Radio’s Future Is Calling. Answer or Ignore?

Anytime there’s an opportunity to learn something, I want to be there. And I assume that most of you feel the same way. But there are times when radio’s future sends a text or makes a call to someone who ignores the outreach.

What a missed opportunity.

Today’s Facts and Opportunities and their impact on our Future

One of the big things that matters today to Country Radio is being relevant – not only to our current 25-54s, but to a giant swath of the population that doesn’t see radio’s value in the same way as their parents or even older siblings.

This was brought into sharp focus by Larry Rosin and the Edison Research team. They gave a visually engaging (and sobering) presentation at CRS 2019 that showed radio’s relevance gap between 40-something year old parents and their teens.

In a nutshell, parents and teens do listen to music/country music together. In fact, 60% of teens found this to be a bonding opportunity.

However when it came to FM, teens were more likely than their parents to focus on radio’s limitations compared to other music sources: commercials, sitting through a song they didn’t like, and the ease of getting music on their phones.

Even more concerning is that 52% of parents say their teens had introduced them to a streaming service, potentially facilitating TSL loss from our target.

But the data also showed opportunities to push back. There were recommendations on how Country Radio could target 25-54s and their teenagers simultaneously.

This was a run up to the “town hall” discussion that would follow, where the collective minds in the room were to explore these opportunities further.

So what’s the problem?

Unfortunately the post-presentation discussion took a permanent detour. It became a debate about whether or not we should add one specific current song from an artist with a reputation for not showing Country Radio or programmers a lot of love.

This went on and on with one of the facilitators repeatedly throwing gasoline on this dumpster fire instead of bringing us back to a discussion of our future.

And just to be sure that we would completely avoid talking about this critical situation with the potential to affect our entire industry, one programmer suggested that this would be the perfect time to talk about women on playlists while another expressed that he was simply sick of all this research.

The future was calling but some people chose not to answer.

I don’t work in other formats, but I can’t help but wonder if this happens there too.

Some of the Best Advice I’ve Ever Taken

I admit that I’m a hoarder when it comes squirrelling away things I’ve learned. And so as I’m sitting in this room stunned and frustrated (and even angered) at the obliviousness of some of the programmers who are to lead us forward, I was reminded of Lou Holtz’s CRS keynote address in 1997: When faced with a decision you must ask yourself, “what’s important now?”

So what IS important now?

I submit it’s those things that have the ability to dramatically shape our future. And these are the things that we should spend the most time thinking about and acting on.

But if we add a song we believe in and it turns out to be a stiff, or we miss adding a song for one reason or another, a few years from now no one will care. Our station and our industry will go on.

However if we choose to answer the inconsequential calls and reject outreaches from the future – including how to prove our relevance and value to a generation that doesn’t see us the way their parents do – we will have a hell of a mess on our hands.

For the love of Pete, let’s take Lou’s advice.

Want to share some of your ideas? Want to brainstorm some more? Let’s not let this valuable opportunity slip away from us.

See the Edison CRS Slide Deck here.

Photo by VanveenJF on Unsplash