What Effects Will New Media Have On Radio

Managing four radio stations brings this week’s topic near and dear to my heart. Therefore, I will explore radio’s future. Radio has seen a decrease in advertising sales since 2002. It has also lost some of its audience during this same period. Many in marketing feel this is due to satellite radio. Yet, satellite radio garnishes less than three percent of the entire radio audience nationwide. In fact XM and Sirius are currently scrambling to merge as neither business model can survive and prosper in their current state. Rather, radio’s real threat comes in the form of “true” new media not a different broadcast channel of an old media.

Many new media allow the user more control and access to the product when they wish rather than when the radio station provides the content. If you like a certain “radio” show, you used to have to listen when the show was aired. Yet today podcasting offers the same show any time the consumer wants. Web sites offer any user with limited knowledge the ability to create his or her own streaming radio station, and while they may not be as “professional” as commercial stations they can be localized and personalized for a specific group of people, thus eroding radio’s time spent listening.

Other new media that are eroding radio’s time spent listening are MP3 players, games, web surfing, blogs & vlogs, social networking, mobile media, and podcasting. Each of these new media erode radio’s ability to capture a larger audience as people spend less time with radio and more time with new media. Truth be told, radio has not yet lost a large amount of listenership. In fact, radio’s nationwide TSL is 93% of what it was in 1995. The real problem is that radio’s market share of advertising has remained flat or decreased since 2002. Most of this share has been transferred to new media and the web.

In the very near future everyone in the U.S. will have the ability to surf the web, watch TV, download their favorite podcast, listen to their favorite radio station, check their email, chat, receive traffic and weather reports, navigate to a location, find the closest restaurant or gas station and much more via hybrid “cell phones”. Then add in Wi-Max or X-Max and we will have all of these same products available to us in any vehicle or home. These “phones” will be much more like mobile computers and much less the phones we know today. At this point we will have no need for radio’s 100,000 watt transmitters. AM and FM will be replaced with streaming audio sources.

Yet there is one question that still remains unanswered. Who will provide quality audio content. It is this content that will determine whether radio lives or dies in the next fifty years. People don’t care about the media channel providing the content, they only care about the audio and whether or not they enjoy it. If your favorite morning show moved from one station to the next with no change in program, you would move your radio dial position as well. The same thing goes for different mediums. Radio will continue to prosper only if we can provide the quality programming required by our listening base. While I don’t feel radio will be as strong of an advertising source in fifty years, I think it will be there in some form or another.

It’s just a short matter of time before these “hybrid phones” and “mobile computer” services will be available to everyone. When that happens all media will go through a drastic change. Ten years ago no one had a camera on their cell phone, yet today it’s difficult to find one without. Twenty years ago no one even had a cellular phone. What new media will IMC students be exploring in 20 years. Will mobile marketing be threatened by it?