How the São Paulo youngsters listen to radio?

Abstract

This paper analyses how São Paulo radio stations targeting the young audience (up to 30 years old) are reconfiguring their services and schedules to serve a new audience demand. The introduction of social networks in the dynamics of the shows (especially Twitter and Facebook, and more recently WhatsApp) has added new possibilities of interaction between a highly connected audience – which already used telephone, e-mail and SMS – and the broadcaster. Besides that, the stations started offering more content in their web pages: photo, video, predetermined musical playlists, segmented news, etc. Now, the programmes on dial are also changing, bringing back a kind of show that, for about 20 years, have been generally put aside in favour of a music-driven programming. We can now notice more presence of the radio presenter during the musical programming, including more live interaction to the listeners; fictional productions; talk shows and long interviews; live game shows. Thus, this paper demonstrates how the five main radio stations segmented to young audience in São Paulo (two of them national networks) have made major changes to their content production structure