Webcast Radio

AM Radio

AM radio broadcasting originated from the early 20th-century radio telephony experiments. Early radio broadcast transmitters in the 1920s were manufactured by hand, were hard to adjust and maintain, and delivered uneven and sometimes unpredictable performance.

This led to considerable detail in the regulatory requirements established by the FRC after 1927. Stations required a full-time engineer for all the modifications and monitoring required. By 1941 the quality of AM radio was considerably improved.

Until 1941 all US commercial stations operated only with AM transmission and competed only with other AM outlets. The radio industry at this time was small and friendly. While by 1941 the largest cities had a dozen stations, many smaller towns had but one or two and large parts of the country had no local radio service at night. Radio networks dominated programming and advertising with relatively few stations surviving as independent operations. By 1941 there were only a handful of educational stations on the air.

AM faced it first competition when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the creation of FM stations at the beginning of 1941; television arrived by the middle of the same year. The US involvement in Word War II limited growth of new services so that most people could only tune into AM for the duration of the war.

AM radio stations dominated the industry for four decades. There were more AM radio stations reaching a larger audience and making more money. Most program developments were focused on AM radio stations. AM radio station owners controlled the broadcast trade associations and saw FM as merely an expansion of what they already offered.

By 1980 AM radio's competitive position had changed dramatically. The year before, more people tuned into FM stations for the first time and the gap continued to widen for the next two decades as FM's higher fidelity won over listeners. FM was expanding faster as well.

By the turn of the century, only a quarter to a third of the radio audience regularly listened to AM radio stations. AM radio stations began shifting to news and talk formats. In the 1990s the number of AM radio stations actually declined as stations left the air unable to attract a sufficient number of listeners to make money from potential advertisers who chose to spend their advertising dollars on FM radio stations with a larger listening base.

AM radio stations tried for years to make changes to compete with FM radio stations but every time the dust settled the fact remained that AM radio was an older technology with an inferior sound to FM and could not accommodate developing digital formats.

AM radio could not compete on an equal basis with its newer competitors, and had not been able to for the last two decades of the 20th century and the seeds of AM radio's decline dated back even further. To a considerable degree, every attempt made by AM radio to compete with FM radio constituted a band-aid approach to a fundamental challenge that could not be viable addressed without converting AM radio stations into digital formats.