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The Top Five Ways to Program a Radio Station Really Badly

By David Kidd, BPR

Programming a successful radio station is difficult. Programming a bad one is surprisingly easy. In fact, if you follow these five simple principles, you can turn a perfectly healthy station into a terrible one remarkably quickly.

1. Program the station for yourself

This is the gold standard of bad programming.

You love a song, so obviously the audience will love it too. You think a breakfast benchmark is hilarious, so naturally everyone else does. And you’ve been in radio for 25 years, so why would you need research?

The best programmers understand that they are not the audience. Their job isn’t to create the station they personally want to hear; it’s to understand what their target audience wants and deliver it better than anyone else.

2. Change things constantly

Nothing destroys a radio station quite like impatience.

A new breakfast show isn’t working after three months? Change it. Ratings dip for one survey? Change the music. A competitor launches something new? Copy it immediately.

Great radio brands are built through consistently doing something that the listener wants and loves. Listeners need time to discover a station, understand it, develop listening habits around it and eventually become loyal to it.

If you’re constantly changing the product, you’re effectively launching a new radio station every six months.

3. Try to appeal to everybody

This is perhaps the most seductive mistake in radio.

“We don’t want to alienate anyone.”

Unfortunately, a station designed not to offend anyone usually doesn’t excite anyone either.

Successful stations make choices. They know precisely who their target listener is, what they stand for and, just as importantly, who they are prepared not to serve.

Being somebody’s favourite radio station is considerably more valuable than being everybody’s second or third choice.

4. Let the spreadsheet make all the decisions

Data is invaluable. But data without judgement can be dangerous.

Music scores, ratings, streaming numbers, social engagement and research should inform programming decisions…..not make them.

Programming remains part science, part psychology and part theatre. The numbers provide the ingredients. Put the ingredients together without the correct “recipe” and your station will probably sound awful.

5. Forget that listeners have other choices

Perhaps the easiest way to program badly in 2026 is to behave as though it’s still 2006, as I have written about in a recent article.

Today’s competitor isn’t simply the radio station across town. It’s Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, audiobooks, streaming television and the smartphone sitting beside the listener.

That means every unnecessary piece of content, every boring interview, every weak testing song, every tired benchmark and every irrelevant conversation gives the audience another reason to leave.

The question is no longer simply:

“Is this good radio?”

It’s:

“Is this worth the listener’s time?”

That’s a much tougher test.

And here’s a few quotes

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.” Steve Jobs

“Complexity is the enemy of execution.” Tony Robbins

“Great marketing only makes a bad product fail faster.” David Ogilvy, Founder of Ogilvy & Mather

But……..

The fundamentals of great radio programming haven’t changed very much.

Know exactly who you’re targeting and know what they want from their favourite radio station. Give them something distinctive. Be relentlessly consistent. Use research intelligently. Hire great talent. Edit ruthlessly. And remember that the listener owes you absolutely nothing…they have other choices.

Do the opposite of those things and congratulations!!! You’ve mastered the art of programming a radio station really badly.