These past few years have been hard for traditional radio, and the recession has only been part of it. There’s a feeling among radio people that their medium no longer gets the respect it deserves as the great workhorse of media, especially among a very critical audience, media planners and buyers. 

And add on top of that the rise of Pandora, the online radio giant that seems to be adding thousands of new subscribers by the day, and you have a cloud of gloom hanging over radio not unlike the gloom that’s hung over newspapers and magazines for the past decade.

It’s as if radio were destined to follows those two media into decline.

But in fact the prospects for radio are far brighter.

Rather than being like newspapers and magazines, radio is far more like television, its more glamorous sister medium, and television is clearly doing well and destined to do even better.

Like TV, radio is ad-supported and free to consumers, whereas print, while ad-supported, also charges subscription fees, and that’s behind so much of its suffering. Readers won’t pay when they can access the same information online, which explains why newspaper and magazine circulations have taken such a hit.

Both radio and TV have suffered no such decline in audience.

TV audience numbers are up, and so are radio’s.

Arbitron’s latest Radar listening report says an average of 241.6 million people aged 12 and older listened weekly in 2010, an increase of more than 2 million listeners over 2009 and more than 5 percent over five years ago. 

More significantly, though, both television and radio stand to gain from the very forces that are hurting print, led by the internet. They are the beneficiaries.

Their advantage can be summed up in one word: ubiquity.

The great digital revolution, as so many analysts have pointed out, is allowing consumers to access their media wherever they want and whenever they want, and that’s becoming more so as more and more Americans upgrade their mobile devices. They can watch TV, email and surf the internet.

They can also listen to radio. And imagine what that could mean for radio.

As mobile devices become ubiquitous the demand for audio content will remain healthy and likely expand as consumers are able to listen in more locations than ever.

The problem is not that radio is hobbled with a doomed technology but that it’s failed to take advantage of the opportunities these new digital technologies have made available.

The television industry has rushed into digital, creating new ways to deliver content anywhere anytime. Rather than run from the new technologies, the networks have been buying into them, snapping up digital properties.

The networks clearly see video as their province, whatever the platform, and are determined to dominate anywhere/anytime TV as they have so long dominated television broadcast over the air waves.

Just consider all the different offerings and venues available to media consumers where they can watch content from the broadcast and cable networks.

There’s Hulu, countless video services, such as Netflix, where viewers can catch reruns of favorite TV shows and on-demand services from most cable providers with rich catalogs of content.

And of course there are the networks’ own web sites, which make available all sorts of video options, from reruns of old shows to promotions of shows about to debut. They see huge amounts of traffic.

And increasingly that content is available on mobile platforms.

For example, the NCAA March Madness on Demand app provides mobile access to all the games of the men’s basketball tournament. After the first week of the 2011 tournament, site visits were up 47 percent over last year, resulting in 10.3 million hours of live streaming video to iPads, iPhones and other mobile platforms.

Where is radio by comparison? Way behind. Broadcast companies have watched as others, like Pandora, have risen to dominate the emerging audio venues and they are equally far behind in mobile.

The hope for radio is that it looks more and more to the TV industry in reinventing itself, and there’s some evidence that’s beginning to happen.

One need look no further than Clear Channel’s recent acquisition of music streaming service Thumbplay to add to its iHeartRadio online radio service.

The man behind the deal was Robert Pittman, a longtime media executive who founded MTV and went on to top positions at AOL and Time Warner. He recently joined Clear Channel with the title of chairman of media and entertainment platforms.

Pittman is no slouch when it comes to music, to digital and to leveraging one's media assets across multiple platforms.

Of the deal, Pittman was quoted as saying:

“Joining Thumbplay’s custom radio and subscription services with Clear Channel’s streaming expertise, iHeartRadio’s internet and mobile audio and music services, including 750 online radio stations, digital-only stations and apps, will create an unsurpassed integrated music product. Couple this with Clear Channel’s promotional power to reach 228 million people on a monthly basis, and you have a combination nobody else can match.”

Expect a lot more such radio deals in the future.