There was no single announcement.
No one moment when everyone stood still and said, “This is the day everything changes.”
Instead, it began quietly.
At the turn of the millennium, radio felt permanent. Local studios buzzed with personalities. Sales floors were full. Promotions teams filled parking lots with sound, laughter, and station vans wrapped in pride.
Then, the movement began.
Not a march forced by soldiers — but one driven by spreadsheets.
Ownership groups grew larger after deregulation.
Stations were gathered, bundled, streamlined.
What had once been local became regional.
What had been regional became centralized. And what had been human began to feel… distant.
At first, the changes seemed manageable.
One position eliminated here.
Another role “consolidated” there.
A morning show replaced by a voice from another city.
The language softened the reality:
“Efficiency.”
“Optimization.”
“Doing more with less.”
But the direction was set.
Through the early 2000s and into the financial crisis of 2008, the pace increased. Thousands of jobs disappeared across major companies. Entire departments shrank. Some vanished completely.
Promotions teams — once the heartbeat of local presence — were reduced to skeleton crews (if that).
Programming staffs were centralized.
Air talent became interchangeable, tracked and distributed across markets like signals instead of people.
And still, the movement continued.
There was no single road — but if you looked closely, you could see the path:
From local to national.
From live to tracked.
From many voices… to fewer.
Those who remained carried more. More accounts. More responsibilities. More expectations. The weight didn’t disappear — it shifted.
And along the way, something else faded.
The feeling of place.
There was a time when a station sounded like its city — its streets, its weather, its people. You could hear where you were.
Now, in many cases, you hear something polished… but placeless.
This is not a story of sudden collapse.
It is a story of gradual removal.
Over 25 years, radio didn’t vanish — but it was reduced.
Layer by layer. Person by person. Decision by decision.
Until one day, many looked around and realized:
This is not what it used to be.
And yet, unlike those in history who had no choice in their path, the radio industry still does.
Because a march can continue… or it can be redirected.
Stations can choose to sound local again.
Companies can choose to reinvest in people.
Leaders can choose connection over consolidation.
The path forward is not predetermined.
But understanding the journey so far matters.
Because the most dangerous kind of change isn’t the kind that shocks you — It’s the kind that moves slowly enough…that you don’t realize how far you’ve gone until you stop and look back.
Lots of talk about how radio talent is THE thing that separates us from everything else, but separating them continues to the breakdown of radio connectivity.
Be different. Be better. – LF
***On The Dial Publisher had an opportunity to catch up with the person who posted this, Loyd Ford, and here were some questions that we had:
1. You describe this as a slow, almost unnoticed shift—when did you personally realize the industry had crossed a point of no return, or do you believe that point hasn’t been reached yet?
There is no point of no return. There is only now and courage to fix a set of tough challenges facing our industry. We still have very unique advantages if we fully take advantage of them. Many of our problems even now are still self-inflicted. I had a general manager in the late 90s who essentially called all the PDs together in our cluster to tell us that the 96 telecom bill meant the end of having to listen to us anymore. She celebrated this as a freedom for herself and I immediately took that as a warning of what was likely to come. As my social media post suggests, there have been a thousand cuts that have crippled local radio. Not just a few here and there. This is hyper-familiar to all of us and likely not unique to me. Private equity is highly skilled at making things “efficient.” Those firms worked hard across the last 3 decades to understand the levers but not the soul of what made local radio valuable. Many may know that a defining core principle in pulling the value from something in the last several decades has often been to load it with debt and take it public. Once that was done with radio’s large companies, future “buyers” of radio properties were saddled with compromising debt that erroded choices through temptation to cut, cut, cut and that goes back to the thousand cut concept. Failure has a lot of fathers.
2. How much of this “Long Reduction” do you believe was inevitable due to economics and technology, and how much of it was the result of leadership decisions that could have gone a different way?
Any inevitability of much of the long reduction has been due to crushing debt. You know, the people who added the debt thought they were clever. Many walked away with millions. Somebody pays. There are very smart people in these corporations trying to manage that still. Like with any unfortunate corruption of something, the consequences are not seen right away. The technology and change in consumer ability to gain access to a wide variety of opportunities that they didn’t have before had little to do with the challenges radio has created for itself. However, since 2007, those technologies and innovations have created conditions that should make any broadcaster wish they hadn’t cut some of the most important dry powder from our business. This long reduction has created a hightened crisis, but it all essentially came from debt and the convincing of leadership that the contributions of local talent could be narrowed and collapsed for higher profit.
3. You emphasize the loss of “place” in radio—what specific, practical steps can stations take today to restore that local identity without blowing up their current business models?
This is where I think technology is our friend – if we choose to use it for restoring what makes local radio great and not to use the technology to continue to bury the people and creativity that could re-light the fire of passion for what local radio is supposed to be. The practical steps you are speaking about here go back to the Vince Lombardi speech to the Green Bay Packers: “This is a football.” In other words, a principled return to the core values of local tribe, creativity and innovation. Not returning radio to what it was, but reestablishing what it can be and should be in the 21st Century. That won’t happen by continuously cutting. That comes with innovation and transformation only. And that may ultimately unfortunately take definitive and universally recognized failure before it is finally attempted. By then the question will be, “Is it too late?” Radio has more opportunity right now than the business is allowing.
4. The piece suggests that talent is still the differentiator, yet continues to be reduced—why do you think there’s such a disconnect between what the industry says it values and what it actually invests in?
What do you think? People say a lot of things, but what they DO shows you who they ARE. You asked me why I wrote that post. I was compelled by what I see. Everyone in radio understands the problem, but the temptation to continue “attempting to solve the problems by cutting, cutting, cutting” is so great that you continue to see THAT.
Listen. Cuts are sometimes a necessity in business. No one likes it, but that is the truth. But cuts are one tool and that tool is rarely innovative. In fact, you might argue that it is played out in radio. We know it doesn’t work, but it’s easier to do that than to commit to innovation and transformation (which involves risk).
5. If you were sitting in the room with today’s top radio executives, what is the one decision you would challenge them to reverse immediately to begin redirecting this march?
I think reverse is the wrong word. There is no reverse in the 21st Century. This century is speed and innovation. That is part of what is so scary for local radio right now. By the way, A.I. can be used for innovation and transformation as tools or it can be used for more and deeper cuts. I repeat, “Which one do you think is the easiest temptation to fall prey to?”
These radio executives you are talking about have really tough jobs. If it was easy, everyone would do it, right? If I was in the room with them? I’d certainly see if I could appeal to them to become more experimental since in each market they “own” clusters of radio stations. We have opportunity to experiment with innovation, new ideas, to take risks without really risking a lot at all. All stations in these clusters are not “killing it.” Yet we prescribe mass treatment to everything of often one philosophy that largely hasn’t changed in decades while we face something different than competition.
We face consumers with more power than they have ever had. They want to be WOWED. In fact, they don’t have to put up with less than that.
I sent the post I wrote to my 25 year old. Here is what he texted me back: “I would listen to radio that is localized. There really is no other reason to listen to it vs. the insane amount of online content you could otherwise. Localization is the competitive advantage that radio has.” You see. It isn’t a secret. Consumers know. Our cuts are not hidden from the view of radio listeners. They simply expect less of us. That’s called disappointment. In what 21st Century universe is that a compliment?
Loyd Ford is president and chief strategic officer at Rainmaker Pathway Consulting Works (RPC). They help local radio with ratings and revenue. Reach him anytime at 864.448.4169 or Ford@RainmakerPathway.com.