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Content is King

A three-part series on radio, fragmentation and the audio economy.

By Peter Don, BPR

Five Places to Start

None of these require new technology. All of them will start an argument.

1. Audit availability, not audience.

Take the three best hours your station made last week and count the places a listener could find them a day later. For most operators, the honest answer is one, or none. That number, rather than your reach figure, is the size of the problem.

2. Test the co-listening finding in your own market.

The Gen Z data in part one is American and broadcaster-commissioned, and I have flagged both. Before building a sales story on it, spend a modest sum establishing whether your listeners behave the same way. If they do, you have a proposition nobody in your market is selling. If they don’t, you have a positioning problem you did not know you had. Either result is worth the money.

3. Decide which podcast business you are in.

Repackaging broadcast is cheap, defends existing revenue, and reaches people you already have. Originating new shows is expensive and reaches the 11% who consume no radio at all. These are different businesses with different economics, different people and different time horizons. Most operators fund a muddle of both and call it a podcast strategy. Which one are you actually resourcing?

4. Put a price on discovery.

Six in ten Gen Z listeners said that hearing a song, artist or brand mentioned out loud makes them more likely to go and search for it. That is measurable commercial behaviour and almost nobody sells it as a distinct product. Build one campaign proposition around prompted search and conversation.

5. Change one number in the board pack.

If broadcast share of advertising revenue is the only figure reported, every decision beneath it will keep optimising for the transmitter. Add a second: share of total audio time in your market, or total content reach across every platform you publish on. Measurement comes first and strategy follows, however much we would prefer it the other way round.

The uncomfortable possibility running underneath all five is that radio’s problem was never the audience, the technology or the competition. It was the way its measured. And this is the one thing on that list the industry could have changed at any point in the last ten years.

In this series

Part One: Gen Z Is Still Listening to Radio

Part Two: Same Listeners, Different Routes

Part Three: Turning Content into Income

Coda: Five Places to Start

Sources. RAJAR quarterly listening figures, Q1 2026. Edison Research, Share of Ear (US), 2020 and 2026 waves. iHeartMedia research conducted by Critical Mass Media, June 2026 (n=1,090 US listeners aged 18 to 64), including Nielsen reach data cited within it. IAB US advertising revenue forecasts, 2026. Commercial Radio & Audio (Australia) quarterly revenue release, Q1 2026. Podcast category and consumption-mode figures are drawn from published industry aggregations and are indicative only.