New Google firmware knocks out radio stations

Contribution by James Cridland

Here’s something seemingly unreported by any of the radio trades – the great Google smart speaker bug of 2025, which wiped thousands of radio stations off these smart speakers for weeks.

As I understand it, here’s the story – Google rolled out new firmware to their smart speakers and Nest displays about four weeks ago.

This new firmware had the side-effect of breaking support for streaming AAC, a format of audio streaming that many radio stations use (higher quality at a lower bandwidth than MP3). So, asking for “Hey, Google, play 2Day FM” resulted in nothing working, as some aggregator apps have mentioned online.

Of course, each affected radio station thought it was just a problem with their own feed, and it seems to have taken some time before radio stations realised it wasn’t just them that was affected: it was others, too. It was a worldwide glitch, and affected every radio station streaming in AAC variants. (Those streaming in MP3 were unaffected.)

Google’s team took a while to reverse the effects of the firmware upgrade (and I understand from some people that it may have been quite hard to convince Google of the severity of the issue). In the meantime, many stations switched streaming codecs to MP3, which continued to work. I believe it’s all fixed now. but for a number of weeks, many stations were unavailable. And as we know, radio is a habitual thing – breaking habits like this is bad for those stations. It’s a good job there wasn’t any emergency or anything.

I know it’s all about Alexa in some parts of the world; but Google’s speaker ecosystem is #1 in Australia and Canada, from research I’ve seen, and quite a #2 in the US and the UK. 150 million have been sold every year. It’s a large amount of listening, given the most popular thing people do with a smart speaker is listen to the radio (or set a timer).

Those I’ve talked to on this have all wanted to stay anonymous, seemingly concerned about upsetting Google. I’d just suggest to the radio industry, as my BBC pass once told me, “great things happen when we work together” – and it’s a concern when one change can have such an effect on us all.

The worldwide radio industry is still a set of small, disparate and mostly unconnected businesses. Spotify is not; and perhaps we should learn from that and collaborate more.


James Cridland is a radio futurologist: a speaker, writer and consultant helping media companies implement the transition to our digitally connected future. You can subscribe to his free weekly radio newsletter, Radioland here.

 

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