You should get some kind of award for being the 700th post on this thread!
Who says no one cares about AM radio?
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Saving AM Radio
- Thread starter BruceB
- Start date
Who says no one cares about AM radio?
Sometimes I wonder...
The vast majority of the younger audience has long since moved on and couldn't give a darn about AM, but there seems to still be a robust minority of older listeners and younger outliers who are quite passionate about it, and this thread I think is a good sampling of that.
How big is that minority? Who knows...
c
Especially in current times, prestige doesn't pay the bills.
There's still small, passionate groups of people both old and young that enjoy buying and listening to music on vinyl. It still doesn't make vinyl anything more than a niche hobby.
As Yogi Berra once said, "Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours."
I was an AM DXer, starting in the late 50's and was even a founding member and on the first BoD of the IRCA, an AM (Medium Wave) DX club in the mid-60's. I began working at a radio station in 1959.
I don't recall any significant number of stations asking for reports from out of their market except for overnight shows. Yes, occasionally a jock on a big station would mention a far-away listener but that was mostly to impress the local listeners with how "big" their favorite station was.
I hope you taped it!
Yeah, on occasion I'd call a station that was testing in overnights and asking for calls. It was fun, and they usually gave my name on the air. My favorite was calling the overnight show on XEB 1220 AM from Mexico City after my local WGAR signed off. I'd talk to the jock and request a song (always one that they regularly played anyway) and they usually put me on the air. Since I was about 14 or 15 at the time, that was a lot of fun; thrills are harder to come by today!
That's a bit of an exaggeration because even when it was 500 kw it only covered well parts of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. At night, it did well for about 800 to 100 miles in all directions, but that operations was relatively short-lived and ended by the FCC.
What made those distant stations successful was in a big part due to the national nature of network radio in the 30's and into the 40's. Many smaller towns did not have a station, and many more had just one.... often a Class IV.
If you were in Traverse City or Petoskey, MI, in the 30's you had to listen for Detroit or Chicago stations to hear the network shows.
There were no "Top 40" or fully music formatted stations then. People had great big console radios in the living room, and even the dials of some were marked with the "big" stations on their dials. In that era, ads in Broadcasting Magazine showed night coverage and response maps because that listenership was salable to clients in that era; if that show on WSM got one letter from Oregon, for sure that was part of the claims made in their ads.
Agency clients would buy Red or Blue or CBS, but not so much local stations. Fewer stations and big coverage mattered.
There were even more local stations like KMA in Shenandoah or KNX in Yankton that reached farmers in huge, often multi-state areas during the day and then entertained their families at night with network shows. But as the nation... and the dial... filled up after WW II and the influence of the Musicians' Union declined, radio "went local" and music formats emerged, focusing on local retail accounts and not national network ones.
And WMCA could not say those things. A pi---ing contest.
Based on AM ratings in most markets, there aren't many of us who care about AM left.
Calling Huff, Calling Huff!
If you look at a broad sweep of markets... some with bigger AMs than others... and look beyond the "share" numbers we get for free you will see that the reach of AM, express as "cume" is a higher percentage.
While total AM shares may be around 10 or lower in most markets, their unduplicated cume is often around three times that number. So it is not unusual for as much as a third of listeners in a market to actually use AM in markets that have good stations with good signals.
(To get these numbers, you have to have the Nielsen software because cume is not additive as stations share listeners. Only in that software can you get accurate data by doing the cume of "All AM Stations" which you do by creating user-defined combos.)
Certainly I wasn't there like you were, but the Blaw-Knox tower at WLW was specifically designed for maximizing skywave, especially at 500kW. That attributed to the less impressive regional groundwave coverage, but there were reports of many listeners overseas. As I've read, the idea was to make WLW a way of broadcasting President Roosevelt's weekly speeches at night, including into Europe.
Like many of the high power stations of the day, WLW was created as a way to advertise not only Crosley radios and phonographs, but Western Electric who built the 500kW transmitter, also advertised on the station.
Sadly I was 15 and didn't own a tape recorder yet. Still, I was happy to hear It. I didn't mention, but the station also mailed me a copy of the top 100 songs of the previous year, so to say that far away stations didn't care about a kid in Dayton, Ohio?
, at least in those days they did.
It may be all about marketing and sales now but back in the day, stations really valued their listeners wherever they were from.
Good point!
The era of stations just being a voice for the owner was more predominant in the 20's. By the 30's, we had ratings, networks and national as well as local advertisers. Yes, Crosley used WLW to promote his palliances (not just radio and phonographs, but ice boxes and other kitchen appliances, too, but it was a full fledged station for any advertiser by the time the 30's rolled in.
I remember this. I don't know who the host was but it was WBZ and he wanted to hear from out-of-town people.
You just wait until 8-track tapes come back. (clunk)
Yeah, I don't think that will happen any time soon....
*says a person with several dozen 8-track cartridges and an 8-track recorder*
c
I have an 8 track recorder in my basement too. It's been there for 30 years. I wonder if it still works.
Neat!
Since 8 track players don't seem tremendously common these days, I'd imagine that an 8 track recorder, working or not, would be quite rare indeed.
If so, then you and I are lucky!
c
Don't know whether to post this here, or in HD radio. Drove to Denver. HD radio in the truck. Tuned in 810 AM (KLVZ??). Radio locked in on AM HD digital 40 miles out. All of a sudden, no powerline noise, great fidelity, and stereo !!! I recommend that if AM is going to stand a chance, they need to switch to HD.