Ever since Ford’s announcement that they would cease including AM radio in most of their vehicles (commercial vehicles excepted) starting in 2024, it’s become de rigueur to comment and come to the defense of amplitude modulation.
While Tesla, Polestar, and a few BMWs don’t have AM radios, when a large mainstream OEM like Ford made that announcement, the radio industry stood up and took notice. Even though Ford has now rescinded that decision, it’s not that anyone in the radio industry wasn’t aware that AM was in decline.
The initial Ford bombshell was enough to sound the alarms and fight for the survival of AM radio even as the industry has tacitly given up on the band. A telling statistic is that in 1990, there were approximately 1,850 FM translators on the air. By 2021, that number had increased to 8,521. That’s strong evidence it’s a popular move to rebroadcast your AM station on an FM translator, even if the translator can’t exceed 250 watts of ERP.
Nonetheless, the initial Ford news prompted several lawmakers to introduce a bill (The AM in Every Vehicle Act) that would require the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to issue a rule mandating AM radio in every vehicle sold in the United States. This being a research column, I’ll offer some background on how you can evaluate AM listening today.
If you’ve read my first few columns, you know that as an old guy, I enjoy history. Reading about The AM in Every Vehicle Act, I immediately thought of the All Channel Receiver Act of 1962, which required that the FCC mandate UHF receivers in all new televisions sold in the US.
In the early days of TV, while channels 2-83 were originally assigned for television broadcasting, most sets could receive only VHF (analog channels 2-13). Unless you were in an all-UHF market (there were a handful such as Youngstown and Peoria), there wasn’t much incentive to buy a set with UHF or to get a UHF converter.
From a personal standpoint, I had to borrow a neighbor’s 9-inch GE portable TV that had UHF to see Our World, the first multinational live program, in June 1967. The US participant was National Educational Television, the forerunner of PBS, and Rochester’s “educational” station (WXXI) was on channel 21. Why borrow a set? My family’s console Zenith didn’t have UHF and The Beatles were part of the show, performing “All You Need is Love” for the first time. I couldn’t miss that.
Even with a federal law, UHF stations took decades to catch up with VHF channels. I presented a paper at an academic conference in 1986 entitled “The UHF Affiliate in the ‘80s: More Travels Down Parity Road” using regression analysis to show that, based on Nielsen data, UHF still lagged many years after the Act was implemented.
Pierre Bouvard, one of the best people in the business, recently put out a piece claiming 82 million people cume AM in a month. Like just about everyone else in the business, I love Pierre, but at least one-quarter hour in a four-week period doesn’t mean much and that number is subject to certain caveats regarding Nielsen edit rules as I’ll explain.
During my time at the NAB in the late ‘80s, I put together a similar piece using RADAR, the Nielsen national radio network service. If memory serves, AM had a weekly P12+ national cume of around 90 million people. At that time, there was a lot of talk about the death of AM, but it had a weekly circulation that was bigger than US newspapers. Rush Limbaugh had just started his meteoric rise and with him, the rise of news/talk on AM. Streaming didn’t exist and translators couldn’t be used to rebroadcast an AM outlet. Now, we have a (likely inflated) figure that’s smaller, using a four-week instead of a one-week estimate.
It’s 2023 and while there are still some great AM stations out there, many outlets are programmed for religious audiences or people who primarily speak other languages, and usage of AM is low.
As a researcher who’s been looking at ratings for 40+ years, I’d place a small bet that if you were to run the persons 25-54 combined AM share in Nielsen for Monday-Friday 6 AM-7 PM in the 48 PPM markets, most markets would have trouble getting much past a 10-15 share, in other words, FM and other encoded listening would have the rest.
And I’d place another bet that the market-level AM cume ratings for that demo/daypart combination would generally be in single digits. The same numbers for the diary markets would likely be a little higher and P55+ would look better, but keep in mind that FM translators cannot originate more than 30 seconds an hour of “programming” which means any listening to an AM station that simulcasts on an FM translator will be credited by Nielsen to the AM parent, in other words, inflating the AM listening percentage.
If the station is total line only, streamed listening is included as well. You can run this in PPM Analysis Tool or Tapscan. RADAR allows you to look at national AM listening alone and the cume will be an impressive number of persons, but again, Nielsen edit rules will push some FM and online listening into the AM column, so a deflator is warranted.
Like many of you, I grew up on AM. In Rochester, the big top 40 station was WBBF (950 AM) which later on had competition from WAXC (1460 AM) with The Greaseman at night and a young Tom Birch. Nighttime listening to clear channel AMs on “the skip” was fun with music stations like WABC, WLS, WCFL, CKLW, and others.
I’d wake up in the middle of the night and spend a couple of quarter hours with Larry Glick on WBZ who was incredibly entertaining. That was the 1960s and early 1970s, but will requiring AM in cars in the mid-2020s mean much of anything when smartphone penetration is nearly 87 percent (per Statista) and almost any radio station or song a listener wants is available in excellent fidelity on demand?
Further, a frightening number of people don’t own a radio in their homes. If you subscribe to Nielsen in a PPM metro, look at the latest quarterly panel characteristics report. Nielsen reports the number of radios in the household by demo. If you’ve never seen that particular statistic, you’ll want to have a stiff drink available before you look at your market or your company’s markets. Living in Kentucky, state law requires me to suggest bourbon.
The obvious question is “Are we trying to close the barn door after the horse has escaped?” Sticking with the equine theme (another Kentucky requirement), we can lead the horse (listeners) to water (AM), but we can’t make them drink (listen).
An AM tuner in every car is good, but a new law won’t fix the underlying problems.
Let’s meet again next week.
