In the 1950s, a new form of mass media—television—came on the scene. TV 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 around which families gathered. To survive, players in the radio industry transformed their business model so that they could provide new forms of value for listeners.

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Transistors: Making Radio Portable

The portability of radio proved to be a major advantage in the medium’s struggle for survival. In the late 1920s, car radios had existed but were considered a luxury. But when Bell Laboratories invented the transistor in 1947, radios became more accessible than ever before—and portable. Transistors were small electrical devices that, like vacuum tubes, could receive and amplify radio signals. However, they used less power and gave off less heat than vacuum tubes, and were more durable and less expensive. Best of all, they were tiny. 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.

The FM Revolution

To replace the shows radio had lost to TV, many people in radio switched the medium’s emphasis to music, turning to the recording industry for content. However, making music sound better on radio required some technological innovation. Until then, radio technology had centered on AM (amplitude modulation). This type of modulation was sufficient for radio content such as talk, but it wasn’t ideal for music. For that, radio needed FM (frequency modulation), which provided greater clarity as well as static-free radio reception.

FM radio had existed for decades. American inventor Edwin Armstrong had discovered and developed it during the 1920s and early 1930s. Between 1930 and 1933, Armstrong filed five patents on FM. The number of FM stations grew to 700 but then fell to 560 by the 1950s, as Armstrong was pulled into legal skirmishes over patents with such heavy hitters as David Sarnoff. (The RCA executive had initially supported Armstrong’s explorations into FM but then opted to throw his weight behind the development of TV.) In 1954, weary from years of legal battles, Armstrong wrote a note apologizing to his wife, removed the air conditioner from his thirteenth-story New York apartment, and jumped to his death. It wasn’t until the early 1960s, when the FCC opened up more spectrum space for the superior sound of FM, that FM began to grow into the preferred radio band for music.

The Rise of Format Radio

Once radio became portable and FM was introduced, music began to dominate the medium more than ever. This eventually led to the creation of format radio, in which station managers (rather than disc jockeys) controlled the station’s hour-by-hour music programming. Of course, in the late 1930s, music had been radio’s single biggest staple, accounting for 48 percent of all programming. However, most music was live, which many people considered superior to recorded music. The first disc jockeys demonstrated that recorded music could attract just as many listeners as live music.

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As early as 1949, station owner Todd Storz and his program manager in Omaha, Nebraska, noticed that bar patrons and waitresses repeatedly played certain favorite songs from the forty records available in a jukebox. Drawing from jukebox culture, Storz hit on the idea of rotation: playing the top songs many times during the day. By the mid-1950s, the Top 40 format was born. Although the term Top 40 derived from the number of records stored in a jukebox, this format came to refer to the forty most popular hits in a given week as measured by record sales.

As format radio grew, program managers combined rapid deejay chatter with the best-selling songs of the day and occasional oldies—popular songs from a few months earlier. Managers created a program log that deejays followed and sectioned off blocks of roughly four hours throughout the day and night. Each block tried to appeal to listeners’ interests and thus attract more advertising dollars. For instance, a Top 40 station would feature its best deejays in the morning and afternoon periods, during listeners’ commutes to school or work. Management also made savvy use of research. For example, if statistics showed that teenagers tended to listen to the radio mostly during evening hours and preferred music to news, then stations marketing to teens avoided scheduling news breaks during those hours.

The expansion of FM in the mid-1960s created room for stations to experiment, particularly with classical music, jazz, blues, and non–Top 40 rock songs. 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.