Tag: radio

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Radio’s Next Great Format May Have Nothing to Do With Traditional Radio

Dave Van Dyke’s  [Bridge Ratings Media Research] recent essay suggests that radio’s next great format could be “the wisdom of its own audience“. Using AI to organize thousands of listener responses that local personalities can turn into programming is a great concept.

I just don’t think it’s strong enough.

As a technologist, I’ve argued three things about the disruption to terrestrial radio:

1. The disruption to radio’s audience is catastrophic and probably unrepairable. The audience isn’t zero. The revenue isn’t zero. Radio isn’t disappearing tomorrow.

That’s not the point.

The mass audience that once made radio such an efficient cash machine is fragmented to the point that no single ‘bolt-on’ approach can fix. I keep seeing ideas floated that are trying to win back pieces of an audience that no longer behaves like an audience.

A podcast doesn’t solve that.

A You Tube studio cam isn’t the answer either.

Putting the station on Facebook, X, TikTok or any streaming service is a bandage covering a mortal wound. Radio has spent decades optimizing a dying model that crumbled when the technology shifted the valuable commodity to information and data over audience size.

2. Radio needs to make a much larger pivot.

The industry has historically packaged audiences. Ratings tell advertisers how many people were there, when they were there and roughly who they were. That made sense when the viable commodity was access to a mass audience.

Today, audience is fragmented and attention is increasingly personalized. Radio’s future isn’t about finding a better way to count listeners. The future is all about finding a better things to know about them. Information that is useful.

I’m talking about the kind of information that is potentially much more valuable than demographics, psychographics, geography, or buying habits.

What problems are appearing before institutions know about them?

What local events are unfolding that don’t yet exist in a database?

What is actually happening in the community right now?

AI creates a fascinating possibility here. Thousands of individual observations can potentially be collected, classified, geographically organized, compared, verified and turned into something useful.

The product isn’t “more engagement.”

– It’s community intelligence.

3. Radio still possesses something its disruptors cannot easily duplicate.

A license and a tower to transmit. If signal area is a limitation, then you must flip the script and use the asset in a way the disruptive technologies simply cannot match.

Others have said it. Not sure anybody’s listening.

– Radio is hyper-local.

That’s a magic bullet and the corporations do not understand how to do it.

The local business owner gets it. So does the auto repair shop, the car dealer and the beverage distributor.  Their entire customer base is local and that’s where they keep their focus.

Re-imagine the platform to combine localized reach, simultaneous distribution, free reception and the ability to communicate with an well defined community without requiring every person to buy, configure and upgrade a device that spies on their private lives.

Now, re-imagine the content, laser focused on everyday experiences, neighborhoods, and responsive in real-time to the people who actually live there.

When used correctly, AI has some amazing skills; pattern matching, data compilation, source attribution. Start with the human journalists and creative personalities with the means to interpret, challenge and verify AI observations. Find the engaging, report the vitals and share the local experiences.

The new architecture becomes:

People → observations → AI distillation → human creative judgment → community → people

That’s very different from:

People → ratings → advertisers.

And it is very different from doing yet another AI-generated or voice track show.

Van Dyke understands that AI could allow the personality to “hear the entire room.”

I’d simply ask the question another way: What if the benefit isn’t to hear the room better?

What if the benefit is to know what’s really happening in the room?

The pivot could produce something radio hasn’t really had before: a continuously updated, real-time model of the exact community it serves.

The things people are experiencing before they’re reported anywhere else.

The AI doesn’t decide what’s true. It’s a tool to identify patterns, contradictions and confidence levels. Humans still provide judgment, verification, accountability and the creative spark to engage.

The on-air signal still does what it has always done remarkably well:

Reach an entire community, live – 24/7.

A former Apple evangelist talks about how HP revolutionized printing. HP  didn’t just introduce a new font, they made the printer 1000 times better.

Radio won’t survive if the goal is to just become more interesting.

Radio must become more useful.

AI could be part of an answer, helping the local broadcaster build a new kind of community network. That’s a much bigger bet . Potentially, a much more interesting, and lucrative future.

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Better Than Health Insurance…


My first job after college was at a small radio station south of Phoenix, AZ. We needed a swing man. Someone to cover weekend shifts. We found a local guy with a great voice who understood the station, knew the market and was willing to work for the ‘beans and rice’ wage we were going to offer.

He made it through every round of interviews. Then, in the final interview with the whole team, he asked the General Manager what his out-of-pocket cost would be for health insurance. He had a young family. The GM didn’t blink.

“We have something better than health insurance here. You get 25% off from our client, ABC Dental.”

The candidate would ultimately decline the job offer.
– I’m guessing ABC Dental was disappointed too.

Weeks later, I was still working an extra weekend night shift when two fire trucks went past the studio window, followed by an ambulance. Out of nowhere, the General Manager came running in, grabbed the remote transmitter pack and headed for the door. He was going to cover the fire.

He called from the scene a few minutes later.

“This is a big fire,” he told us. “Right at Five Points, downtown.”

He wanted to go live immediately. I had about 45 seconds left in the song.

“Cut it. Get me on the air.” he barked.

You’re the boss, I said to myself. I killed the music, introduced the breaking news and put Matt on-air.

“This is Mad Dogg Matt, er, General Manager Matt Morton, live at the scene of a major fire downtown. I’ve got a firefighter here. Let’s see if he’ll say a few words.”

The firefighter came on.

“Hi, Matt. Yeah, this is a controlled burn. We’ve got two rookie teams training tonight. It was in the newspaper all week. You didn’t know?”

Dead Air.

In my feeble attempt to rescue the moment I asked if any roads were closed.

“No” Matt said. “That’s it from Five Points, back to you in the studio.”

“Thank you, Matt Morton.” I summoned my best stoic announcer voice and stole a joke.

“When news breaks, we fix it. B-105 FM.” I let the record spin.
– Robert Palmer, “Addicted to Love”.

For years I thought stories like these were about individual managers with big egos and bad judgment. The cheap boss. The overconfident boss. The boss who mistakes having authority for having good instincts.

I don’t think that anymore.

I think organizations develop quiet agreements about what is allowed to be questioned. At that radio station, the agreement was simple. The boss’s instincts don’t get challenged in the moment. Everyone understood calling out the absurdity was more painful than living with the error.

I think is the number one reason perfectly ordinary, hard working teams, collectively end with remarkably stupid outcomes.

We all silently agreed you could not ask the hard question out loud.

“Is this really a good idea?”

Sometimes organizational culture is nothing more complicated than the answer to that single question. Sometimes, the only acceptable answer is:

“Shhh~ the boss is doing journalism.”

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“AI Sherpa”

Jacobs Media Newsletter AI Edge
Jacobs Media Free Newsletter “AI Edge”

If you love and listen to radio anytime (almost anywhere) over the last 20+ years, I can almost promise that you’ve been exposed to the creative genius of Fred and Paul Jacobs. These gentlemen have been thought leaders and top level consultants to the industry since I was a little baby DJ at Central Michigan University.

Fred Jacobs founded Jacobs Media in 1983. He was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2018 and is widely credited with creating the “Classic Rock” format.  Brother Paul Jacobs  joined the firm in 1991; is an expert in all “rock formats” and is indeed a “sales savant”, helping radio stations “ring the cash register” for decades.

When these guys talk, the smart radio executives (and the ones who win consistently) pay attention.  Jacobs Media has been talking about disruption in the radio industry for years.   They take radio executives on a carefully guided tour of the CES Show in Las Vegas annually.  In 2020, Jacobs Media added an app development team .

You won’t find Jacobs clients among the cast of characters in my post about ‘Larry the Liquidators List of Losers‘.   Now, they’ve just announced a new free service to help the industry better understand the most impactful technology disruption broadcasters have ever faced: AI.  AI Edge: A Practical Guide to AI for Broadcasters.

~ Of course, you can always continue to make ‘buggy whips’. 

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Who’s “Watching” Radio?

If you are or have been employed in the entertainment business, it might be you.  Tens of thousands of industry employees, particularly those who work for media companies who have exposure radio properties with stock as part of the compensation plan have watched these accounts implode in recent years.

Six years ago, Audacy Inc. Chief Executive Officer David Field proclaimed the radio business was “massively undervalued”.  This wildly incorrect presumption literally cost the Field family their fortune.  Sadly, they are not alone.  Shares of iHeart Media, the nations largest radio chain, have fallen from a peak of $27 and change to below $5, now sitting at about $2.79.  The drop for the nation’s second largest radio operator Cumulus Media have not been as dramatic, but share prices here are also below the $5 threshold.

It’s not necessarily, doom and gloom for everyone in radioland.  Satellite radio operator  SiriusXM received a much needed endorsement from Warren Buffett as Berkshire-Hathaway reveled they’ve taken a small ownership position.  Cox Media began shedding it’s terrestrial broadcast properties in 2012 lifting their fortunes to become one of the top three wealthiest families.

So what went wrong?  Market analysts will tell us that  despite projected audience growth, revenues are down since the pandemic.  Technology has disrupted the business, fragmented the audience and the revenue streams and like the proverbial ‘buggy whip makers’, old school radio broadcasts and the traditional ways of consuming audio are simply less relevant in people’s lives.

Radio will always be special to me.  I grew listening to the truly great ones like Paul Harvey, Don Imus, & JP McCarthy.  My career began in on-air, doing sales and then moving with the technology explosion, into research.  Radio lost it’s luster for me when technology became the easy replacement for talent.  It was clear then and it is more obvious today, that removing talent from the mix does not improve the product.  You can’t fight technology using antiquated business strategies and out dated tools.  Scaling up the business to a bloated, unmanageable size simply means gaining an increasing share of a shrinking market.  We don’t need ‘Larry the Liquidator’ to tell us that is a proven formula for failure.

I don’t spend much time with commercial, terrestrial radio these days unless I’m on the freeway at rush hour and need a traffic report [Thank you WWJ-AM!].  Honestly, I used to get traffic from SiriusXM, but they recently decided to drop this content. [Who do I talk to about that?]  I digitized my personal music collection years ago.  When I get tired of the ‘chatter’ on SxM, I punch up my own playlist, or an audio book, or a podcast and enjoy the ride.  My music collection hasn’t grown much these last years but when I want new music, SxM has me covered there too- commercial free.  I am not alone.

Can radio ever recover?

I’m not going to give out stock picks here but I dumped my company provided VIACOM stock years ago.  If you’re looking for places in entertainment stocks to hold your nest egg, APPLE would have been a much better bet than any company heavily exposed to broadcasting.  These days, you need growth companies.  Innovators.  Places that seek, hire and employ TALENT.

Radio will recover only when it’s leadership begins to think and function like an innovator.  This key pivot requires an ability to develop a culture that rewards creativity over conformity.   Old rules do not apply and must intentionally be broken.   The ‘global village’ is now omni-present.

Broadcast 101: “the medium is the message”
– Marshall McLuhan

If this theory is still true, it must be re-examined in context because the tools of the trade (delivering audio content) have changed at a fundamental level.  What is the true value of a broadcast license?  What does a tower and a transmitter do well that can’t be done with wifi, 5G Cellular or whatever platform comes next?

Radio needs to better understand the competition and their audience.  When Rich Meyer founded Mediabase/MMR, he wasn’t trying to disrupt the industry.  Instead, we were dedicated to disrupting the dreaded practice of ‘paper adds’.  Our mission was all about problem solving, not simply to be the last one standing.  Technology innovators today don’t concern themselves with media theory.  They focus on ‘making meaning’ and fabricating a new paradigm with the game solidly tilted to favor their platforms, their licensing rules and their way of thinking. ‘Scorched Earth’ isn’t just a strategy- it’s an objective.

Finally, someone in the C Suites (or someone capable of earning that corner office) needs to start asking much better questions.  Tech companies  are notorious for asking the impossible or unsolvable interview questions.  They don’t care about the answer as much as they seek to deconstruct a candidate’s way of thinking.

How you define a problem significantly improves your ability to solve it.  Content “Code Cruncher” Harry Kovsky built a lasting legacy  on the principle that once you ‘separate reality from perception’, the path forward becomes clear.  Radio will not survive in it’s present form.  Are you bold enough to try and break the mold?

Passing Thought…

The big reason radio stations can’t just ‘bolt-on’ a podcasting division, is the misperception about what the audience wants from pre-recorded audio.  Yes, they appreciate professional grade production values, but they also want to be stimulated in new ways.   New stories and new story telling styles offer a glimpse into the  mind of millennials and Gen Z.  And they don’t conform to the conventional wisdom or navigate the traditional doors of perception.

Consider these offerings from our friends at the Public Radio Alliance and Pacific Norwest Stories:

TANIS – EPISODE 101 “Seeking Tanis. Runner Available.”

The Black Tapes – EPISODE 109 “Name That Tune”