Some headlines from the last few months. Did you see them all?
“Is the Music Industry’s Love Affair With TikTok ‘Dead’?” – Billboard’s Ellis Leight observes “a noticeable shift in the way the music business talks about TikTok. One executive says TikTok is “dead” for breaking new songs. ‘Another calls it ‘not workable.’ ‘Does TikTok break hits now?’ asks an A&R executive. There’s a bunch of stuff going off there that’s not even a hit. We’re running on the inertia of what it was.”
A few days ago, Billboard published another Leight story. “Playlists Don’t Hit Like They Used To,” detailing how users were shifting away from “marquee editorial collections” in favor of more personalization. “Does Today’s Top Hits move the needle as much now as it did four years ago? No,” says an unnamed label exec. “The difference is especially stark …. If you’re not near the top of the playlist.”
Three days ago, veteran radio programmer Randy Kabrich tweeted an article headlined “Amazon Alexa is a ‘Colossal Failure,’ on pace to lose $10 billion this year.” “How does radio get in-home audience … given [that] household radios disappeared from store shelves about 20 years ago.” The early struggles of Amp—Amazon’s fusion of live chat and radio—and its recent layoffs have already been documented here, although former KROQ Los Angeles morning man Gene “Bean” Baxter will be on Amp on Dec. 16.
There are other sectors of radio that have seemed to flourish, even as broadcast radio’s music radio struggled. In recent days, there have been ominous stories about slowing subscriber growth at SiriusXM and a hiring freeze (but not layoffs) at NPR.
All of these stories need to be viewed realistically. I still hear stories where badgering the artist to post more TikTok videos is seemingly a record label’s entire promotional strategy. Even Billboard is still running positive stories about TikTok’s impact as well. At various points this year, I have often found myself thinking that TikTok is the new radio—the thing that young adults care about, offering the steady stream of new music no longer consistently found on radio. If TikTok isn’t paying off in the same way, music isn’t breaking without TikTok either.
Even if they’re broadcast radio’s competitors, I’m not necessarily happy to hear bad news about Amazon or SiriusXM either. It always seemed naïve to believe that smart speakers would drive people to broadcast radio and not Amazon Music, but Kabrich is right in that it’s the strategy radio has most relied on. Amp has the ability to bring radio’s functionality to a new platform. SiriusXM has often been a last bastion of the classic radio experience for subscribers. I’m not rooting against anybody trying to “do radio.”
In recent years, I have consistently asserted that:
- People will always want what radio offers—the combination of companionship, shared experience, entertainment, and curated music;
- Broadcast radio is having a hard time offering these things;
- Amazon and Apple Music have the ability to offer these things, but have thus far not quite done so.
- TikTok and streaming can unleash a handful of phenomenal records, but cannot yet replace radio in offering 25 hit songs at a time that most fans of popular music will know, even if radio struggles to do so as well. The prospect is a world with no hit music, which doesn’t seem like a lot of fun because even “fewer hits” are no fun.
I am in no way against the relocation of the radio experience to another platform. I hung with AM music radio longer than anybody, but it didn’t irk me when most of my music listening transitioned to FM. If there’s a better home for the radio experience, I only hope that it provides a path forward for my broadcast industry friends.
At the end of 2022, the opportunity for radio to fill its own niche and appoint its own successor still exists, because nobody is yet doing radio better than radio. These stories reaffirm that. In 2023, it is still wide open for radio if:
- Labels and radio work together to reestablish radio as an alternate stream of new music development that augments streaming and TikTok, and find a viable promotional model for doing so;
- Broadcast radio’s endless stream of choices are organized into a viable, coherent, more appealing offering along the lines of SiriusXM with a more listenable stopset experience;
- Broadcast radio finds a way through its cutbacks and consolidation to offer the things that showcase its strength—personality and local information. This opportunity became apparent at the beginning of COVID, which is now nearly three years ago.
I’ve been writing that part about “a more listenable stopset experience” for 15 years. I’m not naïve about radio’s response rate. Or about broadcast radio doing what it needs to do amidst ongoing budget challenges, or even wanting to. Filling up a stopset with more ads for podcasts isn’t just more expedient, it’s more in line with the future as major groups see it.
But for 2023, radio’s rights to “do radio” have been renewed for another year, because better financed groups have failed to bid on them, or maybe weren’t as better financed as we thought. Broadcasters need to be reminded of that. Broadcasters need to acknowledge that.
