Post by Tom Pinkus

Radio didn't lose its young audience to streaming platforms. It gave them away. Gone are the days of station vans at Friday night games, street teams at the mall, and DJs who actually knew your town. Consolidation cut the local. The 25–54 chase cut the young. And now the bill is coming due: aging audiences with no pipeline behind them. I wrote about how American broadcast radio aged itself out of relevance with the very listeners who once defined it — and what it would actually take to win them back. The advantages are still there: free, live, local, human. The question is whether radio remembers how to use them. Would love to hear from people in the industry — am I wrong?