Having been on numerous radio stations over the last 15 years, whether by weekly feature, phone-in interview or as a guest, Spling has garnered experience on air as well as off air in hosting and presenting podcasts over the years. Having experience across the board, he’s able to offer some insights into what will surely be the next step for podcasts.

Spling has been presenting Talking Movies on Fine Music Radio for 10+ years, a show that’s converted into a weekly podcast. Now available on MFM, this weekly film programme has been running for well over 500 episodes. Confessions of a Movie Critic was a much more candid stream of consciousness type podcast. Running up to 15 minutes, it’s an opportunity for him to get a bit more personal and topical with his listeners, adopting a conversational approach to broadcasts. While it was interrupted by the pandemic, Must Love Movies served as an interview podcast. Going for up to an hour, Spling would watch one of his guest’s top 10 movies and then interview the celebrity or film industry professional about their taste in movies. More recently, Spling has recorded a pilot for a new film interview podcast that’s in the pipeline.

Podcasts are becoming the next big thing. While it seems like almost everyone is getting to the point that they feel they need their own podcast, the medium is growing in terms of contributors and listeners. In fact, it’s quickly becoming necessary to have applications that are able to handcraft a radio stream for users.

Curating content and music based on your personal preferences seems like a natural step in the right direction. The recommendation algorithms already exist and have been fine-tuned to the point that recommendations are very useful and quite strong when it comes to figuring out what other music or movies people might enjoy. Based on your personal preferences, modelling your taste based on your listening history and learning from your trends, it’s becoming incredibly accurate with on-target suggestions.

It seems that the natural progression of this would be for a company to design something that pulls in specific podcasts and music that match your listening profile. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if a service existed that charged users a small monthly fee in order to do that for them. Being able to curate a blend of talk and music, geared specifically around your customisations… people would love that! Since there are so many podcasts, it wouldn’t take much for streamers and podcast owners to agree to having their content added to that kind of platform to connect with more fans.

Being able to choose which new service you wanted to get news from, when you want to do news – even if on the hour or just in the morning at a certain time, there are many ways that this “radio station” could play out. For most listeners, it would only serve their purposes to have the function to simply hit play. Deciding your balance of talk versus music and even allowing the software to make editing changes to switch between the two at set intervals, it seems as though this kind of disruptive technology would challenge most radio stations.

Podcasts are still in their infancy but they are definitely stars developing from within this world – and not just Joe Rogan. They would essentially be the “DJs” of the future, which would occupy a global marketplace instead of regional. Imagine being able to listen to a podcast on castles, interspersed with your favourite rock music only to get sport alert results that are in line with your favourite team – if you like that sort of stuff! Being able to offer niche content that completely matches the listener’s profile will make this platform very powerful. Most radio listeners tend to switch between channels, probably due to too many adverts, a song that doesn’t resonate or a radio personality that bothers them.

Of course, if radio stations were wanting to survive this kind of disruptive technology they would have to present or take on a similar offering. Allowing their listeners to essentially download a series of podcasts, radio stations would have to allow their own listenership to essentially curate or compile a best of for their own listening pleasure. This would mean that the platform would be able to cater to stations and try to keep them in the game for the type of listeners who want a much more drilled down version of the platform’s content.

In this fast-moving age where people don’t feel that they’ve got enough hours in the day, having on standby content that’s completely customised will add more value by zooming into their interests and not simply delivering a mainstream selection of current music and opinions. The immediacy is probably the most attractive part of being able to switch on the tailor-made radio and get a typical brand of music and talk, however with the advent of speech recognition technology and data mining, it’ll be quite feasible for shows to be analysed and attributed to certain listener profiles.

It’s already amazing to use one of your music apps and have the system learn from you, offering you a personal mix of music. How amazing would it be if something similar were able to be done with podcasts, making it much easier for you to have your own custom radio station built for you from the ground up. It may seem like quite a difficult task, but based on all the supporting technologies that exists already it can’t be that far in the future.

It would be wise for radio stations which are already struggling to compete with portable apps but is something that they should definitely anticipate to remain relevant to the next generation of listeners. Younger audiences are used to having things tailor-made and curated based on their specific likes, so one imagines it’ll only be a matter of time before this is transferred to mainstream.

The possibilities are endless, the biggest challenge is creating an audience and sustaining the momentum of the podcast series in order to make it a proper, curated piece of content. The beauty of it all is that since it is so specific, connecting listeners with things they will enjoy can work for the platform creator and the creators who are listed. There is a need for podcast creators to be connected with on-target audiences and this kind of custom radio station idea would do wonders in making that possible.