Radio stations lose listeners after FM shutdown.
DAB+ in Switzerland; the sad reality of utopian hope? Michel Fremy asks himself in Radiomagazine. He describes how the operator SwissMediaCast, one of the main Swiss digital broadcasters, decided earlier this year to return its license to the canton of Ticino for economic reasons. The multiplex was initially almost full with 15 of the 18 slots rented, but several stations closed over time. In the following years, some broadcasters withdrew due to lack of coverage and additional slots were freed up after bankruptcies. On the other hand, the public service broadcaster SRG had abandoned ship by handing over a significant part of its participation in SwissMediaCast to private broadcasters. The Belgian media expert writes further here:
The network was filled to less than half its capacity and its economic operation was no longer viable. A profitable DAB network requires at least six to seven stations operating at a data output of 72 kbit/s.
Concerned broadcasters were unable to resume broadcasting immediately after the shutdown, as the multiplex of competing operator Digris was fully occupied.
According to market observers, the initial enthusiasm for digital radio has already faded and new broadcasters are turning their attention to terrestrial broadcasting. In addition, the public service broadcaster SRG is planning a return to analogue FM in the coming months. The decision is explained by a difficult economic context, a saturated market and reduced advertising revenue.
One of the disadvantages of DAB+ technology is the risk of the license being revoked in the event of operating losses, thus depriving other stations of the opportunity to broadcast in DAB+. The second disadvantage is that some radios are forced to minimize bandwidth or drop DAB+ broadcasts for budgetary reasons. This leads to higher fees for remaining stations.
DAB advocates prefer to talk about "digital listening records", including online listening in the results, to mask the real DAB+ listening. They also talk about a percentage of listeners who "listened to dab+" without worrying about whether they listen exclusively to dab+. This includes those who only have a compatible receiver (e.g. in the car) and those who have to drop FM, due to lack of coverage.
It was these rigged results that led to the SRG ending FM prematurely, forcing a late and costly retreat.
In the 20th century, the introduction of DAB+ was the only alternative to saturating the FM band. It is 25 years later and in the 21st century, in a complex situation, DAB+ will highlight the migration of radio listeners to online listening. A migration that leads to a diversification of sources, which will increase, damaging advertising resources. Switzerland serves as a laboratory, but such scenarios are likely to be repeated in all countries, writes Michel Fremy.
Premature FM shutdowns are also causing problems in Germany. Fremy writes that among the states, Schleswig-Holstein has always wanted to be an ardent defender of DAB+ and a rapid shutdown of FM. The cessation of FM broadcasting is now turning into a fiasco.
As confirmed by the MA 2026 II sound survey, the station lost 44.7% of its listeners and now has only 26,000 (compared to 47,000 in the survey). Delta Radio deactivated its national FM network at the end of 2025. It now turns out that this decision was probably premature and clearly resulted in a massive loss of listeners. Even worse! These figures were partly collected when Radio Delta was still broadcasting on the FM band. In other words, the audience could decline further in the next Media Analysis (MA) survey.
Another station in the state, Radio Bob, which also abandoned its FM network, also suffered losses, albeit more modestly, with a decline of 15.6% (from 64,000 to 54,000 listeners). Energy Bremen also lost more than a third of its listeners (34,000, a decrease of 34.6 percentage points).
At the other end of the country, the situation is even more worrying for Arabella Bayern, which has lost 47.4% of its listeners and now reaches only 20,000 listeners on average per hour. Radio Seefunk, the regional station covering Lake Constance and Haut-Rhin, lost 30.3 percentage points and now reaches only 23,000 listeners on average per hour, according to Radiomagazine.
Commentary
There are still no comprehensive analyses of the DAB fiasco in Europe, but one thesis that is put forward is that listeners who lose their FM channels would rather migrate to the Internet than DAB. This is especially true in new cars that have all three platforms; FM, DAB and online. And smartphones do not have DAB either. A nationwide DAB+ geographical coverage in a country does not mean that automatically there are a lot of DAB+ listeners.
When national FM networks were closed in Norway, many listeners switched to "digital listening", but the share of DAB+ and Internet is not reported by NRK or other relevant actors.
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