In this letter to the editor, the reader responds to the story, “Legislative Compromises Pushed AM Radio Bill to House Passage.” Radio World welcomes letters to the editor on this or any story. Email [email protected].
In the wake of the U.S. House of Representatives passage of the “AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act,” I have seen a great deal of commentary on the concept. And I think a lot of it really misses the point.
First off, for everyone who says “AM radio is dead,” that is not really true. WBZ(AM) in Boston routinely gets a three-to-four shares with 282,000 cume.
The larger point is that nobody is going to be installing “AM-only receivers” because of this law. They’ll be installing receivers that pick up both AM and FM. So it directly benefits FM as well as AM.
Second, let’s stop for a moment and realize that amongst all personal electronic devices in the world, radios are second only to smartphones. And the numbers of radios in use has never declined. It’s just that smartphones grew more. This is far from a dead technology.
Third, emergency communications during a disaster are nice, but that’s not a viable business model. Disasters are too infrequent, too unpredictable and, for good reason, too hard to monetize.
Last, and perhaps most important: Radio is the only medium left that isn’t in the dashboard because someone paid for it to be there, so it’s the only medium left that doesn’t inherently spy on you through the device and sell your personal data to everyone else to use against you.
Radio actually trusts the listener…out of necessity … because the listener has all the control! If the listener doesn’t like what they hear? They change the channel. Easy-peasy. There’s no early termination fees. There’s no massive difficulties moving your media library to a different device. There’s no limitations on what you can and cannot listen/watch if you change streaming services.
No endless AI menus making it impossible to get a human to cancel your service. No games played by secretly re-enabling your service without telling you, and then billing you anyway.
None of that nonsense; it’s just turn the knob, change the channel…and that’s all. That’s the limit of how much radio can invade your personal space. The listener has all the control, instead of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk or Altman.
– Aaron Read, Providence, R.I.
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