Newstalk owner Bauer lobbies Catherine Martin about keeping licensed radio stations ‘easy to find’ in cars

Bauer Media Audio Ireland, the owner of radio stations including Today FM and Newstalk, lobbied Minister for Media Catherine Martin late last year to urge the introduction of European regulation that would help licensed stations remain “easy to find” in a new generation of car dashboards and other user interfaces.

According to a return made to the lobbying register by the company, Bauer’s Irish chief executive Chris Doyle emailed the Minister and senior officials in the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media in October 2023 with the intended result to “secure changes” to the European Council’s general approach to the European Media Freedom Act, a proposed law that counts protecting media pluralism among its aims.

Bauer, in common with other radio groups across Europe, want both car manufacturers and smart device providers to be required to ensure that services from licensed radio stations are “granted appropriate discoverability”.

This comes amid concerns that in-car infotainment systems are increasingly eschewing radio receivers in their design, making cars an increasingly contested battleground for audio consumption. This could leave the radio industry reliant on motorists accessing their services through smartphone apps rather than traditional dashboards with AM/FM tuners.

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At the same time, the rising popularity of listening to audio through smart speakers has bestowed greater route-to-market power on big technology companies such as Amazon, Apple and Google.

While most audio listening takes place within the home, research by cross-industry group Radiocentre Ireland published in October found that 41 per cent of people listen in a car or van on an average day. This rises to 48 per cent for 25-44 year-olds and 50 per cent among people in employment.

Mr Doyle previously told The Irish Times that the findability of radio stations in cars was “increasingly at risk from unfair preferencing by connected car user interfaces” and should be regulated. Similarly, if technology companies are not subject to rules on how they control access via smart speakers and their voice assistants, this could prove “a significant threat” to radio, he said.

The European Commission last September designated six companies – Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, TikTok owner ByteDance and Microsoft – as “gatekeepers” under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, the legislative progress of which Bauer indicated it would “watch closely”. Several tech companies have since brought legal challenges sparked by the EU’s proposals.

Bauer Media Audio Ireland also owns 98FM, Spin 1038 and Spin SouthWest – which it bought alongside the national stations Newstalk and Today FM from Denis O’Brien’s Communicorp in 2021 – as well as its more recent acquisitions Red FM and iRadio. The company, which operates radio stations in nine European countries, is part of Bauer, a privately owned German multimedia group led by Yvonne Bauer.

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