Dead is Dead
The first video MTV ever played was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. That was August 1, 1981.
When MTV’s music channels shut down internationally at the end of 2025, the last video they played was the same song.
Forty-four years. A perfect bookend. Except for one problem: radio didn’t die. Audio is actually at an all-time high right now. And MTV, the network built on the idea that video would replace everything, is the one that stopped playing videos. I don’t think anyone saw that coming in 1981
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I bring this up because we keep hearing the same thing about everything. Print is dead. Email is dead. Retail is dead. Brick and mortar is dead. Fast fashion killed luxury. TikTok killed Instagram. AI is killing everything.
Then experiential marketing becomes the hottest thing in the industry. Online shopping plateaus and everyone rushes back to physical stores. Email turns out to have the highest ROI of any channel. Nothing ever actually dies. It just makes room for the next thing. Or it gets optimized in contrast to it. Or it pairs with it in a way where 1+1 somehow equals 3.
What the Data Actually Says
Edison Research just released its Infinite Dial 2026 study, and the numbers are striking. 167 million Americans listened to a podcast in the last month. 233 million listened to online audio (streaming music, podcasts, internet radio — I had to look it up, too). Both are all-time highs. And 57% of Americans have both listened to and watched a podcast. The researchers put it simply: video isn’t replacing podcast audio. It’s expanding the tent.
I saw this play out over eight years at InStyle. The conversation was always about what would replace what. Would digital kill print? Would social kill the website? Would video kill the photo shoot? Would influencers kill the editor?
None of it happened. What happened was addition. We launched live events. Then mobile apps. Then a hairstyle try-on tool using facial recognition that got 600,000 downloads. A shoe line. A nail polish. A book series. InStyle-branded hair salons. Sixteen international editions. Licensing deals I never could have imagined when I started. Each new thing was supposed to signal that we were “moving on” from the magazine. But we weren’t moving on. We were giving people more ways to find us. The magazine was still the anchor. Everything else was a door.
Now, full disclosure: InStyle’s print edition closed in 2022. I’m not pretending otherwise. But it didn’t close because digital replaced it. It closed because the economics of the publishing industry shifted underneath all of us. That’s a different story. The point is that for the years we were building, addition worked. Every new format brought in people who wouldn’t have found us otherwise. The mistake would have been betting on only one of them.
I work in a neighborhood now. Retail, dining, events, public space. During the pandemic, the headlines were clear: physical retail was finished, downtowns were over, nobody would ever commute to an office or shop in person again. A little of that stuck, but most of it did not. Turns out people still want to be somewhere. They just want that somewhere to be worth the trip.
What Goes Wrong When You Replace Instead of Add
The brands I’ve seen get in real trouble are the ones that treated every new format as a replacement for the last one. They’d launch a digital strategy by gutting the print team. Go all-in on social and let the website rot. Invest in e-commerce and let the store experience fall apart.
Every time, they lost something they couldn’t get back. Not because the old format was sacred. But because their audience was still using it.
Your audience decides how they want to engage with you. It’s not your call. Your job is to be there when they show up.
The Edison data makes this point well. The fastest-growing segment in online audio isn’t Gen Z. It’s Americans 55 and older, who jumped from 52% to 70% monthly listening in just two years. Nobody told them it was time to start listening to podcasts. They just did, when the format made sense for them.
A Rubric for Your Team
A question I come back to a lot in my own work: where do we have permission to be? Not where do we wish we were. Not where the latest conference told us to be. Where does our audience already trust us enough that if we showed up there too, it would feel like a surprise and not an intrusion?
If you’re running a brand or managing a team, a few things worth pressure-testing:
Map where your audience already is. Not where you’re posting. Where they’re actually spending time. If there’s a gap between those two things, that’s your next door. Not a replacement for what you’re doing. An addition.
Ask what you’d lose. Before you pivot away from a channel or a format, ask yourself honestly: is anyone still there? Because if the answer is yes, you’re not pivoting. You could be abandoning.
Stop auditing formats. Start auditing presence. The question isn’t “should we be on TikTok?” The question is “where does our audience want to find us that we haven’t shown up yet?”
Test with the lightest touch. You don’t need to launch a podcast studio. You need to put one episode out there and see if anyone cares. Addition doesn’t have to be expensive. It has to be intentional.
Your newsletter reader might also want a podcast. Your Instagram follower might also read long-form. Your online shopper might also want to walk into a store. These aren’t different audiences. They’re the same person looking for a different way in. Show up there too. Surprise and delight them.
One Last Thing
Video didn’t kill the radio star. MTV killed itself. And the radio star is doing better than ever.
The tent keeps getting bigger. The only question is whether you’re inside it.
If this one resonated, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment, share it with someone on your team, or hit the restack button to pass it along. It makes a bigger difference than you’d think.
See you next Tuesday at 7 AM
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