You are not your medium.
This is something that everyone working in radio needs to understand to have any chance of adapting to the digital future of this industry.
You don’t make radio, you make content. While that content may currently be broadcast by a radio station and distributed digitally by a radio station, the product itself is not radio. It’s not even strictly audio given the proliferation of video in live streams and social media. You are making content that is designed to reach and retain an audience, and while this column I’m writing is primarily aimed at those labeled as talent in our industry, it applies to other aspects as well. You’re not selling radio so much as radio advertising is one of the ways companies can include their advertising with your station’s content.
This all sounds pretty straight forward or at least it should, but it is a conceptual shift that everyone working in radio must make because the industry is changing. The portion of the audience that listens to the over-the-air broadcast of a live talk show is shrinking, which is another way of saying it’s becoming less and less valuable to advertisers. Now maybe the audience will seamlessly shift to the live streams, delivered on an app or via the Internet, and maybe the advertising dollars will move there in their entirety. If that happens, the job that is currently described as a radio host may not change all that much.
I don’t think we’re going to be that lucky. Listeners ages 13 to 24 are shown to be twice as likely to consume spoken-word via podcast than over the radio. Maybe they’ll reach their 30s and decide they want to start listening to over-the-air radio, but I doubt it.
It’s not just podcasts, though. It’s Discord, Twitter Spaces, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok. Whether you refer to these entities as a medium, a platform or by the device used to access them, they are all methods of conveying your product — your content — to your customers, which is the audience. Some of these tools will be easier to monetize than others. Some of these tools will generate a larger audience than others. Each is going to need content, the shape of which is going to vary according to the type of tool, the medium being used.
This is why it’s so important to see your job not as a radio host, but as a content creator. If you believe you work in radio, your future is tied to the viability of the medium, which is something you can’t control. If you see yourself as a content creator, your job is making something people will listen to via any variety of outlets, and if you view the industry this way, there is a huge opportunity here. Absolutely enormous.
The structure of this industry is about to be upended. I’m not talking about the ownership side or even management. I lack the experience and probably the intelligence to offer much insight about that. I’m talking about the talent side, the hosts who I’m saying need to call themselves creators.
The economic order of our industry has been entrenched for decades. The most remunerative positions in a radio lineup are the weekday hosts in the daytime lineup. The most lucrative spots in that lineup have been the two drive-time slots, morning and afternoon.
What do you think will be the most lucrative job in spoken-word 10 years from now? Maybe it’s podcasts. Joe Rogan’s deal with Spotify certainly speaks to that. Then again, Pat Mcafee is doing a live show in his deal with DraftKings, and Dan LeBetard has a significant amount of live programming as well with FanDuel becoming the title sponsor and getting the ad inventory.
I’m not trying to predict what the next big thing will be. That’s like hoping to win the lottery. I’m telling you to have your eyes open to the possibility — the likelihood — that there is going to be something else that comes next. That the daily radio program as we know it may not be the most lucrative, the most desirable outlet for our content in the future. If you have that mindset, you’ll have a better chance of figuring out what the next big thing will. Hell, you’ll have a chance of making the content that does become the next big thing.
That all starts with understanding that you are not your medium. You make content that can be carried by any variety of media, and while radio has been and may continue not just a viable but lucrative medium, you shouldn’t think that you or your work are defined by it.
Allow me a brief analogy to wrap up.
Railroads had a hell of a run in this country. For more than 100 years, they played a huge role in the development of the United States from the industrial revolution in the Northeast to Westward expansion. The industry is thought to have employed a million people when it peaked around 1920, and while the federal subsidies provided to the auto and aviation industries played a role in what has happened to railroads in the 100 years since, the railroads also made a critical error. They thought they were in the train business, competing against other trains. The reason they thought that was because for a number of decades the train was the only real choice for someone who wanted to travel any significant distance over land.
But the railroads weren’t in the train business, they were in the transportation business and as such their competitors wound up including cars and planes and the trains wound up losing that competition in part because of the advantages of those other forms of transportation but also because the railroads had an overly narrow vision of what they were.
I’m not saying that radio is going to be wind up like a railroad. Radio has nowhere near as much infrastructure, it is much more flexible and radio doesn’t have to go that far to from broadcast audio over the air to distributing audio in a digital format.
For you to make that switch requires an understanding that you can not be defined by your medium. Not if you want to retain control of where your career goes.
