Across many sectors, digital transformation follows a relatively predictable pattern. User behaviours evolve, new players emerge, and the value chain is progressively reshaped.
Nicolas Colin proposed a particularly insightful framework for understanding how industries react to these shifts: the five stages of denial. They appear in publishing, music, television… and increasingly clearly in radio.
What follows is a structured adaptation of these five stages, applied to the wider context of media and cultural industries.
1. The Initial Digital Burst – “We’re Not Really Worried About It”
Innovation emerges but is perceived as marginal.
Early on, a new technology or behaviour is adopted by only a small fraction of the public. Incumbents see it as anecdotal, a gadget with no structural impact.
Television networks long saw YouTube as a platform for amateurs posting videos of dogs on skateboards. Publishers treated blogs as peripheral. Record labels viewed MP3 as a minor, temporary threat. Podcasts were considered by radio a niche format reserved for enthusiasts.
The common point: as long as an innovation affects only a few percent of the market, established players do not feel concerned.
2. The Digital Trend Grows – “We’re doing it too”
Adoption increases, but adaptation remains superficial.
As digital behaviours spread, companies respond, but mostly at the edges. They launch apps, set up innovation labs or internal incubators (for the larger ones), and produce “native” podcasts. These initiatives create an impression of movement, but they do not change the underlying economics or strategic decisions.
On the ground, very little shifts:
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Decisions continue to prioritise the linear broadcast,
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Teams and budgets remain organised around live radio,
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Key metrics remain based on linear performance,
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Decision-making processes stay unchanged.
This is more of a cosmetic adjustment than a real transformation. Digital is added around the existing model, but the model itself is not reconsidered.
As seen in other industries (booksellers facing Amazon, for example), those closest to the audience typically feel the impact first.
3. The Balance Shifts – “We need to speak to politicians”
The power dynamic changes, and defensive reflexes appear.
When digital platforms grow significantly, concern rises among incumbents. At this stage, calls for regulation multiply.
We see demands for guaranteed visibility in interfaces (like in the car for the radio), obligations for distribution, or stricter rules aiming to slow down the new entrants.
The same pattern appears whenever legacy players feel their access to audiences is threatened by platforms controlling distribution, interfaces, or recommendation: taxis versus Uber, publishers versus Amazon, broadcasters versus streaming services.
The logic is identical: try to preserve existing balances through public intervention. Regulation may slow the trend, but it does not alter the underlying shift in usage. And crucially, energy spent trying to delay the inevitable is not invested in actual transformation.
And when regulation is no longer enough to stabilise the model, another reflex emerges: consolidation.
4. The Digital Platforms Dominate – “We should acquire our competitors”
The consolidation phase: a classic but limited response.
When audiences and, therefore, margins shrink, consolidation becomes a logical strategy: pooling resources, reducing costs, and rationalising operations.
Cultural industries offer many examples: Sony/BMG, Universal/EMI, the attempted Publicis–Omnicom merger…
Television already illustrates this dynamic clearly, with the aborted TF1–M6 merger in France, RTL and Sky in Germany, ProSiebenSat.1 and Media for Europe, and more recently the ITV–Sky discussions in the United Kingdom.
Radio is very likely to follow.
Consolidation can provide temporary relief, but it does not change the underlying fact that user habits are shifting toward on-demand, platforms, and personalised services.
5. Vertical Integration – “They will always need us”
Platforms rise along the value chain and gradually displace incumbents.
In this final stage, platforms that initially focused on distribution or recommendation begin to produce their own content and structure their own ecosystems.
Netflix, once a distributor, now produces its own programming. Amazon, initially a bookseller, now offers authors the ability to publish directly through its own services.
Platforms no longer wait for legacy players to transform; they create their own alternatives.
A familiar belief often remains: “Radio retains a natural advantage — the human voice, immediacy, proximity.” This is also the stage when we often hear: “They will always need us.”
Until one day, they don’t.
Conclusion: A Landscape Deeply Transformed
By the end of these five stages, the original balance has disappeared. The organisations that navigate the transition successfully are not those that add a bit of digital on the side, but those that rethink their place in the value chain, redeploy their capabilities, and align themselves with actual audience behaviour.
The question is not whether the transformation is underway. It already is.
The real question is: At which stage of denial does your organisation currently stand, and how long can it remain there before taking meaningful action?
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