Radio Wants to Be Trusted for Curation. Now What?

Can human curation be a difference-maker for music radio? That was the suggestion made earlier this month by Strategic Solutions Research’s Hal Rood, prompted by revelations in the tech publication Wired about a market agency charged with hyping DSP streaming activity. “Radio just got handed an opportunity it hasn’t fully claimed yet,” Rood wrote. 

But is the industry willing to claim that opportunity now? Does radio have enough curators left in this moment of endless layoffs? Would they be allowed to use their ears and practice music enterprise as opposed to just looking harder for songs with a streaming story? Where does reclaiming curation and music discovery fit among radio’s other challenges and opportunities?

Even without a scandal as catalyst, Triple-A stations have been successfully emphasizing “humans, not algorithms” for a while now, as evidenced by format’s seemingly monthly surprise success stories — most recently heritage  WXRT Chicago and non-comm KEXP Seattle. Next week, the latter station’s camp meets in Philadelphia for the WXPN-sponsored NON-COMMvention 2026.

Country WKDF Nashville was beginning to generate industry and ratings noise before dropping Nielsen. But most stations ceded music discovery a while ago, choosing to emphasize personality instead, because “anybody can play the same music.” Here’s why they should reconsider, and what that would look like, on and off the air. (“Music discovery” and “trusted curation” are not the same things, of course, but while “music chosen for you” is a positive in any format, most of the industry’s hype machine is on behalf of new music.)

Of course, companionship and music go together. If you’re reading Ross on Radio, chances are better that you talked to somebody about the new or old music you like today than about what Blake Lively posted on Instagram yesterday. Shouldn’t radio personalities do the same? As radio’s influence on new music has waned, “friends and family” as an influence has risen. If we are the listeners’ friends again, it’s a natural opening.

If you don’t want to compete for “the same music as everybody else” don’t play “the same music as everybody else.” My biggest issue with watching Spotify and TikTok is not that some of the success stories are possibly rigged, but that they have become the only place where the record and radio industries look for stories, especially in pop. Triple-A and Country still have a lot of “radio records,” and appear to be thriving for that. For curation to be a selling point, we need to actually curate, and radio needs to be more than “streaming, but weeks later.”

A sweeper won’t do it. Whether “live and local” or “no subscription fees,” radio’s campaigns have always started with a sweeper and not always moved beyond it. At most formats, the stagers that said “music discovery” didn’t work because they weren’t reinforced (and because they weren’t always in front of truly new music). In my listening to WXRT over the last half-decade, I haven’t heard it positioning around new music, because it doesn’t have to. For other stations, I’m in favor of telling the story, but it has to resonate. In this case, the messaging is in the music.

Be careful whose credibility you impugn. If you want to take advantage of the opportunity Rood cites, you will have to find a way to explain that the music on ISP and social media is subject to manipulation, and make the listener care. Then you will have to be sure that listener doesn’t immediately hear the contest promo that thanks a label for promotional consideration or, on some stations, the one stating outright that some spins are paid for. If you don’t think listeners notice or care about those disclaimers, maybe you’re right. But how then are we going to get to care about somebody else’s malfeasance?

Create opportunities to talk about music, new and old. Okay, not every jock break about music was great, back in the day. Sometimes it was “that was, this is.” Sometimes they would backsell and casually throw in “good song!”; programmers knew that was code for “actually, I despise this record.” Maybe it was that “Stevie Nicks misheard Tom Petty’s wife say ‘age’” anecdote about “Edge of Seventeen” that always seems to come up. Recently, there’s been a lot of “this artist just dropped a new superstar collaboration today, but we’re going to play something else.”

But in general, even talking about our songs has been challenged, first by morning shows that partitioned jock content away from music, even when a show was local and a backsell could have happened. Then, voice-tracked content everywhere else meant that a host wasn’t backselling the music, wasn’t listening to the music in real time, and might be cutting a generic break where they didn’t even know what song had just played. Are we willing to address that?

My suggestion for getting the music discussion flowing again starts with “frontsell/backsell plus one” — some brief, non-rote comment or observation about the song you’re talking about. Artist info counts. So do requests. So does telling the story of the song and relating it to the listener. Anything that forces just a little bit of forethought about music in the break is a move forward. The more elaborate challenge is to … 

Put the process on the radio. Nearly a decade ago, as radio’s new-music hegemony began to crumble, I suggested renaming your music director the “music supervisor,” and making that person a consistent on-air presence. I also suggested deputizing listeners in the music process in a way that goes beyond online callout research and putting them on the air as well. 

Take the process beyond the radio. No matter how much effort your station puts into curation, the people who most need to know about it may be the ones who are barely listening at the moment. Because radio does have so many issues at the moment, I don’t know if this is what I would emphasize in a major marketing campaign, were such a thing somehow possible, but it is an opportunity for stations to reach beyond the cume via socials, and additional off-air content.

Take the process beyond Triple-A … and Country. As Triple-A becomes the “music discovery” format, it seems to have freed its adjacent format to become “Alternative Gold.” To listen to even a well-programmed Alternative station now is to realize that programmers think “Fly Away” by Lenny Kravitz is stronger than any new song they can play. Alternative has a 45-year music-discovery franchise, and I’d love to hear the station that reclaims it. Recently, several iHeart Classic Rock stations rebranded themselves as just “rock”—suggesting that there’s not enough recent rock music to necessitate a distinction.

It’s easy for the industry to pigeonhole Triple-A as the only place where listeners have a deep enough connection to the music to care about a steady stream of new excitement. But “connection to the music” is pretty well documented in Country, as well, and now with WKDF, we’re seeing that play out on the air. I would listen to the station Rood envisions that fights for listeners’ trust, and backs it up. But all formats would be a little better if we were just using music and music discovery to relate a little more to listeners.