This week, the media industry woke up shell-shocked at the decision to surrender key FM radio licences across major cities. The shutdown of stations operating under brands such as Radio Nasha, Radio One, and Fever FM (Chennai) has triggered alarm across broadcasters because it’s not another media restructuring exercise in a rapidly digitising entertainment economy. It’s the clearest sign yet that the private FM broadcasting, once among the country’s most influential and fastest-growing mass media sectors, has entered a full-scale structural crisis.

But as painful as it is, people in the business aren’t surprised. After all, the industry, they say, has spent years warning the government that rising regulatory costs, outdated policy structures, and the rapid migration of listeners and advertisers to digital platforms were making large parts of the FM business economically unsustainable. Now, those warnings are beginning to materialise in the form of station closures, layoffs, shrinking investments, and companies exiting markets altogether.