Crowd React Media's State of Media 2025 report surveyed 1,100 adults on their media habits, platform trust, and what makes them stay with a radio station. The findings are specific enough to act on. In-car listening is radio's strongest remaining fortress: 62% of listeners tune in during morning drive, and the car remains the environment with the lowest competition from streaming and podcasting.

Local content and live hosts are the attributes listeners cite most often as reasons to choose radio over a playlist. Trust in radio as a medium remains high. What the report also found, less comfortably, is that the loss of personality and community connection in non-morning shifts is actively eroding audience in exactly the dayparts where radio used to be unchallenged.

Radio Ink's coverage of the report makes the implication plain. The stations that are growing are the ones doubling down on local voices, meaningful content, and deliberate daypart strategy. The stations that are not growing have, in many cases, replaced local personality with syndication or automation in midday and afternoon, treating those hours as cost centres rather than audience-building opportunities.

The data does not support that trade-off. A listener who has a reason to tune in at midday is more likely to be in a habit of listening across the day. A station that gives them no reason to listen at midday is training them to listen elsewhere.

The trust finding is the one that should inform sales conversations as much as programming decisions. Crowd React Media's report describes AM/FM as "a high-trust, high-impact channel, especially when your target is in the car or in the community." That is a precise positioning statement.

It is also exactly the kind of language that closes a conversation with an advertiser who is weighing radio against digital display. The stations that have internalised this positioning are packaging it as a sales argument. The ones that haven't are still leading with reach numbers that the advertiser already knows and is not impressed by.

The three things the data says to do are straightforward. Protect and invest in morning drive as the habit-formation engine. Treat midday as an active-listening environment that now outperforms afternoon drive in raw listenership.

And build local personality into at least one non-morning daypart on every station in the group. None of those things require a large budget. All of them require a decision.

Sources:

• New Study Shows Radio Is Still A 'High-Trust, High-Impact' Medium, Inside Radio, https://www.insideradio.com/free/new-study-shows-radio-is-still-a-high-trust-high-impact-medium/articlec23fc8b6-2ab1-4dfd-bd06-6ef1774cfcd7.html

• New Report Challenges Radio's Reach; Urges Focus on Air Talent, Radio Ink, https://radioink.com/2025/05/05/new-report-challenges-radios-reach-urges-focus-on-air-talent/

• State of Media 2025, Crowd React Media, https://crowdreactmedia.com/state-of-media-2025/