How long will radio last?

These are among the since-demolished towers of the once-mighty WMEX/1510 radio in Boston.

The question on Quora was How long does a radio station last on average? Here is my answer, which also addresses the bigger question of what will happen to radio itself.

Radio station licenses will last as long as they have value to the owners—or that regulators allow them to persist. Call signs (aka call letters) come and go, as do fashions around them. (In the ’70s, the hot thing was using high-value scrabble letters: Z, Q and J.) But licenses are the broadcasting equivalent of real estate. And for now their value is holding up. But it won’t forever.

Arguing for persistence is the simple fact that nearly all the licenses ever issued, starting in the 1920s, are still in use, and still being renewed. So are a great majority of the many thousands of of new licenses issued over the near-century since then radio was born in the U.S.

But there are signs of rot, especially on the AM band, where many stations are shrinking—literally, with smaller signals and coverage areas—and some are dying. Four reasons for that:

FM and digital media sound much better. Electrical (and especially computer) noise also infects all but the strongest signals. And most modern radios, especially those in cars, suck at AM reception.
Syndicated national programming is crowding out the local kind. This is due both to consolidation of ownership in the hands of a few large companies (e.g. Entercom, Cumulus, iHeart) and the shift of advertising money away from local radio. The independent local AM (and even FM) station is in the same economic pickle as the independent local newspaper.
The value of real estate under many AM transmitters exceeds the value of the stations themselves. Even popular AM stations, such as WBBM/780 in Chicago, have moved to other sites with lesser signals, so they can sell off valuable land under their original towers. (Note that WBBM is still #1 in the Nielsen Ratings for Chicago at this writing, in July 2020.) A more typical example is KDWN/720, which used to be 50,000 watts day and night (the legal max), with a huge night signal reaching the whole West Coast. It recently moved to another station’s towers with just 25,000 watts by day and 7,500 watts at night. The owner did this so it could sell off the old transmitter site, which is (or was, if it has been sold by now) probably worth more than the station itself. (Here is a 2019 Google StreetView of the old site, with a For Sale sign.) Note also that KDWN now identifies as “101.5 FM / 720 AM – The Talk of Las Vegas .” Transmitting with 250 watts through its translator (K268CS on 101.5 FM) from atop The Strat (formerly the Stratosphpere) on The Strip, KDWN puts a good-enough FM signal to the heart of the Las Vegas metro. Its showing in the ratings likely owes to the FM signal. Today many AM stations exist only as an excuse to operate FM translators like this one.
In the Battle of the Bands, FM won. For evidence, look at the Nielsen Audio Ratings for the Washington DC region. Only two AMs show. One is WBQH/1050, a regional Mexican formatted station with an 0.2% share of listening and a signal that is only 44 watts at night. And most of the listening likely owes to the station’s 180-watt signal on 93.5fm. (That signal is from a translator, which is a low-power repeater signal.) The other station is WSBN/630am, a sports station with an 0.1% share: a number that couldn’t be lower without disappearing. That license was once WMAL, which sold off the land under its towers a few years ago, moving far out of town to “diplex” on the towers of yet another station that long ago sold the land under its original towers. That other station is now called WWRC/570. It’s a religious/conservative talker with no ratings that was once WGMS, famous in its glory years as a landmark classical station.

Despite this, the number of AM licenses in the U.S persist in the thousands, while the number of abandoned AM licenses number in the dozens. (The FCC’s Silent AM Broadcast Stations List is 83 stations long. The Silent FM Broadcast Stations List is longer, but includes a lot of translators and LPFMs, which I’ll explain shortly.) Also, neither list includes licenses that have been revoked or abandoned in the distant past, such as the once-legendary KISN in Portland, Oregon.)

What I’ve reported so far applies only to the U.S. AM band, which is called MW (for mediumwave) in most of the rest of the world. In a lot of that world, AM/MW is being regulated away: abandoned by decree. That’s why it is gone, or close to it, in some European countries. Canada has also scaled back on AM, with the CBC  moving in many places exclusively to FM.

The news is less bad for FM, which has thrived since the 1970s, and now accounts for most over-the-air radio listening. The FCC has also done its best to expand the number of stations and signals on the FM band, especially in recent years through translators and LPFMs (low power FM stations, meant to serve a few zip codes at most). In Radio-Locator’s list of stations you’ll recieve in Las Vegas, 16 of the 59 listed signals are for translators and LPFMs. Meanwhile only 18 stations have listenable signals on AM, and some of those signals (such as KDWN’s) are smaller than they used to be.

Still, the effects of streaming and podcasting through the Internet will only increase. This is why so many stations, personalities, programming sources and station owners are rushing to put out as many streams and podcasts as possible. Today, every phone, pad and laptop is a receiver for every station with digital content of any kind, and there are many more entities competing for this “band” than radio stations alone.

While it’s possible that decades will pass before AM and FM are retired completely, it’s not hard to read the tea leaves. AM and FM are both gone now in Norway, which has switched to Digital Audio Broadcasting, or DAB, as has much of the rest of Europe. (We don’t have DAB in the U.S., and thus far there is very little interest in it.)

Still, I don’t doubt that many of entities we call “stations” will persist without signals. Last summer we listened to local radio from Santa Barbara (mostly KCLU) while driving around Spain, just by jacking a phone in to the dashboard and listening to Internet streams through the cellular data system. Even after all their transmitters get turned off, sometime in the far future, I’m sure KCLU will still be KCLU.

The process at work here is what the great media scholars Marshall McLuhan and his son Eric  (in Laws of Media: The New Science) call retrieval. What they mean is that every new medium retrieves the content of what it obsolesces. So, much as print retrieved writing and TV retrieved radio, the Internet retrieves damn near everything it obsolesces, including TV, radio, print, speech and you-name-it.

In most cases the old medium doesn’t go away. But broadcasting might be different, because it exists by grace of regulation, meaning governments can make them disappear. The FCC has already done that to much of the UHF TV band, auctioning off the best channels to cellular systems. This is why, for example, T-Mobile can brag about their new long-range “5G” coverage. They’re getting that coverage that over what used to be UHF TV channels that stations auctioned away. It’s also why, for example, when you watch KLCS, channel 58 in Los Angeles, you’re actually watching channel 28, which the station shares with KCET, using the same site and transmitter. The Los Angeles Unified School District collected a cool $130,510,880 in a spectrum auction for channel 58.

So, when listening to the AM and FM bands drops sufficiently, don’t assume the FCC won’t say, “Hey, all the stations that matter are streaming and podcasting on the Internet, so we’re going to follow the path of Norway.” When that happens, your AM and FM radios will be as useful as the heavy old TVs you hauled out to the curbside a decade ago.

Additional reading: The slow sidelining of over-the-air radio  and AM radio declared dead by BMW and Disney .