Radio Reinvents Itself

Older media forms do not generally disappear when confronted by newer forms. Instead, they adapt. Although radio threatened sound recording in the 1920s, the recording industry adjusted to the economic and social challenges posed by radio’s arrival. Remarkably, the arrival of television in the 1950s marked the only time in media history when a new medium stole virtually every national programming and advertising strategy from an older medium. Television snatched radio’s advertisers, program genres, major celebrities, and large evening audiences. The TV set even physically displaced the radio as the living room centerpiece of choice across America. Nevertheless, radio adapted and continued to reach an audience.

The story of radio’s evolution and survival is especially important today, as newspapers and magazines appear online and as publishers produce e-books for new generations of readers. In contemporary culture, we have grown accustomed to such media convergence, but to best understand this blurring of the boundaries between media forms, it is useful to look at the 1950s and the ways in which radio responded to the advent of television.

Transistors Make Radio Portable

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ADVERTISEMENTS for pocket transistor radios, which became popular in the 1950s, emphasized their portability. Image courtesy of the Advertising Archives

A key development in radio’s adaptation to television occurred with the invention of the transistor by Bell Laboratories in 1947. Transistors were small electrical devices that, like vacuum tubes, could receive and amplify radio signals. However, they used less power and produced less heat than vacuum tubes, and they were more durable and less expensive. Best of all, they were tiny. Transistors, which also revolutionized hearing aids, constituted the first step in replacing bulky and delicate tubes, leading eventually to today’s integrated circuits.

Texas Instruments marketed the first transistor radio in 1953 for about $40. Using even smaller transistors, Sony introduced the pocket radio in 1957. But it wasn’t until the 1960s that transistor radios became cheaper than conventional tube and battery radios. For a while, the term transistor became a synonym for a small, portable radio.

The development of transistors let radio go where television could not—to the beach, to the office, into bedrooms and bathrooms, and into nearly all new cars. (Before the transistor, car radios were a luxury item.) By the 1960s, most radio listening took place outside the home.

The FM Revolution and Edwin Armstrong

By the time the broadcast industry launched commercial television in the 1950s, many people, including David Sarnoff of RCA, were predicting radio’s demise. To fund television’s development and to protect his radio holdings, Sarnoff had even delayed a dramatic breakthrough in broadcast sound, what he himself called a “revolution”—FM radio.

Edwin Armstrong, who first discovered and developed FM radio in the 1920s and early 1930s, is often considered the most prolific and influential inventor in radio history. He used De Forest’s vacuum tube to invent an amplifying system that enabled radio receivers to pick up distant signals, rendering the enormous alternators used for generating power in early radio transmitters obsolete. In 1922, he sold a “super” version of his circuit to RCA for $200,000 and sixty thousand shares of RCA stock, which made him a millionaire as well as RCA’s largest private stockholder.

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FIGURE 5.2 AM AND FM WAVES Data from: Adapted from David Cheshire, The Video Manual, 1982.

Armstrong also worked on the major problem of radio reception—electrical interference. Between 1930 and 1933, the inventor filed five patents on FM, or frequency modulation. Offering static-free radio reception, FM supplied greater fidelity and clarity than AM, making FM ideal for music. AM, or amplitude modulation (modulation refers to the variation in waveforms), stressed the volume, or height, of radio waves; FM accentuated the pitch, or distance, between radio waves (see Figure 5.2).

Although David Sarnoff, RCA’s president, thought that television would replace radio, he helped Armstrong set up the first experimental FM station atop the Empire State Building in New York City. Eventually, though, Sarnoff thwarted FM’s development (which he was able to do because RCA had an option on Armstrong’s new patents). Instead, in 1935 Sarnoff threw RCA’s considerable weight behind the development of television. With the FCC allocating and reassigning scarce frequency spaces, RCA wanted to ensure that channels went to television before they went to FM. But most of all, Sarnoff wanted to protect RCA’s existing AM empire. Given the high costs of converting to FM and the revenue needed for TV experiments, Sarnoff decided to close down Armstrong’s station.

Armstrong forged ahead without RCA. He founded a new FM station and advised other engineers, who started more than twenty experimental stations between 1935 and the early 1940s. In 1941, the FCC approved limited space allocations for commercial FM licenses. During the next few years, FM grew in fits and starts. Between 1946 and early 1949, the number of commercial FM stations expanded from 48 to 700. But then the FCC moved FM’s frequency space to a new band on the electromagnetic spectrum, rendering some 400,000 prewar FM receiver sets useless. FM’s future became uncertain, and by 1954, the number of FM stations had fallen to 560.

On January 31, 1954, Edwin Armstrong—weary from years of legal skirmishes over patents with RCA, Lee De Forest, and others—wrote a note apologizing to his wife, removed the air conditioner from his thirteenth-story New York apartment window, and jumped to his death. A month later, David Sarnoff announced record profits of $850 million for RCA, with TV sales accounting for 54 percent of the company’s earnings. In the early 1960s, the FCC opened up more spectrum space for the superior sound of FM, infusing new life into radio.

Although AM stations had greater reach, they could not match the crisp fidelity of FM, which made FM preferable for music. In the early 1970s, about 70 percent of listeners tuned almost exclusively to AM radio. By the 1980s, however, FM had surpassed AM in profitability. By the 2010s, more than 75 percent of all listeners preferred FM, and about 6,660 commercial and about 4,000 educational FM stations were in operation. The expansion of FM represented one of the chief ways radio survived television and Sarnoff’s gloomy predictions.

The Rise of Format and Top 40 Radio

Live and recorded music had long been radio’s single biggest staple, accounting for 48 percent of all programming in 1938. Although live music on radio was generally considered superior to recorded music, early disc jockeys made a significant contribution to the latter, demonstrating that music alone could drive radio. In fact, when television snatched radio’s program ideas and national sponsors, radio’s dependence on recorded music became a necessity and helped the medium survive the 1950s.

As early as 1949, station owner Todd Storz in Omaha, Nebraska, experimented with formula-driven radio, or format radio. Under this system, management rather than deejays controlled programming each hour. When Storz and his program manager noticed that bar patrons and waitresses repeatedly played certain favorite songs from the records available in a jukebox, they began researching record sales to identify the most popular tunes. From observing jukebox culture, Storz hit on the idea of rotation: playing the top songs many times during the day. By the mid-1950s, the management-control idea combined with the rock-and-roll explosion, and the Top 40 format was born. The term Top 40 came to refer to the forty most popular hits in a given week as measured by record sales.

As format radio grew, program directors combined rapid deejay chatter with the best-selling songs of the day and occasional oldies—popular songs from a few months earlier. By the early 1960s, to avoid “dead air,” managers asked deejays to talk over the beginning and the end of a song so that listeners would feel less compelled to switch stations. Ads, news, weather forecasts, and station identifications were all designed to fit a consistent station environment. Listeners, tuning in at any moment, would recognize the station by its distinctive sound.

In format radio, management carefully coordinates, or programs, each hour, dictating what the deejay will do at various intervals throughout each hour of the day (see Figure 5.3). Management creates a program log—once called a hot clock in radio jargon—that deejays must follow. By the mid-1960s, one study had determined that in a typical hour on Top 40 radio, listeners could expect to hear about twenty ads; numerous weather, time, and contest announcements; multiple recitations of the station’s call letters; about three minutes of news; and approximately twelve songs.

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FIGURE 5.3 RADIO PROGRAM LOG FOR AN ADULT CONTEMPORARY (AC) STATION Data from: KCVM, Cedar Falls, IA, 2014.

Radio managers further sectioned off programming into day parts, which typically consisted of time blocks covering 6 to 10 A.M., 10 A.M. to 3 P.M., 3 to 7 P.M., and 7 P.M. to midnight. Each day part, or block, was programmed through ratings research according to who was listening. For instance, a Top 40 station would feature its top deejays in the morning and afternoon periods when audiences, many riding in cars, were largest. From 10 A.M. to 3 P.M., research determined that women at home and secretaries at work usually controlled the dial, so program managers, capitalizing on the gender stereotypes of the day, played more romantic ballads and less hard rock. Teenagers tended to be heavy evening listeners, so program managers often discarded news breaks at this time, since research showed that teens turned the dial when news came on.

Critics of format radio argued that only the top songs received play and that lesser-known songs deserving airtime received meager attention. Although a few popular star deejays continued to play a role in programming, many others quit when managers introduced formats. Program directors approached programming as a science, but deejays considered it an art form. Program directors argued that deejays had different tastes from those of the average listener and therefore could not be fully trusted to know popular audience tastes. The program directors’ position, which generated more revenue, triumphed.

Resisting the Top 40

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RYAN SEACREST may be best known for his job hosting TV’s American Idol, but he began his career in radio when he hosted a local radio show while attending the University of Georgia. In the style of his own idols—Dick Clark and Casey Kasem—Seacrest now hosts two nationally syndicated radio shows, On Air with Ryan Seacrest and American Top 40, in addition to his television projects. Mark Davis/Getty Images

The expansion of FM in the mid-1960s created room for experimenting, particularly with classical music, jazz, blues, and non–Top 40 rock songs. Progressive rock emerged as an alternative to conventional formats. Many noncommercial stations broadcast from college campuses, where student deejays and managers rejected the commercialism associated with Top 40 tunes and began playing lesser-known alternative music and longer album cuts (such as Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and the Doors’ “The End”). Until that time, most rock on radio had been consigned almost exclusively to Top 40 AM formats, with song length averaging about three minutes.

Experimental FM stations, both commercial and noncommercial, offered a cultural space for hard-edged political folk music and for rock music that commented on the Civil Rights movement and protested America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. By the 1970s, however, progressive rock had been copied, tamed, and absorbed by mainstream radio under the format labeled album-oriented rock (AOR). By 1972, AOR-driven album sales accounted for more than 85 percent of the retail record business. By the 1980s, as first-generation rock and rollers aged and became more affluent, AOR stations became less political and played mostly white, post-Beatles music featuring such groups as Pink Floyd, Genesis, AC/DC, and Queen. Today, AOR has been subsumed under the more general classic rock format.