Reinventing Radio: What a Century of Disruption Teaches the Audio Industry

Music Biz brings together audio industry leaders to discuss how broadcast radio survives each wave of technological change, and what comes next for connected cars, AI advertising, and participatory listening.

Radio has been declared finished many times. Television was going to kill it. Then the internet. Then smartphones. Then streaming. At each turn, radio retained something its competitors struggled to replicate: a trusted, human voice that listeners return to out of habit and genuine affection.

Even today, with on-demand audio, algorithm-driven playlists, and podcast libraries numbering in the millions, broadcast radio reaches more people each week than most digital platforms care to admit.

That resilience has limits. The car dashboard, historically radio's most reliable touchpoint, is being rebuilt around software-defined interfaces that require broadcasters to compete for screen real estate alongside apps, maps, and streaming services.

Younger audiences expect content to be visual, participatory, and available on demand. Measurement frameworks that once made radio easy to sell to advertisers no longer reflect how audiences actually listen. The gap between radio's cultural standing and its commercial infrastructure is growing.

At a recent industry panel session, four audio industry leaders sat down to examine how radio has managed to survive everything thrown at it, and what the medium's next chapter looks like.

The panel was moderated by Jarrod Gräetz, Audienceologist at The Audience Company, and brought together Jeremy Sinon, Vice President of Digital Strategy at Hubbard Radio; Tommy Gaustad, Global Comms lead at Radioplayer; and Con Raso, CEO and Founder of Tuned Global.

Raso's vantage point, spanning broadcast radio, digital streaming platforms, gaming applications, and in-flight entertainment systems, shaped much of the discussion's most practical thinking.

Identity, Experience, and the Power of Personality

The panel opened by asking whether radio is defined by its transmission infrastructure or by the experience it delivers. The answer from all corners was the experience.

That framing matters commercially. Tuned Global works with clients ranging from broadcast radio operators to DSPs and gaming companies, and a radio-like experience keeps appearing across all of them.

"We see radio really being spoken about almost across all the executions that we do, except maybe it's not in its traditional sense," Raso said. The transmission technology evolves. The appetite for a curated, live, human-guided audio experience has not.

Sinon defined radio by its audience behaviour rather than its delivery method. "It's live in the moment audio that the masses are consuming, however they consume it," he said.

Tommy Gaustad added trust as a defining quality, particularly relevant in the current media environment where audiences are increasingly sceptical of algorithmically generated content.

What the panel agreed on was that radio's durability comes from human connection rather than spectrum allocation. That agreement extended into a longer discussion about personality as the medium's most durable competitive quality.

Streaming platforms carry the catalogues and the algorithms, but the authentic, responsive voice of a human broadcaster connecting with an audience in real time has proved harder to replicate.

"It is that ability to have personality that connects beyond music," Raso said. "It creates an opportunity to have something unique as far as content goes that can't be compared to a competitor in that market."

He drew a parallel with the current industry conversation around fandom, noting that listener relationships with radio personalities follow the same logic as fan relationships with artists.

"It's also how fans connect closer to the personalities that are on radio," he said. Both kinds of relationships are built on trust, consistency, and the sense that something real is happening on the other side of the speaker.

Gaustad pointed to radio's track record as evidence.

"Radio survived all the threats it's met - even if it's been TV or whatever it's been - by a lot of passion for radio and a lot of passion for how it sounds and the on-air personalities," he said.

His point was that staying close to the medium's identity, rather than chasing each new format, has been the consistent pattern across 100 years of disruption. The next shift is that broadcasters need to bring that same attention to how radio looks and how audiences interact with it on screen.

The Car, the Screen, and the Shift to Visual Radio

The in-car environment remains radio's strongest distribution channel and one of the fastest-changing. Gaustad's organisation, Radioplayer, builds technology partnerships with car manufacturers across Europe to keep radio visible and well-presented on connected dashboards.

Gaustad argued that visual presentation now carries real weight. "Radio needs to look as good as it's sounding," he said.

For broadcasters not yet focused on visual metadata and screen experience, the car, a near-guaranteed touchpoint for decades, may quietly become harder to access.

In-flight entertainment offered an instructive parallel, given Tuned Global's work in that space. The back-seat screens of commercial aircraft went through the same transition that the connected car is approaching now. Passengers who once tuned a dial on their armrest to select a radio station largely shifted to video as options expanded.

"We've been doing a lot of initiatives to actually say, how do you bring a lot of relevance back to radio?" Raso said.

Looking further forward, autonomous and semi-autonomous driving will change the in-car dynamic significantly. As the driver becomes a more passive occupant, the entertainment system becomes more central to the experience.

"I think the car environment's going to be a more passive environment, where the driver as well can be engaged in different experiences," Raso said.

Radio that works in that context will need to be more visual and more interactive than the medium has historically required.

AI, Social Radio, and the Audience Data Problem

Whether AI voices belong on radio was one of the sharpest points of debate. Some broadcasters are already experimenting with AI disc jockeys, particularly in overnight hours, to reduce talent costs. The panel was generally hesitant about that application.

Raso questioned where AI presenters sit in a medium built on authenticity and trust. Sinon's response was that AI has a genuine role in scheduling, automation, and production tooling, but the listener-facing voice needs to be human.

"We cannot fool ourselves into thinking that AI is going to replace personality," Sinon said. "In a world of AI, people are going to want human connection."

The area where AI finds broader acceptance is in advertising. Tuned Global has been building technology that generates audio ads in approximately 22 seconds and inserts them into a personalised stream for individual listeners.

The system uses AI to understand a listener's travel patterns, match them with relevant advertisers, and deliver a targeted ad without interrupting the core broadcast.

"You can hyperlocal target people knowing the journey they're actually traveling," Raso said. "We think there's a real opportunity for better monetisation through that."

Raso noted that audiences seem willing to accept AI in different roles depending on context.

"People are perhaps more tolerant of an AI within an audio ad that sounds like a human, than wanting a personality and an opinion, and you don’t necessarily want an opinion from an AI," he said.

A related question running through the session was how radio engages a generation raised on participatory social platforms, where the line between creator and consumer has largely dissolved.

Tuned Global's answer, currently in prototype, is a product called social radio. The concept allows DJs, artists, or audience members to create micro-stations with a live listening group and two-way communication between broadcaster and listeners.

"How do you actually bring radio to a TikTok generation?" Raso asked. "How do you get the concept of both creators and consumers to be blurred? Consumers can actually be creators as well."

The design draws on radio's liveness while adding the participatory elements that have driven engagement on newer platforms.

Measurement remains a structural constraint, particularly in the United States, where the divergence between traditional broadcast ratings and digital listening metrics makes hybrid models commercially difficult for many operators. Sinon described the challenge as ongoing.

For Tuned Global, which works across markets with very different measurement frameworks, standardisation is the broader priority.

"If we can standardise how measurement actually works, that's a better indicator of the success of a particular company rather than doing this one city in this one medium through this one type of distribution," Raso said.

Gaustad added that connected devices are already generating a different quality of audience data, and that broadcasters should be building their capacity to use it. "You will fully understand what kind of songs make me turn off, what kind of songs make me volume up," he said.

The session closed with a practical question to each panellist on what anyone could do tomorrow to improve audience engagement.

Gaustad focused on visual presence, advising both radio stations and music industry players to check how they appear on screen in connected cars. Sinon's answer was about reciprocal engagement. "Engagement breeds engagement," he said. "If all you do is project out and wait for response, you're going to have a harder time."

The priority Raso named was data infrastructure. Getting enough audience data into the right systems so that better decisions become possible is, in his view, the foundation everything else depends on.

"There's a lot of tooling with AI and other elements that allows you to trawl through that data much more effectively than you once could," he said. "But you need to have those pipelines to get that data in the first place so you can understand the audience and provide relevancy."

Sinon reinforced the point from an operator's experience. Hubbard Radio has been building opt-in listener registration for more than a decade.

"I don't think there's a more important mission for radio than to know who your customers are," he said.

The consensus across the session was that radio's audience is in transition rather than in decline. The broadcasters with the clearest understanding of who their listeners are, and the technology to act on that, are best placed for what comes next.

The full webinar session can be viewed by clicking here.

About Tuned Global

Tuned Global is the data-driven music cloud platform that empowers businesses to integrate commercial music into their apps and launch complete streaming experiences using advanced APIs, real-time analytics, licensing solutions, rights management systems, AI-enabled music discovery, and customisable white-label streaming apps.

Our turnkey solutions for music, audio, and video, coupled with advanced AI capabilities and a broad ecosystem of third-party music tech integrations, make us the most comprehensive platform for powering any digital music project.

We handle complexities in licensing, rights management, and content delivery, enabling rapid innovation and bringing new ideas to life. Since 2011, we've supported 40+ companies in 70+ countries, across telecom, gaming, fitness, health, media, aviation, and more, to deliver innovative music experiences faster and more cost-effectively.