Elasticity of demand. If you raise your prices, you will lose a certain amount of customers. Period. No product has perfectly inelastic demand; the closest to it is probably cigarettes, but even higher prices will get a certain number of smokers to quit. So the choice for radio stations is as follows:
1) Increase spot prices, hoping that the dropoff in advertiser demand is less than the incremental revenue increase
2) Hold spot prices steady, which means you have to accept less profit, take on more debt, and/or cut expenses ("corners"). If you're running a good business that is already making money and has zero or easily serviceable debt, then you can stick with this.
3) Increase spot load, and hope it doesn't drive off listeners due to "more talk, less rock" and advertisers due to dilution and/or lost ratings
Right now in the restaurant industry, sales are off. One reason for that is because the price spread between groceries and restaurant food has reached a historically high level. http://www.nrn.com/blog/grocery-restaurant-price-gap-worse-you-think . They are talking about a "restaurant recession" because people don't want to pay so much to eat anymore.
People have to eat, and businesses generally have to advertise. But they don't have to eat your food, or advertise on your medium. Here's a company that has literally taken billions of advertising dollars away from other media: https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=goog
You run your business on a "cost plus" basis, where you decide what your profit margin in excess of your costs is going to be and price your product accordingly, and you have a dead business walking. I would guess that most small businesses fail because of this; I have seen it time and again. They don't care that the market won't pay their asking price, thinking that they know everything about value or "nobody can expect me to not make a profit!!!", until they run out of money and the bank forces their hand. Nobody is guaranteed a profit. Heck, nobody is guaranteed break-even.
Now, if you're charging an attractive price for your product and still at least break even, congratulations. You're a good businessperson, and you get to open your doors tomorrow.
