How will.i.am is pioneering a new future for radio

OVER THE PAST 50 YEARS, the death of radio has been announced so many times that it’s become a cliché. First came video, then the iPod, streaming and, finally, podcasts. It’s true, though, that radio as a format is on the slide, finding itself in a liminal space – too linear, too unpredictable or too commercial, especially for generations tuned to immediacy and algorithmic preselection.

Yet, elsewhere in the audio media landscape, things aren’t much better. Podcasting sold itself on democratisation, where anyone with a microphone could be a broadcaster. It’s resulted in content overwhelm, questionable actors free of ethical responsibilities and a new attention economy that’s spilled into a social-media bloodsport. The streaming services, like Spotify, which initially promised liberation from radio’s programming gatekeepers, are now under fire for using algorithms, commercial models and scale to devalue artists and entrap them in poor deals in the hope their music will be picked up by the algorithm’s ‘Discovery Mode’ (which can say less about the music we seek to discover than about the artists willing to play the game). Then there’s the new power vested in TikTok trends, where not only music but news, too, is discovered and devoured in 15-30-second increments.

All this is to say, we are drowning in audio content, but too often missing the one thing radio has always been able to provide: context. This is the gap that music legend and futurist will.i.am is hoping to fill – ironically, by using one of the technologies threatening the wider media industry. Meet his latest project: FYI RAiDiO – a (mostly) humancurated, AI-powered new media technology that is reinventing radio. And unlike traditional radio and entities like Spotify DJ, it allows and introduces conversation.

“We’re more like NPR talk radio than we are Spotify,” the Black Eyed Peas frontman tells me during a live demo of the technology. He’s giving us a two-hour demo from the driver’s seat of a Mercedes-Benz, the marque having rolled out the technology as an in-car app experience in some of its vehicles in the US via a beta program last year.

FYI RAiDiO is just one element that exists within FYI (Focus Your Ideas), an impressive, AI-centric platform that will.i.am designed and launched to serve the creative community. Think of it as an all-in-one productivity tool for creatives to manage ideas, communicate, share files and collaborate on projects, and have AI help bank, create, research and build upon.

“Spotify is every song. We’re not every song – we’re not a streaming platform. We’re more like radio, and radio is curated,” he says of the FYI RAiDiO platform, which (depending on the device) has around 16 stations spanning themed topics like pop culture, fashion, sports, tech, politics, finance and music, with more stations rolling out in the future. FYI RAiDiO also has an array of diverse and very authentically human-sounding AI hosts, many based on real people in Will’s orbit.

“We wanted to layer a music information platform,” says will. “It’s more information than it is music, to allow you to scour and inquire about the world as it unfolds and seamlessly transition from segment to music, and then asks you to engage by hitting the mic button.”

For example, we tuned into Dime, Will’s favourite and a hip-hop, culture-focused station, and asked it for very specific details about one of Tyler, The Creator’s LA launch parties, including the hat Tyler wore. The AI answered our questions with ease in English, Spanish and German, when prompted by will.

“What we’ve done is taken the concept of radio and simulated it with AI, so there’s an AI host and human segment curation. Most of the stations and segments are all human-curated,” he tells me. For his next trick, will switches over to a news station, and the radio starts playing the daily headlines in between musical breaks. In these moments, you can ask questions about the content, suggest different tunes or ask to be recommended artists based on your current tastes/vibes. We put the AI’s acuity to the test by asking it to give the most recent Ukraine headlines from both right- and left-wing perspectives, which it also does promptly. So, while the FYI team is curating the content on the backend, AI can welcome curiosity and different perspectives, something that both LLM models and traditional media seem less capable of doing.

“We have our point of view. Our AI personas that we build are highlighting the unspoken, the folks that always are affected by data bias and algorithmic biases,” says will. “So we try our best to curb the biases that have been implemented into these algorithms. We’re delicate with politics, but technology is technology. Fashion’s fashion, pop culture is pop culture, sports, music, film and TV.”

For the fortune segments, FYI has partnered with financial literacy-focused media platform Earn Your Leisure, one of a handful of media partners the company is working with as they scale the platform. “We hit finance from your traditional Fortune perspective and Earn Your Leisure. Earn Your Leisure is like this urban finance phenomenon. So, we try to support the communities that have been overlooked, underserved. That’s our POV.”

The media partner side of FYI RAiDiO is an interesting innovation, as it opens up new channels for media companies to build, engage, report and curate content, at a time when many traditional media platforms face waning trust. This is Esquire’s second interview with will.i.am (or rather, demonstration of a new technology he and his small team have deployed) in the past year. And we’ve come to learn that, from one of the most exciting futurist minds, there is always a refreshing idea offering long-term betterment behind the product. In the case of FYI RAiDiO, it introduces a new way of engaging with information, music and curiosity – though he is quick to rebuff the descriptor of “saviour of media” we throw at him during our interview.

“I love media. The life I live now is because I’ve dabbled and contributed to the world of media with songs, videos, interviews and movie performances. I love our world, but it is under threat because of AI,” he says. “And I think experiences and tools like FYI are like a new media type.

“Creativity and media have already been chopped to bits and compromised with ads; and now that same footprint from magazine and news, print to TV, made its way to the internet with, like, this eye that’s watching and then populating with pop-ups, and now your attention is compromised because it’s ad, ad, ad, algorithm, algorithm, ad, ad, swipe, swipe, swipe, monitor, monitor, monitor.”

A technology that allows two-way interaction could also likely result in a net-positive relationship for how we consume and appreciate media. “It can create a deeper engagement, because we are in an age of reducing people’s attention to TikToks that are, like, five-to-10 seconds long,” Will adds.

Does he think our attention span is doomed? On the contrary: “I think people’s attention span is vast. This notion that, like, no one has the attention to sit for five minutes to listen to a song, I argue the opposite,” he says. “People do have attention. It’s just that the creator doesn’t have to make anything meaningful to get someone sitting for five minutes to listen to it. So, the creator has been reduced to TikToks, as much as the audience has been reduced to TikToks. But then the creators that work in Netflix haven’t been reduced to TikToks. The streaming platforms are, like, ‘Yo, you got 12 hours. I got a whole series for you, a whole day’s worth of shit, and you can’t wait for it.’ [And the response is] like, ‘Yo, I’m gonna binge-watch that shit for three days’. We can’t wait for the shit. We dedicate time to watch it.”

This is how will views expanding the number of stations on his platform – as a way to achieve long-term engagement with media, and deeply personalised curation. In a way, he says, it’s like a new album. “So, like, what the fuck is an album? You make an album, most folks will pay attention to three songs – that’s the reason why no one wants to listen to a whole album, because a playlist gives you the premium: ‘This is a hit, this is a hit, this is a hit,’” he says. “There are some [musicians] that have great taste, where every song is listenable. Very few groups do that. Coldplay does that really well. Radiohead does that really well. Being biased, I think the Black Eyed Peas did albums really well. Parcels, Empire of the Sun, Daft Punk, David Guetta all do albums really well. But what is the next version of a body of work? I believe a body of work can be a station, because you could go from segment to song to segment to song, and the segment is like a bunch of information in the form of text.”

This is also the thinking behind the wider FYI app’s creative purpose, the notion that a body of personal work can extend to collaboration, links, writing, documents, all enhanced with AI personas to help shape, create, archive and educate. “The AI allows the listener to go as deep as they want in that station or in that segment, and then, there’s music they love woven through.”

FYI RAiDiO is already available on smartphones, desktop and in select Mercedes-Benz vehicles around the world. And at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January, will revealed the latest way he’s planning on bringing the platform to users, wherever they are. Through his partnership with LG and Qualcomm, FYI RAiDiO is now rolling out in freshly announced LG products, most notably, a range of xboom by will.i.am speakers, including the Stage501 (a party-focused speaker with AI karaoke tech), Blast and Rock (rugged outdoor-friendly speakers) and the Mini (designed for everyday use). This is in addition to a new boombag concept he revealed – a range of high-end, wearable backpack speakers, enhanced with FYI RAiDiO, which will roll out in limited-edition drops and collaborations, drawing from sneaker culture.

“My imagination said the combination of speaker and bags is a product that’s ripe for sneaker culture,” he explains. “That’s what we have here with the boombag. The speaker isn’t an accessory. It’s the soul of the bag.”

will notes that this concept opens up audio-product design to designers, creatives and musicians to engage in these wearable collaborations, in addition to the everexpanding list of partner stations and communities he aims to connect with. “We are turning sound into a living, learning experience,” he enthuses, adding that he hopes the tech will bring people closer by connecting them through a shared passion for music and creativity generally. “There are so many collaborations that will come out of this… This is where it starts. Watch where we go.”

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