Seems like we're mixing up two points here: Radio as an entertainment medium and radio as an essential service for critical emergency information.
Terrestrial radio can be both. Or I should say, "ad supported radio" which means AM, FM and streams of such services.
Radio as an entertainment medium is quickly becoming insignificant.
That would be why 89% of adults use terrestrial radio, right?
Music services like Spotify, Apple, and Google can deliver what listeners want to hear much better than a heavily researched playlist from a corporate program director.
You know that research actually identifies what listeners want to hear the most? Since when is asking users to tell what they want a negative?
For talk radio, there's an infinite number of podcasts although the listener doesn't have the option to call-in live and interact with the host. For DJ mix shows, there's MixCloud and SoundCloud.
The biggest "victims" of podcasts are not music radio stations... not even talk stations. They are pre-recorded TV talk shows.
The DJ presentation is exclusive to radio. The host can play music with a certain theme or include artist interviews and context behind the songs which can create a very personal experience for the listener. However, this requires significant resources and could impact ratings as it deviates from a predictable canned playlist format...which is why this programming has been replaced with shallow DJ banter. Do you really think people make an effort to tune in at a certain time every day to listen to all four hours of Ryan Seacrest?
Radio is not and has not been intended for a solid 4 hours of anything since the later 40's.
The idea of Seacrest or Bobby Bones or Charlemagne da God is to entertain while a person is having breakfast or in the car commuting or driving to the store or childcare center or whatever. You tune in, you are entertained, you leave. In fact, shows are designed not to require long-term listening any given day. It's Kibbles and Bits, not War & Peace. Dr Seuss, not Tolstoy.
There's definitely a role for radio to play as a service for critical information. Cell towers only cover about 2/3 of the country. Yet, one can travel anywhere to the most remote parts of the outback and still be able to receive at least one radio station, even if it's a distant AM signal. However, I would question how many of these stations would actually provide critical info to the public during an emergency. I recall reading about how many stations in Louisiana and Mississippi were either off-air or playing canned music in the days following Katrina. WWL served as a reliable lifeline for communities along the Gulf Coast by providing live and local news during that time but most of the other stations didn't take initiative. We may need to reconsider the amount of land resources, power, and infrastructure required to keep these stations running when they are nothing more than glorified distribution points for repetitive playlists and hollering preachers.
First, stations that survive a disaster can be automatically added to an emergency network via the EAS system. In fact, local stations can't activate that service... authorities with authorization have to do it. And, as long as even one station can stay on the air, that is better than cellular services which died in the Lake Charles area almost immediately with the flooding and loss of power (cell repeaters usually have limited duration battery power and if the mains is off, they have a finite life. And their connections with the Mother Ship are generally landlines, digital ones, of course, but physical installations that can be cut by floods, fires, earthquakes and other disasters we don't even want to think about.
By the way, the stations that could not stay on in New Orleans in many cases contributed to the manpower of WWL during the emergency so that information flowed. Landlines did not work. TV did not work (and works less now with all digital transmission), the newspaper did not publish. And cellphones did not work, and in some areas no service was restored for weeks.
And I mentioned Puerto Rico, USA, where in some locations cellular service took months to return following their hurricane. But AM and FM never, ever, lost service.
