Content by Anthony Dockrill

As someone who has become a taxi driver to two teenagers, I can tell you journeys are now fairly quiet affairs. The passengers in the backseat are on TikTok or Snapchat, and the radio is off. “Turn the radio off” is often the extent of communication inside the car.

While many parents have or will soon have stories of dealing with grumpy teenagers, the underlying message for the radio industry is stark. In today’s attention economy, when it comes to Gen Z and Alpha, radio is going broke.

Working with students getting their first taste of radio production, I noticed a few years ago that I was often training people who did not listen to radio at all. I was helping them make content they didn’t consume. Radio remains a vibrant and successful medium that has weathered the digital storms well. In many respects, it appears to be in a healthier state than its once flashier TV cousins, but the ticking time bomb at the heart of radio is demographic.

Boomers and Gen X grew up with radio as a place for music discovery and entertainment.

Millennials also have many radio memories to draw on, but we are fast seeing the emergence of a generation where audio consumption is app-based and, more often than not, doesn’t trace back to traditional radio broadcasters. If radio doesn’t reverse this trend quickly, it will become as relevant as the media equivalent of the Black Stump Restaurant.

Broadcasters are reaching out to young people through social media and other activities, but if these initiatives aren’t driving young people to radio or other audio offerings, this demographic hole won’t be filled. We’re just ignoring it until it swallows the industry.

Radio remains relevant today because it meets some key needs. It’s a human connection that, when done well, is communal and often community based. Radio is also about habit and herein lies the real problem. The industry might think it can wait for Gen Z and Alpha to age into radio listening, but if this generation doesn’t build the habit of listening, they’re unlikely to reach for it even when the industry’s offerings become a good fit.

So if radio cannot wait for young people to wake up and love their content, what can it do?

It has to get its hands dirty and compete in the attention economy. Imagine a radio service made for this generation—what would it sound like? Let’s say upfront it would break a lot of rules and be fastmoving. Maybe it would only play parts of songs, with voices changing rapidly. It would move across topics and tones in ways that would give most traditional radio listeners vertigo. It would be shareable and built around news and events but have many ways for listeners to interact. It’s not simply a jukebox with an AI voice.

Managers and bean counters reading this would already be hitting the cancel button on this idea.

While the economics of such a service might not make sense when viewed through the prism of traditional radio formats and advertising, I would argue such a service has two main functions.

It’s an investment in the future—not just in a future for radio, but an investment in radio having one at all.

I would also argue this service would be, in retail terms, what’s called a loss leader. It gets someone into the store… once inside, they may buy something else—in this case, radio.

Anthony Dockrill is a Digital Producer at Pod Jam and the former Program Director of 2SER FM Sydney.