Is AM radio dead?
The BBC World Service shortwave broadcast [0] is still one of the few (safe) ways people can get outside news while living in war-torn regions and totalitarian regimes across Africa, Middle east, and Asia.
People arguing about Audio quality are missing the point of AM: Robustness in adversity.
Receivers are easy to put together and repair, transmission travels long distances beyond enemies/oppressors and unlike online access nobody can intercept your traffic or estimate your location.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2x9tqt6mc05vB2S37j...
> But as more and more radio stations in the US are controlled by ever fewer radio conglomerates
This is what's underlying it all. Following deregulation, fewer hands gained control of more outlets nationwide, homogenizing for maximum margin on advertising to the markets with the broadest reach. Top-40, country, r&b, at-work, alternative, and at best some market segmentation in parts of the country with significant ethnic demographics.
Advertisers mainly want to pick from this menu, and AM wasn't on it, with the exception of nationally syndicated talk and regional news and sports. That put AM in a down-market position, which put it at lower revenues, which made profitability a bigger struggle, which is a big sign pointing to the "niche" door of relative commercial obscurity.
The technical aspects are a factor in terms of appealing to listeners and thus advertisers, but the decisions are made entirely on commercial grounds.
It's certainly 99% dead for me personally but based on the ad dollars still flowing in, I'm assuming there is a still a big audience, even if it's on the decline.
What's more surprising to me at this point is Sirius. I just don't understand how this is still a $22 billion dollar company, doing $9 billion in revenue and is still growing revenue. I don't see where the value is. I haven't subscribed in almost a decade but when I left, the audio quality was really bad -- terrible digital compression artifacts -- and there wasn't really anything that interesting in terms of musical programming that couldn't be had with a streaming service like Spotify. Maybe it's all Stern and sports content that's driving revenue or is there still a big legion of people who actually subscribe for the music?
The "Divided Dial" series (six parts) from WNYC's On the Media does an excellent job of detailing how and why radio in general (both AM & FM bands in the US) has come to be both so concentrated (in ownership) and divided (in content and audience). Both ... portend poorly.
The full series, with both audio and transcripts, is here: <https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial>
Doc Searls, an old radio hand himself, often writes about the topic, though concentrating more on infrastructure than business or culture:
<https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/category/broadcasting/>
I'd argue that AM radio, much as with FM and over-the-air television, is fading fast, especially in urban regions in which broadband Internet and cable programming offer far more attractive options. For myself, I find I'm listening to podcasts far more than informational radio (though I'll listen to some music programming) over the air --- it's convenient, and has very little advertising. Less than the nominally noncommercial public broadcasting alternative.
But in rural regions, where markets are sparse, AM's range still pulls in what few people there are, and motivated and ideological ownership often drives content, radio remains a potent force. The OTM series gives strong insights into those dynamics.
(The series was mentioned downthread by danielodievich: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34602095>)
I seriously considered buying an AM radio station a few years ago. You can get a fully operational station and the land it's on for under $200k in pretty populated areas.
Something about just broadcasting whatever you want into a protected frequency band for anyone with an antenna to hear seems really cool.
I once got a part time job as an overnight engineer for a collection of faith based radio stations. Wild stuff. 5 FM stations. One of them, the latin station was the largest FM station in the market. 3 AM stations. Two rebroadcast the FM and one was an AM station to itself.
I know a bit about radio, but one of the most surprising things to me was why they had to have me there and paid me so little. I would be the ONLY person in the building overnight and on holidays. Sure I was there to "engineer" a couple shows that were put on by weirdos who paid to have a show on the late night air that broadcast to shut ins and prisoners. But the real reason was AM radio. The sun sets at a different time, every day. The FCC requires a person to be at the helm at sunset to manually lower the power of the AM stations and write in the log book that they did that. If you don't lower the AM power at sunset, your signal will bounce around the world over and over echoing and causing all sorts of interference.
Terrestrial radio as it is controlled and broadcast might be "dead" but EM waves are not a product. They are real estate. No one can actually stop you from sending some electrons around in a circle in a little box other than social norms. I think about this constantly, still. Go take a look at CrowdSupply[0] and the products that are shipping now that stick together a bunch of SDR chips to some high throughput and think about what you can do with that and some consumer GPUs. I think in the next couple years the way we use radio is going to change in ways that will really surprise us. There is definitely a meta resonance radio space that our current systems (as far as I'm aware) are not operating in and it's weird and exciting.
Also, Jeff is a freaking treasure and is doing some of the best tech communication out there. I'm so happy that he's back from his procedure and releasing new stuff. I should buy some of his merch or something. We all should.
AM is not dead, if you've ever lived or visited outside of the big metropolitan areas. It's normal to have a radio on the kitchen counter tuned to the local station, for gossip, local news, talk, and ads that are actually relevant to you.
.. and of course, baseball.
I listen to political talk radio on AM, even though it simulcasts on FM, all the time for a few reasons.
1. Signal strength is much more consistent and further reaching.
2. I don't have to worry about my wife changing the station on the AM radio in the car. The FM radio could be set anywhere, but when I'm driving I just change it to AM and there's my station.
3. There's a "je ne sais pas" factor in the fuzziness and softness of the audio that I find pleasant and less harsh than what you get with talk radio on FM. Maybe for the same reason people like the sound of vinyl records, though I'm not into vinyl.
I've never listened to AM radio on purpose, and I'm not young. From what I've heard, it's a content desert that consists primarily of religious/crackpot programming. As fewer and fewer new cars support AM¹, the writing is on the wall, and there should be concrete plans to reallocate that spectrum for something more useful.
¹ https://www.thedrive.com/news/heres-why-some-automakers-tune...
All I listen to is AM radio in the car. If you're like me and your musical tastes are outside the mainstream then FM radio is useless. Unless you're in a big city or anywhere in Louisiana then quite simply you're not going to find any blues or Cajun music and probably little if any jazz.
Tesla ships without AM radio for technical reasons. The electric motors in EV's generate electromagnetic interference that interferes with the AM band. Ford EV's do have AM radio standard however.
I'm the founder of an audio ads startup. To put things in perspective the global radio market for ad dollars is ~$35 billion to $40 billion depending on who you ask. All of podcasting is $2 billion.
To be clear the shift to all digital is happening but am/fm radio has a long ways to go before being irrelevant and this shift will likely take a few more decades. Don't sleep on traditional media.
> On the other, companies like Tesla stopped shipping AM radio entirely, and if you want to add it on, they'll gladly retrofit your EV for $500.
Reason #27 for not buying a Tesla. When you're on the highway and see the flashing lights saying "Tune to 520 AM for adverse road conditions" what are you going to do?
Someone started an AM radio station in my small town which has managed to survive for 7+ years now so there must be a workable business model there. They focus on hyper-local news & sports coverage that you just can't get anywhere else. The really clever thing they did was to use the launch of the radio station and broadcast location downtown as advertisement for their streaming app. They got a lot of local news coverage and public interest simply by doing something unusual like starting a new AM radio station in a tiny town. They still do AM but I believe the vast majority of their listeners stream. Super clever because someone like my Dad would never know a streaming station existed but he knows they exist because he can drive by the studio and see them broadcasting through the window.
My city has a newsradio AM station that's still doing well and lots of people listen for the traffic reports, but they started simulcasting on FM as well recently to futureproof themselves. The FM signal has far better sound quality of course but thats not really necessary for news reports. But the AM signal can frequently be heard when the FM is completely lost to interference.
I dont know of any other big am stations, my car has separate presets per band, so newsradio is permanently on for the AM signal and their FM is frequently on the fm preset.
AM is here to stay for at least a few more decades. In the US it’s a lot more scarce to find AM broadcasts that aren’t either political or religious (often extremely so) because of the market for renting airtime and the longer reach than FM.
But AM is still bread and butter for South/Central America and Africa. Not sure how much it is used in Southeast Asia but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was still very popular there too.
Eventually it’ll be gone due to the inevitable March of technology, but it has plenty of life left in it.
So in Boston (which is the No. 10 radio market),
https://ratings.radio-online.com/content/arb013
WBZ 1030 AM (news radio) hovers around no. 5. They transmit on HD radio also (HD 2 on 107.9 FM), but the range is limited compared with AM.
RKO 680 AM (local right wing talk radio) is also near the top.
Conclusion: AM is not dead
In rural Saskatchewan, where I am from, farmers listen to AM radio literally all day long because they don't get good FM reception. It's too sparse and the demographic is too non-technical to even know what Spotify is.
I was on a multi-day hike (Tasmania, Australia) some years ago, where we would need to know if snow was falling further ahead, as the pass would be difficult in snow, so we would need to turn back in that case; it would be easier to turn back well before reaching the pass. I packed an AM radio to listen to the weather forecast in the morning; before sunrise, the ionosphere reflects AM waves, so the distance of the signal is greatly enhanced (the hike was in a mountainous area and had no straight-line to any radio towers). In fact, I couldn't get the local radio station's reception, but did get reception for heaps of other stations, one of them over 2000km away; I almost wonder if the local station was being drowned out by distant ones (or more likely the ionosphere reflection is better a shallow angles)
I've heard the comment of HD Radio being a failure multiple times. Personally, it doesn't seem to be true to me, as the majority of my radio listening happens on receivers with HD Radio on stations with HD Radio. I didn't even go out of my way to make sure I bought just the right trim of a car with HD Radio or an AV receiver with HD Radio, it just had it. Most of the radio stations in my market offer HD Radio and several have multiple subchannels. A few of my go-to stations are HD Radio subchannels as those often are operated with minimal to no advertisements (usually just self promotion and station ID).
I realize HD Radio is pretty much US-only, but am I seemingly the only one actually using HD Radio?
I live in Australia and when I go on a decent road trip its interesting when you lose mobile phone coverage, then FM radio coverage leaving just AM radio.
In summer you can drive along just listening to news and sport coverage (Cricket).
In the country it is the primary source of news and emergency information. During flooding and bushfires most other forms of communication are not available especially during prolonged power outages.
Of course, if you go outside the AM coverage area you lose that as well but that's a different story.
AM radio is no different than any other radio: If the content is good, people will listen.
It's worth noting that for decades, FM was considered a graveyard of talk programming, with occasional classical mixed in. Today, the situation has been reversed.
In cities where there is enough money to produce good content, AM radio does well. In smaller places, where there isn't enough money available to create good content, AM stations are very often relegated to satellite- and internet-fed formats.
The most recent Chicago ratings I can quickly find¹ (June, 2022) show AM doing well, with AM stations ranking #5, #11, #23, #25 and #27 in a market of over 50 stations.
But even in small places, while the FMs will dominate all day long, a good AM or three will dominate the morning drive when they present local programming.
Electric cars are starting to be a problem for AM radio, which is why so many now have FM translators, and free internet streams. But AM will have a place on the air for a very long time to come.
/I've worked for about a dozen different AM stations in my lifetime.
¹ https://robertfeder.dailyherald.com/2022/06/13/chicago-radio...
In upstate NY you might think so. The only channel you can really count on during the day is the one that used to have the Rush Limbaugh Show. Around sunset though the atmosphere changes and there is a short time you get DX and can hear Bloomberg radio talking about the stock market being about to open in Hong Kong and then hear it fighting with the "Black Information Network" in Detroit.
Well, he's in St. Louis and it isn't doing well there.
1430 AM ("The Crazy Q") was the last bastion of oldies in the 50s, early 60s sense. Its license, as well as a few others, were held by a man who was a convicted felon and apparently that's a no-no. Anyway, it folded and that was that.
I dig around and there's just not much else I can find on the AM band aside from talk, some kind of Catholic radio, sports ...
AM radio is still my go-to for sports. Nothing like summertime and MLB on the radio while I work on a side project in the garage. College football and basketball too. Love those hometown announcers!
Having grown up in the USA, I was never into AM even though my father was. He would find the most nails on a chalkboard stuff on the dial and leave it there. Probably not the best impression of a medium.
Fast forward and now I live in Japan. My first job required a long ride by car to deliver/pick up supplies then do manual labor. Like most manual labor jobs there was a radio on all the time and it was the oldest worker (in his 70s) who got to set the station. I listened to hours of AM radio in Japanese. Baseball games (they feel more alive over AM than in person oddly enough), news, shopping (yes, shopping channel like advertising by radio), stand-up/comedy routines and the odd oldie track from the 70s or earlier that sounded even more nostalgic due to it being on AM. This is what finally gave me a love for what it had to offer. It may be a dead format in the west but in Japan it seems to still kick around.
I happened to listen to this podcast this morning which has some interesting things to say about this topic:
AM radio is long gone in Europe, in Italy the last stations did shut down years ago. The audio quality of AM is too low for any practical use, and didn't evolve in the years, such as implement stereo transmissions. FM is much better, it can provide decent quality with stereo sound.
Even FM will not probably be still around for much longer, even if I'm not in favour to the transition to DAB radio since I like vintage Hi-Fi systems in the end it will be abandoned, transmitting with digital is much cheaper since you need less power for a similar coverage and you can multiplex more stations in a single frequency.
I pulled an old Kenwood HF transceiver my dad had given me about 10 years off of a shelf in the garage about a week ago. While I was digging around for the various pieces of it (long story short, it was broken, started repairing it, got overwhelmed, boxed it for a decade) I found a USB SDR in another box. I hooked up the SDR and checked out the FM broadcast band from the basement. The online radio guide showed that there were about 80 FM stations within 60 miles. In the basement, I could pick up about 35 of them. 1/5 were Christian stations. 2/5 were country (and/or western) stations, and the other 2/5th were interesting. A couple of 'adult album alternative' stations, a couple of Spanish stations, a few classic rock, a classic hip-hop, etc.
Once I got the transceiver repaired and functioning, I checked out the AM band on the Kenwood with a endfed shortwave antenna strung up in the back yard. between the local stations and the ones coming out of Denver, I think I could pick up about 20 of them with reasonable fidelity. They were, without exception, all talk. Some religion, some sports, a LOT of politics. Shortwave, which is arguably more dead than AM, seems to at least have more interesting content on it. (Still a lot of christian content, but also some propaganda / government news stations and some cool music coming across in languages I don't understand.).
Radio, as a hobby, requires a lot of poking around looking for signal these days.
Great discussion. I listen actively to AM in the car and when I’m camping. We’re moving to the Olympic peninsula from Seattle this year, and I’m so excited to start pulling in Canadian AM stations - many stations from Victoria and Vancouver are audible, and it’s not just talk - there are multiple Asian cultures broadcasting music, in particular I revisit one station playing Bollywood and what sounds like devotional music from india, depending on the hour.
Anyone curious about listening can get up and running with the cheap portables mentioned on other threads here. I’d add that I event;y bought and rtl-sdr dongle [0] and mla-30 active loop antenna, attached it to a small spot on my roof, and am pulling some distant things in without interference. Getting that loop antenna up 25 ft off the ground was especially helpful. [1]
If you want to listen, my xp is getting a decent antenna established is key. Another way for the curious to start listening without equipment is one of the many web-based SDR (software defined radio) sites, like this one [2]
[0] https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/
[1] https://www.rtl-sdr.com/reviews-of-the-low-cost-mla-30-wide-...
AM radio helped kindle my lifelong interest in technology and music.
Grew up in Alaska in the '50s. When I was 8, my Dad bagged me some old headphones, wire, a variable capacitor and one of those new-fangled 'diode detectors' from a friend at Elmendorf Air Base.
Much coil winding and fiddling later, I was able to hear KOMA in Oklahoma, a great rock station. KOMA Klimbers!
Nowdays, I find AM content distasteful in the extreme, hardly ever listen. But fond memories of an early influence.
Tesla is singled out in the article, but there's a general problem of interference with AM radio in electric vehicles--which seems like the biggest challenge for AM. There are some legislative rumblings to do something about it. https://jalopnik.com/u-s-sen-ed-markey-really-really-wants-a...
With 50,000 W of power, we go by faster miles an hour.
AM is where the really green student DJs get to train, because if you screw it up, there's no one there to hear you :P At least during the daytime. You can pick up a lot of distant stuff at night.
Shortwave, on the other hand, is alive and well. You can find some really nifty stuff out there. Everyone ought to own something like the old Realistic DX-350 and scan the bands now and then.
There are actually a few AM stations in my area. Now, if my car radio still worked, I would totally listen to them because when it DID work, there was a lot of good local news and personalities on there. Did my heart good to hear opinions on current events in my area from people actually effected by it instead of an outsider from a completely different city's opinion on it all.
I would love to see AM radio opened up to private citizens. Take podcasting and move it to AM radio, where a person can pay or subscribe to a frequency and broadcast on it. Not so much as a corporation but something easier, cheaper, and more accessible to average citizens. Maybe that's a recipe for disaster but it's an idea..
It's alive and well in my car when it comes to news. AM 1030 WBZ
I want to hear the technical side here. So, sure, AM radio is fading. But audio content delivery is alive and very active. So in practice everyone will just move over to podcasts and it'll be fine.
But what happens with the spectrum if we just turn it off? The ~1MHz band is basically useless to digital transmission. There's not enough (literal) bandwidth to put anything modern on it, and the transmission characteristics lack the ionospheric reflections of short wave, so it's only a to-the-horizon kind of thing anyway.
So do we just turn it off? Is there anything useful to do with it? Or is there interesting astronomy we could do without the interference?
Maybe the reason AM radio continues limping along is that there really aren't any takers and this is just junk spectrum?
Cars are rather important for radio listenership. So when AV cars finally arrive, the effect on radio should be large - former drivers would be more able to consume different forms of entertainment in the car, and I don't think many would remain with radio only.
I really dislike this type of usage of the word "dead". There's not a general consensus on what it means. Does it mean unpopular, not as popular as it once was, literally unusable and inaccessible, or some subtle variation?
Something I don’t see mentioned:
Some (many?) new cars don’t have AM radios. And since people in cars seems to be a huge chunk of AM/FM radio listenership that’s a very big problem for AM stations.
I know the Mustang Mach-E removed it in the newer models.
I would like to see a "national public" satellite radio. Pump the National Weather Service and another channel or few with public domain entertainment on it, to get people to buy them (eg. Eton radios) and chuck them in the closet for a severe weather or disaster event.
I understand the science decently, but I don't understand the economic feasibility. I assume if it were feasible, it would have been done by now.
But it seems like something that will become more economically feasible in the near future as space transport progresses.
I've been listening to AM broadcasts a lot over the last few months. I can get good reception from 2-3 local stations on my crystal set. One gives me state and national news, interviews, the weather; useful stuff. From the other I've learned a lot about aliens, nutrition, debt and debt consolidation, Gray Man, World War III, psychedelic drugs, skinwalkers, Christian dating situations (ex: non-abstinent partners), the holiday/inflation deals on Smith & Wesson steel, various troubling situations involving Biden and his son...
What else. I don't know, I learn so much from my radio that it's hard to keep track! And it's so much more engaging than your typically maybe-just-as-sane Netflix documentary with its jarring interview style. The AM hosts actually let their guests talk, uninterrupted, and at length, so you can hear what their points are in the way that they meant to say it. The other night a caller phoned into this expert cryptozoological guy they were interviewing and related how a canid, "too big to be a dog but too small to be a wolf", planted itself on the road in front of his truck before morphing into a woman before him (at night!). And he and this doctor they had as a guest were able to work through the experience on the spot; it wasn't some high production story that cut back and forth through irrelevant fancy stuff for 20 minutes before finally explaining what the guy saw.
I'm only partly being tongue in cheek... This is how "information diet" + learn more about radio new years resolutions have been working out for me. All this crazy stuff has replaced the social media and news/opinion drama I would get wrapped up on before. It's free, actually enjoyable (because of the radio projects, not the broadcasts), mildly to thoroughly amusing (because of the broadcasts), and the insanity is gone as soon as I take the headset off. It should get better soon as well. I'm going to build an FM receiver next, and I hear they still play music on those channels!
I have been curious about why AM stations exhibit the demographic effect you see (in terms of programming, station ownership, etc).
Is it because of something to do with the licensing of the spectrum, and the cost of buying that? Or because of the restrictions around broadcasting (content and distance) of any given station? Or the cost of equipment to operate?
So interesting that something about how the domain operates that creates a different dynamic of what you hear on the radio in AM vs. FM.
I just discovered last week that Teslas don't have AM radio. I was trying to get the 49ers game as we were driving and I couldn't find the button for AM radio to listen to the broadcast, so I got my wife to search for me. She eventually found a link that said that because of the noise from the motor, AM radio wouldn't work so they removed it entirely. I was a bit shocked but I guess that's just how it is.
Funny that I saw a similar piece in WSJ commentary section 2 days ago:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sadness-and-static-as-am-statio...
OTOH, CB radio has been lately getting harmonised and deregulated all over, and AM is one of the legal modulations (along with FM and SSB). So a lot of opportunity to enjoy "warm AM sound" with your neighbors, even if the cell goes down.
[edit] they even have portable ones! (look up "Randy", no SSB though). And with a half decent SDR you can record the whole 40 channels at once, to see if there is anything worth joining in.
The article/video mentions Tesla - curious to know if other EVs have omitted the AM radio from the car, or have worked around the inteference issues
I live in Portugal. I haven’t tuned an AM radio station in more than 20 years. And at the time there were already few stations, and the ones remaining were just a replica of what they also broadcasted over FM.
I understand that AM still has a place in long range broadcasting to regions of the world where other ways of spreading information may be blocked, but I honestly thought AM had been mostly dead for decades…
AM radio has one value for me, if you live in a city with a 50kW station that has traffic announcements every 10 minutes on major screw-up areas/bottlenecks (bridges, tunnels, etc), you can sometimes get around even more efficiently than using google maps to drive with. And by truly not taking your eyes off the road to look at screens of any devices to know where the traffic problems are.
I still listen to baseball on the radio.
Although I'll mention that nowadays it's also streaming online. So I really only use it with AM radio in the car.
AM radio transmission relies a lot on the characteristics of the earth where the antenna is. In St Louis, you need less land to site your antenna than the east coast. A few years ago, one of the big AM broadcasters on the east coast sold their 75 acres of now prime real estate that they bought many decades ago for their antennas. The price was around $1M per acre.
> constantly push listeners to download an app to 'listen anywhere.'
I remember wondering how on earth iHeartRadio managed to integrate with so many small, local radio stations. As an IT consultant it was a struggle to get a small shop to keep as much as an API up.
Turned out they simply bought up all the stations.
One of my hobbies is listening to Yankees games on my old wooden tube radio from the 20s. It's alive for me!
Like shortwave broadcasting, AM have their place nowadays, it brings a comunication service to their target. It's true that it isn't as popular as before, but take a look to the postal service and their letters. Who writes a letter today? but you can do it without problem if you want.
Not at all. AM radio is where I get all my great financial tips on Gold, REITs, and vitamin supplements!
More seriously, the clear-channel license holders are still a big deal. It's pretty amazing to be able to cover half the country from one transmitter. WSM out of Nashville is still relevant for example.
I suspect there’s some sort of weird money cleaning operation with AM radio.
The crazy talk people are pretty toxic for normal advertisers, and it’s dominated by weird supplements and other weird stuff. Plus, all of the hosts say the same thing, all of the time.
Not at all. And when they simultaneously try to broadcast AM content on FM bands, it sounds like crap. It's arguably where the majority of any given marketing budget goes, probably only edged out by FM, but maybe not.
One of the few instances where the title being a question actually makes sense.
All I listen to is AM radio, so if it's dead then maybe I am a zombie.
Let's hope that DRM (https://www.drm.org/) will replace AM. At the moment, the big issue is the lack of cheap receivers.
It's not dead for baseball fans in the NYC Metro area!
I sure hope it isn't dead. I listen to it every day.
It is mostly dead here in Western Europe for over a decade now, I'm assuming a mix of relatively high cost, yet almost no relevance.
Someone I spoke to once said that the frequencies that AM uses aren't all that useful for many other kinds of services.
How could I possibly get the latest news about Fidel (his death hasn't stopped it) without Miami Cuban AM radio?
FWIW.. IIRC in the 70s Syracuse NY was known for having a prog rock station that actually broadcast on the AM band.
Is AM radio a US-only thing? Because I've never heard anything broadcast on AM here is Sweden.
It will be once all cars are EV. The noise generated by the motors will make it infeasible.
Not when you're at everest base camp and listening to the BBC world service.
Recent vintage Porsche 911s only have FM. anti-flex.
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I'm no expert, but it seems like that mid-frequency part of the spectrum could be put to much better uses.
Invoking Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
AM may have it's technical limitations, specifically when compared to FM, but as a medium it's not dead and I doubt it's about to be anytime soon. It's still very popular amongst political talk, at least here in the U.S.
Edit: spelling
Until the FCC declares AM broadcast illegal (and likely for some time after, as pirate radio stations will attempt to fill the dead air out of sheer contrarianism), there will always be users of the AM band. Hell, as popularity wanes, I'll bet that broadcasting expenses will go way down, so we could very well see a renaisseance in the next couple decades as community groups take to it as a new-old means of distribution.
The existence of simulcast doesn't make the AM broadcast any less real. It just broadens the listener scope.
[dead]
It is dead to me and has been for decades. Once in a while I'll put on the AM band when driving and there is nothing for me.
- hispanic music -- i don't speak spanish and not growing up with it, I have no connection - conservative talk radio -- as a liberal, I find it more terrifying than anything. hosts and callers will declare that liberals think this or that, or that we are trying to do this or that, things that I and none of my liberal friends would identify with. I was surprised to find out that liberals hate freedom and want to force our kids into being gay. I guess I'm way behind the curve. - biblical literalism - (edit) I forgot sports. does nothing for me.