation efforts to benefit from the platform. Why bother at all? Well back to my earlier point about the phrase ‘wherever you get your podcasts’. Consumers, particularly younger ones, will expect your show to be on YouTube and YouTube Music.

The optimal strategy for podcasting on YouTube is to create full-video versions of your podcasts, with proper attention paid to thumbnails, titles and descriptions, uploaded manually, with live-reads burned in to the video and then opting in to YouTube’s ad network. This maximises revenue and drives awareness and sample through discovery.

The minimum you should do is ensure that (within the rules) your full podcast episodes are uploaded (manually or dynamically) so listeners who seek you out can find and listen to you.

AOB

• A good Media Podcast this week with LBC’s Iain Dale and Broadcast’s Rebecca Cooney. Listen or watch (on YouTube!).
• I was also Matthew of the Week on Matt Chorley’s Times Radio show/Red Box Podcast talking about media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict with the excellent Manveen Rana.
• Check out more details about the Podcast Growth Summit on 30th November.

It’s Mipcom Cannes and, no, we’re not live from the beach… but we’ll still run you down all the TV gossip and things you need to know.

Also on the programme: misinformation and the rush to publish. How have journalists fared in their reporting of the Middle East crisis?

Plus, the BBC cuts another continuing drama – is there anywhere left for writers to hone their craft? And we discover the big story that everyone is talking about in Australian radio. All that, plus in the media quiz… we discover the true price of your IP.

The regulatory issues are particularly focused on the ownership restrictions in Metro markets, where any operator can only own two stations. At the moment in Sydney for example, SCA operates FM stations Triple M and 2DayFM (Hit Network) and ARN run WSFM (Gold network) and KIIS 1065.

So as part of the detail ARN have teamed up with a private equity firm – Anchorage Capital Partners – to acquire SCA and divvy up the assets.

For ARN – they would retain the KIIS network and many of their regional radio stations and would merge in the Triple M network of 5 Metro stations alongside 51 of SCA’s regional stations.

For ACP – They would acquire the 3 Metro stations and 10 regional radio stations that ARN would need to dispose of to stay within the rules. They would also acquire, from SCA, 5 Metro stations (the Hit Network) and 25 other regional stations. They would also take ownership of SCA’s TV operation plus their digital business.

In radio terms – it looks like the KIIS and Triple M networks to ARN and the Hit and Gold network to ACP. It is also likely the existing SCA technical operation would form the basis of the ‘new’ ACP media business.

In the documents it also talks about ARN and ACP putting together their digital audio businesses into a new joint venture. This, it seems, would be SCA’s Listnr operation alongside the activity around ARN’s iHeartRadio business. In Australia ARN licence US company’s iHeart podcast tech/app platform. They then have an owned and operated digital audio content/advertising operation as well as partnering and repping a number of other shows.

Not mentioned is what would happen with national advertising and whether there’s opportunities (or a desire) to sell that together.

From the outside, this definitely looks like an opportunity to streamline the legacy audio business and build scale for a digital audio one.

For ARN, working with a company like Anchorage offers lots of opportunities. In the short term it helps them become the business they want to be, and gives them a strategic alliance with the number two competitor.

In the medium term it may also position ARN well to do further deals with Anchorage if any media regulation changes.

Anchorage themselves, will want to make a return on their investment – which in the short term means a likely reorganisation of the remainder of SCA.

In the UK, a not dissimilar deal happened when Global sold a number of its stations to a friendly buyer in Communicorp. They operate local advertising and production of their radio station separately to Global. However the brands Communicorp put their stations under and the national advertising contract are owned and operated by Global.

This is definitely not the end of the Australian story as the two companies haggle over the deal (or indeed anyone else comes along to interrupt their party).

AOB

• On The Media Podcast this week I spoke to Paul Robinson and Newsweek’s Alex Hudson about Newsnight, Netflix and more. Listen here. Watch here.
• I’m looking forward to the Podcast Growth Summit on Thurs 30th November (earlybird pricing until the 4th November).

Ratings continue to slide, budgets about to be cut, and they’ve just lost their editor. So what’s next for the flagship news show?

Also on the programme, a new report show’s that just three publishers dominate newspapers, but really, does it matter?

And there’s big news from big streamers with YouTube announcing new channels and platforms, while Netflix subscriptions have slowed.

Media news and analysis with guests, Gold Wala founder Faraz Osman, Chloe Straw from trade body Audio UK and City University and Spiritland’s Brett Spencer.

Also on the programme: can publishers block the advance of AI? Our panel discusses how to stop the web crawlers out to grab your IP, and BBC Studios new acquisition of someone who knows about acquisitions.

There are a number of ‘podcast rankers’ around the world – these usually bring together a number of the main networks who share their download data with a third party who publish the data. The challenge with these rankers is that not everyone participates. In the Australian ranker, for example, Spotify and the ABC don’t (currently) take part. So whilst it gives a lot of data, it’s not complete.

In the UK we don’t have a centralised ranker. RAJAR have looked at it, as have some other people, but they haven’t been able to get all the participants to agree.

In the US, as well as the Triton ranker, Edison Research created their own chart, but with some different methodology. Instead of taking the download data from the networks, they just did a big survey that asked listeners what podcasts they’re listening to. This way you don’t need to get networks to buy in, or provide data. The results are the ranker includes any podcast made by any network. Here’s their recent US data.

But surely the download-based rankers are more accurate? Well, perhaps not. They include data from every episode downloaded but it can’t tell whether anyones listened to that file. I’m sure we all have a load of shows that have been downloaded to our podcast app but not listened to. Measuring downloads also means you can’t tell if multiple people have tuned in – a family listening in a car for example.

With survey-based research, like the Edison one, you’re asking people what they can remember they’ve listened to. Whilst comprehensive – it will catalogue any show mentioned – the main challenge is the sample size. Can you reach enough people to provide a comprehensive overview?

The current release of the UK data says they interviewed 2,273 people from April 2023 to June 2023, a three month period, so I imagine circa 200 people a week.

As well as the main chart they’ve released, subscribers will also be able to access broader demographic breakdowns and network-reach numbers.

I’ve always been pretty fascinated by this sort of exercise. My corporate radio career involved lots of research – both quantitative and qualitative – and I’ve been thinking about podcast data for quite a long time.

Indeed, when me and Matt Hill ran the British Podcast Awards, we had a go at creating our own UK podcast ranker at the beginning of 2021.

We worked with research company Kantar and spoke to around 9,000 people to find 3,000 podcast listeners over 12 weeks. Back then our Top 5 was:

1. The Joe Rogan Experience
2. BBC Friday Night Comedy
3. Happy Hour Podcast (Jaack Mate)
4. That Peter Crouch Podcast (BBC)
5. Shagged Married Annoyed

It was a fascinating exercise and quite a complicated one. We also spent quite a lot of money on it. Our attempt was to see whether we could create perhaps a weekly or monthly chart. As you can maybe tell, it wasn’t something that we ended up launching!

The key challenge was the sample size and the long-tail nature of podcasting. Now, the shows up the top of the list definitely passed the smell test. Did I, as a podcast expert, think that looked like the biggest shows? Sure. Even better, the demographic data looked pretty resilient too. Our problem was that as you went down the list the data started to look a little more wobbly. There were only a few shows that had hundreds of our respondents listening. Our top show – Joe Rogan – only had a reach of 5% of the audience. Pretty quickly we were into just tens of people saying they tune in. Overall, we felt it would be hard to provide something comprehensive to the sector, so we went back to the drawing board.

Now I have a lot of time for Edison Research. They’re easily one of the best audio research companies in the world, and nice people as well. They will have been much better than us at doing the research. So lets look at what they’ve come up with. Their ‘top 25’ is as follows.

This definitely passes the ‘smell test’. I could absolutely believe they were the top 25 shows in the UK.

The challenge is that there are charts that we do all see in podcasting – that’s the Apple and Spotify ones – where even though we know that the algorithm is designed to reflect changes in popularity, rather than total downloads, it does skew our perception slightly.

The fact the Edison research measures recall – shows that listeners can remember what they’ve tuned into – and also means that it will be skewed towards the more popular, memorable shows. If I asked you to name the podcasts you follow in your app, how many could you remember? Five’s probably do-able. Could you list 10? If you read this newsletter then you probably follow many more.

Update: Megan from Edison dropped me a note about this:

When respondents are asked to list the podcasts they’ve listened to in the past week, they are also asked to consider all the places they consume them (e.g. apps, services, social media, websites, YouTube). They are then given extensive instructions on how to access their listening histories to ensure the list is as comprehensive as possible. It is a multi-step process to collect responses from study participants.

There’s also some interesting things around names. Friday Night Comedy doesn’t appear in the list – but then do people refer to the shows on it, like Dead Ringers or The News Quiz? The BBC shows they include are roughly in the order of the BBC’s data for the same quarter – though Edison picks up shows like Moneybox and Infinite Monkey Cage that don’t seem to trouble the BBC’s own downloads-based chart.

This, of course, is one of the issues – the methodology is different so you wouldn’t expect the same results.

Similarly comparing some of the shows that are hosted by Acast – Off Menu, Shagged Married Annoyed, That Peter Crouch Podcast, The Therapy Crouch, Happy Place and Newlyweds – the order is pretty close when comparing the actual UK downloads Acast tells its advertisers. However it misses some that, based on downloads, you would expect to see – Guardian Football Weekly, The High Performance Podcast – that rank higher than some of those listed.

Now who’s to say these didn’t appear in places 26-30? Again, the methodology is different to measuring downloads.

Weekly reach is also very different to total downloads from a show. Today in Focus, from the Guardian, has as similar weekly reach to Newlyweds (though doesn’t make the list above) but, with five episodes a week, it does nearly five times the total downloads. The latter is clearly a ‘bigger’ show, but, once again, it depends how you measure it.

Finally, the chart data combines the recall of three months of respondents. This definitely means it will lean into shows that run all year round. There’s, in effect, 12 opportunities to capture people mentioning a show. If you’re only a six part series, you might be one of the most popular shows for a short period of time, but you may miss out on a chart placement.

Summary

So, is the Edison Research chart a comprehensive list of the top 25 shows in the country? No. Is it a pretty good approximation? Yes. But you need to remember what’s being measured.

AOB

• In this week’s Media Podcast, I catch up with Charlotte Tobitt, Editor of Press Gazette and Chris Lockery, Editor of Popbitch to talk about Russell Brand, Rupert Murdoch and more. Listen here. Watch here.
• I’m looking forward to speaking at Podnews Live this Wednesday where I’m going to be talking about what makes a Top 200 show. I’m also at the, now sold out, British Podcast Awards on Thursday. Do say hello if you see me at either.
• If you want more on the Edison Research study, Adam Bowie’s written about it too.

We look back over seven decades of Murdoch Senior’s media empire. Plus: the media’s twisted relationship with Russell Brand. From Sachsgate to Dispatches… will broadcasters ever learn lessons?

Also on the programme: the media decamped to Cambridge for the annual RTS get-together. We tell you all you need to know. And why are local newsrooms striking?

Joining me are Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt, Popbitch’s Chris Lochery and media consultant Kate Bulkley.

Watch above, or listen below:

They’re using some software from RadioNewsAI.com created by Stefan de Groot, someone who’s been a radio producer and web developer.

The way it works is that you choose some news ‘sources’ – either RSS feeds, or your own written work – it then crunches them down to radio scripts. You can then edit this and train the system to understand what you like. There’s then an approval queue to ‘sign off’ what it’s done.

You then create a voice, either trained on your own people, or use one of theirs, build the structure of the bulletin, including adding any audio production. It then can automatically upload bulletins to your playout system.

The Station Manager for both stations, Andy Green says: “As a small station, we are unable to afford a full-time journalist, nor rely on a single volunteer to produce voiced bulletins. The advantage of using the RadioNewsAI system is that our team can produce and edit local stories from anywhere, and load the text to the online system, with the AI software generating the audio.”

As you can expect, internet radio commentators are not happy – “The so so sorry state of the way radio is going”, “the start of a slippery slope” and “Radio is destroying its unique selling point and reason for being”.

Hopping on their Listen Again service for their Drivetime show, it looks like they run a Sky News national bulletin at the top of the hour, and then run their AI local news after. Here’s how it sounded last Friday:

Now, obviously it’s not perfect. The Times/Sunday Times mention and the end pause before refill is perhaps noticeable, but otherwise I thought, as a new piece of tech, it sounded pretty good. I Imagine the first story came from this text.

Technology isn’t good or bad, it’s how it used and what benefits it delivers. The economics for this, and many community stations, as Andy mentions, means that it’s difficult to deliver local news in a traditional way. The choice would normally be not to do any at all. Is it better having something rather than nothing? I think so, though it depends what safeguards you put in place.

The danger is that there isn’t any oversight, and the system processes the feeds, creates the bulletin and publishes it without anyone looking at it.

To me, the potential benefit is that it reinvents the work flow. For many local stations a human does the equivalent of re-writing the news, and then they’re anchored in a studio to do a bulletin every hour. Today, doing fresh reporting or getting ‘cuts’ can be difficult. Having a system that reads the similar sources and generates short stories could free people up to do fresh journalism. They, or a colleague, could do the edit to make it flow better. Maybe a Slack channel pops up the script and someone confirms it.

I’m also interested in ways you could use it to do a better job. Maybe your radio station broadcasts to different areas and the system could target more localised stories (along with weather and travel) to be sent to different parts of your area? Perhaps you could expand the number of bulletins you do across the day, maybe it means what’s in the bulletin changes more often?

On the other hand, a company could use the work flow to remove lots of journalists and have a central person ‘approve’ bulletin elements. Though that’s a human problem rather than a technical one. How the tool is used is far more important than merely deciding whether it should exist or not.

I’m interested in how we use AI to enhance what we do. I’d sooner be using it to help me grow audience and make more money, rather than just use it to save it.

This isn’t the first use of AI by a radio station. Keri Jones runs Alfred, an all-speech community radio station in Shaftesbury. I asked him to talk me through how he uses it.

Here’s how it is used in just one story – about a local geocache group. I went out with them. That’s important. There’s human contact here. I edited the audio on a text-based AI editor, removed filler words, elongated a syllable with AI for a smoother edit, and used AI to quieten the background noise of a tractor. I transcribed the entire piece for a website article. AI provided me with shorter versions for different platform teasers and created hashtags. For my cue, AI wrote me a sentence summarising geocaching. I got it to create different cue versions for interest, altering focus and changing tense for later broadcast.

A voice clone of mine can get listeners’ lost pets or travel alerts on air remotely when I’m sitting in a Parish Council meeting and I’ve seen a listener’s Facebook message. Otherwise, that just wouldn’t air. But the buck stops here. It is not a replacement for people, human sensibility and knowledge. AI can create your 25+ hour day. But needs to be considered as your worst-ever work experience, whose content you must continually check.

For legal, stylistic and credibility reasons, I’d be terrified to listen if ‘let loose’ on-air reading RSS feeds. And I cannot foresee a day when I would want that. Because if it’s reading what’s already on the web, it’s not my unique content and, without that, I don’t see how I’d be adding value or how my service would remain relevant and survive.

At the Radio Festival last week, Daniel Anstandig from Futuri talked about RadioGPT -a suite of software that adds AI to radio stations, particularly AI presenters.

I wouldn’t want to replace my Fun Kids presenters with AI (they’ll be pleased to hear!) The reason their shows work on our main station is their unique content and what’s in their heads. But, at the same time we have presenter-less spin-off stations – things like Fun Kids Soundtracks. We wouldn’t put a human on there, but would it be better to add something using AI. It could be a presenter, or we could create a voice that’s maybe a helpful owl to back announce songs! Using the technology creatively opens up lots of options.

Much of our main station is pre-recorded, so a late birthday shout-out wouldn’t normally be able to be included. Wouldn’t it be better if we, like Keri, could easily add that in? Wouldn’t that enhance our presenters’ show rather than take anything away?

AI isn’t going anywhere. Radio faces new challenges from new media types, our aim should be to use AI well to supplement our existing broadcasts and make it even better for our listeners.

AOB

• Speaking of the Radio Festival, I was honoured to receive a Fellowship from the Radio Academy last week. It was lovely to receive some recognition from my peers and weird to a hear a kind of eulogy when you’re still alive!
• There’s a really packed Media Podcast this week. Joining me was TV writer Scott Bryan and Private Eye journalist Adam Macqueen. We were talking The Telegraph sale, BBC local radio changes, Clarkson on Amazon and more. I also spoke to PR supremos David Yelland and Simon Lewis about public relations today, the press and their new show It Hits The Fan on BBC Sounds. Take a listen, or watch on YouTube.

Also on the programme: how has the art of PR changed? I sit down with two seasoned pros, David Yelland and Simon Lewis to discuss how techniques have evolved in recent years. All that, plus in the media quiz… we take a look at the classifieds.

Plus: Mark Thompson is taking over at CNN – but after taking on the top job at the BBC and New York Times… is this his toughest challenge yet?

Also on the programme: how some enterprising souls could be using Spotify to launder money and why Facebook’s hitting ‘close tab’ on Facebook News. All that, plus in the media quiz… we look at the winners and losers at the National TV Awards.

Here in the UK, a mild-mannered middle-of-the-road broadcaster in his 70s – Ken Bruce – made the surprising decision to leave the biggest radio show in Europe on BBC Radio 2 and up sticks to young upstart commercial station Greatest Hits Radio at the beginning of April.

The show is basically the same and he got to take his big feature – PopMaster – with him. Meanwhile, after a short break with interim presenter Gary Davies, Radio 2 appointed a spring-chicken – 49-year old Vernon Kay to the role, who seems to have settled in pretty well.

Well, the first figures are out and it looks like the power of Ken is pretty strong.

On Greatest Hits Radio the slot’s audience has doubled (since this time last year) giving the Brucester 3m listeners. It’s around an 800k increase on the quarter, but the previous quarter’s increase of 450k is probably down to him too.

Over at Radio 2, listeners for Ken’s slot have dropped, this quarter, by 1.3m. This seemingly has affected the station pretty significantly as its headline total reach figure has dropped by a million from 14.4m to 13.4m.

Whilst Radio 2 says this is “only a 7% drop”, I imagine they’ve been a bit surprised by the scale of it. I know I was, especially as I told the I Paper earlier this week: “I imagine that Radio 2’s headline weekly reach figure won’t really change much. There’s very few listeners that will have entirely abandoned Radio 2 to go to another station.”

My reasoning was that for your headline figure to drop, people have to entirely stop listening to your station and I guessed that I didn’t think many, even if they now listened to Ken on GHR, would abandon Radio 2. This was certainly the case with other high profile defections.

Perhaps after Steve Wright being moved and other musical changes, Ken is the straw that broke the camel’s back. However my hunch is that it isn’t likely to be terminal or even replicated over another quarter. Indeed the shocking headline of ‘loses a million’ is somewhat belied when you realise that Radio 2 retained 84% of the slot’s listeners, and the replacement – Vernon – was only on-air for half the quarter measured.

So if I was looking at this positively I’d say:

• It’s only one quarter – it’s the trend you need to keep an eye on
• The new show wasn’t measured the entire quarter
• Radio 2 fluctuates up and down between -3% and +3% each quarter – and has had quarters that have been up 8% and down 5% fairly recently.
• A big change will have promoted lots of trial over this quarter, that doesn’t mean they’ve abandoned Radio 2 for good.

However, saying all of that, it’s still a sizeable loss that’s embarrassing for the station to have to deal with. It also may take some time to rebuild.

It has however hard to be too sad for Radio 2. They’re still, by far, the biggest radio station in the country and have the biggest breakfast show.

Meanwhile Ken’s arrival at Greatest Hits Radio has spiked their numbers nicely. His 3m weekly reach, has helped the station’s reach grow to 5.7m from 5.1m. But I don’t think that’s the end of that story.

As I’ve talked about before, stations measure audiences in different ways. If you’re a big national station you use quarterly data, this means your figures come only from data in the last three months. Smaller national stations and many larger local ones use half yearly data. This combines two quarters of data that rolls across each release. This is what Greatest Hits do. So actually their figures are half Ken, half not-Ken – so both the 3m and the 5.7m probably only tell half the story. Indeed, many of the smaller stations that make up Greatest Hits only have data based on 12 months, so it’ll be this time next year when we know the true story.

This is why there’s a bit of a difference between Radio 2 losing 1.3m listeners and GHR only gaining 800k of them. A decent number of the other 500k have probably already moved too, we just can’t see them yet.

Next quarter I’d expect to see Ken up even further and Greatest Hits maybe up towards 7million.

• Yesterday I spoke to Ken’s boss, the Hits Radio Network Programme Director Gary Stein for a special edition of The Media Podcast, which should be available now!

More on the BBC…

Whilst Radio 2 dropping 7% will lead the headlines, other BBC stations didn’t do too well either. Radio 3 drops 11.8% this quarter (15.8% year on year) back to 1.7m (its Q3/22 figure). Staying on classical music, Global’s Classic FM has not fared well either (down 1.5% this quarter, and now 10% year-on-year).

5Live drops 1.2% this quarter (1.6% y-on-y), 6 Music drops 1.6% (6.4% y-on-y), 1Xtra down 3.7% (up 1.7% y-on-y) and World Service is down 0.7%, but 23.4% y-on-y).

A better look over at Radio 1 (up 1.6% q-on-q and 2.9% y-on-y) and the Asian Network (up 13.7% q-on-q and 6.9% y-on-y).

Over at Radio 4, their reach is down 4.5% quarter on quarter, and 12.9% on the year to 8.9m. The Today Programme is also on the slide – down to 5.5m, that’s a 4.6% drop quarter on quarter and a 16.1% drop year-on-year.

The Today Programme and Radio 4 generally are pretty much in sync. When one rises (or drops) the other one does too. Post-pandemic between 60% and 62% of Radio 4’s audience listen to Today. This quarter it’s 61.3% so pretty much unmoved.

Is Radio 4’s reach drop a concern for the network, or a return to its historic position? Fundamentally, I think there is far more quality audio on the radio and through podcasts now than there has ever been before. So it certainly faces far more competition. The chart below shows the changes in reach for each demographic and what percentage share each demographic makes up, over time.

I think what it shows is that the younger end – that’s 24s to 54s – which were pretty stable over time, are now able to get quality speech from elsewhere, meaning Radio 4 no longer needs to be part of that mix – and so we see a drop. This also coincides with the rise of digital radio and podcasts.

55 to 64s meanwhile have been stable and 65 pluses, are if anything growing – but I would imagine this might be matching population trends. It does mean, though, that 65 pluses who were just over a third of Radio 4’s audience are on track to become half of it over the coming years.

Of course Radio 4 is a big supplier of on-demand content, in fact nine out of ten of BBC Sounds’ top programmes are from R4 – and that won’t show up in these RAJAR figures.

Over on BBC Local Radio, which is in the process of making significant changes to the structure and programming, they’ve seen a reach increase of around 250k taking their total up to 5.5m.

In other news…

It’s interesting to see that the main Kiss station has now been overtaken in both reach and hours by its stablemate Kisstory. There were also good results for Capital Dance and Kiss Dance – both are now over the 1m reach mark.

Also well done to Hits Radio – the station (rather than network) has grown significantly over the year from 1.3m to 1.8m and the breakfast show with Fleur East, James Barr and Matt Haslam has grown from 413k to 550k.

And congratulations to Boom Radio, now whilst their reach increase wasn’t as impressive as previous months, they are the station with the most loyal listeners – tuning in for an average of 10.3 hours a week!

Also well done to my team at Fun Kids, with 96k listeners, 10+ in the London area and loads more that are younger than that, and also who listen across the country. But even in the bit we measure, it’s nice to be bigger than all of Virgin’s spin-off stations, all the country stations, Capital Chill, Heat and especially GB News.

AOB

• I’ve recorded a special RAJAR edition of The Media Podcast with guests Adam Bowie and Ken Bruces’s boss, Bauer Hits Programme Director Gary Stein. You can listen to it now: https://podfollow.com/themediapodcast.

• I’ve been working with Lauren Layfield and the Podcast Discovery team on a brand new podcast called Your Next Podcast. Each week it talks about a brand new podcast series and features the whole first episode. Follow the podcast here. It’s a great way to always have something to listen to.

On the show this week, with BBC and ITV bosses facing MPs this week and on the ropes, we ask what they can do to regain control of the narrative?

Joining Matt are guests Prof. Lis Howell and Farah Jassat from Intelligence Squared.

Also on the programme – should politicians present news programmes?

As OFCOM starts to ponders the question, we offer an answer or two.

All that, plus… Andrew Tate verses the BBC, and who is the biggest news podcast in the UK? Have a guess. And, in the media quiz… we play Give Us A (News) Clue.

Automated Transcript

Check against delivery

Matt Deegan  

Hello and welcome to The Media Podcast. I’m Matt Deegan. On the show today, TV chiefs in the dock with BBC and ITV bosses facing MPs this week and on the ropes, we asked what they can do to regain control of the narrative. Also on the programme should politicians present news programmes as Ofcom starts to ponder the question that we offer an answer or to all that, plus Andrew Tate versus the BBC, and who’s the biggest news podcast in the UK. Plus, in the media quiz we play give us a news clue. That’s all to come in this edition of The Media Podcast. 

In the news this week, Channel Four boss Ian Katz sent an email to indies saying last few months had been difficult, but they should hold their nerve. Deadline also reports the channel’s TV audience sank to a record low in May, Idris Elba launched a global marketing business called Silly Face with business partner, Mark Boyan. The Media Leader says the pair met last year while plotting to buy Channel Four, and the celebrated sitcom Black Adder marked Its 40th birthday with the troubled pilots making for a fascinating read on Broadcast’s website this week. Go check it out.

Now joining me at The London Podcast Studios. It’s Lis Howell. Hello, lovely to see you in person. Now we’ll talk about ITV more in a minute with everyone. But as an experienced TV exec and someone who had your own breakfast fun when you do keep doing GMTV What is your take on on this morning?

Lis Howell  

Well, it’s very interesting, isn’t it? In fact, I was on the commissioning panel for this morning, way back in the 1980s when they got the gig at Granada. I think that in fact ITV have handled this quite well. They’ve been very quiet. And I think they were very dignified at the hearing. And they made some very sensible points. For example, there have been very few complaints at ITV about the so called toxic environment. I have to say, I don’t really agree with Martin Frizell about fruit and veg and things. But I am a little bit sick of hearing word toxic. Yeah, what does it really mean?

Matt Deegan  

I mean, if talents are a complex thing we’ve talked a little bit about about the Phillip Schofield issue before but when you’re sort of in the editor’s chair, or when you have to look after what are quite large teams, dealing with raw talent flare ups, there isn’t a book to tell you what to do is there

Lis Howell  

no there isn’t an every single programme that’s successful has difficult times there’s jealousies and resentments. And there’s people who think they should be promoted, and they’re not promoted and people who get promoted beyond their ability. And it’s difficult. It’s a high risk, high reward business. And that’s what you go into. And you know that when you go into it, and that’s part of the fun and part of the excitement, you know, you can rise to the top and you can fall an awful long way as I know, my personal experience. So I think they’ve handled it very well. I keep wanting to say to these people that are quizzing them, these are the pumpers MPs and so on. What should they have done? Yeah, what should it be done? Should they have followed Philip Schofield home? And then if they’d found out that he was having an affair with a younger person, what would they have done? Make him give him up? It’s so complicated and difficult. And I do get really sick of all the hypocrisy and the self righteousness.

Matt Deegan  

Well, let’s talk a bit more about that select committee in a little while. But before we get there, though, someone who’s making their media podcast debut, it’s our second guest, the head of podcast Intelligence Squared for just that. Hello. Hi, Matt. Nice to be here. It’s lovely to have you here. You’ve been busy launching a new podcast.

Farah Jassat  

Yes, we’re launching a new podcast today. In fact, it’s called vs. And it’s hosted by Coco Khan. The Guardian journalist who you may also have heard on Pod Save the

Matt Deegan  

UK. She made it she made an excellent appearance on Pod Save the UK and

Farah Jassat  

she’s absolutely fantastic. And she’s boasting asked for a series of essays, which is a podcast all about the little debates that are a big deal to someone. Okay, so

Matt Deegan  

what’s a little debate?

Farah Jassat  

So our first episode that’s out today is cars versus bikes. And we have two engineers debating it, but in a fun way. So we’ve got Yasmin abdulmajeed and Roma Agra, while they’re both engineers. We’ve got other episodes like the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones. We’ve got London versus New York. That one includes the mooch, Anthony Scaramucci against Simon Jenkins of The Guardian. So it’s kind of fun, takes fun topics, but you’ll learn something from it.

Matt Deegan  

Have there been any punch ups from it already?

Farah Jassat  

Well, I have to leave that. Listen to me and I’m gonna keep you in suspense.

Matt Deegan  

That’s good vs available wherever you’re listening to this. Okay, so Story number one. We’ve touched on it already. TV chief’s in the doc. So not one but two TV bosses are interviewed by MPs in Westminster this week. The BBC is Tim Davey and ITV is Carolyn McCall both spoke to the DCMS select committee. They do love dragging a media person in front of them.

Lis Howell  

They really do and I think that there is an element of sort of enjoying getting somebody who was in business said to me the other day MPs what right have they got to quiz ITV on media about It’s moral stance,

Matt Deegan  

isn’t it? Because we give them such a hard time.

Lis Howell  

Often, you know, they are elected representatives and they should. Well, we all know what’s going on at the moment. So while Tim

Matt Deegan  

Davey, he was defending BBC cuts, particularly to local radio, a 30% of income gone over 10 years at the BBC plus inflation at 10%. How did he How did he do? Did you see him before?

Lis Howell  

Yes, and I think he did quite well. But the trouble is that local radio is a very emotive thing. And people get terribly worked up about it. And MPs love local radio, because it’s a platform for them, they never off it for it to be honoured don’t. They love it. But I’ve just been looking at some figures, which I think are really interesting. So BBC, local radio costs 124 million, and it’s got 7.7 8 million listeners. So radio for, for example, costs 96 million, and has 10 million listeners. But of those 10 million listeners, six and a half million just about tune in for the two day programme. So for the rest of the channel, there’s really only three and three quarter million. So in a way why skimp on local radio and maintain radio for which without the Today programme has only half the listeners of BBC local radio. Of course, it’s because of the snob element in London and people who think that local radio just by definition must be naff. But I came up with an idea that perhaps you could keep the Today programme, and then put out all the rest of the feed as as it were, to the local radio stations who could pick and mix from the radio for programmes that they like or think are relevant. I just thought it would be interesting to turn it on its head. Why should local radio suffer and radio for carry on when it’s really only the Today programme that counts on radio four?

Matt Deegan  

That’s quite as quite a statement to make.

Lis Howell  

Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s turned on its head because I started in local radio where he was great radio leads. And back in the day, it was quite hard to get a job. And I did write to them asking if I could go for an internship. But there’s no such thing as an internship there. And we didn’t even have that language. I just asked if I could hang around. And they said, Well, we’re interviewing for a receptionist. So I went along to be interviewed as a receptionist. And when I got there, I said, Well, I don’t really want to be a receptionist. And but I could only work on a Saturday, I used to do something called the Saturday show at first. But it was a really great place to work. And there was a very, very loyal following. And that I think, is what they’re in danger of losing. far do

Matt Deegan  

you think the BBC are under estimating their own local broadcaster?

Farah Jassat  

I think they are absolutely, I mean, I think local radio is one of the USPS of the BBC. I mean, it’s a public service broadcaster, this is one of the things in their charter that they can do that commercial rivals can’t do in the same way. And you know, the key with local radio is that it’s local programming made by local presenters for local people. So audiences are hugely loyal. And, you know, you’ll have people listening for decades to the same person, you know, feeling a real companionship, a real sense of community, and decimating local radio in the same way that’s happened with the World Service and those communities around the world. It’s going to have an impact that will only probably realise many years down the road.

Lis Howell  

So it’s it’s this obsession isn’t it was getting young, cool people and they’re not going to listen to the radio BBC,

Matt Deegan  

the BBC would probably say the BBC across all of its channels caters very well for older audiences, a very high proportion of older people listen to and watch BBC programmes, whereas at the younger end, it’s much more difficult. Why throw them overboard? But are they are they really throwing overboard? They’re not saying there’s nothing for them to consider

Lis Howell  

actually that they are throwing them overboard? Because one of the really silly things about this scheme is the idea that if you’re in radio Cumbria, for example, you can take a programme from Manchester in the morning and from Newcastle in the afternoon. People in Cumbria hate that. They want to be cumbrians and listen to Korean material radio

Matt Deegan  

two’s probably more successful than BBC Radio Cumbria in that market.

Lis Howell  

Well, it probably isn’t. It’s probably national. And radio too is a different matter when I was comparing with radio four, but even radio two isn’t that much more popular proportionally. So why not have a situation where you have read local radio, still making local programmes with local people and not have this sort of fudge where you have regions that don’t really count as regions being artificially put together and put radio two on in the afternoon? Well, if

Matt Deegan  

we talk about an age group, so it’s an interesting thing that came up in the select committee discussion, and this was Tim Davies saying that most 16 to 34 year olds don’t believe that any media is impartial. There’s also a lot of impartiality talked about the BBC. I mean, far it’s an interesting challenge for the BBC, an all broadcasters about what young audiences think about media, particularly when they consume so much of it digitally or through social.

Farah Jassat  

Yeah, absolutely. I think you know, this notion of impartiality is maybe a notion of a bygone age. I mean, most people going forward feel more trust when they when they know which position a broadcaster is coming from or or a news outlet. I mean, my background is at the BBC. I was at newslite for many years. I believe in the you know, the aim of impartiality but I also believe that it’s probably you know, an unachievable goal. And you’re all you can always aim to be as impartial as you can. But you know, people come from different perspectives from different backgrounds, and there’s no harm in actually just being able to admit that

Lis Howell  

I think I couldn’t really see where you’re coming from, although as a journalism teacher, I was teach objectivity and impartiality, but perhaps are very different things they are and I think it’s a question of honesty, if you know where a person’s coming from, that’s what matters. And I think that was very interesting in the in the Gary Lineker case, for example, where I didn’t have any problem at all with Gary Lineker, not on air, giving his personal opinion. The same with Jeremy Clarkson, for example, he was really unpleasant about Meghan Merkel, but I’m glad that I know that about him because it put me right off. And I know the truth about Jeremy Clarkson. So it’s a complicated thing. But I think if you’ve got objectivity, then you can rely on the broadcaster to tell you both sides of the story or all the truth.

Matt Deegan  

Well, the other people that were facing a grilling were ITVS, Carolyn McCall and Kevin LIGO, who sort of heads up kind of content and programming facing a grilling from the MPs Liz. I mean, when I started when I was watching that, some of Kevin Lagos statements are pretty good. He’s a good speaker anyway.

Lis Howell  

I think all three of them were really good. I was a little bit confused about Carolyn McCall, when she was talking about defamatory or otherwise statements, and then said, well, we don’t mention that I mean, just mentioned, which was either very clever or a bit odd.

Matt Deegan  

I was just hoping a bit annoyed. Yes, I

Lis Howell  

think very annoyed, because I can absolutely see why they’re so annoyed these people making these allegations they’ve done as I said, their investigation, what are they supposed to do anyway? They can’t put the thumb screws on these people. And you know, all right, Philip Schofield may have pulled the wool over their eyes. But if he wasn’t doing anything illegal, then really there puts them in a very difficult position. Anyway, Kevin, like

Matt Deegan  

I said, He’s spoke to Schofield, just before he was about to come out on on transition. And there’s been a lot of discussion about why he chose that moment. Kevin said, he’d said to Philip, is there anything you want to tell me that we should know that has prompted this? And Scofield reportedly said, No, there’s nothing? I mean, and they had an I think they asked 12 times, what are they

Lis Howell  

supposed to do go on and on? And I you know, put them on the rackets. It’s absolutely huge, because and there’s a real complications here. If a person is in their 20s, at what point do they take responsibility anyway? And in many of these relationships, it’s the younger person that’s got what you might call the whip hand, you know, they’ve got the power in the relationship. So it’s enormously complicated. And I have said this before, but I think it’s so good. Also, again, what are they going to have a situation where a senior producer can only sleep with an executive producer, or a reporter can sleep with the producer, but a producer can’t sleep with a runner, a runner can’t sleep with the cleaner, but the cleaner can sleep with the executive producer? Where’s it going to end? Are we going to have guidelines for you know, who goes with who in the green room? It’s crazy.

Farah Jassat  

I mean, I wouldn’t quite agree with that. The younger people might have the whip hand over all the people in this situation. I’m gonna see immense amount of power in the programme. Yeah, sorry.

Lis Howell  

Can I just say I do agree in this situation. It’s obviously perhaps abuse of power, maybe going too far, but certainly inappropriate.

Farah Jassat  

Yeah. But I do think, you know, it is a very difficult situation for ITV to be in, as you say, you know, they asked, you know, people tend to 12 times about this. And if you’ve not got evidence, what can you do?

Matt Deegan  

I mean, Liz, Kevin also said that a lot of the people that are slacking off ITV are the ones that previously they had a lovely time there, and we’re very happy to stay on the network. Well, I’m

Lis Howell  

not gonna argue with that.

Matt Deegan  

Another story this week, is off comm. They’re looking into the rising trend of news interviews anchored by MPs, such as Jacob Riis, mog and Nadine Dorries, yes, you’re still an MP at the time of recording anyway, appearing on talk TV. I mean, we are we talked about this, this challenge of impartiality. I mean, actually, if you’re an MP of a political party, you know where they are, is it fine for them actually to be on to be on television, interviewing people or having an opinion?

Farah Jassat  

I think it’s fine for them to have opinions. But I think there’s a real problem when you have shows, such as their shows on TV news, where you have a politician from a certain party interviewing other politicians from the same party with no other views. Therefore, there’s no range of views and there’s no objectives. Your impartiality there

Matt Deegan  

so often would argue on its current affairs, it’s not new, so that’s okay.

Farah Jassat  

I think off comments fudging it completely here. I think they’re late to the party and they’ve they’ve been a bit Toothless over this issue, frankly, because there’s quibbling over format. This is the current affairs programme. Therefore, impartiality rules don’t count. It’s not a news programme, but they basically things on format, which is is a presenter speaking to the audience, is there a reporter segment? Are there VTEs in the package? You know, I mean, I don’t think that looks at the principle behind do impartiality, which is the whole point

Matt Deegan  

of it. I mean, as far as right I mean, Ofcom have have, of course, been fortunate that traditional broadcasters have played a Straight bat and the same game for so long and that you’ve been using top TV are sort of following the rules. But it just doesn’t seem it doesn’t seem right.

Lis Howell  

Well, I think with GB news, they really like poking the bars of the cage with that gets them lots of publicity. They’re a tiny little outfit really. I mean, they must think all the birthdays have come at once with a human and all the stuff at the moment. But anyway, on top of that, they like controversy, they caught it. And they always say rather grandly, we chose to be on TV than being online. The fact is, they get far more publicity because they’re on on TV, and it’s also more their target audience. So they’re poking the bars that are a bit with Ofcom. I’ve actually got the off gone off comm guidelines is really out for us. So item 5.3 says that no politician may be used as a newsreader interviewer or reporter in any news programme, unless exceptionally it is editorially justified. In that case, the political allegiance of that person must be made clear to the audience. It’s really not a very good guide. For a start, what’s the difference, a news programme and the current affairs programme which is going to say take a newsflash, you know, which I’m one of the things everybody criticised about GB news, when it started was it didn’t have any news? So they’ve got us, you know, between the programmes and so on, and are at the top of the programme. So does that make it a news programme? It’s complicated, isn’t it? And when they say, well, it’s editorially justified, you know, our presenters are brilliant. Everyone’s talking politics, and we can use their views and it’s fine editorially. So it’s really very difficult for Ofcom. They also seen an item 5.5 Do impartiality on matters of political or industrial controversy, and matters relating to current public policy. So this would be the junior doctors, for example, must be preserved on the part of any person providing a service. So this could be achieved within a programme or over a series of programmes. If you have got a politician presenting a programme and consistently being the presenter, you cannot do that, because they’re going to have a partial view.

Matt Deegan  

I mean, it has it has radio actually done this much better. So LBC was always sort of held up and occasionally pointed out for doing something wrong, but they look like their their heavenly in comparison to maybe

Lis Howell  

well, that chat programmes are very much chat programmes and diverse personalities. And what they do is they have a posing politicians. And that’s the dynamics and it’s quite fun and quite exciting. And it’s also clearly a current affairs programme in the middle of the day, usually. So I totally agree with far I think it’s very confusing. I sort of feel a bit sorry for Congress. It’s a tough call. But they’ve got to clarify this. And they’re going to do it by some sort of survey and see what we all think, oh,

Matt Deegan  

far, they’re going to talk to people and try and try and get a view to sort of outsource the decision making somewhat to the outside world. There’s a bit of me that looks at this and the sort of the grumpy people with people who’ve been around in news for quite a long time. Actually, does it open up opportunities for BBC, ITV and Channel Four to to rethink perhaps some of the ways that they put together their news and current affairs programmes?

Farah Jassat  

I mean, it can do but ultimately, I think that the main issue here is the Ofcom has certain rules in place. And now, as you said that they are outsourcing it rather than enforcing their own rules or clarifying their own rules. I mean, a case in point that you were just talking about with, you know, the was estimate V interviewing Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, about the budget. You know, I mean, yeah, it’s just incredible. I wouldn’t endorse interviewing Boris

Lis Howell  

Johnson would say it was a bit of a party, but that’s true.

Matt Deegan  

Then you could argue the audience are entirely aware of their political standing. They understand where they’re coming from, we talked about earlier as well. Yeah, maybe there’s a certain honesty,

Lis Howell  

as long as it’s not in the news context. And that’s the difficulty about something like talking about the budget, where it’s a news item, news of the day thing. So I think it’s a really difficult situation. And it’s got it’s got to be resolved. I did do something for the times radio recently, which was about politicians doing pieces to camera as we call them in TV, you know, where the presenter, the sorry, the reporter talks to the camera, and they had some hysterical examples. And one was Jeremy Hunt, trying to explain I think it was inflation with coffee cups. It was so patronising and awful and what struck me was that why do these politicians want to be entertainers that politicians but then

Matt Deegan  

that goes back to the ego doesn’t need to be an MP, you need a decent amount of ego and being a telly performer is similar.

Farah Jassat  

That’s what one it’s some of the people are saying if on Titans is rules, politicians may have to choose between TV and Westminster, they will surely quit.

Lis Howell  

But just to be super topical, Glenda Jackson who’s just apparently said this really funny thing about being in the House of Commons was really just like acting except the lighting was rubbish and it was rather under rehearse.

Farah Jassat  

My real worry about this situation with impartiality is not you know, we could be unwittingly going into a Fox News style environment in the UK and that is the real problem where you know, for so many decades we’ve had these rules of do impartiality and broadcast. England and almost by stealth, the rules have changed without anyone realising. And you know, we’re going to end up in an American style polarised news environment. And that is my concern.

Matt Deegan  

Just on that, Liz. When Fox News is hugely successful, it’s the most popular cable network out of all of them, not even just the news. I mean, these channels, GB news and talk TV, they’re not successful.

Lis Howell  

Well, they’re not in the same league, obviously. But it has occurred to me that perhaps the idea behind GB news is to add more and more towards Fox because Fox is successful, but not on a broad spectrum. It’s successful with a very small targeted audience, which is enormous ly loyal. So it’s a bit like saying, there’s alright for the sake of a better word. There’s a lot of odd people out there with crazy views, but they’re a market they still buy, I don’t know nappies and jam and things so we can still sell advertising and absolutely feast on the fact that they’ve got these crazy views and that’s really the business plan behind Fox News now whereas I’m not sure that GB us is really ready for that but it might be the route it’s going down it that might be part of the whole you know, poking through the parts of off comms page

Farah Jassat  

and over the next few years I mean, you know, Boris has just stepped down is Boris gonna get a programme on talk TV I mean, I think there’s a lot of you know,

Lis Howell  

potentially start his own channel or you might by the telegraph, who knows

Matt Deegan  

so dear. Well, whether you’re odd or not stick around. We’ve got more news after this and we’re back with The Media Podcast listen for is still with me. Time for some news in brief. A couple of weeks ago, you may have seen a BBC interview with a pretty controversial figure Andrew Tate recorded whilst he is under house arrest in Romania, for numerous charges, including rape, human trafficking and exploiting women. For the BBC. His interview was edited and then shortly afterwards, title his sort of social media people released that the sort of own cut totally if people aren’t aware of that story, tell us what happened.

Farah Jassat  

Yeah, so the BBC is Lucy Williams in India have interviewed Andrew Tate at his house because he’s currently under house arrest, as you say for many charges, including human trafficking and rape. So as soon as she walked in Lucy Williamson agitates people were filming the encounter until she sat down the whole interview until she left the house is about 40 Something minutes, the BBC obviously recorded the interview itself and then put out an edited version of just under nine minutes. So this has caused a lot of controversy with people online saying, you know, why is the BBC done that they’re trying to hide something and the problem with this is that it’s become a very polarised it was always going to be a polarised issue, you are interviewing Andrew Tate. Now his followers are always going to say that the BBC is going to do a hit job on him, which they are saying already. I think that Lucy actually did really well in that interview. I mean, it was a very difficult interview to have. But you know, if we compare it to other interviews in the past, like, say the Elon Musk interview, which was done by a great reporter, James Clayton, I used to work with him at news night. But you know, Elon gave very little notice it was a last minute interview, a little underprepared. He was a bit underprepared. It was very last minute. And you can see he was a bit caught out as Elon tried to turn the tables on him ask him questions. Now, I think Lucy was very aware of this strategy. And so I was quite impressed. Although I sat I watched this interview, kind of at one o’clock in the morning, because I only meant to watch the first few minutes. And then I just got obsessed. It’s one of those things. I don’t want to be interested in this story. But I have this morbid fascination, like with cults and, you know, with a due date. So I think she did really well, you know, what she did was quietly consistently repeat her questions. And she was armed with facts, even when he was, you know, saying, No, I didn’t say that, even though there’s evidence that he didn’t say that, or you’ve made up this person who’s a witness, which they haven’t made up. You know, I mean, I, to be honest, my heart was beating really fast. I thought, palpitations, I would be incredibly nervous being the interviewer with someone like him. Well,

Matt Deegan  

sort of, from the audience perspective, this kind of combines media literacy with being in your own sort of silo of news, but a Trumpism as well or just or just lying. I mean, leads if you if you’re a broadcaster, is this something we should learn from this and say, Actually, should we put up all the rushes should read so we have something for the 10 O’Clock News, and just go, Look, we’re trying to be open and honest, here is everything. I think

Lis Howell  

you’ve got to be quite careful because sometimes there are things which both sides wouldn’t want to have edited out. But I’m the programme about Brown and Blair that was on TV quite recently, was wonderful, because it showed them sitting down and preparing for the interviews and in a way that was unfair, but in a way it was incredibly telling. They sound like real people. Yeah. And yes, and they’ll let’s slip certain things that they don’t do in the interview and so on. And of course, I’m sure that was waivers and they had to give permissions and so on, but it really did work as a very interesting show. With Tate I thought what was so amazing was that he came over so absolutely terrible. And that wasn’t because Lucy was good. giving him the opportunity to be absolutely terrible. She was really sort of countering him and so on and, and she was giving him away out on occasions. But he was absolutely awful. And really it was it was unbelievably interesting to watch. Just to answer your question about media literacy, we’ve got so many platforms. Now I can’t see any reason why much longer version shouldn’t be put up, or the whole of the version put up. And we go back to Phillip Schofield and Mirage, and there were the headlines put on the news programmes. And then there was the full length interview, which did have other insights in it. So no reason why not at all, but it will get into a different type of negotiation with the interviewee. That’s the thing that the permissions will have to be different. I think Tate absolutely hung himself in that interview. And I think she did very well. And it was really telling the musk interview made me cringe, I’m afraid.

Matt Deegan  

I mean, there’s a question about that comes up whenever these people were interviewed about whether they should be platformed or not. Same with same with Trump. And we’ve talked about the CNN town hall, I should they have let him beyond beyond live television. Should these people be platformed?

Farah Jassat  

I think it’s a really difficult question. I mean, with Tate in particular, I think the police in Bucharest came out saying that. Why has the BBC given him VIP treatment? Because he’s under active investigation? And you don’t maybe there is a case there? I mean, what are we going to learn from someone like Andrew Tate that he’s not already said, I didn’t feel we learned much.

Matt Deegan  

You know, I disagree. I guess we’re saying when you suddenly see that there is there is nothing. There is nothing really there.

Lis Howell  

I think we learned that he is as bad as we’ve been led to believe because I was thinking he can’t be that bad. And I want to hear his side of the story. I’m glad I did. Because it was horrible. And now I know he’s horrible. I guess

Farah Jassat  

you’re right. You know, someone like me, I will actually go on social media and look at his stuff. And I all know that but lots of people won’t know they’ll just hear about him. And this is the only way that they’ll actually be able to

Lis Howell  

write I have not had time in my life to go and research Andrew tape. But I was absolutely fascinated when he turned upon the news. But so

Matt Deegan  

some of these demagogues, they they don’t have to be on traditional media because they’ve got large audiences themselves. So suddenly when they are faced with it, it doesn’t really work for

Lis Howell  

them but that gets right back to our input impartial or objective stance, which is when they come up against somebody that’s going to fight them they really don’t like it. And it’s it’s quite entertaining to see how they react. Well. He

Farah Jassat  

didn’t like it so much that I didn’t know if you I don’t know if you saw earlier this week he has been discrediting Lucy. I’m really sorry for her on his social media. He has been saying that she’s in love with him. Well, that day is everything. A video of her basically door stepping him on the street with some love music in the background and some love heart emojis over her face.

Lis Howell  

Oh, dear. Oh, dear. But I’m glad you did it aren’t you

Matt Deegan  

know, definitely that was something that came up this week was the Reuters digital news report. And it shared some interesting research into the top 10 News podcasts in the UK. Far. Did you see who was at the top of the list?

Farah Jassat  

I think it was newscast was a BBC Yeah. So

Matt Deegan  

three podcasts sort of tied for the top. So news agents. Rest is politics. And BBC news cast. Why do we think those three shows are at the top of the tree?

Farah Jassat  

I mean, they’re great political analysis shows their chat shows, you know who the hosts are, they chat to each other. And they’ve all got deep dives. You know, the rest is politics, to former political insiders, the news agent, you’ve got Emily Maitlis, John SOPA, Louis Goodall, experienced journalist, they’ve been around for many years. And newscasts, which has got a great format, which they’ve replicated over things like Brexit cars, Ukraine cast American cast. So I think that, you know, people are interested in learning about the news from people that are, you know, chatting about it.

Lis Howell  

Yeah, I think this is really interesting, because there is this current a tendency to have things explained to you. And I don’t like that. And I know other people find it uncomfortable, because there’s a sort of assumption that you don’t really know what’s going on, it’s going to be explained to

Matt Deegan  

you, you got to be you got to be really into if you download a podcast, well, you have, but

Lis Howell  

also even when you don’t go that deep, but it’s great to have the feeling that you’re being talked to as an equal, intelligent person. And that’s why I like Chris Mason, and I think you’d be a great podcaster when he gets needs to get another job. I hope not for a long, long time, because I get the feeling that he’s giving me that insider thing. I don’t want someone to explain, I want somebody to let me in and give me those juicy bits that maybe you know, I wouldn’t know about ordinarily. And that’s what I think works in the best sort of podcast, the idea that somebody’s saying something that perhaps they wouldn’t say in another environment. I mean, I don’t know about you forever, but I feel much more comfortable and more honest and open chatting away here than on some of the media I’ve done recently where it’s very formal. So things do slip out. And you do have a little bit more of a relationship with the audience and you do tell them things. So like the receptionist at Radio lead story, but there you go, and it makes it more alive.

Farah Jassat  

I was interested in that report, though, Matt, about how you know programmes like today in focus, which is a brilliant programme that does sort of deep

Matt Deegan  

dives. This is this is this is the Guardians daily podcast. Yes. The Guardians daily

Farah Jassat  

podcast that sort of deep dives into issues. I think it’s great podcast. But you know, they didn’t do

Lis Howell  

as well as maybe they’re the wrong sort of issues. Well, it

Farah Jassat  

seems that the reports saying that many people are not interested in deep dives in the UK. There were some interesting statistics. I think it’s only 8%. of UK audience that listens to news podcasts.

Lis Howell  

Yes, it was it was. And it was disappointing in terms of the whole audience, and they were just comparing in a very small area. But I think that that could be to do with the nature of podcasts in that you do want entertainment value as well. And you perhaps need needing your podcasts when you’re doing something else. And you need to be engaged in a way that perhaps asking you to sit down and concentrate and a deep dive doesn’t work. But I listen to podcasts when I’m doing something else is done is that

Matt Deegan  

I think a lot of people do it in the same way that listen to the radio. Yeah, exam. It accompanies them on their day. Yeah,

Farah Jassat  

absolutely. But in the US, news podcasts accounted for about 19% of lessons. So over double the amount of difference in the UK proportionately.

Lis Howell  

I think that might be cultural, because there is an obsession in the US with being deceived. People feel there are conspiracies and terrible things happening. And they don’t really know about them. And they go into podcasts wanting to know the truth. I don’t think we are quite so paranoid. Yet.

Matt Deegan  

In the kind of things I thought about those sort of three winners, were they were shows that are particularly if we look at newscast in the news agents that are visualised that have big social media output and following. Do you think that’s essential for shows to be successful?

Farah Jassat  

I think in this day and age, it’s becoming increasingly important. You know, there lots of people. I mean, I get the news agent clips on my Tiktok. And loads of people watch those clips, but don’t actually listen to the news agents doesn’t matter. I don’t think it necessarily matters. Because they are I mean, it matters in terms of monetization for the news agents themselves. Yeah, the more people that listen to it, the more you know, the more money they’ll make.

Lis Howell  

That’s exactly what I was going to say. Because when monetization of podcasts still confuses me, I don’t understand how they necessarily make money.

Matt Deegan  

While it is you can go to patreon.com/podcast. And

Lis Howell  

let’s seriously, is it going to be something that I wouldn’t say it’s a flash in the pan? Because it’s obviously not going to be but if you can’t monetize it, what’s where’s it going to go? It reminds me a little bit of the early days of the internet, and I did get involved in having a small business, which was online, and it was impossible to monetize it. We had at one point 1000s of people coming into this particular website, but there was no way before PayPal really getting any money out of it. So in the end, it had to go.

Matt Deegan  

I mean, most publishers are finding this a challenge on this. I mean, some publishers have had three or four audio strategies. And for Intelligence Squared, you know, it’s a combination isn’t every events, business and exactly, membership. That’s why

Farah Jassat  

it’s so cleverly Yeah, so with the podcasts or the business, you know, you can get you can monetize it through adverts on the on the on the programme, but also through membership, you know, where people get extra concert

Lis Howell  

in a way subscription is because it’s a subscription is going to

Matt Deegan  

be the model. But also that’s that’s why having a really strong connection with your audience is essential, because you want to convert them into being subscribers and not just passive consumers.

Lis Howell  

So really, if you have a sort of a very narrow thing that people are very dedicated to and will pay, then you’re going to make money with your podcast, because I’ve got a friend who wants to do a church music podcast, maybe that’s not such a bad idea. If

Matt Deegan  

you find find the audience, I think one of the challenges is you’ve got to be able to tell them that you exist. So where do those people go? What do they consume that you can go? Oh, by the way, there’s this great church music podcast that you could choose, because podcast discovery is still a troublesome thing for any new show.

Lis Howell  

Absolutely. As we’ll know, with vs. Sounds ailable, wherever you are already very worked up about bikes versus cars and Beatles versus the stones itself, obviously, the Beatles,

Farah Jassat  

one thing I was gonna say about, you know, the top three podcasts. And I’m not just saying this, because Coco’s hosts on verses. But actually, I really think pazzi the UK is going to be rising up the charts over the next couple of months, especially in the run up to the general election. And I wouldn’t be surprised if in one of the next reports, you know, that’s towards the top of the list.

Matt Deegan  

Well, so possibly the UK have to declare some interest in doing some work and helping them do some of the marketing. I mean, it’s quite well, it’s working. Well, it’s going to output said the UK is it has an opinion, you know, it is more of a left wing show it they’re not insiders, a lot of political podcasts, they’re insiders or mates of insiders. And I think when that show got established and all that big, big discussions, you know, it was a spin off of pod save America, your consummate insiders, they used to be Obama’s speech writing team. So with this, it’s like do we do we put with initial load of insiders, or actually do we occupy the position of the audience are we outsiders looking in and I think it’s going to be fascinating how that sits alongside those shows. But also think for all politics podcasts. If we go into a change of government. Will they all have a little bit of a bit of a drop have we’ve been lucky To have the the Tory party collapse I mean

Lis Howell  

it is really hello or okay politics at the moment isn’t it sort of become almost like crazy celebrity life and it’s fascinating on a gossip level? I think you’re right when things calm down. Will people want to go into it in quite the same way?

Matt Deegan  

Well, the ultimate podcast format that I’m still surprised hasn’t been spun off into its own global successful subscription podcast is the media quiz, which this week is in price we always lose. That’s why it hasn’t well, we’ll say due this week, it’s entitled give us a news clue. Give us a news clue. I’ll give you a clue that hints to media story from the week. The less clues you need, the more points you get points as well. But if you doesn’t get it wrong, you’re locked out Geez How many format points are in this I’m gonna say that again. So there’s there’s there’s clues or hints for a media story of the week less collusion need, the more points you get. But if you buzzing the wrong, you’re out like Angela’s in your buzzing with your name. So Liz, you’ll say Liz Farah, you’ll say Farah right. Here we go. Number one. Clue number one. It’s good news for West Yorkshire Dundee in Belfast. Okay, for two points. They’re getting government funding. Oh, oh, is it a I know,

Lis Howell  

Liz? Is it about AI and investment in AI? It is sort of?

Matt Deegan  

Yes, the government is investing almost 150 million pounds in a network of research labs across the country tasked with developing the next generation of special effects using tech such as artificial intelligence. That’s according to the Guardian. So two points to you for getting it on that that second clip. Well done. Right. Question number two, or three points. It’s Formula One with a ball.

Farah Jassat  

Oh, Farah, who? Is it Netflix entering the live sports space?

Matt Deegan  

It is. They’re in talks to livestream their first sporting event, only it sounded quite a good idea. So a celebrity golf tournament featuring golfers and f1 drivers. I can’t imagine anything worse. It sort of combines doing something live doing sport with some celebrity.

Lis Howell  

If you put them together, we’ll have to watch them at all.

Matt Deegan  

Would it be something that you’ll you’ll click on?

Farah Jassat  

Not personally, but I think you know, for Netflix, it’s quite an interesting move for them to make to go into this sort of live sports space and to experiment with something that’s a little bit low risk here. It’s not, you know, a household event. And there’s definitely

Matt Deegan  

some rumours they were they were into bid for things like Formula One, be found too expensive. I mean, if you can’t, if you can’t buy it, create something new.

Lis Howell  

This isn’t really live sports streaming. This is an entertainment show. And I think it’s quite genius.

Matt Deegan  

Right. So three points as far as to for you, Liz. So it’s probably on this one. Question number. Three points. It could be you but certainly not PaddyPower. King George the sixth Chase could make Kings Cross for two points. And three, don’t bet on the ad market.

Lis Howell  

Oh, isn’t the oldies radio station?

Matt Deegan  

It is not your frozen out? Farah. So it could be you but certainly not Paddy Power. King George, the sixth Chase could make Kings Cross and don’t take a bet on the ad markets.

Farah Jassat  

I’m sorry, I’m gonna freeze myself.

Matt Deegan  

This is the news that the Guardian has banned gambling advertising from its publications. I mean, gambling is a huge, it’s incredibly a huge driver for lots of media, particularly, particularly sports media. Are they biting the hand that feeds them? Or is this a good thing for them to do?

Lis Howell  

It’s definitely morally a good thing for them to do. But if you do bite the hand that feeds you and your business dies as a result, then that’s not so great.

Matt Deegan  

I mean, is this something that TV channels should follow suit with?

Farah Jassat  

I mean, I think morally, it’s a good thing to do Intelligence Squared, we’ve turned down many opportunities to actually make money on those grounds. And it’s a difficult call, though, because you do put your organisation in a difficult position.

Matt Deegan  

I think far you’ve just won that. So congratulations, Liz, again, you’ve failed to win.

Lis Howell  

I’d say it’s a draw. At least I’m consistent. But as a prize,

Matt Deegan  

you get to, you get to decide what The Media Podcast gambling policy is. So you can come away with the documents and data don’t have to do that. And that’d be great. So well done. Thank you. So you both where can people keep up with what you’re up to?

Lis Howell  

Well, I’m still involved with the expert women project and we have a website and we’re going to have hopefully a big conference next year after 10 years of campaigning for more women experts on the news, I have a horrible feeling it probably rose to a peak in around 2015 And certainly in the pandemic it was women overboard as usual. So yeah, on the website address, its expert women project and for how can people keep up with what you’ve been doing?

Farah Jassat  

Just go to intelligence squared.com We are a live events and podcasts business so you can find our podcast search for Intelligence Squared, or the new one. On vessels, which is vs. And if you’re in London and want to attend any of our live events in person, check out our website.

Matt Deegan  

Brilliant. Thank you both. Thanks so much for joining us today and whisper it quietly. But most podcast studios look very similar. But here at the London podcast you use there’s a brilliant video backdrop that can change with your podcasts complete with a setup, so easy to use that even our producer can do it. Just head to the London podcast studios.com. There’s also a link in the show notes there too. And if you follow up podcast next week, you’ll hear our deep dive with Matt Kelly and Matthew D’Ancona from The New European talking about their view on the media landscape. So make sure you follow. Also want to tell your colleagues about it. We’d love to spread the good word of the podcast and more people tune in. My name is Matt Deegan, the producer as Matt hill it was a Rethink Audio production. I’ll see you next week.

The CNN boss ends a calamitous month with an embarrassing expose. We discuss what went wrong. Also on the programme – The Telegraph is up for sale… but why? And who might be in the running to grab it?

All that, plus Spotify announces more staff cuts, the EU tackles AI… and, in the media quiz… we learn who’s going green.

Automated Transcript

Check against delivery

Matt Deegan  00:02

Hello and welcome to The Media Podcast. I’m Matt Deegan. On the show today, Chris Licht is out. 

The CNN boss has had a calamitous month with an embarrassing expose, we discuss what went wrong. Also on the programme The Telegraph is up for sale but why and who might be in the running to grab it. All that plus Spotify announces more staff cuts, the EU tackles AI and in the media quiz, we learn who’s going green. That’s all to come on this edition of The Media Podcast. 

In the news this week, Prince Harry gave evidence of the High Court in the phone hacking case against the mirror group newspapers. The Duke of Sussex spent eight hours in the witness box. That’s one of four people due to testify on behalf of over 100 plaintiffs. And this may not be the end he could be back in the court if separate claims against the owners of the sun and the Daily Mail Go ahead. Across the pond the WGA strikes rumbled on this week, this time with Apple being the target writers and their celebrity friends who are out in force flyering at Apple stores and picketing Apple HQ in California, although not causing quite enough noise to detract from the launch of Apple’s new Vision Pro mixed reality headset. Now joining me from the beating heart of Holborn here at the London podcast studios. We welcome back Managing Director of gold Waller for outdoorsmen Hello,

Faraz Osman  01:17

hello, how are you?

Matt Deegan  01:20

I’m excellent yourself. I

Faraz Osman  01:21

feel that’s how I should start every conversation now. How How are you? Well, that’s

Matt Deegan  01:25

always the stuff that we edit out in radio so it made it to Holly speech. This as well, culture secretary, Lucy Fraser this week claimed that the BBC is on occasion biassed. Do you agree with Lucy Fraser?

Faraz Osman  01:40

The bias things really I think the biassing is really weird, right? Because it’s it’s presented as an absolute. So like, there’s a goal that you can achieve, which means that you are suddenly unbiased, which is obviously ludicrous, like bias as an experiment. So like, you know, and how you see biases is comes to you as an individual. And when you’re doing broadcasting I think much surely it’s impossible to be unbiased in broadcasting because completely dependencies consuming it. My view on this is actually, if a cultural secretary from a political party goes in front of select committee and says the BBC is unbiased, I would argue that’s a bit of a bigger problem. Because you know, they are a coach sector of a political party. They are bias. And I think that the fact that you have to ants ask the question of the BBC, is probably a good thing. If you ask the question of, say, a particular newspaper, you probably know if they’re left wing leaning or right leaning. If you ask it about certain new news channels that have sprung up in Alaska, yes, you don’t use channels, not news channels, or whatever they’re called these days. But you kind of know if they’re left leaning or individuals for that matter. Yes. But as a corporation, if you’re asking the question is, is that corporation? unbiased? And you don’t know the answer straightaway? That’s probably a good thing. But

Matt Deegan  02:49

when she was pushed for an example, she can give any.

Faraz Osman  02:51

Yeah, I mean, actually, I think it’s a complete, I’m saying this, but I actually think that she handled herself quite well in a quite balanced way. But it’s ironic, weirdly,

Matt Deegan  03:01

is it just the bar for Coach secretaries is so low. Do a good job.

Faraz Osman  03:05

No, I think what I think what the problem is, is that if you ask a coach or secretary, do you think the BBC is biassed? And then they say yes. And then they say, because of this Gary Lineker thing or whatever, that then becomes a thing that everyone starts worrying about. And they’re like, oh, we need to do something about this, because the culture secretary said this. So I think that it was a bit of a trap that was laid, and there was no right answer that she should give. But I think the reality is that I’m less interested about whether or not she thinks the BBC is biassed, I’m more interested in knowing if she’s going to do anything about it. So she said, Yes, I think the BBC is biassed, and as a result, I think x y Zed changes need to be made that her previous person did have that role had previously then that was problematic. But I didn’t get a sense of that from from the select committee. So I think it’s a it’s a bit of a non story. But I actually think it’s quite a good answer from her and gives me a little bit of comfort. That yes, she’s experienced his bias. Of course, she tells you the story. She should think the BBC has bias you’d like but she’s not planning to do anything about it. So we’re all good.

Matt Deegan  04:04

Well, also joining us making her media podcast debut is broadcast reporter Ali Khan. Hi, Ellie. Hi, Matt.

Ellie Khan  04:10

Thanks for having me.

Matt Deegan  04:12

No worries. We love that you’re here. What do you make of that story?

Ellie Khan  04:16

The BBC is very aware of its own bias, and it’s actively trying to tackle it. It’s currently on the second of a series of thematic reviews looking to sort of weed out where it’s going wrong with impartiality. And

Matt Deegan  04:31

I mean, if you look at Ofcom, because Ofcom see adjudicate on the BBC is biases. And there’s been some this upheld but it’s kind of like a handful, isn’t it? So yeah, every so often, there’s something that it’s got a bit too far or there wasn’t quite the right combination of people in the in the newsroom or on or on that programme?

Ellie Khan  04:48

Yeah, yeah, completely. I think what’s happened and I agree with something that Nick Robinson, BBC, veteran journalist said today In that the goalposts have kind of shifted without anyone really being aware of it, he said that the rules have changed, secretly and Ofcom sort of allowed it. And this is this is not to do with BBC This is to do with GB news, the like, where politicians are sort of allowed to come and interview their own and make very, very impartial statements, and it’s sort of being often allowed to slide so he’s sort of saying we’re operating in a completely different environment, we need to address it.

Faraz Osman  05:30

But that’s that’s something that seems like it’s been pioneered by radio right? So we’ll be see doing all of those shows where they had your nick Ferrari, that’s more right, you’ve got but not just that, but you have politicians doing shows like, you know, and I think obviously did a pretty good job of having that balance. And then kind of GPUs have taken that and kind of going, Oh, just get rid of the balance bit. But have all the politicians interviewing their mates, etc.

Matt Deegan  05:50

I think for those channels is easy for them to get away with, even if they are getting away with it according to off comms rules, because they’re more minority channels. Yeah. And it’s not like it’s that everyone sees it, and suddenly notices and points.

Faraz Osman  06:02

Yeah, but I think the wider issue is, is that like, the opinionation of is that. Like, yeah, as we’re doing on this show, like we’re giving opinions, but you know, I’m not an impartiality lawyer or a kind of, you know, I’m just giving my opinion on a particular story, that creep has started to happen,

Matt Deegan  06:20

because I can get balanced the other way. And that’s, that’s the difference is like, it’s fine for you to say that, it’s fine for you to argue that the BBC is imbalanced. And I can say, well, some would argue the other way. But where

Faraz Osman  06:31

it becomes tricky is that when you have subjects like climate change, or Brexit, or vaccines where you have where you where the balance is, like, what do you have one person on each side of the debate? Or do you have 10 economics that believe one thing because it’s 10 to one and one economics believe something else, or 10 Scientists believing that climate change is real issue? And one outlier saying it’s not or do you just have one of each? What is What does balance look like? And I think that’s the struggle because we want both sides of the coin but that’s not necessarily representative of what the argument is. And and like I said, I just think it’s an experiment. And we should just continue to scrutinise it because if we got to the end and said, Oh, suddenly the BBC is impartial that to me, it’s just a bit weird.

Matt Deegan  07:10

I was reading this week about channel for making further programming cuts. This time to Kirsty all sorts daytime series, and the last legs lost some apps as well. How would you say channel for managing their financial difficulties,

Ellie Khan  07:24

they’re experiencing some serious financial woes, but they are sort of doing this salami slicing thing. This is the second and third in in what we assume is going to be a series of of cuts. The last leg really interesting, it’s one of their staple shows 10pm It gets about a million views a week and it does really well nine UPS down from nine to seven, it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I think it probably is, compared to something like Kirsty’s handmade Christmas, which gets decent views every year in December and in the daytime slot.

Matt Deegan  07:57

Some of the in production companies have been a little grumpy about this and sort of the risk has been pushed to them away from from Channel Four. It’s up to the last legs producer to basically deal with channel fours. loss of income.

Ellie Khan  08:10

Yeah, we’ve heard sort of anecdotally that there have been grumpy, produces grumpy crew left of high and dry and those last two episodes of The Last leg. In general indies are very, very worried they are sort of being asked to finance their own shows which isn’t necessarily unusual for a channel at ITV, but for Channel Four, it’s unheard of and worrying for for a lot of Indies. They’re very concerned and and lots of shows also being pushed to next year

Matt Deegan  08:37

for as you run an indie these sort of surprised these cuts come quite late in the production process. Almost a lot of people thought they got it they got a nine show commission and built their programme around that. And then suddenly they found a programme

Faraz Osman  08:50

that their company and it’s not just the companies but it’s also the freelancers that get employed by those companies. I think the show that got that got decommissioned or cancelled or not greenlit red lit. I don’t know what they call it now. What they were talking about for wedding wasn’t enough for me, but yeah, so what was it called was cancelled. It was yeah, whatever their lighting that was in production. Yeah, all of those freelancers got two weeks notice. And then and then a few days later, we had this what I think is ridiculous story about the retention bonuses that everyone at Channel Four is being paid. And I think that many Brits have deferred now. Well, my understanding is is that the top three heads have deferred. I don’t know if the commissioning editors and the heads of department who have to have deferred it as well. And I think if you’re a freelancer, particularly if you’re a junior freelancer, and you’ve been given two weeks notice on a job that you thought you had eight months on and that’s just gone in a in a really difficult climate and then you pick up the paper and you read a story about how the people that decommission that show have been given a bonus some of which they deserve it because they’ve done a really interesting job and decent job for the past few years. But that’s a retention bonus they’ve been given rewarded for not leaving their jobs. It It kind of is pretty tone deaf. And I think that we have to remember that channel four have to remember that they don’t make any of their own shows, it is all independent production companies of many different sizes. Some are truly independent and fairly small, like mine, some Mammoth and actually bigger than the balance sheet of Channel Four itself. But we’re all independent companies, and we will have to run our cash flow. And I think it would be similarly scandalous if I turned around and as a as a producer, running a small company, and just called up one of my suppliers and said, oh, sorry, that guaranteed work that you had for a year. We’re pulling it because we didn’t run our fingers properly.

Ellie Khan  10:34

worth mentioning. Also, that channel for strategy director, appeared before NPS this week and talked about this, he addressed this saying they’re facing short term market pressures. But he did also mention the channels in strong creative health was his quote, so that there’s like a quick return, aren’t they? Yeah, let’s see. Yeah, that’s what they said. But to

Faraz Osman  10:56

be clear, I didn’t mismatch Channel Four and giving their employees bonuses if that’s the reason why people I’ve got no issue with that. I think that that’s a fairly decent thing to do. And we should retain staff and talent in any way that we can. What I take exception to is this giving younger freelancers, two weeks notice on a fairly long running job. And I think that that could have been handled in a much better way, not commissioning a show like Kirsty or, you know, slimming down the next commission of last leg to lesser episodes and before, again, you can then plan for that and you can decide how you employ people and that’s how the market works. I’m a, it’s not great, but you know, it’s the ebb and flow of creativity in the production sector. But But telling young people and in fact all people that you have a guarantee job for what eight months and then telling them that they only have two weeks. I think it’s pretty scandalous,

Matt Deegan  11:45

not good for someone at the top, who has lost their job is CNN chairman and CEO Chris Licht, following a mixed response to his changes and some poor PR choices. He was dispatched earlier in the week, le what led to Mr. LICS downfall.

Ellie Khan  12:00

There was a 15,000 word profile written on Chris Licht, and it was sort of the main thrust of this was off the back of this town hall that CNN did with with Donald Trump. And Chris left, supposedly, according to the profile filled the room with extra Trumpy people, and sort of diehard Trump fans. And it was it did make for really uncomfortable viewing if you if you look at the the sort of highlights of it. It there are some moments that are really, really uncomfortable. And

Matt Deegan  12:36

I’ve angered a lot of people on Caitlin Collins who was tasting that somewhat under the bus because she had to deal with it on her own. She talked about this was in the Atlantic, it was a big long, a big long piece. It sort of pushed him pushed it over the edge really for him, I think.

Ellie Khan  12:51

Yeah, I think it was definitely the straw that broke the camel’s back. He he had to sort of come out and apologise a few days after it was published, apologised directly to staff who he had already angered by all accounts. So yeah, he’s completely lost the dressing room. The chief Zaslav didn’t didn’t say it specifically because of this article. But wow, imagine that the power of being able to write an article that really has has that has that impact. He has

Matt Deegan  13:21

to take some of the blame as well, when he said this is the chairman of the Chief Executive of Warner Brothers discovery he own CNN, he said that he took responsibility. Yes, yeah, I really should do because apart and you read if you read this Atlantic piece, basically, czars was always on the phone to Chris electon was very much pushing him to deliver his own vision, which sort of drew a wedge between him and the staff.

Faraz Osman  13:45

It’s a really difficult job. Firstly, I think also, the reality is, is that the decisions that he made didn’t right. I think that like, you know, I PVR the Donald Trump Town Hall because I’m a bit like, we’re back to the nonsense and the chaos and a soap opera, but after about five minutes of watching it, you’re just a bit just fatigued because I’m bored of it. You know,

Matt Deegan  14:04

ratings wise, it did okay, but it wasn’t.

Faraz Osman  14:08

And I think that when you start seeing figures like Newsmax is beating CNN on occasion, you’ve got to start asking questions. If CNN went through this decision, and it worked for them, then I think everyone be calling him an absolute genius. And

Matt Deegan  14:20

this is what a lot of people think that the the profile if it had matched an upward trend would have been a great profile. But unfortunately, he’d stepped on a number of landmines before before it came out. But But

Faraz Osman  14:32

to say that some of you know they are some of them are land mines, some of them are of his own making. The channel has got a weird tone now, because it is trying to be a bit more right and I don’t really know, more centrist. Well, I don’t think it is trying to be a bit more centrist because I think that it’s trying to pander to you know, the centre, the centre or the right of the political spectrum in America has moved so right, that like the whole kind of whole Overton Window thing, it means that you then start having to platform you You know, January 6 deniers and you know, and when, and it’s like, that’s not about moving to the centre, or it’s actually even more problematic. The issue is is can you have centre news in America? And in the same way that can you have a centre newspaper in the UK? The answer is probably as we’re discovering No, all you

Matt Deegan  15:17

can, and there’s just no viewers for if you’re passionate enough to watch a channel without a left or right view,

Ellie Khan  15:22

I think his remit was to push it to the centre. And it seems like he’s gone against that completely. That moment when Trump completely demeaned it was the day after he was found guilty by a jury of sexually abusing the writer EG and Carol, and he made fun of it, and the room went wild, they loved it. And that’s, that’s not that’s not a centre.

Faraz Osman  15:45

But I would argue that town halls are, they’re a very American thing. We don’t really have them here. They tried them in the UK, but But I do think that when you have a town hall, you kind of let the speaker hang themselves, and you kind of let the audience see and decide and, and make comments like this, I think that, you know, some pushback is necessary. But town halls are meant to be a forum to allow people to say these things, you know, the Nikki Haley, when we didn’t get anywhere near as many viewers but was interesting. She said some ludicrous and audacious things. Do I think that she should have been pushed back on them? You can argue that, but the reality is, is you need to hear them say that. So you understand that, you know, Nikki Haley might be transphobic, or has an issue around has a opinion around abortion, and she will sign up as a federal law around it, you need the voters to be able to hear that so they can make up their minds. I don’t know if it is for the the the anchors of those town halls to kind of go well, I think you’re wrong. Because that’s not really what those forums are for. But either way, it’s it’s not writing, it’s not worth something needs to happen. And I think it’d be a real shame of CNN continues to slide because it’s an important broadcast.

Matt Deegan  16:50

What is interesting, I mean, all the news channels, MSNBC, CNN and Fox in America make all their money from cable subscriptions. So it doesn’t matter so much where your ratings are, as long as you get the cash from the cable companies. It’s okay. But that’s under a lot of threats with people kind of cord cutting. So, obviously, it’s a race for ratings, but also a race to keep your business model intact, isn’t it?

Faraz Osman  17:11

Yeah, I mean, I think the CNN business model is an international one, right? It’s quite interesting. I’ve been watching a lot of the coverage around the whole Lyft golf PGA Tour, like merger and there’s been a lot of particular from Jake Tapper, who’s been kind of going this is outrageous. And you know, and it is outrageous to PGA Tour went on record and saying that when we think that, you know, the Saudis and lift golf is something that we really, and then suddenly they have a massive three merger bouncer. But if you watch CNN internationally, all the adverts in the break bumpers are all Qatar, the rules, you know, there’s a lot of Saudi adverts within it. They’re taking a lot of that coin, from the very same places that are criticised. And there’s

Matt Deegan  17:48

the Gulf too. You said that you said earlier about newspapers and here in the UK, the telegraph is at risk of falling into administration. Also it has fallen into administration. Now following a court battle between the papers owners, the Barclay brothers, whilst reporting on the development has been branded irresponsible by the Barclay family. The papers are going to be sold along with the spectator led pretty fancy buying a national newspaper 600 million for these

Ellie Khan  18:13

Yeah, go on. I mean, if I was to buy it, it would be purely out of interest in the tradition and the history that the paper carries. It would be like you know, it’s an institution it’d be like buying John Lewis or something. It’s that’s where the sort of priceless value I think lies

Matt Deegan  18:30

for us is that the likely buyer, someone who is maybe right winger just wants to carry on that tradition, rather than someone that wants to build a modern media business. Are you going to see dmg tea or Irish or European media company

Faraz Osman  18:44

iron? I think I’m going to say Lebedev, and I’m not saying that there’s going to be a buyer but I think it was interesting when he bought the Evening Standard, and and what that meant for him as a person. And we there’s obviously new stories about labour that are coming out now particularly with what’s happening in Europe. And I think that the Telegraph in the last few years has moved from being a bit of paper of record to being a mouthpiece for the party that’s currently in power under spectator by by extension. So I think that if you want to get close to the current cabinet and the previous cabinet, or you want to get close to what the Tory party might turn into then it would probably be quite a sensible buy and maybe more sensible than than cutting a check for for a donation to that party. And I think that the buyers are circling around it will probably be looking at it for its power and influence more from Ellen for us next after this

Matt Deegan  19:45

and Ellen for us back with me for part two of the media podcast time for some news in brief, a Spotify a cutting 200 jobs from their podcast section, combining podcasting gimlet into their already existing Spotify studios and shifting focus to Spotify for podcasters. For our Spotify acquired the studios in 2019, it really kind of kicks off their big push into podcasting. But now it seems to have sort of fallen apart a little bit where what’s gone wrong with their strategy or has anything gone?

Faraz Osman  20:17

I don’t I actually don’t think that anything that hasn’t necessarily gone wrong. It’s this isn’t a huge surprise to me. I think it’s I think it’s a shame that that always, always is a shame that they cut staff, I think that that’s, you know, is ruthless. And, yeah, people who can do that have got more, I say, confidence, confidence. It’s not something that I could imagine getting on a zoom call and saying you’ve lost your jobs but but away from that the podcast strategy and getting deep into it. I think that we’ve got to remember that companies like Spotify tech companies, and they put these out in these plays, and they kind of see podcasting. And they’re like, it seems to be like a growing market. Let’s make sure that we cover our terrain about it, if it grows, continues to grow in this way, then great. We’ve got a foot in it. It reminds me a little bit of the smartphone boom, right. So when Microsoft were a massive company, and they missed the move to mobile, that’s always a fear that a lot of tech companies have got that they’ll miss the next thing. And it felt like in audio podcasting was going to be the next thing after music. It does feel like it slowed down slightly. I think it was probably there was too much content, too many podcasts and a lot of a lot of listeners got a bit of fatigue. Every day. Yeah, well, no, but it’s just as too much choice in the same way that we’re seeing the same thing in television, you know, and there being a pullback in the television space in the streaming space. It doesn’t surprise me that’s been mirrored in the podcasting and on demand audio space as well.

Matt Deegan  21:40

The Spotify sort of talk about creators being a big focus for them and some of their deals rather than making stuff themselves has been the sort of Joe Rogan’s of the world even the Bahamas signing them up. And now obviously supporting other creators sort of a bit like YouTube, is that a better a better thing for them to be doing then making their own shows?

Ellie Khan  21:58

I don’t know if it’s a better thing. They’ve they’ve invested a lot of money on some some some big bets. Meghan Markel, also being one of them. Her podcast has sort of steadily fallen down the charts. Yeah, I think they bet big on on some original programming. And perhaps that hasn’t quite paid off. I think it’s I think it’s probably needed to happen that they that they were going to go back, but sad that it’s off the back of a series of other cuts earlier this year as well.

Matt Deegan  22:30

Yes. I mean, for us is it is the truth, really, that basically gimlets run out of creative steam.

Faraz Osman  22:36

It’s a bit unfair, maybe I mean, gimlet had had their issues. And I think that they had some internal issues that they had to deal with, given gimlet staff would

Matt Deegan  22:45

say that they weren’t supported marketing wise by Spotify. And they didn’t get all the goodness that they were promised. But it’s part of the problem is that in a hits business, if you don’t make the hits, then you’re going to be on your way out.

Faraz Osman  22:58

Yeah. Look, I think that’s that’s what it comes down to. And I think that when you launch something new, the only way that you can make noise about it is to acquire lots of things, talent, and companies that people know. And then slowly start to find the hits along the way. So I think he’s absolutely right with the mega marketplace. And you mentioned the Obamas. But if I if you look at Apple strategy, for instance, when they launched Apple TV Plus, they launched it of all these huge names and this like, you know, this nonstop roster of everybody that’s ever famous in any you know, it was it was almost like, ludicrous. But actually the hits have been Ted lasso. And they’ve been severance. And they’ve been actually show that don’t actually have these massive stars. But you need to get to that point. And it doesn’t feel like Spotify have had a podcast. So he bought in lots of stuff. And they’ve acquired lots of stuff, but they didn’t they haven’t kind of really started building their own. This is what the Spotify podcast tone is. And this is what you get. If you listen to it. They’re really people still know Spotify for a place to listen to the latest Taylor Swift.

Matt Deegan  23:57

Well, maybe the solution is just AI and just getting somebody else who’s getting the computer to make the podcast but all this is coming. There’s some news this week that the EU has urged social media companies to immediately start labelling AI generated content in a bid to contain the spread of misinformation from Russia. I mean, le Twitter on I don’t think a part of a US voluntary code anymore and getting Elon to do anything is is pretty difficult. Do you think it’s gonna be do you think we’ll see this work for for social media companies doing what the EU wants them to do?

Ellie Khan  24:30

I think what’s interesting here is this is off the back of a lot of discourse about worries about AI. You know, high profile tech people coming out Elon Musk, people who loved AI up until now and saying, you know, we need to we need to pause this. It’s dangerous. Lots of caution.

Matt Deegan  24:51

So one of the problems is that there’s big fines for some of these social media companies up to 6% of their global revenues. For Twitter that can be about 140 million quid So lots of

Ellie Khan  25:01

Yeah, yeah, it’s a lot of money. I think, you know, this, this is such a complex area. And I think the issue that these companies might be facing is the fact that the technology is moving so quickly, it’s so hard to define the threat that AI poses, by definition, because AI is, you know, ever, ever learning and ever moving and ever shifting. So it’s, it’s, it’s going to be a tricky one,

Matt Deegan  25:26

for us at least, right? Isn’t she? Because we’re still sort of at the foothills of AI, it’s still really early days is legislation. Everyone says there must be legislation for it, but why legislating for the wrong thing?

Faraz Osman  25:38

I think this story is hilarious, right? Because if you run an AI company, and you make AI content, and then somebody says to you, you need to mark your AI content has been made by AI, how do you think they’re going to do that? They’re gonna get AI to do it. Right. So they’re gonna build an AI bot to check its own homework. And that is I pretty sure the beginning of how Terminator started, right. So when you’ve got like an AI algorithm checking another AI algorithm, like, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s just hilarious to me, I just don’t understand, like, where that begins and ends. But what I think is happening and what I’d like to see happening and I do you think it’s, it’s interesting that you’ve got the biggest companies Google Microsoft, getting in on this space, is that there will be a kind of standardisation is a poor example. But in the same way that in television, you have a product placement logo, that there will start to be a standardisation for consumers and audiences to know, but the question around, you know, writing articles or coming up with titles or shows or Britex vo or whatever that might be, that there is an issue and staffing around that. And are we losing it, you know, are we getting people the machines to do that rather than started I saw a hilarious thing where like at fast food restaurant is turning their their kiosks that you go through dry threes into AI bots, and it gives you an instruction, if you want to talk to a human being and say this word and it will revert you back, that’s all going to start happening. I remember the days when you would book cinema tickets via the phone, and that was all done via AI and say want to do this. We’re kind of in that world right now,

Matt Deegan  27:03

for you for one of your shows, if there was sorry, if there was, if one of your shows if there was still a bit of AI just used in the production of it, you wouldn’t want to put a little AI in a circle on the credits, which

Faraz Osman  27:16

will give you a better example. If we have a if we have a steal. And in that still is a piece of a piece of footage, we’re not going to steal if we have a shot and in the background of that shot is an a bit of artwork that we can’t clear. What is traditionally done is that it’s blurred right now, is it right or wrong for me to kind of go? Well, let’s just get Let’s just remove it. Right? Because it’s a better experience for the audience because it’s gone. And it’s not distracting. It’s not blurred. It’s it’s not doing anything that we haven’t done before. Because we’ve always masked it because we it’s not cleared. Is it then coming is it they’re not real for me, so long as the story and the content continues to be what it’s meant to be, that’s fine. If we start making things up as in like, this person didn’t say this, or this didn’t happen or this picture isn’t real, then yes, that should be marked. So

Matt Deegan  28:02

one thing you can do, and probably for both organisations, you could ask them a journey to generate a picture of Matt Hancock to illustrate a story. And that’s, you know, in addition, it’s not really changing anything. It’s

Faraz Osman  28:15

again, I saw sky I was watching Sky News last night, and they did a hilarious reconstruction of Prince Harry in his courtroom giving his you know, Saint because they couldn’t get the footage inside the cameras inside the courtroom. They do this wild thing where they get an actor pretending to be Prince Harry, reading out what he said in Prince Harry’s weird accent. Sorry, the act of weird accent. Maybe a bit bit of both. But it’s got reconstruction in the top right hand corner and the audience accepts that and kind of goes, well, I know why you’re doing this. And I think that as editorial, we just need to ask the question, well, why are we doing this? We’re doing this because you can’t get cameras in the courtroom. So as a result, we’ve reconstructed it in AI.

Ellie Khan  28:49

Yeah, it was a similar example, which actually used AI. The BBC did a programme about going inside the AAA. And in order to preserve the identities and safeguard the identities of those the people they were speaking to, they superimposed faces over the top of, of the, of the interviewees, and they had to clearly label every time that happened, because it looked really realistic, you can really tell. And so that was a good example of how I I think was used positively to send a good message and to do a good thing on TV. And Mark very clearly marked their work. They were adamant about that.

Matt Deegan  29:29

Well, something that AI will never take on is the media quiz. This week, it’s entitled greener, or not so green, greener or not to green. I’ll name a company with a media profile. You just tell me if this week they are greener, or not so green, easy, sorted.

Faraz Osman  29:50

Three jumpin chat GPT to write this script for you and it wouldn’t be any clearer to be cleaner. Well,

Matt Deegan  29:55

if you want to play just buzzing with your name. So for us, you’d say for us finale your c’est la vie. Here we go question number one greener or not so green for radio Caroline

Ellie Khan  30:07

le le that greener they are greener they’ve gone green they’ve gone solar powered radio Caroline is such an interesting thing at the moment. It’s it’s the radio that inspired the amazing film the boat that rocked Bill Nye and Nick Frost. But the it’s a lovely thing that’s happening at the moment. They they are crowdfunding at the moment to save the Ross revenge, which is that boat which the the radio Caroline is housed on, and it needs a lot of repairs. It’s a bit of a wreck, but it’s got so much history and it’s such a lovely story. And it’s I think it’s such a valuable part of this, this country’s culture

Matt Deegan  30:48

and they’re looking for the transmitter to be fully powered by solar panels. Yes, that’s, that’s gonna Yeah, what they hope will make them greener. So

Faraz Osman  30:57

why not call them solar sails? Like, come on Chad GBT would have given you that, that title,

Matt Deegan  31:03

you can send them five quid and put that in the comments on that on their Crowdfunder. Okay, question number two, greener or not so green for Shell?

Faraz Osman  31:12

Or they’re not so green, aren’t they? I’m sorry. Sorry for and then shell are not so green. They’re quite yellow and red. Really?

Matt Deegan  31:20

Why are they not so green? They got in trouble for

Faraz Osman  31:23

some advert that they did where they basically said that Bristol is nice and green and clean because of shell and naturally. That’s not not quite true. I’m being quite cynical about this. Company. I’m saying this out loud. And honestly, I’m on shell sci fi but a big oil but I’m here basically. But that’s how I keep my company going. Like I’m actually funded by the Qatar I’m not an official sentence you can decide your anything. But the the advert that got inverted commas banned. Although hilariously, every time you ban an advert it means it gets more viewers, which I always think is a bit self defeating. But it said that Bristol is ready you had ready in big letters. And then it said to go green. And yes, it kind of suggested that. That meant that shell had got it ready to go green, which they hadn’t. And shall we’re arguing No, we’re just saying that Bristol is using a lot of green energy, which means it’s ready for the green switchover. Yes, a bit semantics but

Matt Deegan  32:13

the AASA so that they were admitting to what extent they represented the overall activities. Yeah. It’s the very polite way of saying they’re like, Okay, point heat. So question number three, greener or not so green for The Guardian. Oh,

Ellie Khan  32:31

stumped.

Faraz Osman  32:33

I’m just to break the deadlock. I’m gonna say first you’re gonna say I’m gonna say not so great. Say not so green.

Matt Deegan  32:40

Incorrect. The Guardian media group’s positive impacts and sustainability report declares they have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 30%. Over the past two years, I assume their own not the country’s partly through finding beef in the staff canteen. And I imagine declining print circulation as well.

Faraz Osman  33:00

I mean, sure.

Ellie Khan  33:02

Yeah, must catch up on some hype reading this

Faraz Osman  33:05

evening. Over not over about over a chicken burger.

Matt Deegan  33:08

well appointed each so a draw. So you get to define the media podcasts new green strategy.

Faraz Osman  33:15

I think it should be your jumper colour. That’s like on YouTube. See, Matt’s jumper is a pale green. I think that that’s a good representation of green

Matt Deegan  33:23

plug ago and find our YouTube channel so you can see the ones that have my green jumper. Thanks to our guests for as Osman and alikhan. Where can listeners keep up with the work that you’re doing? Only? How can people see your writings

Ellie Khan  33:35

broadcast now dot code at UK, we are behind a paywall. So you might have to register or subscribe for us.

Faraz Osman  33:43

We’ve got show coming out and Channel Four. Channel Four is not currently under a paywall, which is a good thing called What’s it called? It’s called sounds like the 80s Kimberly’s very excited about it. And he wrote a lovely piece about it. And it’s coming out at the end of this month. And yeah, other than that, I’m just playing Zelda. So if you’re playing Zelda, can you look me up on Instagram at fosmon? And tell me about it because that’s all I want to talk about is Zelda. He was

Ellie Khan  34:05

late for a broadcast event. And he admitted it was because he was playing Zelda did.

Faraz Osman  34:11

Is that true? Yes.

Ellie Khan  34:14

The day you received it in the post,

Matt Deegan  34:15

should we put your gamertag in the show notes so people can can find you that way?

Faraz Osman  34:19

It’s not a deep game at times, Nintendo honestly, man, get with the times.

Matt Deegan  34:23

Thank you both. Thanks so much for joining us today. If you’re enjoying our new YouTube channel, you’ll know that the London podcast studios are the place to record your next podcast to complete with a full 4k rig and a fancy video wall to throw your artwork on just head to thelondonpodcaststudios.com. There’s also a link in the show notes and remember to keep spreading the good news about the media podcast or your friends and colleagues in person or on social media. send anybody to portfolio.com/the media podcast and then will pop up in their podcast app of choice. 

My name is Matt Deegan, the producer was Matt Hill it was a Rethink Audio production. I’ll see you next week.

Also on the programme – GB News sticks the knife into Phillip Schofield and This Morning, there’s another UK podcast company acquisition from Pod X, and what we can expect from the acting chair of the BBC, Elan Closs Stephens.

All that, plus in the media quiz… we play a game of Backed, left or Sacked. 

Subscribe below.

‘Change’ whether for good reasons or not, can often be messy, difficult and uncomfortable. Like many, I’ve been through it on both sides – sucking up the changes as well as being responsible for implementing them. 

When introducing them, what I’ve found is you can reduce the pain by being clear, by being evidence-based and make any personnel affecting decisions quickly. It’s also essential to have the management implementing this to be across the detail and able to answer questions. They also need to be on-board with the plan. It’s also pretty essential to have an end date of the old way of doing things and a start date of the new way. The new way needs to be a new start and be the point when any staff who’ve been let go have departed. 

Rebuilding a team, and confidence, is tough, but it can be done with clear strategy and direction. Often coming through a tumultuous time, together, can be enabling for a team – particularly if they collectively work on the ‘new’ way of doing things.

Talking to BBC local radio folk, at various levels, shows that the key issue is actually the time this has all taken. Of course there are Union-related things to deal with, but the extended time on staff hearing the details of how they will be affected alongside the number of staff who know they have been let go, but still have to continue to work (sometimes for many more months) makes moving on particularly difficult. 

Moving Forward

Much has been covered online on the process and strategy that’s got to this point – David Lloyd has written a lot about it. I’m going to take a different tack and look at the challenges and opportunities of the new structure. 

As I understand it, the new structure splits off the news team and the programming team into two different groups. News will be a service provider to the local station. HQ will ‘commission’ local material from the station team – the on-air output, social media – and teams can pitch ideas to HQ to do new things. On top of that there’s other BBC departments, like BBC Sounds, who have a say on things like local podcasts. 

It seems like a functional management process rather than a locally managed one. News reports to news, programming to programme bosses etc. This isn’t something that’s unusual in large organisations. 

The challenge for the Local Programming team is whether they will be able to effect change and deliver on, I imagine, growing audience. If the News team is working into News HQ they’re unlikely to be focused on growing local station reach – I imagine they’ll be concentrating on delivering content for the station, for the TV region and online. 

So what levers does the local team have to increase audience? They’ll have the local breakfast and mid-morning shows, input into the regional ones and the sports programming. 

The reduction in staffing, particularly at weekends, and the move of the news team away from the local programming team will mean it will be very hard to do anything special. Activities that need ‘all hands on deck’ will be harder. Maybe it’s the Tour de France coming to an area, a football team winning the cup or a social action campaign – the things that aren’t in the wheel of the day-to-day shows will be hard to staff. What I think is the challenge, is that these are often the things that generate awareness and sampling – the things that grow audience. 

I’m not aware of any local marketing resource at most sites. 

To me the digital opportunity is potentially a good one. I think the idea that a BBC Local Programming team can create content for whichever platforms reaches licence fee payers in a local area is great. Not only does it potentially reach more people in a local area it can also drive sample of the local station too. 

With this, though, the local stations are somewhat stymied. Digitally they will be able to control the social media pages and will be able to put clips on their website (that they link to). Websites for local radio stations are long gone and as has been reported, the content created by local stations isn’t generally used by the BBC News website. 

If the aims were to reach people locally, digitally you would probably use Facebook – where much of the older audience are, but also Instagram and LinkedIn. TikTok use is also on the rise for all demographics as well. Most of these platforms are video-first and require some good skills to execute well. They are, together, probably the best way to grow BBC reach in a local area – and be the free marketing for the local radio stations too. 

Podcasts, potentially, are an opportunity to reach new audiences as well. Right now there’s little podcast knowledge and understanding by local teams, but that is something that can change. The new structure has a local podcast role. I hope this goes to podcast people rather than move staff to this role without podcast experience. The bigger issue is that the BBC podcasts are predominantly delivered by the corporation’s audio product, BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds have their own objectives, particularly driving reach of under 35s. Getting local podcasts launched seems to be the result of commissioning decisions by Local Radio HQ and BBC Sounds – if unaligned this could be difficult to get done. 

Even if BBC Sounds and Local Radio work really well together – the battle between what’s shown where in the app will still be a tough one. Would BBC Sounds want to promote a podcast about loneliness for over 55s?

Fundamentally BBC Local Radio doesn’t have a website it can control and doesn’t have an audio destination it can lead either. The resource to deliver social media is small – potentially now smaller with the BBC News team split off. As a real world example at the moment – in Norfolk there’s a Facebook page for BBC Radio Norfolk (65k) and one for BBC News in the East of England (330k followers) – which replicates the TV coverage area for Look East. I imagine the news team will be creating content for the latter rather than the former. 

For the BBC (or anyone really) to be successful locally it has to concentrate on three things – content, distribution and marketing.

If I was the King of Local my job would be to try and ensure that the local team is resourced to be great content creators for all the platforms that they can use to reach licence fee payers. They should have audio, video, social and podcast skills. Perhaps by managing two stations together this could be a better way to create this resource.

I’d then really think about platforms and access. FM and DAB radio transmitters as well as the stream provide opportunities themselves. What splits can be created, economically, to derive a better experience for listeners? Can this be done in regional and national shows as well as local ones. Gig guides, local news, travel, weather could be split a hundred different ways. If commercial radio streams can have local ads why can’t you drop in a local weather bulletin down to a town? Why shouldn’t national and regional shows be able to reference a clip from the local breakfast show. Can it be linked to, re-versioned as a social clip. Could it appear in a Newscast Norfolk podcast, spun-off from the national brand? Is it mentioned in a local daily newsletter? 

When you stop thinking about just a local radio station and think about being about content plus platforms to reach people, it’s incredibly freeing and lots of fun too.

I know many might read this and think “how could we do all than on this number of staff”? Well for my children’s radio station Fun Kids we run fresh programming from 6am to 9pm every day plus material for seven spin-off stations. We have seven weekly podcasts (ranging from science to stories, from streaming to activities) and usually a short-form series or two (on air at the moment a fully featured historical drama). There’s an updated website, a weekly newsletter and social content across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. We have two full-time producers, four part-timers and input from six freelance presenters. It’s all manageable, but you need to change the way you work. 

The final thing is marketing. Marketing is essential for any station (or content operation). The content can be marketing in itself – providing it’s deployed well on the right platforms. But also there’s a need to be visible locally. This doesn’t mean you have to have a roadshow every week, it could be as simple as having branded open/closed signs on shops supporting a ‘buy locally’ campaign or going to the chamber of commerce meetings and be able to broadcast the soundtrack to the fireworks. 

For me, though, the MASSIVE opportunity is using the BBC’s own media. All users of BBC Sounds and BBC iPlayer have to give their postcode. Every bit of media streamed from Eastenders to the Archers has the users’ location associated with it. 

Why aren’t their pre-roll ads, post-roll mentions, or dynamic inserts that talk about the local radio stations. Why isn’t there the equivalent of a breakfast trail popped at the end of every In Our Time catch-up? Why can’t the national Newscast podcast have a ‘here’s what’s happening in your area’ section? Why doesn’t the streamed version of BBC Breakfast have an opt-in at the end saying what’s coming up on the local station’s mid-morning show?

The BBC announced that they’re working with Spotify’s Megaphone to do promos for non-BBC Sounds listeners on podcasts. What another great local promotional opportunity! 

I still don’t entirely know how the new BBC Local Radio setup will work. I worry, like many do, that the cuts and strategy will weaken local radio output and the ability to create local digital content. However, there’s absolutely nothing to stop it being a success too. 

New local websites and social channels have been launched by National Word. Older audiences have managed to re-tune radios to find Boom Radio, who are adding 100k listeners a quarter with some clever marketing and not much cash.

Fundamentally though, to achieve this the BBC local teams – both bosses and staff – will have to think about content, platforms and marketing – not just local radio shows. They also need to be aggressive about fighting their corner. As many of the other BBC departments are already excellent at doing.

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• A good Media Podcast is up with Brett Spencer and Chloe Straw from Audio UK. We touched on Phil & Holly’s relationship (RIP), the move of programmes from BBC Audio to Studios and Carol Cadwalladr’s legal bills. Plus we speak to Dino Sofos and Ellie Clifford from Persephonica.
• I hosted a session last week for Spotify and BBC Sounds last week which looked at the challenges and opportunities of a closer working relationship. Some good insights from Jonny Kanagasooriam, Mary Hough and Rowan Collinson, and good that they talk about it in the open. They’re two of the leading digital audio operations in the UK and hopefully we’ll see more companies happy to do something similar so everyone can benefit from good knowledge and experience.

Recorded this week at The Podcast Show in Islington’s Business Design Centre, Matt Deegan is joined by audio consultant Brett Spencer and Audio UK MD Chloe Straw to review the week’s media news.

Also on the programme: Carole Cadwalladr faces a £1.2m legal bill in her battle with a Brexit funder… should the publishers be stumping up?

We also catch up with Dino Sofos and Ellie Clifford from Persephonica.

All that, plus in the Media Quiz… we get into everything that’s going on outside the conference.

Transcript

This is a semi-automated transcript, so do please check against what was delivered above.

Matt Deegan : Hello and welcome to the Media Podcast, I’m Matt Degan. We’re at the podcast show in Islington’s Business Design Centre to grab some of the execs milling around the conference. We’ll have all the key takeaways for the sector and maybe snuffle some pastries too. Philip Schofield leaves this morning. What did it for him and how does the show steady the ship? Carol Cadwallader faces a 1.2 million legal bill in her battle with a Brexit funder. Should the publishers be stumping up? All that plus in the media quiz, we get into everything that’s going on outside the conference. That’s all coming up in this edition of the Media Podcast.

In a news this week, Twitter buckled as it tried to welcome Ron DeSantis into Twitter spaces to announce his presidential nomination. A glitch has prevented many from hearing the announcement and pointed to the ongoing issues bought on by Musk’s recent restructure. Former Chief exec, Sly Bailey, has appeared at the Mirror Phone Hacking trial, saying she’s deeply regretful about what went on. She maintained she didn’t know about widespread use of unlawful information while she was in charge. Only hearing about it once she had left, the trial continues, and the Paul Foot Award nominees have been announced. The annual award for investigative journalism praised scoops, including the Guardians of the IP Lane and Michelle Mone’s stories. The Times’ British Gas Baylifts and the Sunday Times’ revelation of the former BBC chairman and the £800,000 loan to Boris Johnson. Today, we’re recording at the Podcast Show at the Spiritland Productions Studio, and I’ll have some more stories shaking up the media sector. And joining me for part one, we welcome back audio consultant Brett Spencer. Brett, your voice has gone a little bit.

Brett Spencer : The voice is gone from talking to so many people.

Matt Deegan : and you’ve been telling a lot of people about City University. What’s been going on?

Brett Spencer : Well, we’ve launched the first MA in podcasting, the first dedicated MA in podcasting. So we’ve got to stay in here at the show, talk to people about it, and try and attract some bursaries from the big companies, which has announced our first one today, which comes from Gary Lineker, where the guys at Goalhanger have given us a bursary to support a student for next term, so for the first term, which is in September, so thanks to them. But there’s been a huge amount of interest from across the board, from what? What are all the different parts of the industry?

Matt Deegan : It’s great that there’s going to be some proper academic courses for podcasting and also looking a bit broader than production, that’s right, isn’t it?

Brett Spencer : Absolutely. I mean, we gathered together a really great group of people. Last summer, we had people from Spotify and the BBC, Acast, Sony and loads of others. And indeed, Chloe was here with us. And they all helped us shape the course and where the needs were in terms of training in the industry. So the degree won’t just be about how to make a podcast. It will be about how to write a host read, how to work with brands, how to pitch to a commissioner, how to commission content, how to work with advertisers. Everything that the industry involves that easy addition to making a podcast.

Matt Deegan : So will it also include putting your content on Twitter spaces, something that obviously happened this week.

Brett Spencer : That doesn’t work as we know. With Ron DeSantis. Yes, that doesn’t work. Yeah, it was interesting last night that Twitter couldn’t get Ron DeSantis’ announcement to work in terms of audio on Twitter. But meanwhile, they’re planning to publish Ben Shapiro’s podcast and lots of other right-wing podcasts. And even apparently, try and do Tucker Carlson’s show. Well, he had three million viewers on Fox. So how Twitter will handle that sort of traffic? Maybe he shouldn’t have sacked all the people working on Twitter spaces.

Matt Deegan : Also joining us for a return to the Media Podcast is Chloe Straw, Managing Director of Audio UK. Who have you spotted whilst you’ve been here at the podcast show? Any celebs?

Chloe Straw : I don’t think I’ve seen any celebs, you know, I think I’ve seen any celebs, you know, I think I’ve seen any celebs

I find I sort of end up not seeing any panels, there’s so many people I wanted to see but sort of doing your own panels and obviously excellent things like this and we’ve got a stand here as well means that I’ve seen a lot of mates but perhaps not many celebs.

Matt Deegan : There’s quite a few indies here, aren’t there? What are they getting at being at a show like this?

Chloe Straw : a good question and in fact I was chatting to one of our members earlier about that. I think that it’s probably the same for everyone. I think there’s a lot of conversations that you have. There’s obviously a huge amount of potential business here in terms of brands and other creators. I think brand recognition is the biggest thing but I think also it’s just nice to see the conversations that they’re having. You know there’s different things that they’ve done, fresh air have a kind of area that they’ve got. Listen to the stage yesterday, TBI are here, Whistledown, I’ve got a booth, obviously Somethin’ Else here under Sony and I think everyone’s doing a bit of everything and that’s really nice to see.

Matt Deegan : Right, story number one, Philip Schofield has left This Morning, kind of after a slew of innuendo, laden tabloid stories over the past few weeks. Holly Willoughby returns after the holidays. Brett, ITV have kind of made this decision. You’ve got a background in working on breakfast television, that environment, it kind of combusts people.

Brett Spencer : It does, and it’s hard because I worked on GMTV for about five years, which is now Good Morning Britain, but as soon as you’re through a show at 9.30, you’re literally into the next one. So it is very, very full on doing a daily show that is of that length. I thought it was interesting in the ITV statement, the way Piers Morgan left. They said that Piers had decided to leave. But this quite clearly said that ITV has decided, so it was clearly their decision for him to go. So also the press have had in for him for a long time, it seems. Certainly it all went up during, you know, when the Queen passed away and we had that incident where they were supposedly jumped the queue. Or as Holly said, we would never jump a queue. Interestingly, we were discussing the merits of the story with a group of journalism students the other day, who was sort of doing one of their practice news days. And one of my colleagues said, you know, we all remember him when he started off in the broom cupboard with Gordon the Gopher. And the whole room for the students went, what? Gopher? Broom Cupboard?

Matt Deegan : Well, maybe a return to that could be on the cards. I mean, Chloe, it’s tough, isn’t it? And also, particularly relationships between two people. They seem to be a pair that got on really well, but issues have sort of strained it over the past few months. It’s difficult to manage that, isn’t it?

Chloe Straw : Yeah, I think it’s also an incredibly difficult situation to judge from the outside, you know, so it’s like with a lot of kind of celebrity feuds or celebrity problems, you know, we’re consumers of those stories, aren’t we? And I think it can be, you look at that story and it’s sort of all over the place, like this happened and, you know, that happened and was it ITV? I also think with those two, the impression that you get, particularly after Phil kind of coming out a couple of years ago, I think, is that they’ve sort of built themselves up as really good friends in real life, you know, you hear, sort of all they go on holiday together in, Holly was such a wonderful support and so on and so forth. And I think that it doesn’t feel like just a professional relationship that some picking, does it? It feels like a hugely personal one as well and an incredibly long-standing one. So I think it’s impossible to understand what’s really happening there, what’s going on. I’ll be back.

Brett Spencer : I’m enjoying all the agents trying to get their clients into the newspapers as they’re the hot tip to take over, you know, secret talks going on.

Matt Deegan : I mean, agents is an interesting point, isn’t it? Because both of them, I think, used to be repped by YMU. I think Holly went and sort of created their own kind of management company. I mean, managing the press around around any talent can be quite a challenge, can’t it?

Brett Spencer : It is often the best agents that their skill is keeping stories out of the paper rather than getting stories into the paper and there may be a lot more in this story to come. We don’t know yet.

Matt Deegan : It’s really strange because obviously there’s a lot of innuendo about it and things that have gone on. He had some unfortunate things happen with his family as well. He hasn’t been able to control the narrative or talk about it really yet. Has he just got to go away and re-emerge after the air’s cleared?

Brett Spencer : I think so, we’ve seen people go away and come back, and we saw with Piers Morgan, Piers Morgan had to go away for a while before he came back to talk TV. So I’m sure down the line, he will be fine and he’ll appear somewhere else. And I’m sure his agents currently putting out feelers elsewhere to find him that next highly paid gig.

Matt Deegan : Moving on, some interesting audio news this week that the BBC’s announced that shows including Desert Island Discs will move from in-house production to BBC Studios. Chloe, tell us how does this work? Is there a big difference?

Chloe Straw : I think that remains to be seen. It’s probably the best way to put it. So at Audio UK, we talked to the BBC quite a lot. So we kind of knew that they’d been undergoing an internal speech review for a while, which was kind of the news this week was the conclusion of that speech review. Obviously, it still has a way to go in terms of going through Ofcom and everything like that. But their recommendation was that a certain percentage of their speech output moves to studios. So I think the really significant thing, particularly for the independent sector, is that means that a percentage of speech audio that wasn’t there before will now be able to compete in the open market. So obviously, studios compete to an extent already and has the ability to have podcasts on Audible, Spotify, Amazon Music. But I think the really big thing for us is that there will be a much bigger chunk. How big that chunk actually is, I think still remains to be seen. And I think you hear different percentages or different numbers, but I think the proof will be in the pudding in terms of what that actually looks like.

Matt Deegan : But is this sort of a replication of what happens in television and basically all non-news has been sort of shoved into BBC studios?

Chloe Straw : not all of it. And again, I think that’s something that we probably need some clarity on. We’ve kind of heard different numbers, but in terms of what that actually looks like. But it is a similar model to TV. And I think the kind of the Audio UK point of view and the kind of indie standpoint on it is that if more of BBC comes out into the open market, then more of that obviously represents increased competition for the indie market. And you know, the BBC is a big production superpower. It’s not like it’s kind of a small entrant to the market. And obviously, historically, that’s been built up through public funding and the training that their staff can get. If that comes out into the market, then actually more of the BBC’s speech output or general output needs to be opened up to indie competition. And obviously, not to go too much into the ins and outs of it, which I love to do. But currently 60% of relevant hours, which is effectively non-news output is open to competition, that’s quite is very nuanced. It’s very complicated.

Matt Deegan : So something like a Radio One daytime strand might not be up for competition, but a 6Music daytime strand might be.

Chloe Straw : Exactly, so there’s a lot of different kind of rules and percentages and I think I would love to see the audio model replicate the TV model. I think the TV model where 100% of TV is open to competition between indies and studios is, and the BBC is really clean cut. And I think something that we hear from the BBC is the kind of different percentages are very hard to administer people, you know, they’re a commissioner, they’re also trying to manage in-house teams and so on and so forth. And I really like the TV model because it just opens it up entirely to 100% of competition.

Brett Spencer : You know, I was up with some like 6Music. I think everything’s already open for 10 years and you have to put everything out. The other point I wanted to make was to ask how hard a show like Desert Island Discs is to make. I mean, you’ve got to book a great guest. And to be honest, I’m not so many people will say no. You’ve got to find the eight records. And then you’ve got to throw it into the mix. The best broadcaster and interviewed I’ve ever worked with. So, you know, the three of us could probably make it good with. So, I’m not sure how difficult it is, but actually what they’ll be about is who can do it cheapest, I would suspect.

Matt Deegan : And the move to the sort of TV model would be quite a shot for the people who work in BBC audio at the moment making things for networks or sitting in the network building.

Brett Spencer : So during my time at BBC, people in BBC were already able to get used to things going out and being in competition, they wanted to learn how to pitch, so that was an interesting time because programme-making of the BBC weren’t experienced at pitching in the way that people for indies were. I think the key difference here with ours is that you would never imagine a show like this on a desk, which is one of the crown jewels would go out. So I imagine that is the big shift for them actually. It’s not just kind of the part work shows or stuff on the fringe of the schedule that major BBC properties like Desert Island Discs, which it was always quite hard to do stuff with because Roy Plumley estate had the rights. So it was very difficult to do anything around Desert Island Discs. I know having tried to do something around it some time ago, so that’s quite a shift.

Matt Deegan : Chloe do you think some of it is actually BBC studios getting their hands on some formats that they can do other things with both in the UK and outside of the UK?

Chloe Straw : Yeah, I mean, 100% of the BBC’s got to look towards the commercial future, right? And see how they can kind of prepare for that. And, you know, we’re at The Podcast Show. We’re surrounded by Audible and Spotify and Amazon Music and Acast, who’ve all been distributing on a kind of global stage for quite a long time now. And 100%, you know, studios, it’s really important for them to look at how they can monetize their content. I think it is really tricky because the BBC is a PSB organisation. And how do you balance that with the commercial needs of that organisation? And I think also thinking about contributors, you know, if you’re a writer, you might do something a bit more cheaply because it’s the BBC and it’s PSB. If that content suddenly commercial, then how does that work? So I think they’ve, you know, they’ve got a tricky time on their hands in terms of seeing how that all plays out. But absolutely, you know, they should be doing it. I think it’s really important to think about how it interacts. And I also think that, you know, one of the huge things about the BBC is it’s the best ideas for the audience. And we know that greater competition breeds greater ideas, which is why more competition makes sense. And also greater diversity of ideas, you know, in terms of our members there from all around the UK. And I think it’s really important that the audience gets, you know, the best ideas. So that’s why I’d like to see more.

Matt Deegan : While speaking of money, Carol Cadwalladr has been hit by a bill for £1.2 million after a judge ruled she must pay the legal cost of Aaron Banks. The billionaire Brexit donor successfully argued that a TED talk by Cadwalladr should not have been streamed once a public interest defence had fallen away. Carol says that she didn’t have any control over the content and couldn’t have taken it down if she wanted. This case gets a bit complicated and in some ways they’ve both won and they’ve both lost. Is she right, Brett? It’s not been down to her?

Brett Spencer : I think it’s difficult when you’re individual and you’re fighting a well-funded operation, isn’t it? And essentially, it isn’t down to her because it was published by somebody else, but effectively it was her that said the words. So it’s ultimately down to her. Once you’re saying something in any public arena, it doesn’t matter whether there’s three people in them or if it’s being streamed, you’ve said it in the public arena. So she has got responsibility for that. But you are always going to be at risk if you’re doing something like that and you’re paying up against some big haters.

Matt Deegan : I mean, seeing her tweets about it, I feel that she feels that she’s been somewhat let down by the Guardian and other people who’s been left to sort of deal with this on her own. I mean, as you get kind of big columnists or big characters, I mean, we’re going to see more of this, I guess, aren’t we, Chloe?

Chloe Straw : Yeah, I think it’s really, again, it’s a very tricky situation, isn’t it? And I, you know, I sort of, I agree with Brett to an extent. You, you’re, I’m a big fan of accountability. Just talk to my children about accountability and support children. So, you know, taking responsibility for what you say, but I think it’s so much more nuanced than that, isn’t it? And I think you’ve got these big potential supporters of her and you sort of think, should they have been more behind her? Is there this sense of like, we’re just going to step back and let it go? I mean, it’s, it’s very complicated in terms of what’s happened and the kind of who’s responsible. And I think it’s a really tricky case. I think it’s really hard to judge kind of who’s responsible, who should have supported you. But absolutely from a personal point of view, you can imagine her feeling let down, can’t you? I think you can imagine that feeling from her. It’s, you know, tricky to know sort of, I don’t know, why do you think those organisations didn’t support her more? We’re simply…

Matt Deegan : I mean, broadcasters want kind of edgy content and this is in the in the journalism spaces, investigative journalism, this is hard work. You also see it with talent and be that even like the Joe Rogan end of things and just doing stuff that gets some notoriety. I mean, if you’re going for that, have you got to back your talent more and more?

Brett Spencer : You have, and we saw an incident around Schofield with GB News where they broadcast something that was potentially liable, that was taken down. So you know, if you’re unleashing your broadcasters to be controversial, you’ve got to expect to run into trouble. It’s a sort of fighting time for freedom speech, though, isn’t it? Because she’s speaking her mind there, and therefore it’s going to cost her over a million pounds. And it’s the same as the Elon Musk story we talked about earlier. Here’s somebody who controls the algorithm of what we might see. So it is a worrying time. It’s all a little bit Succession, isn’t it, if anyone that’s watching that series?

Matt Deegan : She’s raised almost a million pounds from the public with her crowd funding and that also shows that if you’ve got a great relationship with your audience you can activate them especially when it’s very obvious that they that they need the dash.

Chloe Straw : Absolutely. I mean, that’s the ultimate subscription-based model, surely, is that you’re making money from not from your content, but from your case sort of thing. But, you know, absolutely. It’s a, you know, you never like to see a case where someone’s got a huge amount of money and someone else doesn’t. So there’s obviously people who really support her. And I think for anyone, whether that’s a, you know, a podcast or a journalist, we live in a world where we’re far more individual now, aren’t we? That’s a great thing about the kind of creator economy and everything like that. But you’re right, how does that work within the world where those big organizations are kind of supporting those people or not? But great that she’s raised so much money.

Matt Deegan : We’ll be back with Chloe and Brett after this.

This podcast was recorded at the podcast show by Spiritland Productions. You can record your podcast at Spiritland, a state-of-the-art podcast studio with full three camera visualization in the heart of London’s Kings Cross. Just visit spiritlandproductions.com to see their studio and to book in your recording. All right, let’s head into the throng. We sent producer Matt Hill into the conference to pick out some key takeaways from the show.

Katherine Templar Lewis : My name is Katherine Templar Lewis. I am the co-founder of Kinda Studios, a creative neuroaesthetics studio based in London, UK.

Matt Hill : Now you’ve been here sort of repping Fresh Air Productions, is that right?

Katherine Templar Lewis : We have indeed, so my background is neuroscience and we’ve been working with Fresh Air to really dig into the neuroscience of podcasts and why our brains love the audio format so much.

Matt Hill : And so this has been written into a report that Fresh Air have used to get brands to basically say, podcasting is persuasive, podcasting is a great way to sell your message, go and work with us.

Katherine Templar Lewis : It has indeed. We basically want to look at what actual engagement is. Everybody says they want engagement, but from a sort of scientific perspective, what is that? So we work with Fresh Air to produce a series of blogs, a podcast, and reports, looking at what happens in the brain and body when you listen to podcasts, and it’s absolutely wild. Most people think that the visual formats watching films and stories on films are the most engaging format, but that’s not actually true. There’s some wonderful research that’s come out of University College London quite recently by Daniel Richardson and his colleagues that shows that if you listen to the same story once as a visual format, in fact, this study was done with an episode of Game of Thrones and also then listening to it as an audio story like a podcast. What happens is even though you think you are more engaged watching the film, your brain and your body show otherwise, they saw increased electrical activity, sort of engagement, attention in the brain. This encoding of memory seems to be stronger when we’re listening to stories.

They also noticed that within the body, which is actually where we can measure emotions, if you think about it when you’re scared, you’re heartbeats, when you’re nervous, your stomach turns, and people were showing stronger emotional reactions when they were listening only. They also saw that people felt more connected to each other when they were listening. This idea of synchronicity, which can often be very chemical in the body, bonding you with other people seem to be greater. All in all, despite being a very visually dominant culture, storytelling had the biggest impact. Now this actually makes sense if you think about it because our brains evolved in a world where we told each other stories to help us face and navigate the unknown. If you think about it, when we lived back into the prehistoric times where we evolved, you have met a mammoth and defeated it. So I meet you sitting around the fire, you belong to my community, and you tell me the story of how you defeated this mammoth, and I inhabit it and almost lay down memories of myself. So then, maybe a week or so later, I encounter a woolly mammoth. I’ve never seen one, I’ve never fought one, but I can actively access your memories that I’ve learned through your stories, and I’ll know how to defeat it. And that’s the basis of learning. Where can people find your stuff? So if you go to kindastudios.com, we have a lot of links through there.

Dino Sofos : Hi, I’m Dino Sofos, the founder of Persephonica.

Ellie Clifford : Hi, I’m Ellie Clifford, I’m an executive producer at Persephonica.

Matt Hill : What have you enjoyed over the last two days of The Podcast Show?

Ellie Clifford : I really enjoyed Dish, the talk that they did about the podcast I went to see this morning. I thought it was great. A lot of the talks that I’ve been to have been really informative, but what I loved about that is it was informative and entertaining, so I really liked the insight into how they got it all going and actually hearing from the team behind it about the way that they sort of reimagined what a podcast could look like and almost work backwards then to then record it. So I found that really insightful, thinking about what podcasts in the modern era now look like.

Matt Hill : I speak to a lot of other producers and companies who look on that show with a certain level of jealousy because it’s a real outlier in terms of a branded show that has cut through to find a wider audience. Why do you think that is?

Ellie Clifford : I mean, from listening to it and from the talk this morning, I think there’s a real warmth there. That’s great that you can really hear. So I think they’ve got the talent absolutely right. The way they’ve set it up, you know, they talked about the fact that the guests don’t wear headphones as a way of actually making it feel when you look at the clips, it feels really inviting. It actually feels like a dinner party. And I think setting that tone just makes it feel like something that listeners really want to be a part of. And I think there’s a real boon for kind of food podcasts and thinking about it in a different way has really allowed them to cut through the market. And they’ve done it in a way that means that, although they did say Waitrose about a thousand times in the talk this morning, it still didn’t feel all that heavy-handed.

Matt Hill : Did you see that Nick Grimshaw is actually going to be covering for Chris Evans on Virgin Radio?

Dino Sofos : Well, look, I love Grimmy. He’s an amazing broadcaster. I think he’s been off our airwaves for far too long. And I just think that’s a really great fit for him as a show. I’ll be tuning in. I think it’s great. He’s such a great broadcaster. And great to have him in the podcast space, but radio is his home. So that’s amazing. In terms of the podcast show, I think it’s a tale of two festivals, if we’re going to call it a festival. It’s much bigger than it was last year. You’ve got Sky News broadcasting live, which is just so bizarre to turn on Sky News and they’re broadcasting from a podcast show. And I think for a statement about the industry and how it’s grown and how many people are here in brands and media organizations and amazing content, right, that people are shouting about. Incredible.

But there are also a lot of people walking around here tearing their hair out about the lack of money in the industry because I think this time last year it was a completely different market. You still had people, streamers, making big investments in shows and that has just disappeared as we know. And I think the Megaphone Spotify talk was the most interesting thing I’ve been to and watching Jack from Goalhanger talking about how they’ve gone with Megaphone and how Spotify have pivoted. So they’re not chucking money at shows, they’re going to help successful shows and smaller shows grow in a kind of more responsible, realistic way, I think. And to be honest, that’s kind of Persephonica’s approach to podcasting anyway. I think the people who seem to be really tearing their hair out are people who have spent a lot of money or spend a lot of money on short-term, limited-run narrative shows. It was interesting, I was on a panel with Kerry Thomas from Tortoise yesterday and one of the questions is about how you make money from podcasting. And he was asked, oh, it’s all about IP and getting your shows optioned. And he said, yeah, that’s actually can be a bit of a red herring because, it’s not always, the money’s not always as great as you think it’s going to be. But also, if you’ve got five or six of these shows and only one gets optioned and you can’t really build an audience and the rest of them or sell the ad revenue or there aren’t the opportunities that we’re seeing with other big shows to take them live, it’s really tough. And again, to what you were saying about Dish, Ellie, I think that’s the thing here with The News Agents. It’s not just a podcast, it’s a brand. The social video numbers, I mean, Emily Maitlis laying into Guto Harry on last night’s episode is going mega viral on Twitter at the moment. Everybody’s sharing that video, commenting, engaging with it. The conversation goes on way after we published the episode. And I think what everybody’s learning here and what all the talk is about is about video podcasts, social marketing strategy. You cannot just record six episodes of a show, put it out there and hope for the best. It’s just a completely broken model.

Matt Hill : Would you say then that, you know, one of the themes this year, you know, you would have walked into this thinking that it was just going to be a whole load of conversations about AI and fake voices and everything, but really, you’re saying always on is one of the bigger trends of this, is that’s what people want now.

Ellie Clifford : I think there’s a lot of conversations around talent and around conversational shows. So you’ve seen more talks that are on things like, though there’s a funny one about not being divorced as a kind of presenting duo, and things like the role that creators have to play. And I think I will say that a lot more of the conversation has been around this more conversational model of podcasting. It’s interesting I went to a talk about how you sort of turn your podcast into a live show. And somebody actually asked the question saying, well, I actually make a narrative show, and we’ve been thinking about how we can expand it and how we can go live. And actually the advice was really like, we think it works better when it’s a conversational show where that’s what you’re getting is some extra insight by turning up to that live show, which is much harder in the narrative space. I mean, I’m a massive lover of narrative podcasts, but I would definitely say that the conversation this year has been much more around that sort of round table bringing people in, having a chat, having a conversation, but informing them at the same time.

Dino Sofos : I think what we’re looking at as a company when we’re looking to create narrative shows which we have in development, it’s such a great medium. I don’t want to suddenly say, oh, you know, narrative is dead and we don’t want to hear those. That way of storytelling is amazing. But I think from a business point of view, you have got to be thinking about the feed, the strand, you know, recur the opportunities to, once you’ve had one great story in that space to build out other stories. I think a really, a person who’s done this really, really well is Danny Robbins with, you know, Battersea Poltergeist. What he’s done there with Uncanny and having created a strand and he can spin off limited series off that, which obviously he’s had great success with IP, you know, people, lots of people interested in buying Battersea Poltergeist and there was a fight over that. And that’s great. But he’s also got a community and live shows. That is the model. It’s not just, this is a really good idea for a narrative podcast. Let’s put it out there and hope for the best and then try and sell it. I just think there’s a lot of people who are realizing that that is a bit of a broken model. So be honest, just in terms of from the podcast industry point of view, how expensive those shows are to make and hiring the amount of staff you have to hire to make them. So yeah, it’s been fascinating being here and the podcast industry is in rude health. It’s great, but it’s a different world to what we thought we were in last year.

It’s RAJAR week – and it’s boom time for commercial radio… we disclose whose numbers are up and down at the UK’s biggest networks. Also on the programme: where did all the unscripted television go?

Who lost out at the BAFTAs? And Vice hits rock bottom. All that, plus a game of radio charades on media quiz. What could go wrong?

Follow the show wherever you listen to your podcasts and get it every week!

There’s been quite a bit of movement in the Q1/2023 RAJAR survey and much of it is happening to the stations targeting older audiences.

The big shift is for Greatest Hits Radio, which has seen its reach leap from 3,978k to 5,189k. GHR is, of course, the stations that’s recently added Ken Bruce to its schedule, but these RAJAR figures are from before him starting. In other words, the awareness of GHR was driven by the news of the move, prompting many people to sample the station.

The additions are pretty much across the schedule:

What’s interesting to see is how their biggest name – Simon Mayo – is actually the weakest performer in the daytime schedule, even after a bump of around half a million listeners. Surprisingly the regionalised show leads with 2.2m.

The growth of GHR is all across the country. In London, it increased its reach by just under 10% from 936k to 1,024k. It’s a smaller increase than some areas of the country, but what it does do is move GHR above Smooth Radio for the first time (1,024k vs 840k)

Back when GHR took over Absolute’s 105.8FM frequency 18 months ago it was at 548k, so it’s seen significant growth. It will be interesting to see what it reaches when the ‘Ken’ effect is added next quarter.

Global have some better news with their Gold brand. Seemingly somewhat unloved – it just has a presented breakfast show – it had its best figures since 2006 – with a reach of 1.75m. Up on the quarter from 1.68m and year on year from 1.45m. Diving into its figures, it’s the London area that’s doing the heavy lifting, with a q-on-q rise from 336k to 479k.

The Radio X network has also has a good time, now reaching just over 2m. Its second highest ever audience. London, again, particularly good, with a reach of 491k.

Over at Radio 2, they’ve seen their reach increase quarter on quarter from 14.28m to 14.45m, year on year it’s pretty stable – just marginally down 130k from 14.58m.

The big recent schedule change is Scott Mills, this is his first full RAJAR quarter (he started on 31st Oct last year). His afternoon figures are slightly up on the quarter to 6.24m (from 6.18m) and pretty similar to Steve Wright a year ago (6.28m).

What is more interesting is to look at his demographics. Radio 2 are trying to reduce the average age slightly (they had been drifting older over the last 5 years or so). This is something Scott seems to have achieved so far. The chart below shows the percentage of audience in each demographic:

25 to 54s up, and a slight decrease for 55 plus. Previously the average age was 55-56, now it’s 54.9. This is a small change – and one to keep an eye on – but taken together this is all meeting Radio 2’s goals. Average age is notoriously difficult to shift has its calculated on hours listened and older audiences have massively more time to listen to radio than young-uns. Also the measurement only starts at 15 too!

‘Going younger’ is often a stick to beat Radio 2 with. Most people completely miss the nuance of this. It’s not trying to have an audience that’s 30, it’s just trying to push its average age down a bit to what it used to be, something it looks like Scott will help.

Further along the ages, Boom Radio (average age 59) has had another good book, with its reach up to 635k (up from 530 q-on-q and 189k y-on-y). It’s basically adding 100k listeners a quarter – which is a phenomenal achievement. Hours have grown slower this quarter, still up, but to 6.1m from 5.8m. Some lower average hours too (9.7 vs 11), no doubt driven by some newer listeners being lighter ones.

Up in Scotland there’s been some big changes this month as Global (and Communicorp) have taken the mostly networked Capital and Heart and re-birthed them with a full Scottish daytime line-up.

It’s a significant investment, and will require some significant audience changes for them to break even on the changes..

The market in Edinburgh and Glasgow is fascinating.

Since the current ratings methodology started in 2004, Edinburgh’s Forth 1’s reach this quarter is its second highest ever – 364k. And Glasgow’s Clyde 1’s 655k is its 3rd highest ever. It is almost unheard of for ‘heritage’ local radio stations to have kept, let alone grown, their audiences.

If we directly compare it to Q3, 2004 – as far back as my RAJAR ratings machine goes – Forth 1 was on 316k and Clyde on 644k. It’s miraculous that today’s figures – nearly 20 years on – are better.

Meanwhile regional services Capital and Heart in Scotland have seen a somewhat precipitous decline. In Q3/2004 Real Radio Scotland (now Heart) had a 654k reach, today it’s 348k.

Capital Scotland, then Beat 106, had a reach of 429k, it dropped to around 200k when it was XFM Scotland, by the end of its Galaxy Scotland incarnation it had got up to around 450k. As Capital Scotland it peaked at just under 600k in Q3/2016 and since then has been in a downward trajectory to today’s 378k.

Smooth Radio in Glasgow had its first RAJAR in Q1/2005 – 183k, and since then has seen general steady growth, peaking around 420k in 2019. It’s currently slipped back a little to 353k but is still a pretty good result and a similar figure to Capital and Heart who cover the whole of the Central Belt, rather than just Glasgow.

Commercially it’s worse. As Real back in 2004, Heart did 7.2m hours, it’s now just 1.5m. It was doing more than double that as recently as Q2/2019. Capital did 3.6m hours in 2018, it’s now on 1.4m.

It will be fascinating to see if the re-localisation of Capital and Heart will boost their numbers.

BBC

Over at the BBC, not great results. Radio 1 down on the quarter and the year at 7.5m. Radio 3 recovers back towards it standard issue 2m listeners with 1.9m this quarter (up from 1.8m and 1.7m in the last two). Radio 4 is never happy when its under 10m, and its 9.3m figure this quarter is down q-on-q and y-on-y.

Not great for 5Live, which has seen its headline number drop this quarter (and y-on-y) to 5.1m (from 5.5m). Talk Sport meanwhile is up both q-on-q and y-on-y to nearly 3.3m from 2.9m.

Very interesting to look at the World Service which has lost a third of its reach over the past year – now just over 1m.

It’s also not great news for beleaguered BBC Local. The English network is now at 5.28m (down from 5.6m q-on-q and 6.3m y-o-y). That’s the lowest reach since the methodology changed in 2004.

As the network re-organises itself into a more regional structure and loses lots of well known presenters, we’ll likely see that number dropping further.

Over at News UK, Talk Radio’s had a big reach increase – up to 840k (from 608k q-on-q). Times Radio meanwhile, seems stuck around the half a million mark, with a reach of 552k (and down q-on-q and y-on-y). With the recent addition of Jane and Fi, this will be a disappointing result for them.

Absolute Radio lacks some of the marketing of its rivals, and analogue frequencies too, meaning it’s now a digital-only operation. However that doesn’t seem to have affected its growth, as it celebrates its highest ever total reach at 5.3m. It also makes the main Absolute Radio the biggest digital-only station with 2.4m listeners.

Listening

It’s always worth reminding readers how people listen to the radio as sometimes there’s lots of assumptions about how people tune in.

As of this quarter, 49m people listen to the radio – 31.2m on AM and FM, 32.5m on DAB, 4.9m on the TV and 22m through the internet.

When we look at the amount of hours listeners give to the platforms – analogue radio has 326m hours, broadcast digital radio (DAB and DTV) is 435m hours and streaming is 246m hours.

When you break that down to demographics it looks like this:

A true reminder of the UK being a very multi-platform radio country. It’s also noticeable how there’s not a massive difference between demographics (except perhaps the over 65s).

AOB

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Media news and analysis, from Matt Deegan, Deadline’s Jake Kanter and Edelman’s Karin Robinson.

Also on the programme: It’s Trump vs CNN… again. What lessons did the broadcaster learn from the last election cycle? Is the BBC handling the Local Radio restructure right? Or is it, as Private Eye reported, ‘a clusterf***?’

Plus, on the deep dive this week we look at the perils of reporting on the Depp trials of the UK and US.

All that, plus a media quiz on the best media quotes of the week.

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Media news and analysis with Matt Deegan and guests Jim Waterson (the Guardian) and media writer Scott Bryan. Vice news is on the brink – has its own predictions for the industry come to pass?

Also on the programme: we take a look at BAFTA members data, the winners of the Radio Academy awards… and squeeze in a farewell to BBC chair Richard Sharp.

All that, plus in the Media Quiz ponders the worst AI executions so far.

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Our pundits share their reactions to the Buzzfeed News shut down; we unpack the Fox & Dominion settlement and why it matters. Plus, the first quarter numbers are out for UK streaming subscriptions, we take on Netflix’s ‘cancel backlash’ and why live streaming a show isn’t as simple as it sounds.

AND in this week’s deep dive, Shalini Govil-Pai (GM & VP of TV, Google) shares her view on the future of streaming and why Google TV’s offering a guide to 800 free channels.

And finally, we test out pundits on the latest telly news in the media quiz.

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We find out why Global is investing in their Glasgow studios, how the BBC are tackling the coronation across all platforms and why movies are making a comeback – discussing the new cinema-to-streaming symbiosis.

Also up for discussion, Succession’s big episode makes the Daily Mail’s front page, Musk’s BBC interview & NPR’s decision to leave the platform over Twitter’s media policies. AND in this week’s deep dive, the Media Bill made simple.

Samuel Oustayiannis, Associate at CMS Legal Services, shares his run-down of the 250+ page document and what parts matter most for the industry.

And finally, we cover audio news in the media quiz!

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