As I often do, I was reading through some of the great content being produced by Barrett Sports Media writers over the weekend.
I’m humble enough to admit that Andy Bloom’s articles are the best News Talk columns on the site, and last week, Andy wrote about Audacy’s most recent round of cuts.
Towards the end of the article, the following quote from Rick Cummings stood out to me: “Radio is going to have to evolve much more to spoken word and personalities, which is a tremendous hurdle when you consider what most of the big groups have done over the last 15 years, which is to voice track things and pipe things in from out of market.
The only thing radio can offer these days that is unique is personality. Because music delivery as a linear system is really, really fading fast. I think that’s going to be a very challenging hurdle.”
I’m admittedly biased as someone who has spent my career on the talk side of the business. Still, after reading Jeff’s quote, I found myself applauding at my laptop screen, which understandably caused confusion from my two toddlers, wife, and dog.
To be at its best, radio’s future is going to have to rely on its local personalities in their respective markets, along with national personalities with mass appeal.
But cutting, cutting, and cutting on the personality side and hoping listeners will sit through several minutes of commercials to hear Stairway to Heaven for the 3,752nd time is not a long-term strategy for success. Not in a world with Spotify, YouTube, SiriusXM, and so many other options that could take up the rest of this column. Yes, it might continue to work to hit the next quarter or next year’s goals. But radio needs its personalities to maintain a competitive advantage over the long haul.
And the good news for News Talk is that personalities are exactly what the format provides. We are the content. And unlike the music side of the business, there is nowhere else to consume us. Yes, our content may be (should be) podcasted, but you can’t duplicate our specific personalities’ content on any other preferred streaming platform.
The other good news is that oftentimes News Talk stations can be big-time billers in respective markets thanks to the demographics that the format delivers. Whether it’s growing new personalities, adding an FM simulcast, or building unique, local content that listeners can’t get anywhere else, this will power the format and the medium into the future.
To be fair, plenty of music shows are more personality-driven and less music-driven. Those can absolutely work as well. But there are risks associated with that, given what the research shows listeners want from their music radio stations.
However, that gets back to the Rick Cummings quote at the beginning of the article: “The only thing radio can offer these days that is unique is personality.”
To do that right, further promoting and growing talk formats and building up local personalities who become deeply ingrained in their communities is the best bet for the industry moving forward, but like anything else in life worth doing, it won’t come without some bumps in the road. However, those bumps will be well worth it.
