In an interview about broadcasting the Olympics on AM radio network in Australia (a sentence that could have been typed in 1970 and still make perfect sense), the Head of Content for the network, Greg Byrnes, talks Sarah Patterson about how, in the year 2024, he is “worried” about Spotify and podcasting, however:

You can’t get that on Spotify. You can’t get that on TikTok … if the school is closed because a local road is flooded, if planes aren’t flying because of fog at the airport, traffic gridlock … that content is really important to us and it’s important that we let the audience know that it is always available. “I think that strategy sets us up well for success.”

Imagine running the audio content for a $2B AUD media company and thinking that post-traditional-broadcast-technologists haven’t solved for 

  • school closures
  • road flooding
  • airport updates
  • traffic gridlock.

School closures: surely schools in 2024 aren’t relying on 2GB to tell all the parents about an issue at school? Do local governments have interopt with Google and Apple Maps yet? If not, that should be a priority. Airlines also have pretty much got the technology thing downpat.

I have the deepest love for the audio medium, I miss working in it and creating for it, but I’m not romantic enough to think that the AM and FM talkback radio and music radio stations I’ve loved and have created for, but very few people in that space are aware that the world is changing rapidly and I don't understand how you could be so ignorant of the fact that the stations may well have a future, but it will be very different to their past.