For years, broadcasters have been told that the future of radio listening would increasingly move online. Yet despite widespread internet access, smartphones in nearly every pocket, and the availability of streaming platforms, the percentage of FM radio listeners who regularly consume their favorite music stations online has not grown as dramatically as many hoped. While station web streams are certainly being used in place of a radio, they have not come close to becoming the primary listening method for most radio audiences.
One reason is surprisingly simple: convenience. Traditional radio remains one of the easiest forms of media usage ever created. Edison Research’s Q4 2025 Share of Ear data shows that AM/FM listening is still overwhelmingly old-school: among adults 25–54, only 14% of AM/FM radio listening happens through digital streams, while 86% still happens over the air. Turn on a car, press a button, and radio instantly appears. There is no need to unlock a phone, launch an app, search for content, or make decisions.
Ironically, that same convenience is also the reason many listeners bypass radio altogether when they leave or avoid the FM dial. Instead of going online to find their favorite station, many people simply open Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music or another streaming service and play exactly what they want to hear. If someone is already reaching for their phone, they are often more inclined to choose their own music rather than a radio station’s playlist, commercials, and personalities. This creates a difficult challenge for broadcasters. The content being delivered over the air may be enough for passive listening, but not compelling enough to convince listeners to seek it out online.
Another factor holding back digital growth is the poor quality of many radio station web streams. In 2026, it is still common to encounter station streams running at low bitrates with poor sound quality, excessive audio processing, distortion, and compression. Too many streams sound as though they were designed for the bandwidth limitations of 2005 rather than today’s broadband and mobile networks. Spotify recently introduced “lossless” quality on many streams, with breathtaking “as-good-as-it-gets” audio quality. Meanwhile many stations’ streams sound really awful.
The result is an experience that immediately feels outdated, even if a station’s content itself is excellent. Let’s go back in history and remember that this is why FM radio blew up and wiped music stations off the AM dial. Younger audiences have grown up with crystal-clear streaming services and premium headphones. When they sample a radio station online and hear harsh muddy, crunchy processing, metallic artifacts, and heavily compressed audio, it reinforces the perception that radio is an aging medium struggling to keep up with technology. And TV viewers would never tolerate a station offering a blurry, low-resolution black-and-white picture with poor audio while Netflix and YouTube, delivered pristine quality.
Over the past six years, people have remarked how excellent Liveline’s audio presentation is, not only by developing our own technology to deliver the metadata live on our affiliate’s RDS and web stream, but by having our own app which embraces a full, clean, 128kbps MP3 with absolutely no processing or compression. When you think about it, you don’t need normalization or heavy processing (especially on web streams) if the elements in your audio library are calibrated and inserted correctly.
Since 1995 when John Garabedian and his team at Open House Party went digital, (which is where we do the show from now) every song and production element is manually levelled and played back into the system. That’s something I’ve admired and rarely see today.
We’ve taken the visual aspect a step further, by making sure every song on our Liveline app has cover art and is labeled identically to what the artist intended on Spotify, something most stations ignore–songs like “WHERE IS MY HUSBAND! by RAYE, or “iloveitiloveitiloveit” by Bella Kay, and all the other weird upper/lower case stuff they do. I’ve been a maniac for perfection my whole life and don’t like things that look cheap, which has likely heavily contributed to why I am here today. A motto I live by is that attention to detail is the difference between excellence and mediocrity.
In 2026 there are better places for people to find their favorite music than on a radio. For successful music stations today, radio’s superpower is companionship, entertainment, and human connection. The lure of familiar, entertaining personalities must engage and bond radio listeners to build habit, which increases cume and TSL Lingering programming issues that are well-known within the industry (unbearably long commercial breaks, bland uninteresting personalities hyping websites and apps, instead of live, fun listener interaction), means there is nothing compelling on too many stations. Add to this crunchy, muddy overprocessed stream audio, and audiences don’t find anything appealing for them. Stations that embrace this reality and deal with it are the ones that will grow again.
