Through A Glass, Darkly.

Following on from a Twitter conversation last night, a couple of radio/new media predictions for 2013:

1. Mixcloud (or, given the internet’s ability to ensure that “the second mouse gets the cheese,” [*1] more likely a Mixcloud clone, with fewer features but easier to use) will become big. Really big. As with all forms of self-publishing, 99.9% of it will be complete and utter rubbish. The remaining 0.1%, however, will push the medium of radio in new and interesting ways that stuck-in-the-mud types like me would never have thought of.
2. Chris Moyles won’t return to Radio One, or indeed to free-to-air radio at all. Once he finally gets sick of tacky dating shows on Sky, he’ll start a subscription-only podcast, reckoning that a million fans at £5 a year must represent a business model of some sort. It won’t be as big a success as he hopes, but neither will it be the flop that his bitterer critics predict. Lots of earnest articles will appear in the analytical end of the print media about whether or not this represents “the future of radio.”

[*1] See Altavista/Google, Hotmail/Gmail, or (especially) MySpace/Facebook.