There was a time when young people LOVED the programming on AM radio. But it was all they had at the time. When they discovered that they could get the same music on FM, they left. Maybe not immediately. But over the period of about five years, the audience transitioned from AM to FM. The AM programmers did everything they could to keep people listening to AM, and they left. Even the DJs left for FM. So you can't expect that young people today, with all the choices they have, will go back to a technology that their parents left 50 years ago. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Especially when radio companies are doing everything they can to make that programming available on either an FM simulcast or an FM-HD or streaming. There is no exclusive anymore.
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Ford Reconsiders, Now Keeping AM Radio
- Thread starter DavidEduardo
- Start date
There was a time when young people LOVED the programming on AM radio. But it was all they had at the time. When they discovered that they could get the same music on FM, they left. Maybe not immediately. But over the period of about five years, the audience transitioned from AM to FM. The AM programmers did everything they could to keep people listening to AM, and they left. Even the DJs left for FM. So you can't expect that young people today, with all the choices they have, will go back to a technology that their parents left 50 years ago. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Especially when radio companies are doing everything they can to make that programming available on either an FM simulcast or an FM-HD or streaming. There is no exclusive anymore.
Who said that talk radio targets 25-54? It does not. Operators of the "stations that used to carry Rush" know (and knew) that the potential audience was over 45, and specifically targeted at 45-64 olds.
"25-54" is seldom the specific target of any one station. It's usually some subset, like "Women 25-44" or "Spanish dominant Hispanics 18-34" or some subset within the 18-54 range.
And agencies that buy a broad 18-49 or 25-54 make sure they get some 18-34 stations, some 25-44 stations, some 35-54 ones and also ones reaching both men and women.
Local direct accounts, the ones talk station and true oldies stations and the like get most revenue from, don't pay so much (if any) attention to ratings and demos. They depend on service and rely on their own perception of "what works".
Local car dealers are notorious for making decisions on media that don't fit the "25-54" ad agency boundaries. On a call years ago I found a car dealer had the service department check what station was on the radio of every car that came in and they used that data to pick stations and to verify that the ones they were buying time on were working.
Since big agencies and their accounts tend to shy away from politically based talk, most sales are local direct and small local shops. So for a station like KFI, they can be among LA's top 5 billing operations because they "work" for those accounts.
It was a lot longer than that. FMs started showing up in ratings soon after the FCC eliminated the full duplication of co-owned AM and FM stations in the later 60's. It was not until somewhere between 1977 and 1980 that different markets even achieved 50% FM AQH listening.
Remember, the 70's was when Arbitron became the dominant ratings service for agency buys. Because Arbitron used larger Metro Survey Areas than the prior preferred ratings services, many AMs were at a disadvantage because so few MSA AMs cover the whole rated market. Thus, a huge reason for FM becoming the "majority band" later in the 70's was because more FMs had full market coverage than local AMs did.
In Cleveland, to use a typical larger market example, there was, and is, just one station on AM covering nearly all the whole market day and night. In the mid 70's, there were 12 FM stations that already had adequate power and height to serve the market, growing to about 15 today (including non-com stations)
Again, FM did sound better. But those of us involved in FM in the later 60's and early 70's started with no revenue, and we limited commercials to... in most cases... 8 minutes an hour. On music stations we were running four stops an hour with two spots in each. Some ran even less; my first successful FM in 1966 ran six 20" spots an hour, one every 3 tunes, for a total of two minutes an hour and it was as profitable as any AM I had at the time.
I remember listening to WMYQ go on the air in Miami around 1972. It never ran more than 8 minutes of ads an hour, and in its launch period it had nearly none. WQAM and WFUN were running 18 minutes... including those speedway ads that all ended with the guy screaming, "... and bring your camera!!!!"
Guess who won in the book 6 months later? And guess who was filled with 8 minutes of prime rate ads a year later? And the, Cecil and Buzz hit town with Y-100 with the same commercial limit but Cecil's magnificent and crazy promotions.
Stuff like that went on everywhere, of course.
Again, the biggest reasons why FM beat AM were not the sound quality... they were big signals and limited commercials.
It was all three. When you listen to airchecks of RKO's Top 40 in NYC, it had as many commercials as WABC. Over at Metromedia, John Kluge told his people he wanted to cash in on his FMs. So he tightened up the formats and loaded up commercials. By the 80s, the consultants were going full tilt, and it was all about cramming as many spots in as possible. So that limited commercials thing didn't last long. The sound quality became a thing for young people because of the home stereo boom that was happening at the time. Everybody in their 20s wanted to have the best sounding home stereo, and they didn't buy those systems to listen to AM.
There were people who wanted high quality AM, and tuners were made for them (the Realistic TM-152, Carver TX-11a/b, to name two). Of course, they were a small minority, and the majority always wins (with limited exceptions).
c
Not in my experience. In the early 80's in Miami, Y-100 continued to run less than 10 minutes of spots. Comparable stations in other markets, particularly AOR and CHR, were sticking to under 10 minutes almost universally.
The 90's, following the crowding of most markets with new signals and move-ins, saw rates collapse and commercial loads increase incrementally.
From early progressive rockers and the every-present Beautiful Music stations of Shulke, Bonneville and others in the later 60's till well into the later 80's, we saw most stations with limits of 8 to 12 minutes of spots, and mostly 10 minutes and under.
The home component stereo thing beginning in the earlier 70's had more to do with "album rock" and the desire to play one's album collection really loudly. It was much less to hear the "Superstars" station at over 100 db levels.
When I was with Heftel, the relaunch of KLVE in 1995 and the launch of WAMR in 1996 both had 10 minute limits, and quite a few music competitors in Miami and LA were also in that vicinity.
As someone who was a college student in (cough, cough) 1975-79, I can tell you that AM radio was no factor at all in my listening or in that of my cohort. Our St. Louis friends were oriented toward KSHE, KADI, or KSLQ, the latter of which started in the fall of 1972 and quickly wrested listeners away from KXOK, especially at night where KXOK's null just happened to be where rapid population growth was happening. On the Kansas City side of things, KBEQ was slower to grab share from WHB, but it did. The situation with AOR in Kansas City was messier, but KYYS finally became established in 1974. I mention both metros since we were almost exactly halfway between them. Our local KFMZ was more tolerated than liked, but it was there, and had an audience and made some money.
By the time the 1980s came around, this cohort, the peak of the Baby Boom, was obviously going to be influential. That's why formats still familiar to us began coalescing into their present form. They were fresh and new then - not so much now - but we're not so fresh or new ourselves, either. AM radio has its demographic dead-end, which is well on its way to playing out; FM's demographic dead-end is also becoming apparent now, but it's a different dead-end.
And the guys, at least, all had stereo systems, and, at any hour of Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, you could hear all the tracks from "Frampton Comes Alive" without a radio if you wanted to, or even if you didn't.
By the time the 1980s came around, this cohort, the peak of the Baby Boom, was obviously going to be influential. That's why formats still familiar to us began coalescing into their present form. They were fresh and new then - not so much now - but we're not so fresh or new ourselves, either. AM radio has its demographic dead-end, which is well on its way to playing out; FM's demographic dead-end is also becoming apparent now, but it's a different dead-end.
And the guys, at least, all had stereo systems, and, at any hour of Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, you could hear all the tracks from "Frampton Comes Alive" without a radio if you wanted to, or even if you didn't.
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Then you were leaving money on the table. I went through a bunch of 1981R&Rs on your history site, entered the word 'commercial' in the search, and the number that came up consistently was 12 minutes. That's FM music stations in 1981.
Depends on the music format. I know that when I was GM of one of the Metroplex stations in the earlier 80's, I helped introduce all the other GMs to Visicalc on early Apple computers for our budgets and one of the things I put in the revenue projection category was, by daypart, day and week the number of spots per hour and the average anticipated rate.
This gave very precise measures of how much a station had to sell and at how much to meet revenue projections. It helped Norm and Bob see when a GM was blowing smoke, too. Our CHR, Country and similar contemporary music stations, in markets like Dallas, St. Louis, DC, Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville and other majors were running 10 to 12 minutes. There were a couple of Beautiful Music stations, and they ran 8 minutes.
The ones with 10 to 12 minutes rand 12 in AMD, usually 10 in the rest of daytime hours, 8 at night and 10 on weekends. This was the pattern at some market leading stations well into the mid 80's. Running more spots in AMD was pretty common back then.
Advertising where, on the AM band?
Not better to any appreciable amount. Especially as compared with just about any other aural competitor like; FM and streaming.
When talking about all these hypothetical's, one must remember that radio as an industry is inherently cheap. Sure, there are some groups/stations who will advertise outside of their own signal, like billboards or poorly produced TV spots, but those cost a lot of money. An expense difficult to justify when your AM station is just able to keep the lights on.
This.
And it wasn't just teens and 20s. Adult Contemporary AM stations found themselves in the same boat in most markets by the early-mid 80s.
Some places saw it sooner.
In Reno, Nevada, KOLO-AM was doing very nicely (#2 overall with a 14.6) until a Beautiful Music FM that was tied for 5th in the market dumped the format, adopted our playlist and ran it on their automation system.
That was 1978. They went from a 7.8 to a 13.1, tying us for third place in one book. We had 15,000 more in cume than they did, but with no jocks, our music and an eight-minute commercial limit to our 18, they had a much better TSL. They went from 5th to 1st in 18-49 adults and we slid from 1st to 2nd.
By 1982, the FM had gone live and stolen KOLO'S morning talent. The FM is still AC to this day.
KOLO went Country in 1983. Five years later, it tried News/Talk. Two years after that, it became a KOOL Gold satellite affiliate, and in 1999, it became the first Immaculate Heart Radio station, which it still is.
This wasn't about signal. KOLO was 5kw at 920 and Reno was easily covered, even by the 1kw night signal, until the early 90s. This was about grownups with ears preferring less talk and more music in stereo---45 years ago.
Regardless of the reason, people left AM stations for FM at a time when AM programming was at its peak, before consolidation, before deregulation, before staff cutbacks, and obviously before competition from other devices.
According to Billboard:
The point is the AM decline was not caused by bad programming. There is no programming AM can do that will cause young people to throw away their phones, computers, or FM radios and buy AM transistors again as they did in the 60s.
According to Billboard:
The point is the AM decline was not caused by bad programming. There is no programming AM can do that will cause young people to throw away their phones, computers, or FM radios and buy AM transistors again as they did in the 60s.
Winston-Salem and Greensboro each had their own stations and I know of only one AM that covered the market day and night. But like most markets I know of, it didn't have that many FMs that also covered the whole market. FM stations started increasing their signals to 100,000 watts around 1980 and it was toward the end of the 80s when all the stations that could do it had done it.
Charlotte had several AMs that at least covered the city but at night maybe one or two stations that were still on the air did any more than that. And WBT, the strongest, couldn't be heard west of the city. There were 4 100,000-watt FMs and they were eventually joined by others. A couple of stations that weren't as strong did cover Charlotte but were licensed elsewhere. Those eventually increased power.
Just curious; when was the last time you left your hometown, or state for longer than three days?
I don't remember. I used to stay in the mountains for five days but motel rooms are expensive.
Did the ceiling fan emergency you had put you off staying in motels, too?
Also, FM in the late 1960s and early 1970s sounded kind of sterile and stale. By the late 1970s FM stations discovered that audio processing was a thing. NPR uses more processing now than the equivalent FM station would have used in 1971, at least in my metro.
I would hazard a guess that the additional audio processing used on FM during the mid-to-late 70s boosted the audience, because the jocks sounded better, the music sounded a little better. In 1969 all the FMs I remember hearing as a kid sounded like the mic and the turntable were directly connected to the transmitter. I.e., little to no compression, and zero processing. I.e., sterile sounding. All the announcers sounded half asleep. Some of it was the 'hip', sedate FM delivery, but that obviously had to change.
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As compared with a lesser-processed station, it made the processed station stand out more when someone was turning the dial of their old capacitance-tuned radio. That, and AM heavily processed AM stations had a slight fringe coverage advantage by running asymmetrical modulation (+125 peak). And this was when all there was is radio.
Fast forward to today; and listeners have so many more choices where the audio isn't being trashed in an attempt to stand out. Excessive processing now hurts listening, not help it.
Re: FM audio processing - in 1974 I was listening to KBEQ FM (song: Bennie and the Jets), their audio processing caused the midrange and treble to drop noticeably in volume when the bass notes at the beginning of the song occurred (I didn't notice this anomaly on KIIK FM).
I would think this type of (mis)adjustment wouldn't have happened this late in radio broadcasting.
Kirk Bayne
I would think this type of (mis)adjustment wouldn't have happened this late in radio broadcasting.
Kirk Bayne
And especially after the loudness wars, people began to value dynamics over pure loudness, so a more dynamic sounding station, even if it's a bit quieter, would sound better, and attract more listeners, I'd suppose?
c