Not a day goes by lately without more bad news for the radio industry. From major layoffs, more voice-tracking, eliminated positions, major heritage brands disappearing, to wild ratings swings, and bad quarterly revenue reports, it feels like the end of our industry is inevitable. Many of those who still have jobs are just miserably hanging on, trying to get to the “finish line” in the next couple of years, and really couldn’t care about what happens after that.
None of this is surprising; this meltdown was completely predictable.
I remember walking into a staff meeting at Channel 955 in Detroit back in 2003 and placing an iPod on the table – the old one with the monochrome display and white disc on the front – telling the staff “meet your new competitor… the size of a deck of cards, with no moving parts, and a hard drive big enough to hold every song that you ever liked that you can play on demand anywhere, anytime, commercial free.”
The rest of the meeting was spent discussing how we could beat the entertainment experience of that device. Most of that conversation centered on things that the iPod couldn’t do – like provide companionship, personality, story-telling, unpredictability, music curation, interaction, and real-time shared experiences, just to name a few. I would go on to hold similar meetings at stations that I brand managed in several different markets, and the brainstorms would all produce ideas in those same categories.
Twenty years have passed since those meetings, and instead of just the iPod, we have so many more options now for dispensing music – between streaming services, apps, all of the music platforms, YouTube… the list goes on and on and on.
What did radio do in that time?
Instead of focusing on those points of differentiation and exclusivity, our industry went the other direction, and starting imitating the iPod, just with commercials. The advent of the PPM ratings system only accelerated the trend of watering down talent in favor of music quantity, and let’s face it, PPM rewarded this behavior for a while. When a station tried to develop a personality show, PPM punished it for quite some time until it hit the point of critical mass – or until management couldn’t take the startup pain anymore and went back to music quantity, as was the case with many attempts at personality shows.
The big personality shows that started before PPM had a built-in advantage because they were able to survive the ramp up period under the diary ratings system since it was more forgiving, so when PPM came along, most survived and thrived because they were already well established. Now many of those shows have even more massive ratings, into double-digits in some cases. Why? Because they are unique and exclusive content with habitual fans that seek them out.
Now we sit on the doorstep of A.I., which opens up a new world of content possibilities if used correctly. But instead of making it a companion technology as a ramp to something new, most radio companies are using it to simply create the same thing that we’ve always done, just at a lower cost point. That’s not innovation, it’s just an expense cut.
At its current trajectory, it sure feels like the radio industry is going away. Contrary to what many pundits say, it’s not due to technological disruption as much as our own bad decisions as an industry. The death of radio will be ruled a suicide, not a murder. There, I said it out loud.
The bigger truth is we are at a point where we have nothing to lose. In some ways, we have come full circle. In the early days of FM back in the 1970’s, when AM stations made all of the money, and operators wanted to keep the FM license active because nobody used this band yet, they hired a bunch of hippies who played deep rock cuts and songs that were never played on their AM counterparts. This unintentional experiment led to the birth of the AOR (Album-Oriented Rock) format, and many of those “hippies” went on to be some of the most beloved and legendary personalities in rock radio. This experiment accelerated the transition from AM to FM, and by the early 1980’s, FM became the money maker.
The AM stations floundered as music outlets, until they discovered the spoken word formats that were also different and interesting in their time – like NBC’s Talknet with Sally Jessy Raphael, and Bruce Williams dispensing financial advice. Then a guy named Rush changed the game again, giving the AM band new life through reinvention. This is what always happened in radio when we had nothing to lose.
We are there again, and today we have less to lose than we did back then.
This SHOULD be the greatest time for content experimentation in the history of radio. We should be trying new formats, unusual music formats, different talk formats – not just politics and sports, maybe even an AI format where AI creates new songs on the fly and you vote on the songs it creates and spits out. Heck, why not?
THIS is the way we need to be thinking. And maybe instead of squeezing every dime of expense by eliminating the starter jobs that incubate potential future talent, we need to be specifically seeking them out, training them, helping them find their voices, and developing the next generation of big personalities – not just in the morning, but in all dayparts. How about spoken word formats on FM that talk about more than just sports, politics, and religion? Joe Rogan touches on some of these things, but you’re just as likely to hear him talk about hobbies, comedy, or martial arts as well. There are dozens and dozens of formats currently not being done that I can think of just off the top of my head, and given the state of our industry, I believe there may be far more risk if we don’t throw some of these against the wall to see what sticks than if we do. Sure, we might try something new and fail, but would we be any worse off than we are now? And what if we succeed?
I truly believe radio is at another major inflection point – probably the biggest of my lifetime, and I’ve been in this game a long time. History is being written and we are running out of time. If we truly reinvent, this could quickly become radio’s greatest era of innovation. If we don’t, this could be the last chapter. Either way, it was our own choice.
Sage guidance, I appreciate the mile markers for reference. Every moment is the one you can make a difference with. Choose wisely, But do something with the gift you have been given, This moment. There is no promise of the next.