Suddenly Losing Your Listeners

The pandemic has made us all change. And not just because of the length of our hair.

Whether it’s Zoom, using Amazon Prime, Disney+ or interacting more with the Smart Speaker, the pandemic has been an accelerant. None of these things existed because of Coronavirus, but their utility was certainly enhanced by it.

Indeed, I expect sans pandemic, the growth curves of all of these things would have been steady, but the last 12 months has probably meant they jumped ahead 12 quarters. Zoom made a $16m pre-tax profit in 2019 and a $660m one in 2020.

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1 Comment
  1. The lockdown has certainly accelerated digital listening in our household, especially as last year a number of the well-known Yorkshire local radio stations including Minster FM, Radio Aire, Stray FM and Yorkshire Coast Radio were replaced by Greatest Hits Radio (GHR), therefore we wondered if our local news would continue and would we still get the local presenters giving us information about our local area.

    We do get local news on GHR, but the majority of the programmes are not coming from the local area, as GHR only have to broadcast three hours per weekday from Yorkshire, which is the same commitment as the other networked stations, Capital and Heart, in the county.

    While these changes happened to the networked stations, we have started to see the emergence of new all-digital local radio stations, which are broadcasting using smart-speakers, apps and online instead of on FM, thus enforcing the point made by Matt in this piece.

    These new local stations include Bridlington Gold (Bridlington), Rombalds Radio (Ilkley, Keighley & Skipton), This is the Coast (Yorkshire coast from Scarborough), West Yorkshire Radio (West Yorkshire from Leeds), Your Harrogate (Harrogate & District) and YorkMix (York & Selby). Some of them are also broadcasting on DAB+ or will do so on when the new small-scale DAB+ is licensed by Ofcom for areas such as Bradford, Leeds, Sheffield/Rotherham and hopefully the East Riding part of the Yorkshire Coast.