Japan's conversion to WIDE-FM was a success because:
- Broadcast franchise areas span the entire prefecture (which there is only 47) and in smaller prefectures, the franchise areas are multiple prefectures, there are far fewer stations.
- Retail stores actually sold radios and was very supportive of the change.
- Japan's equivalent of the NAB (JBA) was very aggressive in their marketing and promotion of WIDE-FM.
- Because there was fewer television broadcast licensees, Japan, like most of the world except the US, Canada and Mexico completely ditched VHF for digital television thus freeing up a ton of spectrum.
- Radio in Japan still a higher ratio of local originated speech to music. Because there are fewer stations, they are more well rounded and not narrowcasted into "formats" and on-air personalities (both local and national) still exist.
- Radio is more live and local and less automated and is in touch with the local community.
- Radio stations in Japan still promote music and the labels.
- Spotify has a 24.1% market share in Japan where in the US, it is 30.5%. Still pretty high, but radio remains relevant there.
Thank you, Michi, for the addition of those qualifying details. It brings additional context but also (unfortunately) serves as validation of my -- and others' -- statement that the success cannot be replicated here. As you, yourself say:
Yes, the WIDE-FM ship has sailed in the USA, but you can blame decades of regulations, strange interpretations of statutes, media consolidation, an unsupportive NAB because of conflicts of interest (radio and TV) and network O&Os with RJ Fletcher Syndrome.
A lot of that can be attributed to the relative difference between the two countries, not only in size but in the effects of being so much larger. More bureaucracy, too many bad decisions which seemed right at the time (even when people tried to point out the potential pitfalls ... the majority of which came to pass), too much capitalism driving the legislative and regulatory processes.
Without the acceptance of new hardware for radio by the American consumer, whether it is WIDE-FM or HD Radio, the outlook does not look good for AM. The AM for All Vehicles Act will do nothing to help save AM as long as the "HD loophole" remains in the legislation (automakers can satisfy the law by installing AM radios that only pick up HD broadcasts while still excluding analog stations).
So ... X-band was not the savior hoped for, largely due to consumers not inclined to buy new radios to make it work (as I said, if we learn from that mistake, repurposing channels 5 and 6 from TV to FM will be nothing more than a new version of the X-Band debacle). Other "ideas" which sound good but are not feasible, such as blanket power increases for all AMs, are -- I hope and pray -- never going to get any serious consideration.
I agree that the outlook for AM's continued existence is doomed. There will still be a lot of high-powered stations that survive, similar but not identical to the handful of SW stations that still exist, and there are likely to be rural areas where the coverage area of a translator is insufficient to reach everyone in an emergency or public safety situation, but otherwise the translators are keeping stations that would have likely gone silent by now if forced to transmit only on AM viable in their local communities.
There is no good reason to force AMs that now only exist to feed translators (i.e., the AM audience is negligible) to remain on the air just for that purpose. And the only way to allow them to go silent without also taking the low-wattage FM off the air, as now legally required, is to change the rules and regulations and create a lower FM class which is essentially the current translator technical limits and provide some degree of contour protection (certainly not as much as even a full-power Class A) so that those can operate without fear of being forced off the air by a larger broadcaster.
As I see it, this is the only way to preserve service to the community. The only reason to oppose it is wanting to make the bigger stations even bigger and I'm not willing to agree to that, because the smaller owners who would be able to use this change in status to stay on the air
need to be able to take their AMs silent without fear that their FM will be steamrolled out of the way by a bigger station widening their own road.
I simply do not see any other viable solutions other than letting stations fail with no recourse to their owners or the communities they serve.
