There are many old school people who deride Netcasting purely because they are not able to consult for them. Consultants fall into many categories. There are the very few that are good. Then there are failed broadcasters and managers. Followed by those who blow smoke up the backside of clients and sell pretty business cases with no substance. The worst of all are those that claim they know what the audience wants without ever going out an actually talking to the listeners – this group could easily be given the name – Radio Murderers.
The above group have no idea, in the main, what listeners want and bury their heads in the sand as to where audiences are to be found – this was evident during the Radio1 50th birthday. Some younger people had no idea how to tune in a radio and some had never touched what the consultant call a regular radio. Can I just state the obvious here, if the listeners don’t know what the device is how can it be the device delivering your content? More heads in the sand.
Humour me here. Many of the consultants come from an age where their peers would consider their music to be noisy rubbish. The then youngsters, who became consultants, poked fun at the old people for not knowing what the youngsters of the day wanted. So, the old people were saying their music was better and the young their music was best. As it goes both were right and wrong.
Now a simply rule for any broadcaster, you need to come up with a balance that encourages young people to start listening to radio so that when your older audience dies you still have an audience.
Again, it’s not rocket science.
We now return to those that don’t and will not use a single use radio. Smartphone are now the pocket radios of 2017, rather like those noisy young people, inc the so-called experts of today, who walked around with a NEW THING called a pocket radio. If you want an audience you need to be smart phone friendly.
Now to upset more people I know. Those that listen to the radio via expensive hi-fi’s are the smallest sector of radio listeners. Actually, they are beyond small. They are a mini-group. Yes, broadcasters have to be nice to them, but in reality, they can kill a radio station. High bandwidth only stations are dead in the water – rather like the thing had stopped DAB from taking off, ever engineered and what actually killed off the old BSB satellite system, more over engineering.
A single sentence, in this paragraph, Shout or Icecast is not the way to get an audience, lead with them at your peril, but at least one going for the anoraks/enthusiast.
N.B I don’t consult on radio. Our team and I are busy running radio that get real audiences, so don’t be offended when we don’t consult free of charge.
My final tip, is don’t be a vanity broadcaster, like most of the corporate are that are killing radio, yes, I do have the evidence to support that comment. Vanity radio is fine if you are a millionaire and don’t care if you get listeners or not. Once upon a time some station gained millions of listeners, now they have just specialist appeal and will only ever get a few hundred listeners – I do not consider that radio and never will. Of course you can run a vanity station, but remember that’s all it is.
Netcasting is the future, but you won’t make milions from – make your target BREAK EVEN
Eric Wiltsher 
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