It depends if they "turned their backs" on you when they found better alternatives, or you drove them away and caused them to seek better alternatives... or a combination of both.
Here is what I think. It's a combination of factors that were in different proportions depending on where on the timeline you look.
As I said earlier, the addition of more FMs during the 1980s in markets that had stable distribution of ad revenue prior to those additions made some FMs (new and old) less viable. That was also when audience migration from AM was beginning to happen in greater numbers; that mitigated some of the impact on the FMs those listeners moved to but degraded the viability of the AMs.
The stations (on both bands) whose ad revenue dropped to a point where they could no longer maintain their programming at the same level of quality made changes ... out of necessity. It's not a coincidence that the first two Satellite Music Network formats began operation in 1981, and Transtar's first formats debuted that same year. By the end of the decade, the combined number of stations affiliated with one or the other of those two services was well over 1,000.
That solved the problem of payroll for an airstaff for those stations that invested in the infrastructure to use those services. Others in the same predicament opted for traditional automation, with reels of tape for the music (with or without generic announcing). Either way, though, any listeners who became upset by a live and local personality "going missing" at the least changed stations or in the worst-case scenario invested in personal audio devices (e.g. the Sony Walkman, which conveniently made its debut in 1979).
For some stations, the switch to either satellite or automation included a format change because of stronger new competitors, and that -- unsurprisingly -- caused more changes in listener behavior.
Things stabilized somewhat in the late 1980s and 1990s, but there were still a lot of stations operating in the red and in some cases, format changes happened as fast as the audience adjusted to the previous ones. All of that was very likely perceived as "ruining radio" by the listeners, but we in the industry were just trying to stay afloat and viable.
Then we got a double whammy as the new century began. Both Sirius and XM started operation within a few months of each other in 2001-2002, and the Internet was starting to move from slow dial-up service to faster DSL and cable speeds. The latter made it possible for streaming to take off as a service, and by necessity pretty much all of the early streams were announcer-free because there was zero revenue to pay anybody (and paid streaming wasn't part of the equation early on).
The listeners who were already fed up with the changes we had to make in the previous decade started migrating to non-OTA sources. And then word of mouth "promotion" manifested, not unexpectedly but still devastatingly. I don't have to outline what happened from there to the present.
And so it was a combination of factors. Yes, we did drive some listeners away because of the changes we had to make due to the changing landscape of ad revenue distribution (although I suspect some listeners, especially younger ones who didn't have any real memories of the way radio was in the 1960s and 1970s, actually liked the "less talk" approach, and they kept us afloat for a long time).
The bigger problem -- and in some ways a "chicken and egg" conundrum -- was that the ad revenue split changes, applied to lower revenue as overall terrestrial broadcast radio listening declined, forced even more draconian measures. Consolidation and allowing greater ownership per-market caps solved that for a while, but there continues to be audience erosion and (despite what iHeart, Audacy, and the NAB would have you believe) further adjustments to that model are not going to be any more successful than what has already been achieved. Hell, we are already seeing that Connoisseur is using a variation of the same playbook as they make changes at the former Alpha Media stations.
Despite what some have erroneously perceived in my posts, I no longer find SiriusXM to be much of a threat, nor do I find the paid streams to be much of one either now. The overall economy is causing a lot of paid subscriptions to be cancelled as people adjust their personal budgets -- and cable television is actually hurting a lot more than radio right now because of that belt-tightening -- and I suspect that the free streams are going to find, just as OTA radio did, that ad revenue split too many ways results in a lot of non-viability. (And as far as the "hobbyist" streams go, there's a vicious circle already happening there, as the hosting services raise their rates because as streams discontinue the costs have to be spread among the remaining clients, so there will eventually be a breaking point there as well.)
I believe there is still hope for OTA radio, because the way we program now is closer to what the listeners expect, based on the streams, the podcasts, and SXM. And if I am correct about people dropping paid services because of the economy, there will be more tolerance of the advertising because there will be a realization (even if only subconsciously) that those are making the radio programming free.
It's not over yet. Not by a long shot.
Thus endeth the K.M. Richards version of the Sermon on the Mount, but without the passages in Matthew 5-7. You may resume your normal arguing now.
