That there radio futurologist James Cridland was recently sprooking his wares over on the Fred Jackobs site on the back of a piece entitled ‘Pandora Is Not Radio‘. Which actually, despite my friendly ribbing, is recommended reading. However this piece is going to be one of my occasional “real world observations” blog posts.
At some early hour yesterday morning I found myself, packed in with many another commuter, on a Metrolink tram on the journey into Manchester city centre.
I was stood (yes stood, hello metrolink how about some more double units on the Oldham/Rochdale line?) next to a young lady resplendent with a set of red Sony headphones plugged into her Samsung mobile.
Now first up credit to her for the reasonably priced Sony “cans”, who in their right minds buys the ‘beats audio’ headphones? And at least the Sony’s don’t leak nasty tinny sound like mad like the average Apple earbuds of the youth commuter. (I say noting I’m currently using the significant other’s iPhone earphones with my MP3 player, and occasionally with much cursing with my Samsung Android phone which doesn’t recognise them as a hands free headset, but that’s a whole other story.)
Now much as it’s rude to try and judge a lady’s age, this was truly a ‘young lady’, dressed for the office, but obviously not that far from being in the ‘student’ category, other than of course a student wouldn’t be on a tram at such an ungodly hour.
To cut to the point, as I glanced across I couldn’t help but notice she was busy tapping away at the YouTube app on her phone. Having found something she liked, she promptly put her phone down, paying no attention to the ‘video’, but obviously enjoying the music tracks she’d just ‘added to playlist’.
The takeaway from this for radio types, don’t just consider Pandora, Spotify or that annoying Deezer, an ‘android system app’ that Samsung kindly doesn’t let me uninstall, as competition for your radio service, look at the other places that people are looking for entertainment. Are the generation of today the ‘YouTube’ generation? Well I believe that a little bit more after yesterdays experience.
Of final note, I searched ‘you tube radio’ for the illustration for this post. The second result is BBC Radio One’s You Tube Channel. No doubt these results are skewed to the fact that the great Google know I’m in the UK, but never the less interesting to note that Radio One is the only UK ‘Radio’ service highly prominent in this search.
Photo Credits: “You Tube Radio” by Phil Edmonds
