The digital takeover outlier: Radio

I love radio. In my days at university I spent many a long hour broadcasting on the Campus radio station LCR, playing music, shooting the breeze… well, I say “broadcasting”, but only in the loosest of senses as a couple of speakers in the next door pizza bar and a few rooms in halls of residence served by an extremely low-power AM loop system barely made up a mass audience. In the early 1990s I also got involved with organising student radio nationally, and am still immensely proud that I set up the Student Radio Association in 1991.

These days I am but a consumer. Most of what I listen to is talk-based, with BBC Radio 4 being almost permanently on the car radio on the journey to and from work, only occasionally switching to podcasts played from my phone (but still, it has to be said, mostly sourced from either the BBC or The Guardian – with the notable, wonderful, exceptions of RadioLab and Freakonomics).

On the drive home yesterday I caught an article on Radio 4’s The Media Show about the slow take up of digital radio, and in particular of Digital Audio Broadcasting services, in the UK. Whilst the country’s conversion to digital-only TV has now nearly been completed, tentative targets for a move to digital-only radio by 2015 are just not achievable.

What’s going on? Why is, on the face of it, a more-digital friendly media like radio audio taking so long to go digital?

Looking at the recent Ofcom report into the UK communications market, the numbers are interesting. DAB radios are now owned by over 40% of the population, yet DAB amounts to only 19% of digital radio consumption (digital radio consumption in total is 29% total listening, with the rest made up of listening through digital TVs, and listening via the internet).

It strikes me that the challenge with digital radio switchover comes from it being such an early-adopted medium. Analogue radio was the original medium on the move – especially with the advent of transistor radios in the 1960s. As a result, whilst a substantial minority of the population own a DAB radio, almost certainly they own a lot more analogue radios, sometimes without even knowing (is there one in your phone? and do you ever use it?). Simply put – there are an awful lot more analogue radios than there were TVs, and they’re really cheap devices (especially in comparison to DAB sets), and they are still outselling digital sets by more than 2 to 1. Then there’s the car issue: a DAB radio added into my car at purchase, for instance, costs an extra £305; given you can now buy a decent DAB set for around £20, Volkswagen Audi group should be deeply ashamed…

Will we ever get to turn off the analogue services? Well it might be that radio will become obsolete only when internet-based distribution mechanisms become pervasive; given that most mobile phones these days have the capacity to stream audio via a network, DAB might find itself substituted in the end through content agnostic networks. Unless, of course, the value of the radio spectrum that would be freed up by turning off FM broadcasting would be so great that political will forced the issue…