The advancement most industries are currently afraid of is AI and how it will negatively impact them personally. Just this week I watched an episode of The Diary of a CEO with the title AI AGENTS EMERGENCY DEBATE: These Jobs Won’t Exist in 24 Months! Which is a great title by the way, probably why it has a couple million views. However, AI doesn’t concern me in our industry because I believe radio is uniquely positioned to benefit more from AI than be damaged by it because of how understaffed we already are. The advancement I fear the most is cars without radios. Here’s why that keeps me up at night and what we can do about it.

Last month a Jeff Bezos’ backed EV car company called Slate released an American-made electric truck for under $20,000. They got to that price point by stripping it down. Part of that stripping down included dropping the radio all-together. That’s right, the Slate Truck does not include a radio, any other traditional infotainment system or even speakers beyond those required for basic warning sounds. Instead, the truck includes a universal smartphone mount and USB power to allow drivers to use their phone for navigation, music and other functions. While Slate offers a wide variety of customizable upgrades, options for wraps, additional seats, and the ability to make it into an SUV, as far as I can tell so far, none of those upgrades include an AM/FM radio. There might be a work-around involving an accessory kit designed to convert the vehicle into a radio-equipped unit but it won’t be a simple process. Obviously, it’s a concern that a car company would assume that their customers aren’t interested in having something that’s been standard in cars since the early 1920s.

On the other end of the spectrum, we are seeing car dashes that are being taken over by screens and as autonomous cars become more prevalent those screens will only expand to the windows as well. It’s hard to imagine radio in its current form competing for our share of that screen space. Couple that with the fact that car manufacturers have been considering dropping AM radio for the past few years and the AM Radio For Every Vehicle Act is currently in limbo. Plus, earlier this year Radio Ink published this story, CarPlay Ultra to Let Apple Control How Drivers Access AM/FM. As the article states, CarPlay Ultra ‘goes far beyond mirroring your iPhone on the infotainment screen, it now integrates fully into every single visual screen in an automobile, giving Apple complete control over what drivers see and how they interact with their car.’  Essentially drivers would never leave Apple’s environment for maps, climate control or even changing the radio station, which would be fed by our streams instead of our terrestrial signals, having major implications on our business model.  

Knowing that these things are happening and understanding that radios dominance in the car has kept us in business in recent years, roughly 75% of daily in-car audio time is spent on the radio. Plus, anywhere from 52 to 71% of that is AM/FM depending on the age of the car. So, how do we maintain that dominance while fighting these new technological headwinds? First, we improve how we look on those car dashes by A) Upping our content game immediately by creating cross platform content for every one of our local shows and requiring the syndicated shows we carry to do the same and B) improving how our player looks in that dash by working with DTS AutoStage, RadioPlayer, MyQuu.net or a similar company. Second, instead of writing off an entire generation of potential radio listeners, we make a concerted effort to get more young people into radio by creating unique formats that appeal to them, speak their language, deliver content how they’re use to consuming it and shorten our stopsets to be more inline with what they’ve grown up with. One of the quickest ways to make this happen is to recruit, hire and promote more young people within our operations. Third, we do everything we can to lobby for legislation that will keep radio in cars.

What do you think? How will advancements in the auto industry impact radio and, in your opinion, what should we do to address it? Comment below or email me at Andy@RadioStationConsultant.com.

Pic from Slate.