I think you might have seen the very early beginnings of a long term trend here with the recent moves of the Hit network to an older audience, I think you won’t really see much attempt to target commercial radio at young audiences - as they will be the ones who have just never added listening to traditional radio to their routines.
That said, I think there’s a place for radio -
First - curation. I’ve got my own playlists to stream - but I still use radio as a means of hearing something that’s outside my library. I’ve never found any of the streaming services able to get close to giving me a good experience with their attempts at generating stuff I’d like from stuff I listen to.
Second - live and local. Traffic reports, talk about things happening in the city, sports - being live in general. A lot of my listening is to podcasts - but they fill a different niche to what live local content does. The closest I ever really get was that my Google Home would play me the ABC News feed when I woke up (back when my commute to work wasn’t 2 metres), usually but not always recorded about an hour before I woke up - but a short news update is about all that can be delivered that effectively and with that good of a turn around.
Third - ad models. Radio is really the only radio-like thing that has a proven successful business model. About the only thing less profitable than our major radio operators are the big streaming services and podcast giants - they are being sustained by being mega corps like Apple/Google, and by hoping enough growth and profits might eventually appear like Spotify.
So, those combined make me think there’s future in radio as a concept - just that they need to focus on their strengths to survive - piped in networked voice-tracking is a deathwish, people will turn that off and never come back. Invest in good playlists, throw in stuff that only a human with music knowledge would know to throw in, not just what an algorithm spits out.
Aside from music, I think you’ll continue to see pushes into more profitable niche formats - I’d be shocked if by the end of the decade there’s not an FM Talk station in each capital city.
That then leaves delivery. My personal experience with internet radio is simply being paralysed by choice - the stations I stream are just the stations I started listening to occasionally years back. Ages ago when I had heavily capped broadband, my ISP had Absolute Radio on unmetered streaming - so I gave it a shot and it’s stuck with me since. 106.4 The Zap from Belgium might be a station I’d like more, but I’m just never going to put the effort in to trying to track them down, so I find myself listening to a tiny subset of stations I’m aware of, and often it’s not worth the effort of me launching an app to go stream it so I just turn on a radio and hit a preset.
I think that makes a loop that sustains broadcast radio - you are aware of the stations because of strong brands, the easiest way to access those stations are on a radio - so you listen to a radio for radio stations, while you’d go online for the more on demand content.
So the questions in my view would be - how does a new internet only entrant create the level of name recognition to create a sustainable radio business without traditional radio? Can an internet service match the localism and live aspect of regular radio - or are people willing to lose that?
. Given the size of our country.