• April 15, 2021

The radio industry in the age of hyper-niche music

The radio business is more competitive than ever and the audience is more diverse than ever. Why has this happened? Well I guess we can blame the internet and YouTube which allows small niche artists to gain a following, then there are the copycats and sub-niches, and then the sub-niches of the sub-niche. People can download whatever music they want, anytime they want, so why would they bother listening to the radio? Well that’s it, most of the new generation don’t listen to the radio much anymore.

Even the yuppies in their BMWs, SUVs and Mini-Vans that have satellite radio have over 100 channels, so what are the chances that they will tune in to a certain local radio station, which if you live in a medium-sized city is probably more than 10-20 stations serving that market. The New York Times published a decent article on February 11, 2013 titled; “The Blush of Youth at the Grammys: A Music Awards Season Leaning Toward the New and Fresh” by James McKinely Jr., and if you watched the Grammys, you would know how diverse music is today and how some Winners were people you never heard of in your life. Even many in the music industry did not know all the winners.

So how can a radio station make money? Well maybe you can’t, in fact there are many very well established radio stations going out of business or merging. Look in your own phone book and see the number of stations run by various radio groups, as they often call themselves. By gathering various niches together, you can interest your various advertisers so that they can get coverage in the right demographic. In a way, this helps advertisers target the market, but it also means that to be worth the cost, those ads need to be quite reasonable.

Another strategy for radio groups is to use syndication outside of business hours, perhaps playing music from a similar station across the country, dividing the advertising time with their national advertisers and then the rest with local ads. No, it is not easy to operate in such a diffuse, diverse and hyper-liquid sector, but that does not mean that some radio stations have not worked out most of the details of their strategy as they evolve with all these changes, some of which we noticed. at the Grammys in 2013. In fact, we can expect these and new trends to continue into the future, they must evolve or the radio industry cannot survive. Consider all of this and think about it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *