Following are excerpts from a story in The Washington Post:
Ford, BMW, Volkswagen, Tesla and other automakers are eliminating AM radio from some new vehicles, stirring protests against the loss of a medium that has shaped American life for a century. […] Automakers, such as BMW, Volkswagen, Mazda and Tesla, are removing AM radios from new electric vehicles because electric engines can interfere with the sound of AM stations. And Ford, one of the nation’s top-three auto sellers, is taking a bigger step, eliminating AM from all of its vehicles, electric or gas-operated.
Some station owners and advertisers contend that losing access to the car dashboard will indeed be a death blow to many of the nation’s 4,185 AM stations. […] From the 1950s into the 1970s, Top 40 hit music stations in many big cities maintained astonishing shares of the audience, with 50 percent and more of listeners tuned to a single station. […] Ford says its data, pulled from internet-connected vehicles, shows that less than 5 percent of in-car listening is to AM stations.
Of the $11 billion in advertising revenue that radio pulled in last year, about $2 billion came into AM stations, according to BIA Advisory Services, which conducts research for broadcasters.
Some of the best years of my life were spent in and around radio. But I haven’t listened in years. The Land Rover doesn’t have a radio and the pickup truck has one but it’s never worked.
It wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that radio –in one form or another– paid for every stitch of clothing I ever wore and every bite of food I ate. But it changed and I changed. I suspect FM radio will disappear some day.
Some thoughts from friend and former colleague Bob Priddy:
“Radio began to lose its soul when cities became markets, when stations became properties, and when the local voices were expendable. It’s been a long, slow suicide. But in some ways, radio is just returning to its primitive days when it was like short wave and could be heard throughout hemispheres.
We are the dinosaurs. The comet hit in the form of FM decades ago. Someday, socio-archaeologists will find our bones in various archives and they will learn of days when the voice of a neighbor you never met read the weather forecast — instead of some stranger working at a TV station or for a national weather broadcasting service in Florida or in Kansas.
I’m one of those assisting in the suicide. I listen to NPR and the SiriusXM because AM radio offers me nothing of hometown interest.
The MBA is installing a dinosaur into its Hall of Fame next month: Marion Woods of KOKO, one of the last neighbors to everybody, a representative of all of those who have gone before and the few that remain who, if they look around, see that the sky has grown dark and the life-giving vegetation is growing short.
Someday, maye even FM will be gone, killed by the comet of technology and there will be generations who will ask when told of it, “Radio? What’s Radio?”