If there’s a future for broadcast radio, maybe we’re going about it the wrong way.
Last week, with Bell Media jettisoning 45 stations across Canada and proclaiming that radio is “not a viable business anymore,” you’d assume that radio’s even deader than we thought it already was. A major broadcaster selling off almost half of its stations isn’t a good sign, is it?
Maybe it is, and maybe it’s a way to extend the lifespan of the medium. Hear me out: Radio as practiced by the consolidators, largely operated on a national level, has fallen victim to private equity (no growth, no future), ad agency aversion (no digital, no buys), you know the story. We’ve also seen success stories, and they tend to involve smaller operators whose businesses are local, local, local — local programming, sold to local clients by local sales staffs, often without a ratings printout in sight. And we know that many of the station clusters owned by the major operators would be profitable if not for their pressing debt.
So…taking radio out of the hands of debt-laden companies and putting it in the hands of local operators who don’t rely on national sales or programming might extend the lifespan of radio as a viable medium. The Bell selloff has stations in smaller markets heading to smaller groups, and depending on what the prices are, there might be a way to restore what radio used to be – smaller operations needing to rake in fewer dollars to cover expenses and make a tidy profit rather than having to kick in a lot of cash to service massive debt.
Or maybe not. Maybe the new operators will experience the same issues the big guys have been battling, A Bell official was quoted by the Canadian Press as saying radio “is a business that is going in the wrong direction.”
Perhaps it’s too late. Or perhaps what’s “the wrong direction” for a massive telecommunications company with much larger interests in wireless and television (and severely cutting back on its TV operations as well) is a viable business model for companies that keep the debt load low and concentrate on local business in 2024, especially if they can combine radio with effective locally-created digital assets.
(This also opens the door for stations where the audience is older. Agencies aren’t buying 55+, but local clients aren’t locked into that. You might see more stations like John Sebastian’s The WOW Factor or Dick Robinson’s Legends 100.3 here in West Palm, and it would be a boon for talk radio. Just let’s do it on FM. I don’t think you can save AM in the long term, for reasons we’ve discussed here before.)
And the same isn’t true for television. Other than local news, which has diminished for decades, the local element in television is long gone in an era of on-demand, anything-you-want-whenever-you-want-it video choices. The internet is practically infinite and the difficulty of making a local site work has been illustrated time and again, while social media, untethered to any particular location, has sucked advertising and marketing dollars away from everyone. Newspapers… oy.
Even direct mail isn’t what it used to be. Local radio? Also not what it was, but if small market stations are going to effectively be discarded, and someone can pick up stations for a nominal price that can be supported by sending local AEs out on the street with media kits, reasonable rates, and an audience to sell, that’s something.
Now, the critical question? Knowing all this, would you invest in a radio station, and if you would, what would you do with it? How long do you expect radio to remain viable, leaving debt out of the equation for now (imagine everyone just going bankrupt, debt discharged, stations sold on the cheap, back to square one)? I would think there are better investments, but you can say that for all media – I wouldn’t buy a TV station, I wouldn’t pay for a website, I wouldn’t try to rescue a newspaper. The answer may be, as I’ve speculated, some form of public broadcasting rather than reliance on commercial sales. But if you would buy a radio license and do have the money and do have a plan, it would be interesting to see how it would go.
I’ll just stand over here and listen. I got other things to worry about.
Perry Michael Simon is a weekly news media columnist for Barrett Media. He previously served as VP and Editor/News-Talk-Sports/Podcast for AllAccess.com. Prior to joining the industry trade publication, Perry spent years in radio working as a Program Director and Operations Manager for KLSX and KLYY in Los Angeles and New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @PMSimon.
