About the fact that this industry is filled with technological gatekeepers and gas-lighters.
the blinders are on, you can see where the industry should go, but you really don't want it to, so you pretend not to notice until you're so far behind the curve that you are left begging people to stay.
back in 1994-ish, a young entrepreneur named Mark Cuban bought the domain broadcast.com for nearly a steal...everyone called him crazy and said no one will every listen to sports or music on the internet, they all laughed.
from the success of that website, sparked the beginnings of what would lead to innovations such as Pandora, spottily, apple music, podcasting and internet radio as we know it today.
knowing what was to come, terrestrial radio continued to sit back and play the long game with many saying there will always be a need for terrestrial radio, no matter AM or FM.
Had Ford and GM not publicly announce the initial plan to phase out AM radio from vehicles, that little story would have gone completely unnoticed by everyone.
you can spit ball all the stats of who has 2% over here and 30% over here, but at the end of the day, the listeners don't care.
and to be honest, no one here really cares about the listeners.
if anyone reading this post ever gave a damn about the listeners over the last 40+ years, there'd be a lot of more stations fully staffed 24/7, no corporate overwatch, no voicetracking... actually listening to that voice on the other end of your voxpro line, asking you play their request.
and if the radio indsutry ever gave a damn about it's roots, it would collectively lobby the FCC to require stations to pay the artists and songwriters every penny they have been due and put an end to the free publicity and exploitation just to get the local dollar general to run a 30 ad on your station.
Over the Air radio will be with us probably for a couple more decades, because it's FREE. People like the cost of FREE.
RE: Radio and streaming: In the 2000's, when streaming first became a thing, there was generally little way to monetize it. You mention Pandora and Spotify. Even 15+ years after they became prominent streaming platforms, they still don't make much profit. Apple streams music, and (reportedly) around 50% of their music streaming revenues go to royalties...
50% of revenue to royalties. That's a big chunk of your income --
before all the other costs.
People at radio may sometimes appear to be a little slow in adapting some new tech, because it can cost a lot of money, but
they aren't stupid. In the 2000s streaming was a toy, basically. It didn't start becoming a
dominant platform for music consumption until the late 2010s. Go look at the RIAA music consumption charts on the RIAA website. People were still downloading MP3s to their phones and IPod devices in 2012. MP3 downloads were still a chief music revenue model as late as 2014, and streaming was still growing in importance. Radio knew this. Radio knew streaming was a big deal, but streaming still presented a difficult business model because of digital royalties, which are (and were) high.
Streaming still doesn't make the platforms much of a profit.
So why would Joe's radio station in Podunk, Missouri concentrate on streaming? They may do it now, to a certain extent, because it's become the dominant platform for music consumption. But up until the late 2010's it just wasn't so.
And even now some stations -- especially smaller radio operations -- have to limit the geographic area their stream reaches because of
royalty costs. One station in California that had maybe 400K online listeners nationwide had to restrict access to its stream to just the local area because the digital royalty payments were so high.
Add in the after effects of the 2008 recession, which slammed the radio industry hard, and the economic effects of the pandemic, it makes smaller radio companies a bit more hesitant to make major changes to their operations unless they are certain that those changes will provide a return on investment.
Finally, radio
does pay artists -- through BMI, ASCAP, and other services, and they also pay
digital royalties for every song streamed. The amounts paid vary. But they do pay. If you want to see the big picture of how much money is involved on the digital royalty side, the RIAA website is a good place to start. It doesn't address radio, but the music industry side of the streaming revenue situation is pretty well covered there.
