Unlike Facebook or web-based music sharing applications, locally owned radio reaches thousands of people across many incomes and ages in a single area at the same time with a message unique to that area. That ability is what once moved entire cities to unite around local bands, local charities, local businesses, and new ideas. The internet may have some advantages, such as connecting individuals over long distances, but it cannot create a vast localized unity the way radio can. The local limitations of a radio tower are actually its greatest asset because the station transmits primarily within a community and is free to everyone inside that community (young or old, rich or poor, educated or not).
The internet is a companion technology not a competing technology. They do different things that can support each other as long as radio is not run like it is the internet. Good radio is radio first. It focuses on the local audience with local deejays delivering local content. By being live and local at the same time, allows a city to communicate with itself in real time on a huge scale. That’s what builds local movements to a critical mass. That is also what makes radio unique and marketable. Sadly though, most of radio is either syndicated from out of town or voice-tracked to fool you into thinking that its live and local. Deejays really aren’t that soulless. When the bankers who own radio remove the live human element, they remove the thing that makes it different from the internet. That’s what’s killing radio.