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Declining radio audiences

Reading through this thread and I have seen some very interesting posts. The one about car dealerships is certainly correct in our area.

We used to have a Suzuki dealer that spent six figures in advertising a year. And not low six figures either. You’d turn on local broadcast TV on a weekend and their informercials would be on 3 different channels at the same time. It was one of the couple largest Suzuki dealers in the nation.

3 months after the Great Recession started they closed. Suzuki stopped marketing in America not long after that. We didn’t have a Mitsubishi dealer in the market for a couple of years. And Charleston is a top 80 metro area. When many people tend to keep their late-model SUVs 10+ years, that cuts into the car market considerably.

Having followed radio probably 27 of my 33 years in this market, it still plays an important part in the consciousness. Just far less stations making news. Charleston has been one of the most over-radioed markets for decades. About 35 FMs and 2 AMs now and maybe 10 stations now have actual followings.

The 3 full-power urban stations (1 urban, 2 urban AC) probably have 80% of the Black market covered which is like 25% of the market. Then the 2 country stations. The 2 news/talk signals which mostly lean farther right. One NPR and then the hot AC, while the main AC and the umpteen Christian stations are background noise.

They listen morning and afternoon drive, taking the kids to and from school. When one of the morning show hosts on the hot AC died suddenly a few weeks back, it was the top local news of the day. It was a huge deal. A lot of folks felt like they had a connection to him from listening every morning, like he was a family member to them.

There aren’t many of those folks left on the radio locally. Maybe a couple morning show hosts, but nobody has a connection to any of them. You see the Cumulus station folks at the local minor league baseball team’s games as they have an agreement with them, throwing out first pitches and handing out stuff, then a few other remotes, but that’s about it.

The guy on the sports station has an extremely loyal following, but it’s limited to the 40-70 year olds who call in. Most under 40 don’t listen to the local sports talk station, they listen to whatever podcasts are available.

Same thing with Spotify for music and everything else. And you can relate that almost everywhere.
 
charlestondxman said:
Same thing with Spotify for music and everything else. And you can relate that almost everywhere.
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I agree. There was major technological and sociological revolution that happened over 25 years ago. Everyone knows it. Yet for some reason, some people expect radio to remain unchanged. That's impossible. Radio has been rebudgeting and redirecting resources for the past 15 years. People are just starting to notice. But they will continue. People will not be throwing away their phones and laptops. We shouldn't expect that they will if we just change a format or hire more local talent. There is a place for radio, but it's not going to be the way it was. People just have to understand that.
 
Audio listening (and that’s how I am going to label it) isn’t declining or dying. It’s changing, just like it did in the 1950s. Television is changing in the same way. Television is not dying either.
 
ericcooper56 said:
Audio listening (and that’s how I am going to label it) isn’t declining or dying. It’s changing, just like it did in the 1950s. Television is changing in the same way. Television is not dying either.
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Both ad supported radio and TV are in a severe decline. A huge percentage of stations are now losing money, and ad sales are going into their 3rd quarter of a steep decline.
 
David can you provide any figures, even ballpark. I'd love to know about the decline in the past 5 years. I know there has been a steep decline since 2000, especially 2008. I see dollars radio once had getting cut back and even companies refusing to offer co-op on radio and in newspapers. I presume the biggest losses are in rated markets although I'm getting some blowback in a small market.
 
b-turner said:
David can you provide any figures, even ballpark. I'd love to know about the decline in the past 5 years.
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David may have better data, but Cumulus local spot revenue is down 7% this year compared to last. Normally radio sees an uptick in an election year as the campaigns for federal office scatter pennies from heaven.

Cumulus revenue was also down 19% (!!) from 2022. All comparisons were made using January to September reports from the company.

I see dollars radio once had getting cut back and even companies refusing to offer co-op on radio and in newspapers.
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IMO small market Co-Op advertising has been slowly drying up for 20+ years. It was really easy to get a buy from an insurance agency or financial planner when Auto Owners or Edward Jones were reimbursing the agent 50% or more. But the last time I heard an Auto Owners spot on radio was probably before the 2007 recession.

Once upon a time we'd get Co-Op dollars from Red Wing Boots or Wrangler jeans. Of course, local clothing stores are history so those co-op programs are unavailable, if they still exist.

Same for some of the independent grocers. One station I worked for had a great relationship with an independent grocer and they would figure out how to get money from Kellogg or Green Giant. But that grocer retired and closed a long time ago, and Kroger won't work with anybody local.
 
The funny part is that there are so many posts on these boards that radio owners are the problem. They're all "living in denial." Then you ask those people what should we do, and they all come up with the same solutions: Do live and local radio like the 1970s. To that I say: You people are living in denial!!! It's not the 1970s!!! You can't do what worked 50 years ago before computers and cellphones and expect it to work. The future won't be like the past. I've been saying that here for years.

We still do linear programming now because there still is an audience for that kind of thing. But it's declining. That's what this thread is about. Radio audiences are declining. We know. We can see that. We don't need to be told. And it won't be fixed with a new format because the whole concept of formats is obsolete. The TV networks can see it too. Linear broadcasting is on it's way out. It's all about on-demand, and creating programming that people can access on their own schedule from their digital device. Yes, we know.
 
I think one of the key things is that I just don't like the music played on a lot of local radio. It's inevitably some variation on CHR or AC, and my tastes aren't anywhere near that. The live-and-local content isn't going to make me sit through a lot of crappy music I hate. It used to, I used to sit through hours of Ed Sheeran and Adele because the jock was talking about my town, but since the pandemic life's been way too short.
 
TheBigA said:
Linear broadcasting is on it's way out. It's all about on-demand, and creating programming that people can access on their own schedule from their digital device.
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The pendulum is swinging that way at the moment but at some point people will demand more than just canned content. They'll want real-time information without having to keep searching for it. When one podcast ends, where do you go next? Linear media is much simpler. That may become a new discovery.

PS: I'm not talking about music radio. That's dying, IMO.
 
The one thing I enjoy about the decline is that the safe vanilla formats -or- traditional formats are not getting the numbers that alot of companies and advertisers expected and now they are faced with either having to program music and content differently or get out of the game.

It's also separately highlighting that there are too many signals on the air doing the same thing.

I don't think radio can ever compete with streaming but it could do a few things to stay a bit more relevant.
 
With declining audiences in most markets (gonna write it anyway, just to spur the conversation) when should we expect the corresponding decrease in radio stations in North America?
 
kwthom said:
With declining audiences in most markets (gonna write it anyway, just to spur the conversation) when should we expect the corresponding decrease in radio stations in North America?
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It's an ongoing thing. There are a couple hundred fewer AM stations now than a few years ago.
 
TheBigA said:
It's an ongoing thing. There are a couple hundred fewer AM stations now than a few years ago.
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And attrition is taking place in the non-commercial FM ranks, too. High schools and colleges are turning in their licenses (if they can't find a Godcaster to take the stations off their hands) due to students no longer being interested in radio, either as an interesting extracurricular activity or as a desirable future career.
 
CTListener said:
And attrition is taking place in the non-commercial FM ranks, too. High schools and colleges are turning in their licenses (if they can't find a Godcaster to take the stations off their hands) due to students no longer being interested in radio, either as an interesting extracurricular activity or as a desirable future career.
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Why would any school offer broadcast courses when McDonalds pays 15 bucks an hour and the local broadcaster pays 12 with no free fries? The on air guys today are making about what we dinosaurs made in 1985 and none of us became rich back then.
 


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