Gen Z's College Radio Revival
Reports say Gen Z isn't discovering new artists. But college radio stations are overflowing with new DJs. As young listeners reject algorithms for analog—the industry should pay attention.
It’s been a weird summer for the music industry.
The fewest new hits in U.S. history. No song of the summer. An AI artist just signed a $3M record deal. The biggest band on the charts? HUNTR/X, a fictional K-pop girl group from a Netflix movie. The vibes are off.
In September, a bombshell report from MIDiA Research crystallized the mood: “music discovery is at a generational crossroads,” it argues:
“Music discovery is traditionally associated with youth, but today’s 16-24-year-olds are less likely than 25-34-year-olds to have discovered an artist they love in the last year.”
Read that again: Younger consumers, typically the drivers of cultural trends, are less likely to discover new artists compared to 25-34 year-olds.
And even when they do discover artists, they are less likely to stream that artist’s music, according to the report.
If you stopped reading here, you might conclude young people just don’t care about music anymore.
However, one unexpected source of music discovery is quietly booming among Gen Z listeners: college radio.
College radio killed the TikTok star
I spoke to seven student general managers and surveyed 80+ DJs at stations across America: ACRN (Ohio University), WCBN (University of Michigan), WEGL (Auburn University), WHRW (Binghamton University), WRFL (University of Kentucky), WVBR (Cornell University), and WZBC (Boston College).
They told me student interest in college radio has dramatically increased in recent years. Stations that once struggled to fill airtime are now turning people away, shortening shows, alternating time slots, and running training programs just to keep up with the demand from aspiring student DJs.
For decades, college radio championed underground artists before they hit the mainstream. Against all odds—COVID shutdowns, FCC regulations, and the long decline of FM radio—college radio is thriving again.
A wave of Gen Z demand
Ten years ago, WCBN (Michigan) was struggling to fill three-hour programming blocks, says GM Anja Sheppard. Today, it’s the “fullest schedule we’ve had in recent memory,” with shows reduced to one-hour due to “such demand from students to be on air.”
At WRFL (Kentucky), “we’ve had some of the most exponential growth this station has seen in its 37 year history,” says GM Aidan Greenwell. “We’ve gotten to the point where we simply don’t have enough time to allow everybody on the show schedule,” with 350 signups at the student interest fair this year, 100 shows on the schedule and around 120 people currently staffing the station.
Event attendance at WRFL has also doubled year after year: the station’s 37th birthday bash headlined by Geese drew a packed crowd “from across Kentucky and out of state” in February.
Demand for on-air slots is out-pacing “hours in the day” at WEGL (Auburn), GM Rae Nawrocki says. The station has grown from roughly 30 members four years ago to 120 students and 60 on-air shows today.
Some stations have so many aspiring student DJs, they have internships and apprenticeship programs for those waiting for their chance to go on-air: WHRW (Binghamton) has 150–200 active DJs and another 80 apprentices, WZBC (Boston College) counts 70 interns for its online stream in addition to 90 FM DJs.
When Anna Loy, the president of the student media guild at WVBR (Cornell), first got involved with the radio station there were about 15 student DJs. “I’d sit around with my friends and kind of joke, ‘should we try to save the radio station?’” she says.
But now the station is thriving, with 80 DJs, 170 people applying to DJ just this semester, and a student-run record label. Even with minimal marketing, “people were ready to join,” Loy says.
What’s Driving the College Radio Renaissance?
1. Algorithm fatigue
Students consistently described radio as an authentic, community-driven refuge from the passive, isolated, algorithm-driven digital experiences that have defined their adolescence. “You can’t scroll on reels and run a radio station at the same time,” says Greenwell (WRFL) “You have to be in the present.”
In our survey of 80+ DJs, students under 25 years old named “friends/word of mouth” as their favorite way to discover music (69%), with TikTok (21%), YouTube (10%) or other social media (16%) relatively low-ranked.
When asked “Who is your favorite artist you discovered recently, and how did you discover them?”, open-ended responses were split almost evenly between friends/word of mouth (27%) and algorithmic/streaming discovery (26%), with smaller shares citing live shows, radio, online communities (Bandcamp, Reddit, RateYourMusic), or physical media.
“I’m 21. I grew up in the age of algorithms. The way music is right now scares me because of the rise of AI. Not even AI made music (I hate it) but even just ‘Daily Mix, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5.’ It’s not made by someone. It’s made by an algorithm. I wish more of that stuff was person curated.”—Mari McLaughlin, WHRW (Binghamton)
“What attracts a lot of people to college radio is the idea of putting somebody on. Showing them a new song they haven’t seen before, outside of the algorithmic nature of streaming.”—Aidan Greenwell, WRFL (Kentucky)
“I’ve started learning a lot more about music from other people’s recommendations than I ever had before. These experiences are shaping me more than algorithms or Spotify.”—Anna Loy, WVBR (Cornell).
“Diehard music lovers are shifting away from Spotify. The trend I am seeing is people want ownership and community instead of this vague green app.”—Rae Nawrocki (WEGL)
2. Analog Nostalgia
The resurgence of interest in physical media is a significant driver of Gen Z’s attraction to college radio.
Millennials embraced technology for its convenience and accessibility, which reduced the friction in media consumption. Gen Z, in response, is seeking out experiences that are more tangible, personal and inconvenient.
This manifests in a return to high-friction analog media like vinyl, flip phones, film cameras and radio.
“We have a cassette deck that just broke, and I’m getting emails asking, ‘when is the cassette deck going to get fixed?’”—Rae Nawrocki, WEGL (Auburn)
“I think the love for radio comes from the analog part of it. There’s this tendency for nostalgia amongst young people of things we didn’t get to participate in.”—Anna Loy, WVBR (Cornell)
The physical libraries at many stations, with massive collections of vinyl and CDs, offer a tangible connection to music history that can’t be replicated online:
“Our music directors have been writing comments on the records and CDs since the seventies. It’s funny to see how opinions change over time. It’s like an analog Internet comment section.”—Marcus Rothera, WZBC (Boston College)
“WHRW has a massive physical music library. I’m pretty sure it’s one of the biggest on the east coast. We have somewhere in the ballpark of 8,000 CDs and vinyls in there.”—Mari McLaughlin, WHRW (Binghamton)
3. Community, Creativity & Belonging
College radio stations serve as vital “third spaces” where students can find a community of like-minded people outside of classes and social media, said several GMs. Community was cited as a top reason for joining college radio (79%) by DJs under age 25 in the survey (second only to “creative outlet” at 94%).
“Everybody just wants to feel like they belong somewhere. And having radio is another place for people to feel like they belong,”—Wami Osikanlu, WZBC (Boston).
“It’s an opportunity to tinker around, there’s no grades, nobody’s watching you. You find community that way.”—Roman Salomone, ACRN (Ohio)
“When I was a freshman, I had no friends…to tune in and hear some weird guy babble in the middle of the night and play one of my favorite songs, that’s how I knew I was going to be okay.”—Aidan Greenwell, WRFL (Kentucky)
WRFL’s (University of Kentucky) most played albums, summer 2025
A Hopeful Counter-Model
Skeptics might point out that college radio audiences are small, but the real story isn’t who’s listening—it’s that so many young people want to DJ, dig into music history, share discoveries, and build community around music.
The revival of college radio isn’t a signal that FM is back; it’s proof that Gen Z still cares deeply about music, discovery, and culture.
In a moment when the wider industry is betting on algorithms, AI, and fleeting TikTok trends, these college radio DJs remind us that young people aren’t bored of music—they’re bored of the shallow, virality-obsessed way music is marketed to them.
Gen Z has been caricatured as the “doom-scrolling generation.” But several students emphasized to me that they desire more substantial and hands-on experiences as an antidote to the loneliness and passivity fostered by algorithm-driven platforms, especially in the wake of the pandemic.
As Anna Loy (WVBR) put it: “For a lot of people, myself included, there is this lightbulb going off of, I want to participate in harder things and figure things out and not just lay in bed and watch TikToks all the time and be alone.”
Far from tuning out, young people are showing us what a more intentional and community-driven music culture looks like: “We had a Geese album listening party last night that a ton of DJs went to, and we’re driving to Brooklyn to go to a Geese show,” Loy (WVBR) tells me.
Even the MIDiA report supports this: More than half of 16-24-year-olds surveyed (55%) say they have become more interested in finding new music over the past five years, and half say they expect their interest to grow.
In our survey, 91% of DJs under the age of 25 rated themselves as optimistic about the future of music culture:
“I feel like music culture is always going to exist in some shape or form. It might not be the old school zine, but I’ve seen hardcore Discord servers have just as much passion in cultivating a music culture with a widespread audience.” - ACRN DJ, 21 years old
“Things have definitely changed a lot, but people still love music, creating it, listening to it, and talking about it. No matter what, I don’t think music culture is going anywhere even if it looks a little different every day” - WHRW DJ, 22 years old
College radio offers a hopeful counter-model for the music industry. Instead of chasing virality: cultivate community, discovery, and fandom.
Why listen to college radio DJs?
The last time the music industry felt this existential and uncertain, I was a college radio DJ and general manager myself.
By the time I entered American University, the student-run station WVAU was online-only, with a mostly digitized library instead of walls of vinyl and CDs. I was trading MP3 files with fellow DJs on a Subsonic music server and building my weekly playlists on iTunes. In 2011, I got an invite code to some Swedish app called Spotify that changed my life.
I went viral for saying the quiet part out loud: the Napster generation wasn’t going to start paying to own music. But maybe we would pay for access. I was right: streaming became the dominant model.
More than a decade later, today’s college radio DJs are living through another inflection point, on the cusp of a big shift in how we listen to and connect with music.
When asked in the survey what they would change about music culture today, college radio DJs requests were clear:
Sustainable income for artists
Champion human curation and creativity
Invest in local community spaces
Build lasting culture instead of relying on fleeting trends
I humbly suggest we listen to what they have to say.
Thank you to Aidan, Anna, Anja, Marcus, Roman, Wami, Mari and Rae and the 80+ DJs who took my survey.
Are you a college radio exec board member? Think your DJs would be interested in taking my survey? Reach out, I want to hear from you!
“The reality of the situation is, labels and artists need the college music industry in order to get people excited about an artist. Because at the end of the day, being tapped into the youth is one of the prime ways of actually expanding your market,” says Greenwell, (WRFL).
“Can you imagine college radio without the radio part?” says Salomone (ACRN). “I’m sure the radio parts will probably diminish even more over time just by the nature of things. But I just really hope there’s always going to be some sort of hub for people to be involved with music”
This gives me hope that maybe, maybe?...the kids are all right.
Love this piece, especially the photo of the CBN studio. Still overstuffed with music, like when I worked there in the 70s.