There are some years you remember more than others because important things happened in your life. 1983 was one of them for me. It was the year I walked out of my PD job at WRIF and launched the company you know now as Jacobs Media.
For me, it was a year of looking at my career- and radio – differently. To that point, I had worked in the radio business for less than a decade. I was still very much reassessing what the radio was – and what it could be.
I looked a little different back then (see photo at Hart Plaza in Detroit), but I was still devoting much of my waking hours to figuring out this radio thing and how a rock station could become a
leading media outlet. The last thing I was thinking about was where broadcast radio might be in 20, 30, or even 40 years down the road. That level of thought was well beyond my world view during the early years of MTV and the emergence of the compact disc as everybody’s pick to replace the vinyl album as the most popular music format.
Back in 1983, radio was “mainstream media,” along with television, newspapers, and magazines. That was pretty much all there was, and radio broadcasters rode that cash cow to incredible profits. Radio was loved and depended on by just about everybody.
Most homes had several working radios in different rooms, and you wouldn’t have dreamed of getting into a car without turning on the dashboard radio. If you were operating a reasonably popular station in Any Market, U.S.A., you were probably making money. Good money. And if you were in a major market and had a respectable share of listening, you were likely cash flowing like there was no tomorrow.
I’m giving those of you who are newer to the business some perspective on how things can evolve and change over time, even institutions that were once a core part of people’s lives. But while radio was a fixture in most people’s lives, not everyone viewed it the same – even in 1983.
Take Steve Jobs, for example. In 1983, Apple was a young company having just launched the Lisa computer. Back then, Jobs wore bowties – the long-sleeved black polo and jeans would come later. Forty years ago, he wasn’t looking at the world the way the rest of us were. He was scheming and dreaming, imagining a very different way to purchase and listen to music.
The TikTok video below is just 87 seconds long, but it is unforgettable. You need to watch it before reading the rest of this post. So, go ahead – I’ll wait.
Steve Jobs casually figuring out the app stores, saas and freemium in 1983 by just thinking about radio stations. pic.twitter.com/gA8ZuL61Iy
— Eren Bali (@erenbali) January 14, 2025
What Steve Jobs was doing way back in the first Reagan Administration is something we should have been doing to ourselves a generation or two ago:
Turn the radio model, as we know it, on its side to reimagine what it could be – what it needs to be – in a world of Spotify, SiriusXM, YouTube, podcasts, “connected cars,” Alexa, and AI.
With all those options and all that fragmentation, we’re still programming, marketing (barely), and selling radio in much the same way there were doing on “WKRP.”
Think about how Steve Jobs turned the conventional radio model on its side to come up with a way for the medium to have value, above and beyond the ways people used it back then:
“I don’t know how we’re going to that, but we need the radio station.”
In 1983, radio may have been an important medium for most people back then. But to Steve Jobs, it was essential – of paramount importance to his vision of consumers buying music over their computers with a credit card as the currency.
For him, radio was about free sampling, the opportunity for essentially every consumer in the country to be exposed to music – for free – whether a pop hit was being hammered thousands of times by the Top 40 station or it was brand new music and artists being played for the first time on rock, country, triple A, AC, and other radio formats. Jobs’ iTunes customers made their purchasing decisions thanks to radio stations playing all those songs in the first place.
Two decades later, Jobs would open the iTunes Store in which we now know radio played a vital role. That’s because Jobs saw radio through a different perspective than the rest of us, a different lens, a different point of view.
So, how do we do what Jobs did more than four decades ago – turn radio on its side to discover or invent a whole new application or “use case” for the medium? Just as it did for Apple in ’83, how can broadcast radio be repurposed to provide value no other medium can?
That is the question because we’re designing, building, and presenting radio in 2025 in pretty much the same ways we were when I roamed the hallways at WRIF. In fact, we’re making many of the same assumptions about consumer behavior that were in place back in 1983 – except most no longer apply to today’s consumption and listening sensibilities.
Rethinking radio is of the highest purpose imaginable because this industry is in need of reinvention and a pivot – or two.
For the purposes of that conversation, we need to toss out the old, tired assumptions, suspend conventional wisdom, and put the ratings on hold – long enough to see the medium, the business model, and the industry itself through a different lens.
The genius who figures it out may become as famous as or even a rich as Steve Jobs.
It’d be worth every penny.
Jacobs Media has consistently walked the walk in the digital space, providing insights and guidance through its well-read national Techsurveys.
In 2008, jacapps was launched - a mobile apps company that has designed and built more than 1,300 apps for both the Apple and Android platforms. In 2013, the DASH Conference was created - a mashup of radio and automotive, designed to foster better understanding of the "connected car" and its impact.
Along with providing the creative and intellectual direction for the company, Fred consults many of Jacobs Media's commercial and public radio clients, in addition to media brands looking to thrive in the rapidly changing tech environment.
Fred was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2018.
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