Radio has always been free for those who listen. That’s the nature of it, right? Sure, maybe you need to buy a receiver to hear it. And yes, your enjoyment may be interrupted by ads. Other media have ads, yet they also have a sticker price: newspapers and magazines, cable and streaming TV, movies, books. But radio is part of a genre of media, one that now includes podcasts and websites such as this one, that may have ads but are flat-out free for users to enjoy.
I always assumed this was kind of an accident of radio’s past, or something dictated by the one-to-many technology of broadcasting itself. This is in fact true. What I didn’t know was how much people foresaw the economic disaster free would turn out to be as a business model, and how very hard they tried — though not hard enough — to avoid the structure we now hobble along with today.
Read the whole piece, by Julia Barton, here: https://continuous-wave.beehiiv.com/p/what-if-we-give-it-away