“It’s not easy to like Spotify, if Daniel Ek comes out and wants to kill all of us”. says Jonathan Wall, director of BBC Sounds, is not the only one to bring scathing critique to the panel. Cilla Benkö is director-general for the Swedish Radio and jumps in on the many questions the coexistence of radio and tech companies poses. The relationship between them is strained, to say the least. Yet mutual respect is called for. “And hopefully we get a better understanding that as a tech company you shouldn’t down-prioritise radio”, she summarises.
The longer the discussion between our speakers goes, the clearer it becomes: The landscape European radio finds itself in has far more camps than you might think. A tug-of-war simile doesn’t quite cut it. And that is even before turning towards the elephant in the room: Artificial Intelligence. There’s many layers of tackling the topic with Benkö wishing to keep the sound of the human voice : “We have decided that the radio should have a natural voice”. Meanwhile Wall imagines transcripts of long texts, headlines of online articles and corresponding tags in the future to be, at least in some cases, AI-generated.
The topic is broad to say the least. Broad enough, in fact, that you could fill an entire panel with the Q&A at the end alone. It doesn’t help that the terms “right” and “wrong” aren’t part of the discussion, but it’s reassuring to hear that today’s radiomakers seem to cope with this topic in a fairly nuanced way.
