The AM Forum

https://inews.co.uk/news/fm-radio-stations-could-be-switched-off-as-digital-listening-passes-50-milestone/

Programming, programming, programming.
Content, content, content.

The current situation is that almost all of the stations out there are devoid of both. :(
<snore>

Put out good content, and you'll have something.
However, internet streaming has changed the equation, just like cable TV and now
internet video streaming has turned the old paradigm on its head.

I think broadcasting over-the-air is essentially "sun-setting" now.

The main problem with the new digital streamed paradigm is that the gatekeepers
can dynamically and instantly "jam" any given "channel". So, censorship has a different
face.

"...the wheel in the sky keeps on turning..."

                                            _-_-

Kids are still listening.

Except, they could give a shit about otar.  They care about either Pandora or IHeartRadio.

IHeartRadio is clear channel.  A friend is the local engineer for clear channel.  He's just riding the sunset (his words) until radio dies. He totally talked me out of a radio career (he controls almost every radio station in a 500 mile diameter.  Where would I work).  He talked me out of starting a station (I have a 1kw and 20 kw TX sitting collecting dust).

The engineers that future proofed themselves all learned IP.  That's where it's at.

Radio, for all intents and purposes, is dead.  Unless you're sending tcp/IP packets using radio.

However, kids are still listening to bubblegum.  We are all just too old to know where they find it today.  It's on Pandora, Google play, iTunes and IHeartRadio.

--Shane
KD6VXI

https://www.newsgeneration.com/broadcast-resources/radio-facts-and-figures/

Yes. My favorite station to listen to on my daily commute is a little lpfm that is live most of the time during the day, only a few hours are they automated from 6 AM to 6 PM. They run an oldies format with a wide variety of songs, not just the same familiar ones over and over. In the evenings and on weekends they run some specialty shows featuring other genres. Now being an lpfm they aren't a flamethrower but the signal was built well enough to have decent coverage once i cross over the mountain that separates their transmitter site from my house. Right now I'm listening to them on a Sony ICF-5900w sitting on my lap inside the house, surprisingly there are a few spots here around my property that i can pick them up, 27 miles away, with a rather large mountain in the way. Normally i would listen to their webcast at home but it isn't being very reliable at the moment so out comes the radio, even though has some static there's enough information there that the brain can still process what is being heard early, you can't do that when the digital or internet signal keeps cutting out, stuttering, or buffering.

The local 5KW AM oldies long since went to not-so-oldies and real heavy on the extremely boring blabvertising -health quacks and retirement/investment 'counselors' all preying upon peoples fears. Nothing drives me to spin the dial faster.
Recently all secular musical was replaced by radio preachers.

Bollywood! The local oldies station switched to Bollywood. Despite the commercial heavy format, I started listening to that station again, put it on a push button.  It's certainly more interesting than hearing the songs of my youth repeated over and over or political pundits shrieking.

And you can Buffalax the lyrics for fun.

There’s an entire generation that’s never known life without the internet. To them, on-demand and instant gratification are the norm. They do a Google search and get what they want right away.

Compare that with the “appointment programming” structure of radio. “News at the top and bottom of each hour, traffic on the 10s, weather at 15 and 45, and sports at 40...”  This is laughable to the internet generation that clicks and gets.

For music radio, the days of a Program Director deciding what thousands of people are going to want to listen to all at the same time are long over.

I had a great time during my 30 years in radio, but that’s why I left to focus on digital content delivery. The content is still good but the packaging had to change.

Internet can supply you with a whole lot of things you like to see or too listen too. But what I remember going to a hill as a kid with my  crystal radio, making an antenna between trees and hearing English and French radio stations, Later at the short wave hearing stations all over the world, the strange sounding tones of music out of the Tibet area, and when I got my fist WS19, radio hams far away, the emergency frequencies late at night in a storm hearing how a ship was rescued.
No internet ever will beat that feeling

Incidentally, The Netherlands has turned off most of the high power AM stations, but found an interesting use for the frequencies. Hobby broadcasters can apply for low power licenses to transmit on these vacated frequencies with either 1 or 100 Watts PEP. I've enjoyed listening to some of these stations via SDRs. For those curious, here's a list of the stations so far:

https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fradio-tv-nederland.nl%2Fam%2Fam.html (https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fradio-tv-nederland.nl%2Fam%2Fam.html)

Albany, NY area lost 3+ stations a little over a week ago (off the air) - owned by the financially strapped Empire Broadcasting Co.
More and more empty frequency space here on AM and Fm.  Sad times of things to come.

https://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Radio-stations-off-the-air-12922936.php

So long as people with money to spend keep tuning in, FM stations will continue to broadcast.

I had a sort of a career in radio engineering - after "Mother Bell" had a layoff - and during the years I did that work, I learned a little bit about the target marketing groups that FM stations aim for.

Long story short: "morning drive" and "after school." The morning drive listener wants an announcer who mouths off to the establishment, so that all the "Walter Mitty" office workers can have their secret lives. The after-school listener is a pre-pubescent female with her mommie's credit card in her purse, and she buys songs. Evening and off-day listenership is too small to pay, or to pay attention to, and most FM broadcasters give over weekends to either the jock-in-the-box or special-interest programming. PBS survives by bringing upper-middle-class households news of sad events in far-away places, or recreations of folksy 1930's-style prairie shows, but it's not a factor in this discussion.

In any case, car companies will be on the phone to their congresscritters whenever there's talk of cutting off FM, since they've already sunk all the costs of in-car radios and they want to keep taking profits from that sector as long as they can. The demise of FM will follow demand for the spectrum (most likely from autonomous airborne vehicles), but it won't happen until automakers agree to make Sirius-capable and iPad-compatible "radios" universal.

Of course, Great Britain is a different world, so I won't comment on what they're planning or doing over there.

W4EWH

FM radio with its decent audio quality should live on, if for no other reason than enough people will 'keep' the appoinments if there is content they want to hear. The AM and FM BC enterprises have got to do some streaming and get their schedule out there where the instant crowd can see it any time. Now they just use web pages. AM should remain as well - might be supported by sports and religion, and indeed the appointment based news more likely traffic reports - the instant folks do drive to work, even if they don't care as much for being precisely on time. well who knows.