The Save AM Radio Campaign Needs to Accept the Final Nail in Its Coffin

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Give it up already. “It” is the fight to “save” AM radio.

I thought we’d determined that AM radio would continue its decline and we were all resigned to that fate, but one of the few ratings-successful AMs — 77 WABC in New York — has embarked on a campaign to demand that AM be in all cars and that consumers insist on AM when they buy a car. The dream, it appears, is still alive.

It’s over, though, and it’s been over for years despite AM radio still being available in most cars. Since, oh, let’s say the mid-‘80s, people under the age of 60 didn’t even bother to program the car radio buttons for AM.

Talk and sports radio kept the older audience on AM, but sports gravitated to FM and that talk audience has aged to the point that agencies won’t bother and you’ll have to sell ads to local businesses who don’t care about ratings or demos and just either like the station or like the number of customers those AM radio stations attract. Nothing about that has changed lately.

Moreover, AM’s emergency capabilities might be just a tad overstated. It is true that high-powered AMs can reach further than FMs can, but that doesn’t solve the interference issue, nor does it mean that FMs can’t do the job. In fact, around here, none of the AMs adequately cover the market, and in order for a storm or power outage to take out all the FMs, it would have to topple a lot of over-1,000-foot towers. It could happen, and one tower came down when Hurricane Andrew made a direct hit, but it’s a stretch. (Cell service is vulnerable, though, and you can’t expect it to work if you’re in the direct path of a major storm or tornado.)

Meanwhile, 77 WABC is buying ads in New York print newspapers – another industry with its own problems – to push the matter, and it — and, frankly, all of the activity surrounding AM radio over the past decade — seems to be more a matter of business owners asking for government intervention and consumer uprising to save their business. Is it the role of the government to protect a business that the public has determined isn’t important to them? Is it consumers’ role to demand something they rarely if ever use?

And isn’t it interesting that conservative talk radio stations, mostly on AM radio, which preach the gospel of the free market don’t want a free market if it affects them? You lost the public years ago. Maybe it wasn’t all your fault – interference makes AM unusable at times, and my car radio just emits buzzing across the AM dial even on the few stations that I can get at all – but it’s time to go where the people are, and that’s streaming and, still, FM.

What? You don’t have enough FM signals, and moving talk to FM would lose you a revenue stream? Them’s the breaks, kid. You gotta choose. If the programming on AM radio is worth saving, it’s up to the station owners to save it, not government mandates.

Anyway, I’d like this to be the last AM radio column I write. Sometimes, technology forces you to move on. If your content’s that good, there are other ways to serve it up. And nobody guaranteed you that your business plan would be successful, did they?

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Perry Michael Simon

Perry Michael Simon is a weekly news media columnist for Barrett Media. He previously served as VP and Editor/News-Talk-Sports/Podcast for AllAccess.com. Prior to joining the industry trade publication, Perry spent years in radio working as a Program Director and Operations Manager for KLSX and KLYY in Los Angeles and New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @PMSimon.