Terrestrial radio accounted for 17% of listener engagement in 2022, compared to subscription audio streaming, which accounted for 24%, according to IFPI’s 2022 Engaging with Music Report. Plus, 73% of those surveyed stated that when they do listen to the radio, they listen to it mainly for the purpose of listening to music, MBW reports. Tom Rose, Managing Director at pan-European PR and radio plugging agency Propeller Communications, believes radio will maintain its position as the essential platform for new music discovery - "people want to be recommended music by people they trust, as well as algorithms. That’s why public radio stations are able to increase in listenership when they get it right. There are less and less media outlets out there with the demise of blogs and print media, but fans still want to be recommended music by tastemakers that they trust."

Mix Mag is worried about the disappearence of independent radio, following several closures: "Community radio broadcasters have the freedom to choose their own track listing and to punctuate their links with rewarding personal stories - without the confinement of a looming news bulletin. Fascinating guests without profiles are as welcome as guests that have them. With that, unplanned conversational twists have the space to be explored. The freedom of online radio’s programming is what makes it so culturally valuable. It’s a paramount tool in supporting the independent music economy and in sustaining the careers of alternative broadcasters".

Radio pioneer Art Laboe, who spent seven decades behind a microphone, brought rock 'n roll to the West Coast and coined the phrase "Oldies but Goodies", died at age 97 on Friday at his home in Palm Springs. The radio legend is credited with pioneering industry standards such as audience requests and song dedications, and he is believed to be the first DJ to play rock 'n roll tunes on Los Angeles radio. He was also among the first DJs to play music by both Black and white artists, and he built a major following among Latino communities across the region. Laboe’s last show was produced last week and broadcast on Sunday night, two days after he died. LA Times shares a lovely story about their co-citizen.

TikTok is launching TikTok Radio this summer, a full-time SiriusXM music channel, Music Business Worldwide reports. It will be available in vehicles and as a streaming channel on the SiriusXM App, desktop, and all connected devices. TikTok Radio is pitched as a radio version of TikTok’s For You page, a discovery tool for trending videos, and it will be presented by TikTok creators, tastemakers, and DJs.

Radio has become an increasingly vital source of community and comfort for its listeners - DJ Mag argues in an interesting article about the old medium. The audience has grown substantially - much-loved independent station NTS' listener numbers have grown from 1.5 million monthly listeners in 2019 to 2.5 million a year later. A similar trend is seen in other stations, which also proves that the radio is being listened to not only in the car.

Radio stations in the US are flipping to all-holiday formats a bit earlier this year than usual, Variety reports. WWIZ in Youngstown, Pa., moved to wall-to-wall seasonal tunes as early as late September, this week Los Angeles’ KOST, among others, also flipped the switch.

American National Public Radio had Korean boy-band BTS for their Tiny Desk concert on Monday, which set a record for online viewership. Later that day, Gabe Rosenberg, the digital news editor for Columbus, Ohio, NPR affiliate WOSU, encouraged the K-pop band’s fans to donate to public radio stations to say thanks. And, so they did, Washingtonian reports. Earlier this year, Korean band’s fans, who are known as ARMY, raised more than $1 million for Black Lives Matter.

No Signal is a DIY black radio station from the UK that broke through in the middle of lockdown. It was the controversial song clash format NS10v10 that catapulted them into the general consciousness - NS10v10 sees two representatives select 10 songs from opposing artists and battle it out in a round-for-round game of strategy and timing. The first one was 50 Cent vs. Drake. Gal Dem talked to women behind it.

Britain’s hospital radio stations are one of the less well-known features of its health system: tiny operations, staffed by volunteers, who mostly play patient requests. Patients can normally listen to the shows, which are heavy on chart music and old hits, using headphones connected to an entertainment unit beside their beds. There are still over 200 such stations, and some claim they have found themselves more useful than ever during the pandemic, providing a human connection to patients who would otherwise be alone, New York Times reports.

SiriusXM announced limited edition channels launching on Friday (May 1) that will bring some of the greatest hits and exclusive content from the likes of David Bowie, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, George Strait, Guns N’ Roses, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, Prince and the Rolling Stones. The personally curated channels will roll out in coordination with SiriusXM’s Stream Free period, which has been extended through May 31, allowing anyone to get free access to the streaming network's full lineup of streaming content on the SiriusXM app.

Ronan O’Rahilly, the Irish founder of the notorious Radio Caroline that popularised pop music on British radio, has died aged 79. O'Rahilly started out as a manager in the 1960s, but had struggled to get his musicians noticed by the UK radio so he circumvented licensing laws by acquiring a former Danish passenger ferry, anchoring it in the North Sea off Felixstowe, and broadcasting from there. Radio Caroline quickly amassed a listenership of millions for its daytime pop-focused output. In 1967, parliament outlawed offshore radio stations, causing a number of Radio Caroline’s DJs moved to the newly created Radio 1, which had been influenced by the success of the former. Radio Caroline moved to Dutch waters, and continued broadcasting at sea until 1991. Alexis Petridis says that O'Rahilly, by championing bands ignored by the establishment, paved the way for the pirate DJs of soul, acid house and grime.

Radio networks around the world are seeing audience reach and listening hours increasing in double digits, radio programs have been trending on Twitter for the first time in years, radio listening has increased (along with TV streaming) at the expense of music streaming - Midia reports on an unexpected shift. What is it about the radio? - the connection, comfort, companionship – or the sheer live broadcast experience – works wonders for passing the time in isolation.

Henry Rollins has begun a new online radio series called 'The Cool Quarantine' with the idea - "We play you songs, I tell you stories, and we do time together", the LA Times reports. The first episode is out now on KCRW - here - and it’s just over four hours long. It includes “live bootlegs of the Cramps recorded by Ian MacKaye, a story about the time Henry and Ian saw Led Zeppelin in 1977 (plus a bootleg recording from that performance), audio from original Joy Division album pressings, stories about the early days of Black Flag and Dischord Records”.

The BBC has seen listening figures for its stations rise by 18 per cent during the lockdown, NME’s radio services have experienced their best month ever with a 12% month-on-month increase, while Global and Bauer have both witnessed surges of 15 per cent. Capital UK's Roman Kemp thinks that people search for consolation through something familiar - “As our world seemingly gets smaller, people want that communal experience”, NME reports.

Hundreds of employers have been laid off last month by the world's biggest broadcast company, iHeartMedia. American conglomerate's chief executive Bob Pittman said the “employee dislocation” was “the unfortunate price we pay to modernize the company”. Laid-off employees blame the cuts on the company’s top executives, with some critics saying executives used the systems as scapegoats, hoping to distract from old-school failures, portray themselves as futuristic and avoid public outrage, according to the Washington Post. The company, which now uses software to schedule music, analyze research and mix songs, has called AI the muscle it needs to fend off rivals, recapture listeners and emerge from bankruptcy. iHeartMedia owns online iHeartRadio and more than 850 local stations across the United States.

London-born, launched in 2011 with a £5,000 budget and a pair of CDJs from a Littlewoods catalog, NTS radio now attracts over 1.5 million monthly unique listeners, and is currently growing between 3-10% a month. Artists that play live on NTS include Blood Orange, Erykah Badu, Flying Lotus, Aphex Twin, Brian Eno, Bjork, Slowthai, Skepta, The XX, Andrew Weatherall, Kamasi Washington, The Black Madonna, Sampha, Kelela, Floating Points, Mac Demarco and many others.

Radio Garden is a great app that allows users to rotate the globe and listen to radio stations from all over the world in real-time. It features thousands of radios now. The site interface is a three-dimensional geolocation, where the user navigates through a representation of the globe. It also provides information on the country where the signal is being transmitted.

The lovestruck ballad never reached number one in the UK, but remained on the charts for more than three years, and it took up a similar residency on the airwaves. Gary Lightbody told the BBC how they wrote the song "in the shed of his [producer's] garden" where they "went down with a couple of bottles […]

Ed Sheeran was the most-played artist on British radio last year, despite not releasing new music, and without an entry in the Top 10 most-played tracks, suggesting his entire catalogue of hits remains on rotation on the radio, BBC reports. It's the third time in four years that he's been the UK's most-played artist. 'Feel […]