We have all experienced this in the early morning commute. A voice cuts through traffic noise with a local reference, something specific, a forthcoming event, traffic update, a joke about the weather, and then a song you had forgotten you loved. For two decades, that voice was FM radio. It knew your city. It talked to you as if it lived there too.
Now, that voice is going quiet.
Several major private FM operators in India have begun surrendering broadcast licences. Expansion plans have halted. Local programming is shrinking. The industry that once placed itself at the heart of urban India's daily rhythm is retreating. Sun TV Network, Music Broadcast Limited and other listed radio entities have reported sustained revenue pressure. India's radio advertising market, once growing at double digits, has been contracting in real terms against digital's explosive rise.
At first glance, this makes no sense. India's appetite for audio content is growing unabated. Music consumption is at an all-time high. Podcasts are growing rapidly. Earphones are ubiquitous. Commutes still happen, and people spend hours in transit. Audio, as a medium, has never been more central to Indian daily life.
So why is FM radio weakening to near collapse even as audio consumption grows?
Radio is struggling because the world it was built for no longer exists. When, at first, private FM radio expanded aggressively in India from the early 2000s, the logic was airtight. Spectrum was scarce and controlled by the government. Music discovery depended on intermediaries, and you needed someone to play the songs for you. Cities had few entertainment options during commuting hours. The radio jockey was not merely a presenter but more the listener's primary guide to popular culture.
Then the smartphone arrived and invalidated every one of those assumptions.
Today, a listener can instantly access Spotify playlists, YouTube music streams, JioSaavn radio stations, algorithmically curated mood feeds, regional podcasts, devotional content and short-form audio entertainment, all free, all personalised, all available without a fixed schedule. Radio's historic advantage, that it was simply the easiest audio option available, was vaporised almost overnight.
Still, technology alone does not explain the depth of the crisis. The deeper failure is one of regulatory design.
Private FM radio in India was, for years, effectively barred from broadcasting news, restricted from political commentary, constrained in content choices and trapped in a city-by-city licensing structure that made achieving programming economics at a national scale difficult.
The result was a medium locked into a single format with Bollywood songs, RJ banter and local advertising. That format worked in the pre-streaming era. In the streaming era, it became indefensible.
Spotify can do music better. Algorithms can do personalisation better. What radio could have built was a genuine spoken-word ecosystem, civic broadcasting, personality-driven commentary, and regional cultural programming; it was largely prevented from building.
Compare this to the United States. American radio evolved beyond music decades ago into talk radio, sports commentary, financial advice, political broadcasting and deeply loyal personality-driven formats. Radio personalities became intellectual and cultural brands in their own right. iHeartMedia, the largest US radio group, operates over 860 stations but derives substantial revenue from podcasts, live events, and digital content.
India never developed that architecture.
Indian private radio remained commercially narrow, and when digital platforms arrived with infinite supply at near-zero distribution cost, radio had almost no defensive moat left.
Think of who loses most when local audio voices disappear.
Streaming platforms are global. Audio intimacy is local. That connection, once lost, does not easily return.
India has hundreds of millions of citizens who are comfortable passive listeners but who are not habitual readers or active screen users. For these citizens living in small cities, on shop floors, and in shared transport, their local radio was often their only reliable source of community information, civic awareness, local commerce, and cultural identity.
Streaming platforms serve the urban, the connected, and the algorithm-legible.
They do not serve the listener who wants to know what is happening in their neighbourhood, in their language, with context that a Mumbai-based content team cannot provide.
As mentioned, audio is not dying. In fact, the opposite is true. India is on its way to becoming one of the world's largest audio markets. But the winners of that market may look nothing like the FM stations we grew up with. The future belongs to hyperlocal audio communities, personality-led vernacular content, and hybrid operators who think of themselves not as radio broadcasters but as owners of attention during idle moments.
That future is possible.
To make it breathe, it requires the industry to stop defending what radio was. Regulators need to stop pricing spectrum as though digital competition does not exist. TRAI has already acknowledged the stress with proposals for lower reserve prices for FM channels. This signals that the old assumptions are no longer sustainable. That is a beginning. The more important conversation is about what Indian audio can become - a civic, vernacular, local, intimate and genuinely irreplaceable media ecosystem.
The morning commute still happens. The question is whose voice fills it and whether that voice will know your city, your language, your street.
As a culture and a democracy, that answer should matter to India.
(The author is a business leader and columnist)
