We used to read newspapers, too. Think about when we were kids. Every city of any size had multiple newspapers, including evening papers, something that, in practical terms, does not exist today. In fact, we’ve reached what used to be an unthinkable scenario: an increasing number of markets have no daily newspaper. It’s all online now, and with severely diminished newsrooms at that. Yet there’s still a public hunger for news; it’s just that we get it from a wider range of more convenient (and often free, like radio) sources.
We’re also left to determine which sources are reliable, but that’s a topic for another column.
Time marches on. The corner grocery or bodega is now home delivery from a supermarket. Television still broadcasts over the air, but streaming is now how people get their video fix, and the entire movie rental business came and went in an eye blink. Practically everything changes as technology improves and the public gravitates to the most convenient option. You don’t need the proverbial buggy whip when a car will get you from place to place far faster. Also, there’s a lot less horse poop this way.
Radio is not immune to the technological inexorability. As it turns out, people do like customizable audio entertainment that doesn’t need to conform to a schedule. You can listen to exactly the music you want, when you want it. You can hear entire talk shows — or see them on YouTube — at your leisure. The medium is quickly moving to an individualized model, and if broadcast radio can do that, it hasn’t shown its cards yet.
The industry relied on ubiquity (and Ibiquity, yet another column) and digital signals and half-assed marketing campaigns (RIP, “Radio Heard Here”) while it could have sunk that money into customization and time-shifting. Oh, well. Meanwhile, Spotify is getting a ton of publicity with its annual “Wrapped” release that tells listeners what they listened to the most this year. As it stands now, radio can’t, and isn’t, doing that.
(Speaking of which, my “Wrapped” got sabotaged this year by one fateful decision: On a drive up to Savannah and back, Fran wanted to hear Bad Bunny, and I let Spotify do the programming. As a result, my lists were dominated by Reggaeton artists. I happen to like Reggaeton, but not THAT much.)
None of this means radio goes away tomorrow, of course. The number of car purchasing cycles needed to replace all those car radios that are primarily AM/FM is still high, and people aren’t replacing their cars as often (finally, someone realized that keeping an older but operable car on the road costs less, even at inflated car repair prices, than the monthly payment on a new car with a fancy CarPlay or Android Auto head unit).
My car, like many of yours, still requires several menu steps before audio will stream through it via Bluetooth. It’s just easier to hit the ignition button and hear whatever happens to be on the radio at that point. For me, it tends to be local hosts complaining about the Dolphins and criticizing how the Hurricanes are behind Notre Dame in the rankings despite having beaten the Irish earlier in the season. None of that matters much to me — I’m not a fan of the local teams — but I’m just not going to spend time finding the Bluetooth option on the (admittedly terrible) Volvo radio to use it.
(Incidentally, have you seen car prices these days? How does anyone afford a new or recent used car? And they all look the same and have those troublesome CVT transmissions. I’d love a bright, shiny new SUV, but not at those prices. Jeez.)
Yes, it’s a coulda-shoulda-woulda argument again. Coulda focused more on the technical issues. Shoulda come up with ways to make radio — broadcast or streaming or both — customizable. Woulda maybe kept broadcast radio viable for longer.
It’s still viable for now, but less so with every passing moment. It’s not like this isn’t happening in every other medium, either. The exercise is not so much second-guessing as it is performing an autopsy on a body that’s not quite dead yet.
And AI is not going to save you. But, yet again, that’s another column for another time.
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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.
