I can't see that happening. There's no legal justification. Reminder, they report to congress, and congress is on the verge of passing the AM in every vehicle act. How does the FCC justify allowing AM stations to shut down after congress has just mandated AM in vehicles? I'd like to see your wording for that press release.
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Saving AM Radio
- Thread starter BruceB
- Start date
I can't see that happening. There's no legal justification. Reminder, they report to congress, and congress is on the verge of passing the AM in every vehicle act. How does the FCC justify allowing AM stations to shut down after congress has just mandated AM in vehicles? I'd like to see your wording for that press release.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I guess time will prove one of us correct and the other in error, then.
Congress has a short memory. What they did in 2024 won't affect what they do in 2030.
Congress has a short memory. What they did in 2024 won't affect what they do in 2030.
And that would leave the owners of many stations stranded on a dead band, with no choice but to either turn in the license and give up or continue pouring money down the drain. Could owners sue the government for destroying their business? I'd imagine not. The small-time breweries didn't lawyer up when the federal government imposed prohibition. They either limped along with soft drinks or ceased operations. But then, this is a much more litigious era. Will the FCC bend over backward to try to accommodate all the AM operators, even if it means stations on every other spot on the 88-108 band in major markets, interference be damned?
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No. Ajit Pai ran the most radio-friendly FCC in recent memory, and even he didn't do that.
But come on, it isn't like if things got worse for the band without warning. AM station owners would have literally decades starting when music packed up and left to realize the environment of media consumption and advertising was changing. It would be like standing in the middle of a lonely highway with a semi heading your way with two days notice. If you don't step out of the way, it's nobody else's fault if you get run over and killed.
Even if it seems like "nobody" is listening to AM because of low or seemingly non-existent ratings...somebody is, as the band has been forever stuffed with right wing/reactionary/conspiracy theorists, and the like., with quite literally no end in sight...so I think it will be around awhile longer.
The only possible change would be to remove the second adjacent separation requirements, which every other country in the Caribbean, Central America and South America as well as in much of the rest of the world has done. That rule came from the 40's and 50's when receivers were pretty primitive.
And a really large number of stations in non-English languages, ranging from Spanish to Farsi!
And they were in a huge market, St. Louis, but were for fairly lousy facilities. Still, one of those, 1380, was the legendary KWK which was a huge Top 40 outlet maybe 60 years ago.
The capacity of the FM band is greater than some think. There are plenty of empty spots in my metro. Of course, I don't hear all the LPFMs that may be on some frequencies, located 20 or 30 miles away. But, then again, LPFM's aren't intended to cover a large range of territory.
But there is room for a few more stations, at least in a lot of metros. The people complaining the most about the FM band being "full" are FM DX'ers. But we already know that their opinion doesn't count when it comes to the business side of Radio.
There is no room in any significant metro. Just because you can't hear a station where you are does not mean that the adjacent or second adjacent channels on each side are not protected from putting anything new on the "empty spots".
When Docket 80-90 allowed uncontested A to B or C upgrades, changes in COL and the like, nearly everything that could be done was done in the next decade.
While there are rural areas with truly empty dial spots, nobody wants those and many that were licensed are now silent or soon will be in the current radio economy.
This is the real point. With lending for anything radio or TV purchased at an all-time low and so many existing stations, especially in rural areas in financial trouble and on the block, jamming more stations onto the FM band accomplishes what?
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Many who post this sort of question or wish don't have ownership or management experience. The big point is that radio revenue is now nearly 60% below the inflation adjusted level from 2004. This year, even with politics, looks even worse.
The presidential race, especially, lends itself much more to the unrestrained, highly visual environment of online advertising than to radio, which is in the straitjacket of fairness rules and broadcast standards. I can't stress "visual" enough, as the physical appearance of both candidates is relentlessly lampooned in online advertising in a way that even standard television advertising, let alone radio, cannot hope to approach.
I agree with you that political advertising on the radio is on the way out. particularly since most people listen to the radio in the car and they can just push a button to another station when a political ad comes on.
KWK is...complicated. The facilities before 1973 were actually fairly decent. The year before, my family moved to St. Charles County, which became the far-flung northwestern suburbs of St. Louis. I could pick the station up at night, at the time with a soul format. Then it went off the air and stayed silent for five years due to bankruptcy and various legal machinations that resulted. When it came back under Doubleday ownership in 1978, it was with inferior facilities, a two-site operation, with a mediocre signal in St. Charles County during the day and none at all at night. I mention St. Charles County precisely because that's where the growth in the St. Louis area happened. I lived and went to high school in O'Fallon, which had 7,000 people during my time in high school. Now it has more than 95,000.
KWK had some mild success when it first signed back on but Doubleday quickly saw the writing on the wall and bought WGNU-FM from Chuck Norman. That FM (106.5) became WWWK and later KWK-FM after Doubleday won a court case to get the rules on K vs. W calls relaxed. While KWK started out as a Top-40 station, the KWK/WWWK format became a tightly-formatted AOR that gave KSHE a run for its money. But KSHE outlasted everyone.
The other facility that was up for auction was the old WIL, an early Top 40 station and later a legendary country station whose call letters still live on in the FM band. But it also had coverage problems, especially in the western suburbs.
St. Louis is in some ways an exceptional case. The gigantic success of KMOX...no doubt about it, it was an awesome radio station...covered up the fact that every other AM station in the market struggled in one way or another.
KXOK was the dominant Top-40 station until Bartell's KSLQ came on in the fall of 1972. Within weeks, no one at Fort Zumwalt High was talking about KXOK any more. It was all about KSLQ and, to a lesser extent, album-rock KADI - for, once the notion of tuning to FM for something other than background music took hold, and it took hold fast, some of us sampled what else was out there.
In many ways, the constant in radio is change. KSLQ, KADI, KXOK, KWK-FM are all something else now. KMOX and KSHE are not the same stations they were, even if they are still successful.
Aside from that, I can't believe the energy that has gone into this thread.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Me either. Lots of wishful thinking, very little acknowledgement of reality.
You talk about empty dial spots, coupled with the fast FM growth over the last 50 years or so, I think it was sometime in the 70s that the highest frequency in use in Vegas was 101.9 !
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I gave this a little more thought, A, and I am convinced that outside of rural areas where FMs may not have the coverage needed for emergency situations (and I admit that I have not done any research into the viability of that argument, even in those areas) the need for AM in passenger vehicles has diminished to the point where Congress is wrong -- imagine that!
-- to have sided with a vocal minority who believe it necessary.*So I am going to expand on my original answer to you. I think that by 2030 it will be overwhelmingly obvious that the mandate for AM in cars is/was totally insufficient to save the service, at which point the FCC will have a freer hand to deal with thinning out the band (and who knows how many more stations will go silent on their own by then anyway?). I believe that when it comes to that point, the process is going to allow AM/translator combos to become a separately licensed FM class of service and the "link" between the licenses broken so that the AM license can be surrendered without penalty.
If and when that happens, I would hope that there would be some preconditions placed on the licensees, such as a minimum period of ownership in exchange for the contour protection that would come with the new full class of service, a specified amount of time before any upgrade in facilities could be applied for, and (most important, because of the clutter on the FM band that this would further codify) a provision that any such "new" station, if it should go silent and surrender its license, would not in the process create an opening for someone else to apply for the same frequency.
As I said before, we'll just have to wait and see what transpires.
* - As I have said previously, I have an older EV and its AM radio works fine. But there's nothing on that band that I want to listen to.
I'm going to make it even worse. The all-digital SFN (single frequency network). The availability of HD in cars has been discussed here, and while there's no absolute statistics, it varies with market, etc, the fact remains there are a good percentage of cars out there equipped with HD radios. There's also a documented method of synchronizing HD radio transmitters into a SFN. But only on FM. What about AM? What about using several low power (100 watt or so) all-digital AM transmitters located at strategic places to fully cover a market? It's a total drastic change to current rules. Antenna efficiency rules would have to be thrown out the window (you're not going to construct many AM antennas - they have to be special, loaded devices - more akin to ham radio antennas). Interference calculations would have to be different (integrated from several sources). It wouldn't work with a regular analog signal. Too much mutual interference. But if the engineers at Xperi are correct it would work for an all-digital signal. The advantage to the concept over standard AM is that you could add coverage to a market by simply adding another transmitter in a high-growth area if that proved financially viable.
How much would it cost? Don't know. Would the FCC ever grant an experimental license for someone to try it? Don't know that either. But it sure would be fun to see if something like that works in the real world.
Dave B.