Spirit Airlines was never really selling a good travel experience. It was selling access. Cheap flights, bright yellow planes, low fares, and a very clear message to the customer: we can get you there, but don’t expect to love it.
Ironically, that was also the general positioning of my Bumble profile. Another brand famous for yellow.
For a while, it worked. Spirit reshaped the travel business with an ultra-low-cost model that made flying more accessible for millions of people. But by May 2, 2026, the company was not just delayed. It was terminal.
This is not a column dancing on Spirit’s grave, although I realize I just walked directly past a Spirit Halloween joke and showed tremendous restraint. The airline had a real place in the market and served a real consumer need.
The lesson for music radio is not that low cost is bad. The lesson is that once the experience starts to feel stripped down, transactional, and emotionally thin, the audience may still use you while caring less every time they do.
Which, unfortunately, brings us right back to my Bumble profile.
Free Should Not Sound Cheap
Radio’s free model is still the greatest advantage in media. No subscription, login, or two-factor authentication. You turn it on, and it works.
That matters in a world where every form of entertainment has found a way to charge you monthly for the privilege of forgetting you subscribed. Hey, Rocket Money, I’m out here dropping endorsement gold in these Barrett Media articles.
But just because radio is free does not mean it should sound cheap. YouTube is free. TikTok is free. Instagram is free. Spotify has a free tier. The best free products still feel modern and alive.
Music radio cannot let “free” become an excuse for running the same listener liners from ten years ago.
No cap, I found a station doing that this week with audio so old it predated “no cap.”
The Songs Are the Seat
In the airline business, the seat gets you from one place to another. In music radio, the songs do the same thing. They move people through commutes, workdays, school drop-offs, bad moods, good moods, and the terrifying emotional journey known as Costco on a Saturday.
But the seat is not the flight. The flight is the full experience: the tone, the service, the announcements, and the in-flight credit card pitch that somehow always arrives the second you are trying to nap.
For music radio, the songs are the seat. So choose wisely, because somebody is out there Puddy-style raw dogging your radio station. No podcast. No playlist. Just sitting there, staring straight ahead, absorbing whatever experience you built around the music.
Radio Has Its Own Baggage Fees
Spirit became famous for the fees around the trip. Radio has its own version, except the listener pays with patience. Long stopsets. Promotions that sound like a flight attendant explaining how a seat belt works.
We know how seat belts work.
Your audience knows you have an app. They know they can text a keyword. That there is an email club, a contest page, and a seat cushion that doubles as a flotation device.
They know to secure their mask before helping others, and more of Today’s Best Mix returns after 12 minutes of commercials.
To be clear, promotion matters. Database growth matters. Apps matter. First-party data matters. Nobody serious about the business should pretend otherwise. But the best promotions feel like value.
And at some point, if everything around the product feels like an upcharge, it does not exactly lift the audience’s Spirit.
Branding Is Your Boarding Pass
Too many branding elements follow the same runway. Dial position. City name. Format descriptor. Empty adjective. “The best variety.” “The most music.” “The station that makes you feel good.” The best this. The most that. Congratulations, you have successfully described almost every station in America and somehow none of them.
Nobody gets into a car and says, “I am really in the mood for the station that combines today’s biggest hits with the most commercial-free variety for the workday.”
If the songs are the seat, then your branding is the airport lounge. It should feel considered, well-appointed, and useful.
That means imaging with actual personality. Promotions that feel like benefits, not chores. Talent that gives the station a point of view. Local moments that prove someone in the building knows the city is more than what is said in the legal ID.
The music may get them on the plane.
The brand experience is what makes them want to fly with you again.
Premium Is a Choice (™ iHeart, iThink)
There are companies and brands showing that free and easily accessible audio can still feel premium. Bauer Media, Global, K-LOVE, Cox, and TikTok Radio all present different versions of this idea. They do not sound the same, and they should not. They remind us that polish, intention, and design are not reserved only for subscription products. Right now, the Tidal snobs are laughing at me.
Efficiency Is Not the Enemy
Centralized systems can help. Shared resources can help. Airlines share the same airports, the same runways, the same terminals, and somehow still have to create a different customer experience once you board.
Radio is no different.
The resources can be shared, but efficiency should support the listener experience. It should not become the listener experience.
Nobody falls in love with the airport logistics.
They remember the flight.
I Don’t Have to Love You to Use You
Spirit had lots of passengers. That did not mean they loved Spirit.
Music radio still reaches a lot of people. That does not automatically mean the audience has passion, loyalty, identity, or an emotional connection to the brand.
Usage is not love, as repeatedly explained to me by my Bumble dates.
The danger for any brand, politician, movie, or radio station is not always that the consumer hates it. Hate requires energy. The bigger danger is that they feel nothing.
They use you because you are there. They remember you because you have always been there. And ultimately, tolerate you because the button isn’t easy to push, or because their phone fell between the seats and now they are stuck with you until the next red light.
Damn you, middle seat.
Free Can Be For Me
Radio does not need to apologize for being free. It should defend it. Free is powerful. Local is powerful. Habit is powerful. Personality is powerful. Shared listening is powerful. A great station can still do many things a playlist cannot.
But only if the experience is cared for by someone focused on more important things than building a perfect grid in MusicMaster and making sure they dubbed in the Mother’s Day sweepers for this weekend.
Even Delta Is Cutting Pretzels
As I am writing this, Delta apparently looked at the Spirit story and said, “hold my tiny Biscoff.”
The airline is cutting snack and beverage service on shorter flights. Delta has spent years building a more premium brand position, which is why even a small service cut gets noticed.
A listener may not be able to explain your music scheduling philosophy, your Selector rules, or your operational efficiencies. But they know when their favorite personality disappeared. They know when the imaging got generic. They know when the stopset feels longer than the flight from Portland to Cleveland for Morning Show Bootcamp.
In other words, your station should never feel like it is permanently boarding, because in radio, “boarding” is only one letter away from boring. And boring is the one destination no listener is choosing on purpose — that and maybe Cleveland.
Barrett Media produces daily content on the music, news, and sports media industries. Sign up for our newsletters to stay updated and get the latest information right in your inbox.
Phil Becker is a weekly music columnist for Barrett Media who has built his career at the intersection of creativity, strategy, and operations leading brands, marketing, and content teams across more than 200 radio stations worldwide.
Known for being ahead of the curve, he was the first to integrate social influencers into broadcast brands, launch station apps years before his peers, and pioneer AI air personalities before anyone else in the world.
With leadership roles at Clear Channel, Citadel, Cox Media Group, Alpha Media, and international ventures—as well as owning and operating stations—Phil blends entrepreneurial vision with operational discipline in the messaging and marketing space. He also hosts the Phil-Osophy podcast.
