Throughout the digital age, radio has been looking for its irresistible object — the app or function that non-radio users will eagerly share with each other. Broadcasters have given their airtime to HDRadio, to NextRadio, to streaming apps, just to watch as Pandora or Spotify or TikTok or Wordle exploded without them.
When Pandora was radio’s biggest concern, I once heard it characterized as a product that was too innovative to have been developed by broadcasters, especially at a time when radio people were more focused on programming to PPM and figuring out where to place stopsets. As it happened, Pandora ended up encroaching on radio’s most basic function — “more music, less talk.” But its “music genome” origins gave Pandora extra cachet. Users mostly listened to the hits; users were happy to have an option behind the hits, not unlike having far more satellite radio channels than they actually used.
These days, the radio app I most hear about from non-industry friends is the map-based Radio Garden, with its unusual radio worldview (literally). Every few years, Radio Garden will capture the fancy of a New York Times or Guardian. When it does, friends will forward me the article for months afterwards. (Now there’s TuneIn Explorer, with similar functionality, but more-mainstream station offerings.) Radio Garden’s best feature is how rekindles the romance of radio (and listening to far away places) that has been dormant for years with most listeners. It also came from outside the mainstream-radio world.
When broadcasters gathered in Toronto last month for the first Radiodays North America, one of the key panels asked “Radio: Can You Handle the Truth?” “Radio is going to have to evolve into something more and greater to compete and stay relevant,” said the panel blurb. “Can the industry do it? Does it have the imagination to make it happen? Where will talent come from? How will it be distributed?”
Any of those existential questions could have been a separate session, making it hard for the panel to make headway on any of them. Panelists also defaulted often to “radio will be fine; we survived the eight-track tape in the car dash”-style arguments. It’s hard for broadcasters not to do that, but that defensiveness overlooks the need for any successful business to constantly reinvent or at least freshen the product. Part of the reason broadcasters will now sweat out their inclusion in each model year’s Ford is because we don’t have our own new features each fall.
But over the last few months, I’ve seen an opportunity, equally obvious and unimaginable.
No matter who you are or what your beliefs in our divided America, you are probably dismayed by either TikTok or Twitter.
Maybe both.
When I wrote this column yesterday, there was an opportunity to be a competitor to either service. Today is the first full day of Meta Threads, and based on the response so far, one of those holes may have been filled already. But there’s always the opportunity for an app that competes with both. What if you could come up with one app that had both conversations about #AT40 reruns on Saturday and videos of users lying in a puddle of purple milkshake?
What if that app came from broadcasters?
Could radio do it? Could the oft-proclaimed “original social network” help create the next social network?
I am in no way unaware of the seeming naivete of this question. But digital is where radio has put its emphasis in recent years. We have talent who have pivoted toward digital content. Broadcasters helped drive podcasting’s first hit in Serial, and are behind two of its three biggest networks.
If radio doesn’t create the next irresistible app — whether a competitor for TikTok, Twitter, or something else, could it form a partnership with whomever does? An alliance that makes an easy-to-use radio dial part of an app that isn’t focused on radio? iHeartLand on Roblox is a move in this direction. So is the availability of streaming radio at Apple Music, something I’ve never heard mentioned in radio’s constant device promos.
Radio would benefit from the cachet of non-radio apps. Some in the digital space would be unwilling to embrace radio. Others would appreciate radio’s reach, and its marketing lists.
Radio still has a lot of work to do on its existing digital experience, both in terms of organizing its choices for listeners and in terms of spotload and stopset replacement. With the former, I’ve been encouraged by the return of the Audacy stations to TuneIn in recent weeks, as well as TuneIn’s expansion of its own offerings. Just making streaming better could certainly keep digital divisions busy indefinitely. Plus, both the “new toy” and cost-savings potential of AI could easily shift their focus away from anything else.
That said, part of the issue with radio’s transition to new platforms has been its reliance on a post-radio generation. If not everybody tasked with moving radio forward grew up with radio, is enamored of radio, or even really understands its strength, let them create the products they are passionate for. Perhaps that is how we’ll find a next Pandora — something that stumbles into its mainstream-radio functionality. Or maybe we’ll just find the next irresistible object and use that leverage to move radio forward.
Radio doesn’t need a new “killer App.” TV is radio with video. FAST (free ad-supported TV) becomes F.A.S.T.E.R. by Enhancing Radio (with video). In other words, all that a station needs to do is obtain master use rights for the videos of the songs in its music library, and replace its audio files with audiovisual files: the audiovisual is streamed on the station’s website; simultaneously, the audio from the audiovisual is broadcast on the station’s transmitter. As long as the station’s stream and broadcast are the same (including commercials), Nielsen includes the digital audience in the station’s ratings. The station sells more valuable audiovisual ads at a higher CPM. Yes, there is a patent for the simultaneous stream and broadcast of audiovisual content by a radio station.
They also have to have the rights to air the videos on FAST style channels which Vevo and XITE already have. There are songs that either record companies, artists, etc. have videos for that TV stations do not have the rights to air for any particular reason.
Terrestrial radio as it exist today is simply not compatible with 21st century technology. Successfully fusing terrestrial broadcasting, a hundred year old technology, with the Internet has not been accomplished because it isn’t possible. As the business of AM/FM broadcasting declined, revenues are off 50% from their peak, broadcasters should have created and promoted a new Internet based business model separate and apart from their AM/FM businesses. Unfortunately, they failed to do this. . As a result, radio has lost much of its audience to Internet savvy content creators by trying to protect their existing business model..
The writing was on the wall! At the RAIN conference in 2009, Triton Research proclaimed that the typical Millennial could not name the call letters of a single radio station. Imagine how disconnected Get Z is now. Here in Los Angeles, seven of the top ten stations cater to listeners over fifty.
AM/FM as a profitable business model is failing. Advertisers now expect the analytics and direct connectivity and focus that the Internet offers and that radio BROADcasters will never be able to provide.
An app is not the answer to terrestrial radio’s decline. An all new Internet based business model is what’s required. One that offers advertisers direct connectivity to consumers through digital marketing campaigns that are focused and that provide the deep analytics that advertisers now demand.
Radio as we have known it has no place in a digital future; it must evolve. No one will listen to eight minute stopsets and twenty minutes of commercials an hour in a world of abundant commercial free content, streaming, and consumer controlled programming. It’s time for broadcasters to realize that the Internet is a not only a far superior delivery system, but it’s where the audience now lives… Embrace it! This will require a complete rethinking of how to entertain audiences and serve the needs of advertisers. .
The landscape has significantly changed since the ‘70s, when the 8-track was going up against a limited set of local offerings from radio. Now, we have literally almost the entire planet’s worth of content available in our phones, which we can take anywhere and isn’t tied to the car.
I’ve been saying it for the past decade: Radio needs to pull its head out of the sand. Just because the industry made it this far doesn’t mean it will survive anything; what got you here won’t get you there. The excuses that “we survived cassettes” and “we’re indispensable during natural disasters” won’t stand up against modern technology and everyday use/entertainment.
At this point, despite a lifelong love of the industry, I’ve basically given up on U.S. radio (SiriusXM included even though it’s not terrestrial). Almost 100% of my listening is either to streams of stations from other countries or podcasts. If listeners aren’t getting what they want from terrestrial radio, the barrier to finding something they do want has dropped to impossibly easy-to-overcome levels, so U.S. radio needs to stop resting on its decades-old laurels and actually make itself competitive again.