• Hell has no fury like an MFW - Duncan Campbell, former content director of ARN, writes about the pressure group Mad Fudging Witches. “Make no mistake about it, Alan Jones, Kyle Sandilands and Karl Stefanovic all lost their jobs because of MFW”, he claims. Not sure about Karl - probably uncritically interviewing Tommy Robinson did that for him - but, Campbell suggests we should be concerned that MFW have this kind of influence. MFW targets the advertisers who fund the shows, contacting them directly and making them aware of the content they’re funding. Campbell frames it as a free speech issue. (He’ll be at Radiodays Asia; I’ve put this through a link tracker since the original link has a naughty word in).
• Spintrack is a “complete radio station on a Mac mini”, it claims. It’s probably understandable that there aren’t that many playout systems for the Mac, but it looks interesting to see - it includes voicetracking and live assist, along with hour templates and music scheduling.
• Over in Podnews this week, SONARR has been advertising its awards. They’re a new audio awards for Australia, including radio, podcasts, audiobooks and voiceovers. You have until this Friday evening to enter, and it can be as low as $75 to enter. You’re guaranteed not to win if you don’t enter…
• Some quite impressive radio analysis for the Sydney market. ARN’s Gold managed 15 minutes an hour of ads. “If you’re hearing an ad on Smooth, there’s a 50/50 chance WSFM is also in an ad at that exact moment”. (Yes, this person - who is clearly someone who cares about radio - calls it WSFM, despite it having rebranded over a year ago). The comments are, as ever, worth reading.

• The EBU released its Radio Trends Report 2026. Weekly reach across Europe is 81.3%, down 2.7% from five years ago. As above - time spent listening is 2h 10m per day - down 15 minutes on 5 years ago (and down 50 minutes from 20 years ago).
• Nielsen released its Podcast Listen & Watch Report, though there’s information in there for radio as well. Particularly, it quotes Edison Research’s Share of Ear for Q1, which sys that 20% of time spent with ad-supported audio is podcasting: radio is more than three-times larger.
• In Australia, Kyle Sandilands will start his paid-for live online show on August 10. It will cost AUD $99 for the year (£51, US$69) - listeners won’t be able to buy monthly. Game Changers Radio seems to think it will be easy to get 10,000 listeners paying that. Sandilands has said he needs 50,000 to “cover costs”. Prior to his sacking, his show had 1.1 million listeners, 96,000 of those online; he had 291,000 listeners to the podcast too. I’m fascinated to watch this.

Links and much more to read at https://radioland.email

Data from Edison Research makes me question what radio is marketing for.

More at https://james.cridland.net/blog/2026/radio-4-longwave-closes/

More at https://radioland.email

All the links are here: https://james.cridland.net/blog/2026/no-kyle-jackie-no-switchoff/

More over at https://radioland.email

https://james.cridland.net/blog/2026/abc-sbs/ is where to go to find links for all these stories

Yikes! The economy! Plus, more news about radio's future

I buy a new radio! I dig into the ownership of the BBC's longwave transmitters! More at radioland.email