Take a drive around Little Rock, Ark., in a new Dodge Charger and sample the FM radio band on the infotainment screen. You’ll find more than half of the stations transmit no RDS information at all.
Staff from the National Association of Broadcasters discovered this disappointing fact last year in preparing to update NAB’s “Digital Dashboard Best Practices Report,” which was released recently.
They conducted “radio audits” in both Detroit and Little Rock, driving around in rental vehicles and observing how stations appear on dashboards of late-model vehicles. These audits were modeled on similar drives done in 2017 by Jacobs Media and engineering consultant E. Glynn Walden in multiple cities.
“The results obtained from these audits serve to reinforce the message that more broadcasters need to be paying attention to their metadata,” the NAB wrote in the updated report.
U.S. broadcasters have in fact done much to improve the appearance of radio on the digital dashboard in the past six years, it found. But there is significant work yet to be done, especially by stations in small and medium-sized markets.
The report is well worth reading. We all need to pay closer attention to how our industry’s product is being experienced by our listeners.
As Radio World’s Nick Langan wrote in a story about the report on our website, “The key takeaway is that it’s crucial for radio stations to ensure that their metadata, especially from RDS and HD Radio systems, meets benchmarks so that radio listeners get an experience commensurate with what they see from satellite radio, streaming services and other media in car dashboards.”
The report found that, at least in Detroit and Little Rock, metadata apparently is not being checked or properly edited before broadcast and that no one may be monitoring the station or market for mistakes.
Stations with HD Radio may not be using the Artist Experience feature consistently, ignoring album art or delivering art that doesn’t match the audio. (Stations with HD Radio may also not be paying sufficient attention to their RDS — these audits were done in vehicles that did not have HD Radio reception, and the authors reminded broadcasters that the RDS data stream is probably the only metadata service available to broadcasters in many such vehicles.)
And while the report focuses on FM, it reminds AM broadcasters to pay attention to metadata on their translators as well as any AM HD Radio signals.
I strongly encourage you to take the time to read this report, which includes a number of useful visuals and recommendations. It explores important topics like RadioDNS, DTS AutoStage, RDS “chunking,” middleware services, multicast branding and how to get the most out of Artist Experience.
“Gone are the days when the radio industry had this real estate to itself,” the NAB report states. “Broadcasters need to strengthen their hold on this turf by improving the user experience on auto dashboards.”
Find the report and additional useful resources at www.nab.org/innovation/digitalDashboardAudit.asp.
