It seems like every few weeks we read another story about layoffs somewhere in the radio industry. Positions are eliminated. Local shows disappear. Newsrooms get smaller. Markets consolidate. One person takes on the responsibilities that used to belong to five.
The given explanation is usually some version of the same thing: radio is struggling to compete in a digital world.
But what if that’s just an oversimplification of the real problem?
When brands forget what they are, they usually get into trouble. The most successful brands in American history have generally understood their lane and leaned unapologetically into whatever made them different.
Google a Carhartt ad from 1980 and one from 2026. Same look and feel, same messaging. Carhartt doesn’t cater to culture; it makes culture cater to Carhartt.
Burger King’s identity was built around flame-grilled burgers and “Have It Your Way.” Like virtually every major restaurant chain, it has experimented with changing consumer tastes, including a push into plant-based alternatives. But nobody was waiting for Burger King to become a health-food restaurant. People go to Burger King because it’s Burger King.
I wonder sometimes if radio has forgotten the same basic branding lesson.
Somewhere along the way, radio became almost embarrassed to be radio. We started talking less about personalities, reach, frequency, local influence, and community connection and more about impressions, clicks, geofencing, retargeting, attribution, and dashboards.
The problem is that in its fight to out-digital digital, radio is forgetting that digital can’t possibly out-radio radio.
And this doesn’t mean radio companies should ignore digital. But digital should extend the radio brand, not replace it. Google is going to be better at being Google. Meta is going to be better at being Meta. But local radio can still do something Spotify, YouTube, Facebook, and practically every national platform on Earth cannot do particularly well: be local.
Radio creates familiarity. It creates frequency. It makes businesses household names. It builds personalities that listeners feel like they actually know.
Spotify isn’t going to cover your high school football game Friday night. A national podcast isn’t going to tell you why traffic is backed up three miles from your house. An algorithm doesn’t know the restaurant everyone in town is talking about, the local coach everybody knows, or why the entire county is arguing about something that happened at Tuesday night’s city council meeting. A great local radio station does.
Which is why I find it frustrating that, as radio searches for ways to compete with digital, we sometimes cut the exact things digital has the hardest time competing with!
We eliminate local personalities. We shrink news departments. We reduce local sports coverage. We automate more hours. We consolidate more jobs. Then when listenership and revenue decline, we point to it as evidence that radio itself is declining.
What if we’re slowly removing the reasons people listened to radio in the first place? What if radio’s biggest threat is… radio? If radio wants to compete over the next decade, I don’t think the answer is just becoming a digital agency. I think it’s becoming a better radio station.
Invest in actual personalities. Build compelling morning and afternoon shows. Cover local sports. Invest in news. Show up at community events. Give listeners people they know and trust. Give advertisers personalities they want endorsing their businesses. Give your market something it literally cannot get anywhere else.
Before anyone dismisses this as a “radio needs to go back to 1985” argument, that’s not what I’m saying at all. Technology changes. Consumption habits change. Radio should change with them. But evolving and abandoning your identity are two very different things.
Radio absolutely needs digital tools. What it doesn’t need is to become so insecure about being radio that it guts its greatest competitive advantages while chasing somebody else’s.
The brands that endure usually understand exactly what they are.
