Webcast Radio

FM Radio

No one person can be called the inventor of FM radio. Even the man most widely credited with developing FM radio, Edwin Howard Armstrong, concedes that point. The first patents concerning FM radio were granted to Cornelius Ehret of Philadelphia in 1905. Scattered mentions of FM in subsequent years focused on its negative aspects suggesting that based on what was known then, FM radio would not be a useful broadcast medium.

From 1945 to 1957, there were mixed results for FM radio as it struggled to become established and successful amidst a broadcasting industry increasingly infatuated with television and still investing substantial sums of capital into the expansion of AM radio. The initial excitement over FM radio began to decline.

Then FM radio began to turn around very slowly. Reports in several trade magazines late in 1957 picked up the fact that the number of FCC authorizations for FM stations had increased for the first time in nine years. Slowly the pace of new station construction picked up, first in major markets and then in suburban areas.

Many FM radio industry policies were changed in the 1960s which led to more rapid growth in the 1970s. FM radio attracted 25 percent of the listening audience in 1972 and one-third just two years later in 1974 but FM radio revenues still accounted for only 14% of radio industry revenues. By 1979 FM radio listenership surpassed that of AM radio for the first time. Every major market had at least 4 FM radio stations ranked in the top 10.

FM radio never looked back after that and dominated the airwaves by the turn of the century when 80% of the radio listening public was listening to FM radio stations. But with success came the pressure to keep up. As news and talk formats increasingly defined AM (because these formats were less affected by inferior sound quality), FM radio flowered the airwaves with a full cornucopia of musical formats and styles.

By the early 1970s, FM radio stations in the nation's largest markets were developing formats every bit as tight and narrow as those of their AM forbearers. Each station and its advertisers were appealing to a specific segment of the once-mass radio audience in an attempt to build listener loyalty in a marketplace often defined by too many stations in most cities.

By the late 1980s, FM radio's primary target market was that defined by advertisers: listeners aged 26 to 34, followed by those 35 to 44 years of age. Only a relative handful of stations targeted teenagers and fewer than 30 percent were interested in listeners aged 55 and older.

FM radio's success is also seen in the usual marketplace measure which is the price of FM radio stations on the open market. The top FM radio stations could hardly give themselves away in the 1950s but by the 1960s the first million-dollar prices were being quoted.