Radio Is Not Dead: Broadcast Is Still the Industry Number 2 Revenue Stream (2025 Data)

You have heard it at every showcase, in every comment section, and from every well-meaning friend who quit music in 2014: radio is dead, nobody listens anymore, just chase the algorithm. It is repeated so often that most independent artists never bother to pitch a station, never register for the royalties radio generates, and quietly write off an entire revenue stream on the strength of a vibe. The problem is that the vibe is wrong, and the people who actually track where music money comes from have the receipts to prove it.

Here is the myth-break, stated plainly. According to the IMPF Global Market View 2025, which compiles figures from CISAC, the global collective management umbrella, broadcast television and radio returned to growth in 2024, rising 1.2 percent to 3.41 billion euros, and it remains the second-largest income source for the music publishing world, sitting behind digital and ahead of live. Not second-to-last. Second. Radio did not die. It got quieter in the cultural conversation while still paying out billions, and the artists who understand that gap are the ones collecting from a channel everyone else abandoned out of fashion.

1. The Data That Kills the "Radio Is Dead" Myth

Let us start with the single most important number, because it does the heavy lifting. The IMPF Global Market View 2025 is an annual market report from the Independent Music Publishers International Forum, a body that represents independent publishers worldwide. To describe the shape of the market it leans on collections data from CISAC, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, which aggregates what collective management organizations around the world actually gather and pay out to creators. That makes it one of the better proxies for where royalty money truly flows, because it measures collected income rather than projected sales.

In that report, the combined TV and radio broadcast category did two notable things in 2024. First, it grew, rising 1.2 percent year over year, after a stretch where many assumed broadcast could only shrink. Second, it landed at 3.41 billion euros, a figure large enough to keep it ranked as the number two income source for the publishing world. Only digital, the catch-all that now includes streaming, ranked higher. Live performance, the category many artists assume is bigger than radio, came in behind it.

Read that ordering again, because it inverts the usual mental model. Most independent musicians rank their income mentally as streaming, then gigs, then maybe sync, with radio as an afterthought somewhere near merch. The collected publishing data says broadcast outranks live. The reason it feels invisible is that radio royalties arrive quietly through collection societies and publishers months after the spin, with no dashboard pinging your phone, while a sold-out show pays cash the same night. Invisible is not the same as small.

What "returned to growth" actually tells you

The phrase matters. A category that "returned to growth" is one that had been flat or declining and then turned upward again. That is a very different story from a category in terminal collapse. The 1.2 percent uptick in 2024 reported by the IMPF Global Market View 2025 is not explosive, and we are not going to pretend it is. But the direction is the headline: broadcast is recovering, not disappearing. For an artist deciding whether to spend a weekend building a radio pitch list, the difference between "this channel is dying" and "this channel is quietly growing" is the difference between skipping it and showing up.

2. What "Number 2 Revenue Stream" Really Means

It is worth being precise about what the 3.41 billion euro figure covers, so nobody overstates it. This number comes from the publishing and collections side of the business, meaning it tracks the royalties that collective management organizations gather on behalf of songwriters, composers, and publishers when their works are broadcast and otherwise used. CISAC measures collections across categories such as digital, broadcast TV and radio, live and background, and a few smaller buckets. Within that frame, broadcast is the runner-up to digital.

Why does this distinction matter to you as an artist? Because it tells you which of your rights radio actually pays. When your song airs on broadcast radio, it generates a public performance royalty for the composition, the underlying song as written, which flows to the songwriter and publisher through performing rights organizations and onward through the CISAC network. That is the money captured in the 3.41 billion euro broadcast figure. If you write your own songs, that royalty is yours to collect, and radio is one of its largest engines.

The honest caveat: streaming is still bigger, and that is fine

We are not going to spin the data to make radio sound like the whole market. It is not. Digital, driven by streaming, is the largest category by a clear margin, and any artist who ignores streaming in 2026 is making a mistake. The honest framing is this: streaming is the biggest single bucket, and broadcast is the strong, growing number two. Those facts coexist. The lazy conclusion that "streaming won, so radio lost" is exactly the error the IMPF Global Market View 2025 data refutes. You do not have to pick. The artists who treat the two as complementary, streaming for reach and radio for royalties and credibility, capture both.

There is also a structural quirk worth naming so you set expectations correctly. In the United States, over the air AM and FM radio pays a public performance royalty to the songwriter and publisher, but it pays no performance royalty to the owner of the master recording or the featured performer. That terrestrial master exemption is unusual globally, and it is why the publishing side of radio income looks healthier than the recording side in the US specifically. We dig into the mechanics of who gets paid in our explainer on whether radio pays royalties and the related guide to SoundExchange and the digital performance royalty.

3. The US Picture: Radio and TV Inside the Publishing Mix

Zoom in from the global figure to the United States and the picture stays consistent. The IMPF Global Market View 2025, drawing on figures from the NMPA, the National Music Publishers Association, breaks down where US publishing revenue comes from. Within that mix, radio performance rights account for roughly 8 percent of revenue, and television and cable account for roughly 6 percent. Add them and broadcast is responsible for something on the order of 14 percent of US publishing income.

Fourteen percent is not a rounding error. It is a meaningful, dependable share of the money that songwriters and publishers collect in the largest music market in the world. A publisher would never walk away from 14 percent of its income, and neither should an independent songwriter who happens to be their own publisher. When you self-release and write your own material, you are the songwriter and the publisher, which means that radio and TV slice is yours to chase, if you register correctly and actually get the airplay.

Reference table: the broadcast revenue facts at a glance

Here is the data assembled in one place, with the source attached to every figure so you can cite it yourself.

Metric	Figure	Period	Source
Global TV and radio broadcast collections	3.41 billion euros, up 1.2 percent	2024	IMPF Global Market View 2025 (CISAC)
Rank of broadcast among publishing income sources	Number 2, behind digital, ahead of live	2024	IMPF Global Market View 2025 (CISAC)
Radio performance rights, share of US publishing revenue	About 8 percent	2025 view	IMPF Global Market View 2025 (NMPA)
TV and cable, share of US publishing revenue	About 6 percent	2025 view	IMPF Global Market View 2025 (NMPA)

One note on reading this table honestly: the euro figure is a global collections number from CISAC, while the two US percentages are NMPA-based and describe the United States publishing mix specifically. We have kept the currencies and scopes separate on purpose, because mixing a global euro total with a US dollar percentage is exactly how misleading stats get born. Keep them distinct and each one stands on solid ground.

4. What This Means for an Independent Artist

Data is only useful if it changes a decision. So here is the translation from a 3.41 billion euro line item into your actual plan as an indie artist. The fact that broadcast is the number two and growing publishing income source has three direct implications for how you spend your limited time and money.

Radio is a royalty engine you can plug into

Every broadcast spin of your song generates a public performance royalty for the composition. If you have registered with a performing rights organization and your works are properly logged, those royalties flow to you over time. Most independent artists who never pitch radio also never see these royalties, not because the system cheated them, but because they generated no broadcast plays to collect on. Airplay is the input. No airplay, no broadcast royalty. The 3.41 billion euros is real money, and the door into it is a spin.

Radio is validation that algorithms cannot fake

A streaming number can be bought, botted, or inflated. A confirmed add at a real station, vetted by a music director who chose to play your record, is a different kind of signal. It tells playlist editors, press writers, bookers, and your future self that a gatekeeper with a reputation to protect put your song on the air. That third-party credibility compounds. It is why a single college or noncommercial spin can open doors that ten thousand passive streams do not. We break down which stations actually carry that weight in our comparison of college radio versus commercial radio.

Radio reaches the listeners streaming misses

Algorithmic discovery is powerful, but it is also a closed loop that mostly serves you to people who already like what you sound like. Broadcast radio, by design, plays to a room of listeners who did not choose your song and are not in your existing fanbase. That is precisely where new fans come from. Specialty shows, noncommercial formats, and the growing world of internet and satellite radio still introduce music to people the algorithm would never route to you. In a market where everyone is fighting for the same recommendation slot, the channel that reaches strangers is undervalued.

5. What To Do About It: A 2026 Action Plan

Knowing radio still pays is worthless without a way to act on it. Here is the concrete sequence an independent artist can run, in order, to turn this data into spins and royalties.

Step 1: Register so the royalties have somewhere to land

Before you chase a single spin, make sure you are set up to collect. Affiliate with a performing rights organization for your songwriting, and if your music airs on digital and satellite radio, register with SoundExchange for the digital sound recording royalty as well. Our step-by-step walkthrough of how to register with SoundExchange covers the digital side, and a PRO covers the composition side. Skip this and your airplay generates money that sits uncollected.

Step 2: Build a targeted station and contact list

Spray-and-pray pitching to every station in a generic directory wastes your time and theirs. The artists who get added research the specific shows, formats, and music directors that fit their sound, then pitch those people directly. This is the entire premise of RadioPromo.io: a real-time contact finder that surfaces the stations and decision-makers most likely to play your kind of music, with verified contact details, so your outreach lands with the right human instead of a dead general inbox.

Step 3: Pitch like a professional, not a stranger

A good radio pitch is short, specific, and easy to say yes to. It names the show or programmer, makes the case for why your song fits their audience, and includes a clean one-sheet and a streamable link. If you have never written one, our guide on submitting music to radio stations without a publicist lays out the exact workflow, and you do not need a costly PR firm to execute it well.

Step 4: Track spins and follow up

Airplay is not one-and-done. Note which stations add you, thank the people who do, and build the relationship for your next release. Understanding how spins are counted and reported, which we cover in what radio spins and charts are, helps you turn scattered adds into a momentum story you can show to bigger stations and press.

Step 5: Run radio alongside streaming, not instead of it

The goal is not to abandon streaming for radio. It is to stop abandoning radio for streaming. Build a release plan that pitches playlists and runs your digital rollout while simultaneously working the broadcast angle. For the full integrated approach, our radio promotion strategy for independent artists and our roundup of the best radio promotion tools of 2026 show how to slot radio into a modern, streaming-first campaign without doubling your workload.

6. Common Mistakes That Make Artists Believe the Myth

The "radio is dead" belief is self-reinforcing. Artists assume it, so they do nothing, so they earn nothing from radio, which confirms the assumption. Here are the specific errors that keep the myth alive, and how to avoid each one.

• Confusing "smaller than streaming" with "irrelevant." Broadcast being number two, not number one, does not make it negligible. A 3.41 billion euro, growing category is not a rounding error. Treat it as the strong second channel it is.
• Never registering to collect. Plenty of artists do get occasional airplay and still see nothing, because they never affiliated with a PRO or registered the digital side. The money exists; the registration is the missing link.
• Pitching everyone instead of the right people. Generic blasts to giant station lists get ignored. Targeted pitches to the specific shows and music directors who fit your genre get added. Precision beats volume.
• Treating one spin as the finish line. Radio rewards relationships and repetition. A single add with no follow-up rarely compounds; consistent, professional outreach across releases does.
• Assuming you need a publicist to start. A PR firm can help at scale, but the barrier to your first spins is information and effort, not a five-figure retainer. Direct, transparent pitching is the path, and it is also the only legal one, which we explain in our note on whether payola is legal.

7. The 2026 Shift: Data and Direct Access Over Gatekeeping

For decades, the knowledge that broadcast was still a top-two revenue stream lived with publishers, label business affairs teams, and the radio promoters they paid. The independent artist was told radio was dead partly because the gatekeepers benefited from that belief, since it kept the channel exclusive to whoever could afford a promoter. The shift in 2026 is that the data is public, the contacts are findable, and the outreach is something an artist can run directly, without paying thousands a month for access to relationships they can now build themselves.

That is the entire reason RadioPromo.io exists. The IMPF Global Market View 2025 tells you the money is there. The old model said the only way to reach it was a publicist gatekeeping a contact list you would never see. RadioPromo.io replaces that with a transparent, real-time contact finder: you search by format and territory, see the stations, specialty shows, program directors, and music directors that fit your music, and pitch them yourself with verified details. The royalty data justifies the effort; the tool removes the gatekeeper. If you want to understand the broader case for radio in a streaming world, start with our overview of how to get music on the radio.

Final Thoughts: Stop Believing the Eulogy

Radio is not dead. The phrase is a cultural reflex that the actual numbers contradict. The IMPF Global Market View 2025, built on CISAC collections data, shows broadcast TV and radio grew 1.2 percent to 3.41 billion euros in 2024 and held its place as the number two income source for the publishing world, ahead of live. In the United States, the same report attributes about 8 percent of publishing revenue to radio performance rights and about 6 percent to TV and cable. Those are not the figures of a dead medium. They are the figures of a quiet, durable, recovering one that most of your competitors have decided to ignore.

That decision is your opening. While everyone else chases the same crowded recommendation slots, broadcast sits there as the second-largest pool of publishing money, paying royalties and handing out credibility to the artists willing to register, target, and pitch. The artists who win in 2026 are not the ones who believed the eulogy. They are the ones who read the data, plugged into the royalty system, and went and got the spins.

Sources

• IMPF Global Market View 2025, published by the Independent Music Publishers International Forum. Global broadcast collections figures (TV and radio at 3.41 billion euros, up 1.2 percent in 2024, ranked second behind digital and ahead of live) are drawn from CISAC, the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers. The United States publishing mix figures (radio performance rights about 8 percent, television and cable about 6 percent) are drawn from the NMPA, the National Music Publishers Association, as cited in the same report.

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