What might a new morning for AM radio hold?
[12/18 update: The first change in the aftermath of the birth of WBZ-FM was pretty dull. AM-890, Boston's ESPN Radio station, went silent in October and switched to a Spanish-language music format on December 3. Nothing yet has happened with the stronger signals of WEEI or WRKO.]
Life can get boring if one demands a plethora of data points on which to base trend spotting so let’s just assume that the overnight ratings success of WBZ-FM 98.5 The Sports Hub in Boston heralds a wide spread migration from AM to FM by talk-driven radio. After all, one of the reasons that compelled WRKO’s lone star Howie Carr to unsuccessfully attempt to switch to WTKK was the opportunity to hold forth on the FM band, where his voice can reach an audience beyond Coolidge Corner after the sun sets. Clearly, FM is the future for AM.
So let’s say that most of talk radio moves to FM – where it would replace music stations getting squeezed by handheld music players like iPhones – what then would fill the AM band? AM became home to talk after music moved to FM so it seems that one can see AM as a minor league for emerging formats.
In Boston’s case specifically one could the Spanish-language music and variety programming replace Anglo sports and political talk. Latino stations have yet to make inroads on FM in the Boston area and don’t have much of a foothold on AM, either (reasons for the weakness of Hispanic radio probably include a fair degree of geographic dispersion of Hispanics in the area and the diversity of the Hispanic audience, which spans from African-Caribbean Dominicans to indigenous people from Central America. It’s not exactly like Texas where one can get a couple of ratings points just from spinning Tejano or re-broadcasting Mexican soccer games). For Latino radio it would probably be quite a bit of progress to snatch a signal like AM-850 (where sports behemoth WEEI currently resides) or AM-680 (WRKO).
But what else might emerge, besides various foreign-language formats? Perhaps geographic or topical niche stations, like North Shore talk or homebuilders/homeowners talk. Perhaps programming aimed at tweeners and their poor parents’ wallets (although it’s not ragingly obvious to me how a commuter-based industry like radio can do all that well with kids whose commuting consist of riding a bus to school or a mini-van to soccer practice). Perhaps an enterprising evangelical church would snap up a strong-signaled AM station to serve souls 24/7 in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean.
For a major university with billions of dollars in endowment funds it might seem like a good idea to take the school’s message to the airwaves, maybe in order to build syndicated programming that could become an additional revenue stream in the not so distant future.
Personally, I’d welcome a jazz station. I don’t care that it’s AM. Heck, AM makes it sound like you’re listening to old 78 RPM records and that’s cool.
