Thank you for checking out The Industry According To… Every Tuesday we speak with a different expert or leader from somewhere in the vast music industry — label executives, artist managers, programmers, talent, artists, consultants, and beyond. To be considered as a future guest, email me at keithblackboxgroup@gmail.com.
Today we sit down with an industry leader, veteran, and passionate advocate for our medium who works with more influential programmers, talent and brands than just about anyone else in the country, Jeff Sottolano. He is the Chief Programming Officer for Audacy, responsible for the content strategy and performance of all local brands across all formats in broadcasting, streaming, and podcasting.
In his role, Jeff leads key company initiatives including the sustained excellence of its local brands, development of new national and syndicated programs including Katie Neal and Bru, the multiplatform evolution of its local sports and entertainment brands into podcasting and video, and countless artist-partnership programs like Audacy’s LAUNCH program which has helped propel the careers of artists like Jelly Roll and Alex Warren. Jeff has spent his whole career with Audacy and its predecessors CBS Radio and Entercom, starting his career as a college intern in Rochester, NY 25 years ago.
So, let’s dive in.
*Editor’s Note: Answers have been edited for clarity and length.*
The Culture Reset
Keith: I’ve heard first-hand that the culture inside Audacy has become very positive and an environment where people really enjoy working. You’ve been a central force in reshaping the internal culture. What did you see that needed to evolve — and what were the first steps you took to shift a company that big after CBS and Entercom merged to form Audacy?
Jeff: It really wasn’t until the CBS Radio/Entercom merger in 2017 that I really understood the impact culture has on an organization and its employees’ performance. The merger, the pandemic and navigating the bankruptcy process were really challenging and noisy environments for our teams to operate in. Under Kelli and Chris’ leadership, I believe we have an increased sense of purpose, clarity in our mission, and an understanding of what it takes to win. I have always believed deeply in transparency with my teams. We have real challenges as an industry – who doesn’t?! – and I think in some cases, rose colored glasses weren’t helping us enable the kind of change we needed to enact to transform those challenges into opportunities.
Content-First
Keith: It’s been widely reported that the company is going through a major restructuring, transitioning from a traditional geography-based model to a content-first strategy centralized around format verticals. Explain some of the benefits of this transition for both the company and the audience, and how it differs from how the company operated even earlier this year.
Jeff: If you think about the way the local media industry has operated for most of its existence, you essentially had locally operated businesses with market CEOs that were multi-disciplinary and oversaw resources across departments as varied as sales, content, engineering and human resources. Obviously, that’s changed, and like every other business in the modern economy, we need to embrace the benefits of both specialization and subject-matter expertise. The goal of our new market and programming structure is to enable our leaders to be most impactful in the areas where they can make the biggest difference. We are seeing increased collaboration across markets and content leadership, and it’s enabling better outcomes for our local brands and increased monetization opportunities across markets. At the same time, our revenue leaders have increased their capacity to develop new business and really understand our clients’ needs.
The Modern Programming Mandate
Keith: Being a good programmer used to mean mastering the basics of music, clocks, promotions and execution. Today it’s more complex — understanding numerous data systems, designing content for multiple platforms, getting more out of smaller teams, competing with an entirely different universe of content, and the need for good talent coaching has never been more important. If you had to isolate one or two, what are the most important skills PDs must be great at today?
Jeff: I think about programmers the way I think about talent. A select few of them are outstanding across every single discipline, including coaching talent, developing big revenue-generating ideas, understanding research and analytics, creative writing, and managing a P&L. At the end of the day, my job is to put them in the right position to amplify their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses by providing them with the right support. I value three soft skills more than anything: Creativity – not just traditional ideas but also resourcefulness, Collaboration – great leaders have to be able to motivate teams towards a common goal and not just their direct reports, and Ethic – putting in the reps and being obsessed with the work is the difference maker more often than not in delivering results.
The Talent Equation
Keith: Nearly everyone agrees, talent is still the biggest differentiator in audio, but thetalent pipeline at radio is thinner, budgets to pay talent are smaller, yet expectations to improve content quality and quantity are higher. How is Audacy going about not only developing young talent, but discovering them and getting them interested in radio/audio?
Jeff: This has to be a collective effort and point of emphasis for each and every one of us in radio in 2026. We do it the traditional ways – through engagement with universities, local career fairs, etc. – and the non-traditional ways – through sourcing candidates from social media, scouting talent at local comedy clubs. I met with a recent SU grad in our offices last week and offered to put him in touch with the head of programming at another company. I would love for him to work for us, but it’s more important to me that his passion for this medium is rewarded – even if that means working for a “competitor.”
What Does Local Even Mean
Keith: “Local” is having a renaissance — but what does local even mean in 2026? Top podcasts aren’t local to any city. Syndicated shows still crush at radio. Updates on city council, lost-dog reports, garage sales, and road construction won’t lure listeners or advertisers, so how should stations be thinking about local these days?
Jeff: We have to understand the distinction between local content and local relevance. We have to be RELEVANT and COMPELLING to local audiences. Sometimes that means we do it with local content – certainly that’s the case in news and sports. But do sports stations not air the NFL playoffs or the Super Bowl when their team is not playing? Of course not! Is Taylor Swift’s NYC wedding a bigger story than that weekend’s turnip festival? Of course it is! It’s a false choice to pit local against national, whether it’s content, talent, or distribution. Great content wins – our job is to figure it out when it matters most to be locally relevant and how to leverage scale when it makes sense.
The Ratings Reality
Keith: Nielsen is important, advertisers agree, but even Nielsen admits their numbers are only estimates based on an ever-changing panel that’s less than 1% of the market — yet those metrics shape the entire radio economy. What in-house data systems has Audacy developed to use along with Nielsen numbers to help give your sales teams and programmers the most accurate lay of the land?
Jeff: For a long time, we have considered Nielsen to be only part of how we evaluate our brands, talent and content performance for ourselves and our advertisers. Certainly, the biggest development has been our access to first-party data from digital distribution, including streaming on the Audacy app, through our partnerships with iHeartRadio and TuneIn, on smart speakers, and increasingly across video and podcasts. This gives us real-time information on the performance of our content without having to account for either Nielsen’s small sample size or the delay in receiving that data.
Now the Revenue Reality
Keith: Everyone in the industry knows the revenue picture is challenging — stop sets can’t get any bigger, and traditional dollars are shrinking faster than digital dollars are growing. From your vantage point, where does the next wave of meaningful revenue come from, and how should content teams be evolving to meet that reality?
Jeff: The word community has never been hotter in marketing, and it speaks to exactly what we’ve been doing for 100 years – building communities around our local brands and talent. The real opportunity lies in how we create new ways for marketers to engage with those communities beyond traditional linear inventory. At Audacy, we’re experimenting with subscription products, an expansion of our live events strategy to sports and podcasting and newsletters as ways we can do that – all while continuing to draw on and strengthen the relationship between our listeners and our brands.
The Transmitter Question
Keith: Streaming changed everything, and it feels inevitable that at some point transmitters won’t be the primary way audiences consume radio. Inside a company like Audacy, what’s the realistic timeline you’re planning for when towers become secondary — used mostly for emergencies or outlier coverage — and digital becomes the clear, dominant platform for consumption?
Jeff: If I knew the answer to this question, I’d be speaking as a futurist at a TED conference instead of appearing in this column. There remains a love affair between Americans, cars and radio and as long as that’s the case, the towers aren’t going anywhere. I think it’s less about planning for when they go away and more about being opportunistic to find new distribution channels and reach new audiences. Clearly, that’s been a big shift at Audacy – we want our content to be distributed everywhere – largely because we believe we produce best-in-class content that can win and attract an audience wherever we put it.
Jeff the Intern
Keith: I love your story — you started as an intern at CBS Radio, which technically means you’ve been with the same company since then. Nowadays, you’re focused on things like massive budgets, acquisitions, the necessary pains of downsizing or rightsizing, rights fees, or even lawsuits. What duties do you remember doing as an intern, and what words of advice do you have for someone who may become a radio intern this summer?
Jeff: I remember getting called into the office to be told I was being hired as a part timer by Mike Danger – then PD at WZNE and WPXY and now our Rochester Operations Manager and a Regional Top 40 Brand Manager – and Jason Beatty – then Promotions Director and now a broadcast media professor at UNLV – and being told my first job was to clean out the station van and having the biggest grin on my face as I did it.
I was fortunate to work in a market like Rochester, which was competitive and featured big-time operators. Still, I was also small enough that I got to do it all – from board operating the Howard Stern show to being on-air to working club events to building bonfires at the Ralph before a Bills game to raising a marti pole at a Dave Matthews Band remote. My advice to anyone starting in radio or any career is to say yes to everything. Your career is unlikely to be as linear as you think it will be. Every job no one else wants to do is an opportunity for you to learn more about another aspect of the business and for you to distinguish yourself through your work ethic. Lean in and have fun!
The One Situation
Keith: Given your resume, you’ve seen everything from ratings and revenue wins in the biggest markets to hair-on-fire crisis situations in cities we’ve never heard of. What’s the one situation you had to deal with that still sticks in your mind as something you didn’t see coming and you still have no idea how you got through it?
Jeff: For me, I guess it’d have to have been those early days of COVID in the spring of 2020, particularly being in Manhattan at the time. We were managing multiple crises at once – the public health crisis, the enormous disruption to our advertising revenue and the need to upend our broadcast infrastructure overnight to allow for more remote work with the health and safety of our employees in mind. Our teams did such incredible work during this team – whether it was our news teams informing their audiences of critical health updates, our sports teams figuring out how to cover the bubble and shortened seasons and shift their content when teams suddenly stopped playing and our music and entertainment brands offering audiences an escape from the largest disruptions to their daily lives we will likely ever experience in our lifetime.
The Blank Slate
Keith: Last question — blank slate — say anything you want to any sector of the industry. What do you want them to hear?
Jeff: Stop looking back – there is only going forward. As an industry, we spend too much time and give too much oxygen to people who are obsessed with reminding us about the way things used to be. Guess what – the world has changed, and radio is hardly alone in that respect. This remains an amazing and unique business with opportunities every day to make a difference in the lives of our consumers and results for our partners. If it’s not fun for you anymore – that’s ok – get out and make room for someone else!
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Keith Cunningham is a music industry and Rock/Alternative columnist for Barrett Media and the founder of Black Box Group, a modern-modeled creative & strategic consultancy built for brands that need strategies with teeth. He’s the former Master of Mayhem at 95.5 KLOS-FM in Los Angeles for over a decade, a nationwide consultant, and has been repeatedly voted one of America’s top Program Directors and strategic thinkers. Keith has built his career by taking multi-million-dollar brands from worst to first and leading Marconi & Gracie award winners along the way. A data nerd with a rock-and-roll heart, he is an advisory council member for St. Jude fundraising, a fantasy football champion, and lover of his daughters & dogs. Reach him at keithblackboxgroup@gmail.com or on LinkedIn or X.
