And yet amazingly, a lot of talent have been doing mornings for 20 years in the same market, making 6 figure salaries, and won't leave because they have kids in school and wives with other careers. And as a result, a very desirable job is unavailable for the 20-something who'd love to get a shot.
While there may be a lot of people in that situation, it’s a small fraction of the total people in radio. If that could’ve been me, I'd probably still be doing it today, but it wasn’t. It’s not a lot of other people either. Maybe I wasn’t talented enough for that job, but, even if you have the talent, you have to be lucky at some point to land a gig like that. I've seen a lot of people with more talent than I have who have bounced from market-to-market and either don’t make it or don’t last long in those bigger markets.
So the young guy starts a VT or imaging business, syndicating himself to a dozen stations, does it from his house, and makes a pretty good living. Not every young kid knows those options exist, but they do.
Fair enough, though you really have to want to do that. Self-employment has its perks, but it also has its problems. It also has startup costs. I can only speak from my own experience, but, when I decided I needed a new job, I considered staying in radio an option. I applied for radio jobs hoping I could move up to a large or major market, but I also applied in my field of study. I received a bite from a station in a similar size market to the one I was trying to get out of and a bite from a tech recruiter offering me more than double the money my radio job paid. Of course, we know which one I took. That job was guaranteed money, and I needed to replace that old car I was driving. Taking the radio job and trying to build a side business wasn’t going to do that for me. Plus, I figured I could always try going back into radio later on if the tech job didn’t pan out. That decision was a no-brainer for me. If a young potential talent is faced with doing his own radio related business or taking the better paying and more secure job dangled in front of him, I suspect he'd do the same thing. Building a successful VO/VT business takes either a track record, which younger talent doesn’t have, or a lot of passion.
The OP put the onus on the station or company. But stations and companies have a farm system. Cumulus and iHeart have no problem finding anxious young people to fill shifts. Small companies hire consultants who mentor young talent, and wait for opportunities on indie radio stations. That's how the business works in a practical way. Its up to the young people to raise their hand and show how willing they are to do the work. If you want to know who those consultants are, they write articles for trade publications every week, and give their contact info at the bottom.
I had a brief experience working for Cumulus. In the more than 15 years since they acquired that cluster, exactly one person has moved up to a large or major market within the company. That cluster has tended to be more of a landing place for talent the company doesn’t want to lose but can’t keep in their current situations (usually due to station sales). Some have moved up to larger markets with other companies, and a few went to similar size Cumulus markets that have better weather. The only person in that cluster who moved to a large market within the company also did weekends at a large market Cumulus cluster about two hours away, but she quickly realized she wasn’t going to go full time there. So, she went back to her hometown and worked for a couple years at the station she grew up listening to and eventually landed at iHeart in DC. One of the bigger ironies is that more people across the street have moved to large and major market Cumulus clusters than have within the Cumulus cluster. If that market resembles normal in other Cumulus markets, the best farm team is the team across the street. They’re more likely to get you out of their smaller markets to keep you from competing with them!
Something that did come to mind, though, was that there was an attempt to solve a lot of the inherent problems with radio jobs a little more than 20 years ago. That was Capstar's Star System. Those Star System jobs paid better than what most radio jobs paid, were in neat places to live like Austin and West Palm Beach, and they cut expenses at individual stations. In smaller markets, they could have local weekend talent, and, if those people were good, they could be moved to mornings or afternoons at stations in those smaller market clusters or potentially brought up as Star System jocks. Of course, radio people screamed that it was taking their jobs, and Capstar merged with Chancellor to become AMFM, which sold to Clear Channel. So, the Star System was short-lived. AMFM had better talent than small-market focused Capstar and preferred to use its large and major market talent to voice its smaller market properties. So, despite its failure, the Star System was an effort to solve the low pay, instability and bad schedules radio personalities frequently complain about. Of course, a lot of radio people didn’t see it that way and could just see a computer replacing them.
