European Digital Radio Alliance

The European Digital Radio Alliance (EDRA) was a joint initiative of several public and commercial broadcasters from across Europe, supported by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).

Unique in the radio sector, the Alliance brought together public service media (PSM) and commercial broadcasters while remaining agnostic about digital distribution technology. 

EDRA was created by twelve public and commercial broadcasters during the Radiodays Europe conference in Paris on 15 March 2016.

The first objective of EDRA was to promote digital radio as the means of listening across Europe, embracing all digital technologies (DAB+, internet, or hybrid) while respecting that different countries will naturally migrate at different speeds.  As a result of its discussions, EDRA has achieved considerable success, alongside the EBU itself, in convincing the EU authorities to incorporate digital radio in the new European Electronic Communications Code (EECC), which came into effect from 2021 onwards. According to the figures released by WorldDAB in February 2022, DAB+ radio came as standard in 95% of new cars sold in key European markets in 2021. Detailed information can be found here.

The EDRA strategy has been promoting "a direct path to the listeners" while reinforcing the paradigm of "collaborating on distribution between broadcasters, competing on content". In November 2020, the then EDRA Steering Group agreed on a manifesto.

EBU technical recommendations on digital radio platforms can be found on the Digital Radio page.

In October 2021, EDRA, EBU and AER came together to ask policymakers to urgently intervene in the Digital Markets Act to prevent anti-competitive activities by certain digital voice assistant platforms. Read their letter here.

In January 2022, the EBU Radio Committee agreed that EDRA fulfilled its mission and decided to not further provide the secretariat of EDRA. EDRA was dissolved and is no longer active.