Most FM stations will enter a deep economic crisis within five years due to decisions postponed today

Deadly inertia

The link in the radio ecosystem that most strongly demands qualified information on audience size, average listening time, and audience profile is, as a rule, the advertiser. When this demand is stronger among advertisers than among the stations’ own directors and managers, the signal is unequivocal: the operation is flying blind.

Without reliable metrics, the station gradually drifts off course without even realizing it. There is no concrete objective, no course correction, and no real reading of the environment. The outcome is predictable: fuel is consumed inefficiently, cockpit warnings are ignored, and the crew only realizes the tank is on reserve when the refueling station has already become unreachable.

It is in municipalities with up to 30,000 inhabitants that the most acute cases emerge

Adapting metric tools for small and medium-sized cities does not depend on large research institutes, but on method, discipline, and standardization. The most common mistake is to assume that metrics are “a big-city thing.” They are not. They simply change in scale and in instruments.

Streaming must fulfill two central functions

The first is to act as a continuous distributor of the station’s audio; the second is to function as a permanent blood test of its audience.

While FM ensures territorial reach and brand presence, streaming provides a real-time reading of listener behavior: entry, permanence, abandonment, return, and consumption patterns throughout the day. Ignoring this second function means giving up the only accessible, continuous, low-cost instrument capable of revealing the true health of the programming.

Using streaming merely as a “signal repeater” wastes strategic information. Using it as a diagnostic tool transforms data into course correction—precisely what separates professional management from the mere occupation of a frequency.

Validating streaming as a channel of operational excellence

The importance of streaming lies, first and foremost, in the fact that it cannot be neglected. It cannot go down, it cannot operate unstably, and it should even deliver audio quality superior to FM transmission itself, within the technical limits of the digital medium.

This is not about creating competition between signal models. FM and streaming do not compete; they complement each other. The goal is to offer listeners distinct and pleasurable experiences, allowing them to choose the listening mode that best fits their context, device, and moment.

Moreover, it is precisely through streaming that the station obtains the clearest, most continuous, and most measurable feedback on audience behavior. In this format, listener responses are observed—retention, abandonment, return, peaks, and drops—and it is based on these responses that management can implement conscious, rapid, data-driven course corrections rather than assumptions.

Don’t forget to breathe!

Neglecting streaming, therefore, is not merely a loss of technical quality. It means giving up the main diagnostic instrument currently available to an FM station that aims to remain relevant and economically viable.

Data alone is not enough

It is not enough to have more and more streaming data; it is essential to know how to access it, organize it, and, above all, interpret it correctly.

Raw, isolated, or poorly understood data does not generate operational intelligence. Without a method for reading, correlating, and comparing historical data, streaming ceases to be a strategic tool and becomes nothing more than a pile of numbers with no decision-making value.

The real competitive advantage lies in the ability to transform data into diagnosis, diagnosis into decision, and decision into course correction—of programming, language, and commercial strategy.

A proprietary app or presence on aggregators like RadiosNet?

I will be direct: I would not use up phone memory to install an app designed to listen to a single radio station. Actual user behavior points to the use of aggregators like RadiosNet, which concentrate tens of thousands of stations on a single platform. Trying to convince listeners otherwise is, in practice, swimming against the current.

The correct logic is to win the listener inside the aggregator. Once there, the listener will tend to choose the station with stronger local identification, greater symbolic proximity, and greater everyday utility. This implies a structural shift: music programming ceases to be the main differentiator, as it once was, and gives way to local identity, service, information, and a sense of belonging.

Listeners in your city will not stop searching for the local station within an app that offers 50,000 options, as long as that station is easily recognizable, well identified, and clearly tied to the territory it represents. The fear of “getting lost in the ocean” is largely unfounded, provided the station ensures brand consistency, local language, and unequivocal identification.

In short, the aggregator does not dilute the local radio station; it exposes the local radio station. It is up to the station to decide whether it wants to be just another frequency or a recognizable reference within this environment.

The 24-hour tool

Even in small cities, for the streaming dashboard to be statistically valid, the station must focus its efforts on reaching several hundred online listeners daily. Only from a minimally expressive numerical threshold do audience curves begin to repeat consistently, hour by hour and day by day.

Diagnostic consistency of the data

When this pattern of repetition is established, true validation of audience behavior occurs. From that point on, it becomes possible to clearly identify:

• the programs that genuinely concentrate audience;

• the programs that repel listeners;

• the exact points of drop-off and return;

• and, most importantly, the tolerance threshold for commercial time.

Before reaching this minimum volume of listeners, the data exists, but it is still noisy and fragile for structural decisions. Once the pattern is consolidated, streaming ceases to be merely a distribution channel and fully assumes its role as a continuous diagnostic instrument for programming and station strategy.