If you’ve worked in radio long enough you’re familiar with tradio. It’s been a staple of small market radio for as long as I can remember and for some stations, to this day, it’s their most listened to and talked about program. If you’re not familiar with tradio, essentially, it’s a one hour swap shop talk segment that happens live on the radio where listeners call in and talk about things they are personally selling or want to buy. It checks a lot of the boxes I like, engages listeners, gets tons of listener audio on the air and takes advantage of the fact that radio can be live and local. The knock on it of course is that it’s a departure from the format during a prime hour (many stations do it at 9am, 10am or noon), it’s a lot of the same people calling in every day, and even in the hands of a professional, trained broadcaster it can be pretty cringe-worthy because there’s generally no producer to screen calls and only put the good ones live on the air. However, with affordable modern tools and equipment there are ways to modernize tradio to take advantage of it’s strengths and minimize the tune-out factor on air. Here’s how that can work.

Put cameras in the studio and use a platform like Riverside, my preference, or Streamyard their competitor, to livestream it while also banking everything in high quality audio/video to a local machine. Solicit both traditional calls through the station’s request line and share the invite link so people can join with video from their desktop, laptop or the smartphone in their pocket. Stream it to the station’s YouTube channel and all of it’s social media sites simultaneously instead of doing it live on the radio. After the hour is up the AI tools in Riverside (or Streamyard) will automatically create clips of the strongest calls, size them vertically for short-form (reels/shorts) and horizontally for long-form. Those clips can be pushed out to those same platforms (YouTube and Social) and scheduled throughout the day and the audio from those clips can be used on air either as a tighter version of a one to two-hour radio show or in recorded promos that run throughout the day.

Since those same platforms use AI to pull transcripts, takeaways, summary copy and more it can easily be loaded into both website blogs/article and turned into a daily email newsletter that goes out to the stations database and anyone who’s participated in tradio (as long as we’re diligent about getting their email every time).

Doing all of this makes for better radio while simultaneously expanding the reach of tradio by a massive proportion. That coupled with the fact that we’ve added the element of video make it much more sponsorable and worthy of garnering a significantly higher rate. It also sets a great example for how to create the multiplatform content radio needs to be competitive with digital that any other on-air talent on the station can learn from and follow.

What do you think? Are you still doing tradio and if so how have you modernized it? Comment below or email me at Andy@RadioStationConsultant.com.

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