How hard is the Radio Industry?

Would the proliferation of self-driving cars cause a huge hit to the radio broadcasting industry?

• One of the biggest reasons why the radio broadcasting industry is still alive and well despite the birth of all these new ways of media communication is that we as a society mainly use personal modes of transportation, which require our eyes and hands to be used to the maximum extent; this makes radio one of the few media consumption choices we have, as it only requires our hearing to consume. With the proliferation of self-driving cars, it would theoretically free both our hands and eyes, and leaves the drivers with many more choice of consumption types -- book reading, web browsing, movie watching, etc. Radio won't be our only choice anymore.

• Answer:

  It will be an issue.  Radio survived the arrival of TV, which severely displaced it as the home entertainment center, and may find a way to change in response to less demand for radio for music and other recorded programming.  People are already preferring mp3 players, phones and other such devices for music in cars.   Radio continues to make sense for live programming but indeed, in a robocar you can watch live TV.  Well, you will once the mobile ATSC standard becomes better established -- today it doesn't work well to moving receivers.   Of course, data in the car is over radio.  It's just no longer purely an audio channel.  Radio should become digital, and live audio streams could become just a small part of what is broadcast.  But this death of radio is still some time away, because first the robocars must arrive (sometime this decade) and then become high enough in market penetration that people no longer are listening.