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I came across a lament by an AM radio announcer, denouncing the shuddering contractions in his industry. AM ought to be more popular and profitable, he said, since 90% of Americans still listen to terrestrial radio.
That seems difficult to believe. It seems more likely that 90% do not. They might be counting the times when people get in a rental car and push the wrong button, producing a blast of static. More people listen to FM, of course, but AM? It’s home to lots of small stations with the wattage of a hot plate, as well as a few legacy blowtorches blasting 50,000 watts of old-fork palaver and gold coin commercials.
The subject makes members of my generation go off on remember-when recollections. Ah, my first car only had an AM radio, and even then, just half the band. It didn’t even have any numbers. We had to make marks in the glass with an X-Acto knife.
When we got a signal from a distant station while driving on the highway, we could tell when we were losing that signal because the song would slow down. If we liked the song, we could do a U-turn, head in the other direction and rewind it a little. There were only two stations in town: One was a man who yelled about the Bible all day and the other was a polka station that played rock and roll from midnight to 12:30 on Saturday nights, but only songs that had been approved by the Lutheran Synod. Etc.
Hardly. My hometown of Fargo had a robust set of radio options, starting with two popular-music stations, the Big Good One and the Scrappy Competitor. Every market had this dynamic. The latter was a station that would hire some DJ who’d been kicking around the Upper Midwest market for a few years, leaving after the inevitable argument with the program director because he’d played the B-side of a low-charting Herman’s Hermits number, maybe. The guy would be good, he’d be different—and he’d be gone in three months because he played “Tequila” six times in a row in the middle of the night, then slurred his words right up to the top of the hour, after which he came back dead sober. It was a gag, cats and kittens.
These were the DJs whose true names you never knew, who flew under the banner of anonymizing assonance and alliteration. Rockin’ Don Dixon. Whistlin’ Whit Walter! Boppin’ Bob Barkins! You’d make a point to tune in to that guy. And then one day he’d be gone. Radio was very Soviet: No one would ever say their name again.
When I drove between Fargo and the Twin Cities in college, I had no tape deck. I’d prowl the dial as I drove, picking up a small-town station as I drew near, hearing five minutes of tinny polka or a swap meet or a crop futures report, then losing it to static. I’d be assured of pop music if I got near a town that had more than 30,000 people—otherwise it was mopey country music or easy listening. I imagined a farmwife in the kitchen having an afternoon cup of coffee, pausing between chores, letting some Mantovani soak in and carry her off to Rome or Ipanema, wherever that was.
When I got close to the Twin Cities, I drew in the big powerhouse stations—better on-air talent, well-produced local ads, a crisper tempo, exciting new call signs! And the same songs I had at home.
Even after cassettes came along, we still listened to the radio, simply to hear songs we didn’t have. But there was something more. There was the notion that we were all listening to this together. Each station had a tribe—or, more likely, each DJ or DJ team had its own cohort—and while I listened I was simultaneously one of many and the only one in the world.
Streaming isn’t the same. It’s better, in most ways. It delivers what the jocks always teased: Less talk more rock! (Or, for a classical station, less talk, more Bach.) You can jump ahead if you don’t like a song. Or you can tap the glass and fave it so you can hear it again when you wish. You can slide in-between genres that glide along an endless gradient. Ambient. Ambient Chill. Ambient Piano. Piano Chill. Chill Piano for Studying. Mid-tempo Piano Ultra-Lounge Ambient Poolside. Lo-tempo Piano Ultra-Lounge Ambient Pool but Actually in the Pool Up To Your Waist. Imagine moving the AM dial a micron and finding a new world of music with every tiny turn.
But old AM radio will never die. It can't. It's not a format like wax cylinders or 78s—it's a fact of nature, a frequency that exists even if nobody does anything with it. It was empty for untold millennium before people came along and filled it with talk and music, and while someday it could fall silent because everyone has moved onto something else, it will always be there, waiting for someone to crack the mic and say let's rock.

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