You’re all talk

There is an article on the BBC News website today talking about Jack Radio, an American concept radio station that’s basically an iPod on shuffle all day.

Basically, instead of having to pay a DJ to talk crap and introduce the songs they just increase the size of their playlist and put it on shuffle until Drive.

This is an interesting concept, and potentially a good way of the stations fighting back against people using their iPods or sites like last.fm for listening to or discovering new music.

However, the article talks about it being the death throw for DJs and talk on the radio - what it doesn’t take into account is the increasing popularity of podcasts and more specifically all talk podcasts.

Yes sites like last.fm are popular, yes people listen to music on their iPod, yes people have huge playlists at home BUT music is no substitute for clever or funny talk radio.

Personally, although having an iPod stuffed full of music and even more music on my hard drive, I still prefer to listen to clever, well produced talk podcasts. Why? Well a number of reasons 1) It’s company on my walk to work and 2) often I’ll learn things from it.

What the commercial stations need to think about doing, instead of getting rid of DJs completely and replacing them with music on loop, is buying some of these brilliant podcasts or at the very least investing in some intelligent programming.

Or get more of the army of birlliant circuit comedians into presenter roles, have funny people introducing music instead of people that think they’re funny - scout.

I don’t have iTunes on the computer I’m using at the moment but from what I can remember this morning every one of the top 20 are talk podcasts - some video which you can exclude for this purpose but it would still be all talk.

And Yes I know you need to take into account a lack of ‘pop/chart’ music on podcasts at the moment but I still think talk shows would be in the majority in the top 20.

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