Radio is at death’s door, because Internet.  The conventional wisdom persists despite the facts.

My radio pals are sharing a story that outlines, in great detail, the financial troubles facing iHeartMedia.  iHeart is the former Clear Channel, which rebranded last year in an effort to move away from radio in order to emphasize digital content.  The new name didn’t disguise the company’s ongoing problems:  a $20 billion debt load stemming from a leveraged buyout in 2008.

iHeart is still the largest radio company in the United States.  It owns 850 stations. Cumulus, America’s second largest radio company, owns 460 radio stations.  Cumulus is also struggling to pay its debt (about $2 billion, stemming from the acquisition of Citadel in 2011).

CBS recently announced that it was considering either selling or spinning off its radio division.

The stories about the iHeart/Cumulus march to Chapter 11 or the rumored CBS sale reach the same conclusion:  thanks to iPods, Pandora, Spotify, and Podcasts, the listening audience for radio is disappearing.

It’s all over, tip your waiters and find a new career.

Well, not exactly.

From the Media Life story about iHeart:

As it turned out, for all the promise of digital media, it simply doesn’t generate the volume of dollars of traditional media, be it radio or TV or print. Advertisers spend less, and sellers make less.

But wait, there’s more!  Here’s Fitch analyzing a CBS Radio sale:

Competitive alternatives and new Internet and mobile entrants will reduce time spent listening to terrestrial radio, although the audience reach should not decline substantially. Any decline is expected to be partially offset by modest pricing growth. Advertiser demand will remain, given the large core audience, the medium’s local reach, its targeted nature and low cost.

For the last couple of years, broadcast professionals have been assaulted with bad information on all sides.  A combination of self-loathing radio people and smug tech evangelists have been telling us that we don’t matter.  No one cares, nobody likes us anyway.  Some radio companies have even apologized for not being a buzz-worthy digital company.

Now that we’re 16 years into the 21st Century, the media landscape is starting to gain a little more clarity.  Yes, digital will be a part of our day-to-day media lives.  We start the day with Facebook, we listen to our iPods on the way into work, we plug in a podcast for a long drive.  But radio will still have a rather significant place at the table.  At the very least, radio will attract more local advertising dollars than the digital alternatives (as the recently released BIA-Kelsey annual report of radio station billings recently found, radio stations do a fine job of monetizing their digital product).

There are challenges facing a radio station, to be sure.  Ad revenue continues to trend downward, but that’s the case for all legacy media.  Radio, newspapers, and TV don’t make as much money as they used to.  NBC isn’t making the same money it did in 1984, but the peacock network is in no danger of shutting down.  In fact, advertisers are shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars to buy commercials during the Olympics in Rio.

Digital should make radio work harder.  A radio station can’t be a jukebox or a relay for some distant talk show.  That business model is dead and gone.  It needs to be a unique product that really stands out in a crowded media landscape.  In the case of radio, it needs to really embrace its city of license.  The good news is that’s not hard to accomplish. The bad news is with 1,200 radio stations owned by companies that are at death’s door, the need to innovate runs a distant second to the need to survive.

Thousands of radio stations could change hands in the next five years, many of those sales will be mandated by a bankruptcy judge.  Some mid-sized broadcasters will grow.  New players will enter the game.  Old names may resurface.  Free of crushing debt and mandates from far-flung programmers, local radio stations will once again be free to innovate.

One innovation is to get rid of syndicated programming once and for all.  At one time, it made sense.  Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern attracted audiences substantially larger than any local counterpart.  But it is no longer 1994.  Syndicated shows rarely move the needle, and they wind up costing their affiliates hundreds of thousands of dollars in commercial inventory.

A radio station “pays” for a syndicated show by offering up a certain amount of available commercial time to that show’s advertisers.  The end result is whole commercial breaks where the money flows into somebody else’s pocket.  The cost of a syndicated show could far exceed the $75,000 it would cost to pay a local nighttime host in a large to major market.  When you own your own show, you also own all of the money that flows into that particular daypart.  If a broadcaster wants to make money in 2016, they have to monetize every hour of every day, and that means doing away with syndication.

Another innovation is to really commit to “now.”  The top 10 billing radio stations in America all have one thing in common – they live in the moment.  WBBM, WTOP, WCBS, WINS, WFAN, and KFI are driven by current events.  If something is happening now, you will hear it on those stations – either at 3:00 in the afternoon or 3:00 in the morning.  That sense of “I’m up to speed the moment I turn on the radio” is the reason why those stations win.

My time at The Loop gave me a little bit of familiarity with music radio.  If I ran a music station, I would do away with all sweepers.  Sweepers are the pieces of production that run between songs.  My attitude about sweepers is as follows:  if you have a recorded sweeper ID’ing the station in between songs, why are you paying a DJ.  That’s the jock’s job.  Let the human being to whom you are paying money identify the station and promote station business between songs.

Besides, with the jock executing the format, he or she has the freedom to respond to events as they happen, surprise listeners with songs (enhance the DJ’s “brand” as a musical expert), start interesting conversations, or react to breaking news (the death of a core artist).  They are small, low-cost programming strategies that can differentiate a broadcast radio station from a streaming service.

The radio industry is being dragged down by two companies that are very sick.  Soon, they will be gone.  But radio will be around for many decades to come.