“Radio is the soundtrack of life”. The creators of Radioplayer found a way to make this soundtrack of life available all over the world, by sharing the contents of broadcasters from 22 countries everywhere.
Yann Legarson, started out working for a small radio station in Normandie in France – with only 5000 listeners per day. He wanted for his small station to have the same visibility and the same chances as bigger stations. His vision: “We need to be sure to keep radio alive for a long time”. To achieve this, he founded Radioplayer as a collaborative project: “radioplayer is not my programme it is your programme – it is not my solution it is your solution.
Laurence Harrison, the director of automotive partnerships of Radioplayer explains that Radioplayer is based on the collaboration between public and private broadcasters, countries, and carmakers. Impressively, Radioplayer is already collaborating with the makers of 45% of cars in Europe. In some of these cars, app stores with a range of music distributors are already integrated.
Ole Jorgen Tovmark from Radioplayer admires the the seamless synchronization between all the devices used – it is quite impressive how “you just plug in your airpods and the radio show from the car continues on the phone, and later on the speakers in the living room”. For him, the seamless integration of stations is a game-changer for online-radio distribution.
Christian Winter of Cariad makes it clear that it is hard to collect the metadata of all the different radio stations in the world – and Radioplayer can help with that. Instead of havint to rely on one-year surveys to know whether a station reaches its audience, with radioplayer, day-to day- information is possible.
To gain insights into the listening habits of consumers and improve the future of audio, Caroline Graze from Radioplayer thinks, too, that meta-data matters. Radioplayer has the potential to provide this data.
The biggest announcement of the session is dropped in the end: Radioplayer now collaborates with Google. With this collaboration, Greg Marcheteau from Google wants to give users more choice and broadcasters more control.
Radioplayer makes content available all over the world, it provides equality and visibility for all stations, public and private. That is an enormous achievement and very important to achieve Yann Legarson´s goal: to keep radio alive for a long time.
