It seems like every conversation about the future of radio eventually turns into a conversation about digital.
Digital revenue. Digital impressions. Digital attribution. Digital strategy. Digital transformation.
We spend so much time worrying about how radio is going to compete with digital that I wonder if we’ve missed something much more important.
Digital isn’t radio’s biggest enemy. A boring radio station is.
More specifically, a radio station that does little more than play a playlist.
Because if your entire product is 12 songs an hour separated by commercials, sweepers, and a voice-tracked personality occasionally telling me the artist I just heard, you aren’t competing with Facebook; you’re competing with Spotify. And Spotify is really good at Spotify.
This is the part of the digital conversation that I think radio gets backward. We keep asking how terrestrial radio can become more like the technology companies instead of asking what technology companies still can’t replicate about great radio.
Music certainly isn’t the answer.
Every song your station plays is already sitting in somebody’s pocket. They can hear it whenever they want. They can skip it. Replay it. Build a playlist around it. Ask an algorithm to find 100 more songs that sound exactly like it.
If music is the entirety of your value proposition, you’re basically Blockbuster explaining why people should still drive across town to rent a DVD. This doesn’t mean music isn’t incredibly important. Of course it is.
It means the playlist cannot be the product. The station has to be the product.
And that requires casting a much deeper net. Personalities. Local news. Sports. Weather. Interviews. Opinions. Humor. Community involvement. Promotions. Local businesses. The weird story everybody in town is talking about. The caller who says something so ridiculous that people are still repeating it at work three hours later. That’s radio.
The irony is that while our industry remains obsessed with becoming increasingly digital, signs show consumers are becoming increasingly exhausted by living completely digital lives. People talk about screen fatigue. Parents worry about what smartphones are doing to their kids. There’s renewed interest in vinyl records and physical media. Younger consumers have helped turn “dumbphones” and other lower-tech products into a cultural conversation. Analog experiences have become novel again precisely because everything else became digital.
I’m not predicting millions of 22-year-olds are going to throw their iPhones into a lake and buy a Motorola Razr tomorrow. There appears to be a growing appetite for things that feel human, tangible, and real.
Radio should recognize the opportunity sitting right in front of it. Radio needs to lean into the following:
A live personality laughing so hard he can barely finish the break is human. A caller disagreeing with the afternoon host is human.
A local high school coach talking about Friday night’s rivalry game is human. A morning show raising money for a family whose house burned down is human. A DJ telling a story about running into a listener at the grocery store is human.
Those moments aren’t generated because an algorithm determined they would increase engagement by 3.7%. They happen because people are talking to people. And in an increasingly automated world, that might actually become more valuable, not less.
We have spent years trying to eliminate anything that might cause somebody to tune out. Tighten the playlist. Shorten the breaks. Reduce talk. Eliminate risk. Research everything. Make the station as frictionless as possible.
But eventually frictionless becomes forgettable.
If you attempt to offend nobody, annoy nobody, challenge nobody, and surprise nobody, you may eventually create a radio station nobody particularly cares about either.
Great personalities aren’t background noise. They have opinions. They have quirks. They make you laugh. Sometimes they irritate you. They become familiar. You know their spouses’ names. You know what team they pull for. You know what restaurant they love. You know what they’re probably going to say about something before they even say it.
That relationship is extraordinarily difficult for digital platforms to manufacture. And yet personalities are often among the first things radio companies eliminate in the name of efficiency. Then we wonder why the audience chooses Spotify.
If we remove the people, Spotify becomes the better radio station.
Radio absolutely should have websites, apps, podcasts, streaming audio, social media, video, and whatever digital products make sense for the brand. I’m not suggesting we unplug the internet and fax the sales report to corporate. But those tools should amplify the product. They shouldn’t become the product.
Put your morning-show segment on YouTube. Turn the coach interview into a podcast. Clip the hilarious phone call for Facebook. Stream the high school football broadcast. Let digital distribute the thing radio created.
That’s a very different strategy from gutting the radio station so we can devote more resources to becoming another mediocre digital agency.
Maybe the next great opportunity for radio isn’t becoming more technological. Maybe it’s becoming more human at precisely the moment everything else is becoming less human.
