RADIO WORLD 25th ANNIVERSARY SOURCEBOOK, Jan. 2001
By Scott Fybush
The year is 1975. From San Diego's KOGO to New York's WABC,
AM music radio tops the ratings. Even the biggest radio groups
own no more than fourteen stations nationwide - and half of those
are FM, which everyone knows is suitable only for beautiful music,
classical, and a few progressive rock stations.
If you're looking for a job on the air at a large station,
you'll have to start small, perhaps spinning 45s at your local
AM daytimer, hoping someday to be able to put together a demo
(on reel-to-reel, of course) that will impress a big-city PD.
Once you find your way into one of those big market stations,
you might get to do production work on a state-of-the-art four-track
recorder - dubbing your finished product to cart so it can be
played through mechanical reverb (and perhaps, in a very big
station, a Volumax processor) and sent out to the world through
an all-tube transmitter.
When you take your break for network news from NBC or Mutual
at the top of the hour, it will arrive through a low-fidelity
phone line (the same 8 kHz line you might rent from Ma Bell for
a remote).
Clear Channel? You might have heard of them - they own a
couple of stations down in Texas. Mel Karmazin? He's selling
air time at WNEW-FM in New York. Infinity is a very big number,
and Cumulus is a kind of cloud. While Don Imus is already a
household name on New York's WNBC, Howard Stern is just finishing
college in Boston, looking for his first radio job. Rush Limbaugh
is a frustrated Pittsburgh DJ ("Jeff Christie" on the
air), about to give up radio for good.
In short, it's a radio world (which would be a good name for
a magazine, come to think of it) that has more in common with
1950 than with 2000.
* *
So how did we get from there to here?
The early signs of change were already in the airwaves in
1975, if you knew where to look. All-news radio was already
a decade old when NBC decided to enter the field in a big way.
In the spring, the News and Information Service (NIS) began
offering 24-hour service to stations around the country. But
instead of putting NIS on its big AM signals like WNBC, WMAQ,
and KNBR, the network launched NIS on its FM signals. Widely
hailed as innovative, NIS nevertheless was history by 1977.
The heyday of music on AM was drawing to a close by then,
too. In 1978, New York's WHOM-FM ditched its ethnic programming,
changed calls to WKTU, and with a stack of records quickly purchased
on the street, "KTU" launched the city's first all-disco
format. With FM radios becoming increasingly common in cars
and homes (and a year later in the form of a little device called
a "Walkman"), the station dethroned "Musicradio
77" within a year, becoming the first FM station to top
the New York ratings.
In market after market, the pattern repeated, and within five
years, top-40 radio had moved firmly to FM. New York again became
the model - WABC's 1982 format change from hits to talk was followed
just months later by the debut of WHTZ ("Z100"), the
quintessential eighties FM hits station.
While the revolution was fast, it was far from bloodless.
FM offered stereo, so AM broadcasters began experimenting with
their own stereo systems. But where the FCC of the early sixties
had dictated a single standard for FM stereo, the Reagan-era
Commission gave broadcasters a taste of the eighties: deregulation.
"Let the marketplace decide," was the cry - and
so while some stations used Motorola's C-QUAM system, others
used systems by Kahn, Harris, and Magnavox. Most receiver manufacturers
chose to wait and see, and without radios to buy, listeners remained
largely unaware of AM stereo. By the time the FCC set a standard,
more than a decade later, many of the early AM stereo proponents
had already given up and gone back to mono.
Deregulation may not have worked for AM stereo, but few broadcasters
found cause for complaint. After thirty years in which the number
of stations remained relatively constant, the AM and FM dials
both began to explode.
* *
On the AM side, the historic clear channels slowly lost much
of their protection, as the FCC began allowing many daytimers
to stay on the air late into the night, while allowing other
stations on local and regional channels to raise power. A 1979
proposal to change station spacing to 9 kHz went nowhere, but
a companion plan to expand the AM dial to 1700 kHz put dozens
of new stations on the air beginning in 1995.
From just 3,353 stations in 1975, the FM dial swelled to nearly
8,000 stations a quarter-century later - and almost all the credit
(some would say, all the blame) belongs to something called "Docket
80-90." Approved by the FCC in the early eighties, it was
supposed to bring FM service to thousands of communities that
had no local radio service, as well as giving would-be broadcasters
new opportunities for station ownership.
For a few years, it worked. But the growth in ownership
diversity was just a small wave, easily overwhelmed by the tidal
force of the era's biggest trend: deregulation.
From public-service requirements to community-of-license changes
to transmitter-staffing rules, the Reagan and Bush eras saw hundreds
of broadcast regulations tossed into the FCC dustbin.
It would take the Clinton administration, though, to bring
about the most dramatic change.
"Duopoly" was the word at first, as the FCC cautiously
allowed radio groups to expand from a single AM-FM combo per
market to two stations in each band, beginning in 1995. Within
a year, the rules were again relaxed, allowing up to four stations
in each band. By decade's end, a single group could own eight
stations in a big market.
As groups raced to assemble their clusters, station prices
soared. $10 million could have bought almost any major-market
station in the seventies; 25 years later, individual big-city
FMs were changing hands for prices in the hundreds of millions.
In market after market, longtime competitors suddenly found
themselves under common ownership, as companies like Jacor, Capstar,
Chancellor, and American Radio Systems assembled the first hundred-plus
station groups. And no sooner had broadcasters adjusted to that
than the second wave hit. With the total elimination of nationwide
ownership caps, the FCC made it possible for the big groups to
join forces and create mammoth conglomerates like Clear Channel,
Infinity, and Cumulus.
(The backlash would be a story for the next quarter-century,
as the fight over low-power FM worked its way through Washington's
corridors of power.)
* * *
If the business deals behind the scenes were invisible to
the average listener, the programming changes that resulted were
easy to hear.
Even before the big groups began forming, the traditional
formats forged in radio's "second golden age" of the
fifties and sixties were beginning to splinter. With most music
formats moving to FM, AM found a new life as the home of spoken-word
programming. Rush Limbaugh led the conservative talk movement
that's credited for keeping hundreds of AM stations profitable
into the nineties. All-sports radio was born at New York's WFAN
in 1986, followed in later years by all-business, all-comedy,
and even all-traffic formats. Other AM stations found their
futures in niche formats: Spanish-language radio soared from
a handful of stations to the number-one spots in New York and
Los Angeles, kids' radio made tentative inroads in Minneapolis
and Seattle before going national with Radio Disney, and by the
turn of the century, a spin of the AM dial in big cities could
yield anything from Chinese to Korean to Farsi programming.
With thousands of new signals to fill, FM programmers moved
beyond the simple categories of "pop," "rock,"
and "country" to create dozens of new formats. From
"classic rock" to "active rock" to "modern
rock" to "adult album alternative," even a smaller
market could boast half a dozen rock stations by century's end.
"Middle of the road," a common description in 1975,
was long gone 25 years later, replaced by stations in every lane
of the AC highway: "soft AC," "modern AC,"
"urban AC," and the smooth jazz format (pioneered in
1987 at KTWV Los Angeles) that supplanted the instrumental "beautiful
music" format. Oldies radio, itself only a few years old
in 1975, would yield up everything from "jammin' oldies"
to all-eighties formats. Country, urban, Spanish, religion --
all would branch off into dozens of specialty categories, each
aimed at a particular demographic within the multi-station clusters
that proliferated from market to market.
Fewer of these formats were emanating from a live jock in
a local studio, though. The advent of satellite transmission
in the late seventies freed the radio networks from expensive
telephone lines. Within a few years, it provided a foothold
for a new kind of "network" -- 24-hour satellite services
perfectly timed to solve the programming needs of many of the
new FM stations birthed by Docket 80-90.
Even at the stations still being programmed locally, digital
technology was transforming the familiar radio studio and transmitter
into something new. CD players began replacing turntables and
cart machines in the early eighties. A decade later, hard-drive
automation made it possible for an entire radio station to run
unattended from a desktop PC, in some cases with voicetracks
recorded by a DJ hours earlier and hundreds of miles away. The
four-track that revolutionized the production room in the seventies
was relegated to the storage room in the nineties, replaced by
digital editing workstations that could do much more and cost
much less. Out in the transmitter shack, the glowing tubes were
darkened, replaced by efficient, longer-lasting solid state gear.
The rise of the Internet gave stations new ways to reach their
listeners: suddenly, every station seemed to have a Web page,
and an increasing number began Webcasting, competing with the
new phenomenon of Web-only "stations."
And as the 20th century gave way to the 21st, the digital
era confronted radio with one more challenge: the last step,
from antenna to receiver.
All through the nineties, broadcast groups worked on the technology
to add a digital signal to analog FM and AM. Avoiding the standards
war that doomed AM stereo, rival groups joined forces in early
2000 under the iBiquity banner, preparing to ask the FCC to approve
an in-band, on-channel (IBOC) digital system for FM, and soon
AM, broadcasters.
Meanwhile, other broadcasters looked to the skies. By early
2001, Sirius and XM Satellite Media both plan to offer listeners
about a hundred channels each of digital programming, transmitted
from a fleet of satellites to a tiny antenna for $10 or so each
month.
With dozens of studios gleaming with the latest digital equipment,
the satellite companies' new facilities are the state of the
art in 2000. No doubt they'll look just as antiquated in 2025
as the carts and rotary-pot boards of 1975 would look today.
What will broadcasters be talking about then? Stick around
for another 25 years of RW and we'll see.
