For most of music radio’s history, the format was the product. We built stations around carefully constructed playlists, clocks, rotations, categories, and rules. We decided which songs were currents, recurrents, golds, and how often each one deserved to be played.
That made perfect sense when radio was the primary gatekeeper of music. If you wanted to hear the new song everybody was talking about, there was a pretty good chance you needed us.
That world is long gone.
Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, TikTok and a dozen other platforms have completely dismantled that model. An artist can release a song tonight and have millions of people listening to it tomorrow morning without a program director in America ever adding it. Listeners don’t need us to discover music, and artists increasingly don’t need us to distribute it. That’s painful for an industry that spent decades helping decide what became a hit, but pretending otherwise is embarrassing.
So why are we still formatting music radio like it’s 1990?
We obsess over rotations, music sweeps, and whether the same artist played 37 minutes ago. We research whether a song is burned. We proudly promote “10 songs in a row” as though unlimited songs aren’t already sitting inside everyone’s pocket. In many cases, we’ve spent the last 20 years systematically removing the one thing Spotify couldn’t replicate – the humans – and doubling down on the one thing technology does infinitely better than we ever could: playing playlists.
There are exceptions. I still believe terrestrial radio can be incredibly effective with music formats like classic rock and classic country, particularly when stations cast a deep musical net and surround the music with actual personalities who understand it. There is value in curation, nostalgia, local context, and hearing somebody who genuinely loves the music tell you something you didn’t know about it. A great classic rock station shouldn’t feel like somebody hit shuffle on the 400 songs consultants have decided constitute “classic rock.” It should feel like a clubhouse for people who love classic rock.
That’s the difference.
The future of music radio isn’t really about the format. It’s about the tribe. If you’re programming newer music, the challenge becomes even more urgent. You’re competing against services where the listener can hear virtually any song on Earth instantly, skip the songs they don’t like, build their own playlists, and have an algorithm learn their tastes. You cannot beat that technology at its own game. Trying to build a better playlist than Spotify is like Blockbuster trying to beat Netflix by alphabetizing the DVDs more efficiently.
Blockbuster’s problem wasn’t that people stopped loving movies. People loved movies more than ever. The problem was that a better delivery mechanism arrived, and Blockbuster continued behaving like access to movies was its competitive advantage.
Radio should learn from that.
People haven’t stopped loving music. They haven’t stopped loving artists. They haven’t stopped wanting entertainment. They haven’t stopped wanting to belong to something. What changed is that they no longer need a radio station to access the music.
That means we have to give them something they can’t access on demand.
Build a station people identify with. Build personalities people actually care about. Build events listeners don’t want to miss. Create inside jokes, traditions, rivalries, characters and moments. Let the morning show bleed into afternoons. Let afternoons bleed into social media. Let social media bleed into Friday night’s high school football game, Saturday’s concert and Monday morning’s conversation. Make the station feel like a living, breathing community instead of a playlist occasionally interrupted by commercials and liner cards.
In other words, stop trying to build an audience and start building a cult following.
I mean the kind of tribal brand loyalty that makes people feel like being a listener says something about who they are. Great sports teams have it. Great podcasts have it. Great YouTube channels have it. Harley-Davidson has it (or maybe had it). Certain artists have it. Their fans don’t merely consume the product; they identify with it.
Radio used to have that everywhere.
People wore station T-shirts. They put station stickers on their cars. They knew the morning show characters. They called the request line. They showed up when the station showed up. The station wasn’t simply where they heard songs. It was part of their identity and part of the culture of their city.
There are some stations that still have dimensions of that, but they are few.
We didn’t lose that because people suddenly stopped caring about radio. What actually happened was this – we engineered it out of the product.
We standardized everything. We reduced personalities. We tightened playlists. We syndicated more programming. We became terrified of somebody talking for 45 seconds because a listener might tune out, while apparently never considering that the same listener can already get every song we’re playing without commercials somewhere else. Maybe it’s time to reverse the equation.
The music should still matter. Programming should still matter. Great curation absolutely matters. But the playlist can no longer be the product. The playlist should be the soundtrack to the product.
The product is the station, the brand, the vibe, the culture, and movement you’ve created. I know I always sound like I’m beating a dead horse, but these things need to be said – If you’re asking your sales team to sell music playlists in 2026, you’re not going to be successful.
