Report: Gen Z Is Learning to Love College Radio

It’s a story as old as time — well, maybe not quite as long as that, but it has endured for decades at this point. That story? Someone young discovering their new favorite musician from listening to a college radio station. The Replacements memorably wrote about college radio in their song “Left of the Dial,” and college radio has long been a way for cult musicians to find their audience. Despite one prominent symbol of college radio’s presence — the CMJ Music Marathon — ceasing to exist a decade ago, it turns out that college radio is still finding dedicated listeners out there.

In a recent installment of her newsletter, Emily White chronicled a growing phenomenon: Gen Z following in the footsteps of earlier generations and discovering the joys of a good college radio station. White reached this conclusion after speaking with dozens of college radio DJs as well as several stations’ general managers. What White learned from this was that colleges and universities around the country are seeing a significant growth in interest from students in taking part in their campus’s radio station.

The upswing in interest in radio led the general manager of Lexington, Kentucky’s WRFL to tell White about the “exponential growth” they had seen in interest in station activities. White connects this trend to something that’s become apparent in recent years: Gen Z is embracing physical media in a host of forms. This is also why, for instance, public libraries are seeing an influx of attention from a younger generation.

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On a personal note, I spent a lot of my formative years listening to WMCX in central Jersey, which tended to play either a selection of excellent punk and hardcore or one of two Dream Theater songs. There’s also a sense of community that can arise from listening to the same shows week in and week out; something that White also found helped drive more people to tune in to their local college station. It’s a reassuring dispatch that a beloved institution has found a renewed audience.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…