Country music is the format where the storytellers who write the songs are as successful as the stars who sing them. Few genres outside Country still do that today, but those that do, like Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, and Olivia Rodrigo, are dominant because of it.

This trend is as much about the demise of radio as a venue for spoken word content as it is for podcasts’ growth in the format. It’s also about the necessity for radio stations to be more than a pure-play one-platform medium.

The use of high-profile on-air personalities isn’t a new trend to radio. The glory years of radio from the 1960s through the 1990s had many big names on-air. Talent who were known for generating big ratings. It is fair to note that the erosion of audience levels began in the mid-90s following deregulation, but it was the rapid consolidation of the early 2000s that found many air talent being eliminated. One would think that the best of the best would have been retained, but that wasn’t necessari