Radio festival: the future of radio's mobile, loud and emotional

Amy Kean is a media futurologist and the head of Havas Media.

Media futurologist, you say? Yes it is a real thing. What does she actually do though? Amy looks at current data and trends and from those she draws conclusions about how we should behave in the future.

Technology is really changing how we live our daily lives and the thing that has changed it the most in the past few years is without a doubt, the smartphone. We as consumers are increasingly demanding. We don’t want to just watch music videos, we want to BE in them.

Cue UK-based recording artist Squarepusher’s answer to this. He released a virtual reality (VR) video to mark the release of a song that can be experienced with a VR headset, mobiles, tablets and YouTube’s new 360º platform. So by using something like Google cardboard and your smartphone or tablet you can feel like you’re IN the video. And no, it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

We are no longer happy with experiencing things in one dimension. We want more. We want multi-sensory experiences, whether that be fireworks you can taste (London’s 2014 New Year’s Eve fireworks) or a fairground ride that each person can control with their mind to get a completely different experience depending on their reactions to it (Neurosis).

In this session recorded at The Radio Academy’s Radio Festival, Amy talks about the many ways radio might use these technological advances and asks how it might look in the future.