<< Why can't radio change back to way it was in the 1960s & 1970s ? >>
Heck, why stop there?
It was in the mid 1920's that radio began to change when a few singing commercial by the Happiness Boys, Billie Jones and Ernie Hare were interwoven into the previously commercial free broadcasts of local talk and musicians. Then, starting in 1932 with the Jack Benny program, radio made a gradual but inexorable shift to drama and news programming until it was near total by 1940. Then in 1947 (after WWII when radio sales skyrocketed) Bing Crosby adopted magnetic recording for his new radio program on ABC, starting a gradual shift back towards music programming, primarily Big Band format along with a healthy Gospel segment. The growing popularity of new-fangled television, with it's ability to SHOW drama and news, helped this along. Another helping hand was lent by the wider availability of stereophonic sound (first developed in 1945, but not demonstrated to the public until the 1951 Audio Fair in New York. Programmers, eager to exploit the new technology, started experimenting with various formats to see which sounded "hip" and cutting edge...and saleable.
Of course, it continued on from there....Billboard's Top 40 ratings that began in the mid-50's (which drove sales) altered radio programming again, skewing towards youth and their disposable incomes....then came the rise of FM and the inevitable changes wrought from that....etc. etc. etc.
And each time there have been people who've lamented the change(s), decrying the desicration of radio's "memory". Older folk in the 60's and 70's probably asked "Why can't radio change back to way it was in the 1940s & 1950s?" But none of what any of you remember is "the way radio was". It's just, that's the way radio IS. It's a fluid medium, reflective of current tastes, norms, mores and available technologies. It ALWAYS changes. And it always will. It's just the nature of the beast.
