The car dashboard will be the next battleground in radio wars warns Carat investment boss
The chief investment officer of media agency Carat has warned that control over the car dashboard will be the next major battleground in the fight between radio and music streaming.
In a panel discussion at the Mumbrella360 conference on the future of radio, Ashley Earnshaw, chief investment officer of Carat, noted that while music streaming enabled dashboard represented a relatively small number today, that number would grow rapidly in the coming years.
“To me the battleground around the car is so key,” said Earnshaw.
The car dashboard has been variously graced and cluttered by radio, 8track, cassette, CD, metal and mp3, to name a few. It will only be affected profitably, by what the inhabitants of the car want, not by what the continuing dreams of technology throw at it.
Radio, the best and most enduring of these, will continue to win out, only if the programming is nurtured and the quality improved and maintained. When certain people refer to ticking the boxes, which boxes are they referring to? how do they know which boxes are the correct boxes?
Only by listening to the public, by driving good radio practice and by striving to provide the best journalism, will either broadcasting or digital media survive. The fall from grace of radio has been obvious and sickening over the past few years, even the great and once enviable ABC has dropped its bundle to a pathetic level approaching air-wave flock.
Stop chasing numbers with programming, and start the truly creative process of programming for numbers, work harder at the coal face, and the level will find itself among the listeners. Continue to ignore the signs, and like the dinosaurs, you will fall over and disappear.