Invoking Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
AM may have it's technical limitations, specifically when compared to FM, but as a medium it's not dead and I doubt it's about to be anytime soon. It's still very popular amongst political talk, at least here in the U.S.
That may be true, but as anecdota I had a show on one of those talk stations just a year ago. They broadcast on 2 frequencies on the FM dial, covering a wide geographic range.
In my experience, talk and even music on AM radio in Africa is used more then FM. I believe this is because the cost associated with AM equipment costs, and the distances AM can cover.
I can get an AM signal in the middle of nowhere with a diode and a bunch of wires.
I'm the founder of an audio ads startup. To put things in perspective the global radio market for ad dollars is ~$35 billion to $40 billion depending on who you ask. All of podcasting is $2 billion.
To be clear the shift to all digital is happening but am/fm radio has a long ways to go before being irrelevant and this shift will likely take a few more decades. Don't sleep on traditional media.
> To put things in perspective the global radio market for ad dollars is ~$35 billion to $40 billion depending on who you ask.
Others say $25 billion globally for terrestrial/OTA and satellite combined, and those physical mediums appear to be a shrinking slice of that. You can see the industry scrambling to redefine all live-streaming audio as "radio" as radio-the-medium evaporates.
There are actually a few AM stations in my area. Now, if my car radio still worked, I would totally listen to them because when it DID work, there was a lot of good local news and personalities on there. Did my heart good to hear opinions on current events in my area from people actually effected by it instead of an outsider from a completely different city's opinion on it all.
Not at all. And when they simultaneously try to broadcast AM content on FM bands, it sounds like crap. It's arguably where the majority of any given marketing budget goes, probably only edged out by FM, but maybe not.
I seriously considered buying an AM radio station a few years ago. You can get a fully operational station and the land it's on for under $200k in pretty populated areas.
Something about just broadcasting whatever you want into a protected frequency band for anyone with an antenna to hear seems really cool.
Does that include licensing of the frequency or just the infrastructure? Even if it includes some duration of the license, I expect there are still regulations and red tape to maintain that license. And regulations about what you can broadcast.
Oh sure, the list of FCC rules is seemingly endless... but it's still a pretty wide margin of media and speech permitted especially on the "talk radio" side of things.
The operational requirements are a bit stringent, though—there are certain staffing and compliance requirements for the studio and transmitter facilities.
And even low-power AM transmission stations need an annoying amount of physical plant maintenance—cutting grass, trimming overgrowth, fixing all the random annoying issues that crop up when maintaining any kind of equipment at a remote site (theft, rodents, water ingress, cooling, power, comms, etc.).
But late night AM, you get "Ministry in the Marketplace with Dr. Richard Hamlet" on WEZE 590. This is the craziest right wingnut radio I've ever heard, even including shortwave. Last week they were ranting on about the "death vaccine".
"By the 1950s, America had forgotten the Biblical principles that it was founded on. In the mid-60s, government-controlled education was implemented. At that time, The Foundation for American Christian Education was formed to help limit that control by educating families and even schools on the . . ."
That last paragraph just sounds like your average right-wing Christian radio station of which there are thousands across the US. Heck, your last paragraph there could've been from Dr. Dobson on the Focus on the Family radio show which is quite mainstream among American Evangelicals (of which there are many).
As for the Loving Hut restaurants... oh, that's what I went to downtown? It did seem culty. They were playing some video on a loop about world peace, etc. I've gotta say, though, their vegan shrimp were quite good - a very good approximation down to the texture.
That would kick ass. Part of me wishes the FCC opened the AM band to "public access" (legit radio piracy — perhaps with a 50W or so ceiling?) but the way the internet has unfolded suggests to me what a shitshow that would become.
but that's not exactly true unless you wear an eye patch, roll your Rs when you speak, have a wooden leg, and have a parrot perched on your shoulder.
that $200k buys you equipment and land. it does not include any licensing or royalty payments for the content you ultimately decide to broadcast. if you have a full 100k flamethrower of a transmitter, the utility bill for that bad boy is not something I'll envy from you.
while not being a radio engineer myself, i spent some time around them for several years. even got to go to the antenna farm with them on one excursion. these things are no joke with the electrical wiring. just seeing the size of knife switch disconnects is an indicator of don't mess with this. never mind all of the other high voltage signage. there's a few other fun facts of broadcast towers that really makes you wonder if this is something you really want to be doing as a "hobby"
don't know the level of urban legend, but i have heard that BASE jumpers that climb to the top of a tower to jump will start to feel their fillings heat up by the time they get to the top.
>I mean, how much would a feed of podcasters’ syndication cost?
That's like asking how long is a piece of string?
How much is part of negotiations. The more people following, the higher the number. The larger the ego of the podcast producer(s), the higher the number. The more desperate the radio op is, the higher the number. If the podcaster has a set price tag type of licensing, then they must be new or are very naive or just don't feel like negotiating. In content licensing, you always shoot high in negotiations. If they come back with a yes on the first offer, you learn to shoot even higher the next time as you're leaving money on the table. If they do the more natural response of a much lower counter, then you get to play the traditional game. If they are someone so big of a broadcaster that they come in with an offer, never accept on first offer either. Always make them provide at least a second offer.*
*I'm not a professional anything in this regard, so don't take the word of rando inteweb person. Talk to your lawyers regarding licensing offers. I'm just someone who has been near/around these things for a long time.
> Something about just broadcasting whatever you want into a protected frequency band for anyone with an antenna to hear seems really cool.
If I ever get ridiculous amounts of money that could be burned on frivolous stuff like this without a worry, I'd make something similar to Fallout's radio stations.
I really dislike this type of usage of the word "dead". There's not a general consensus on what it means. Does it mean unpopular, not as popular as it once was, literally unusable and inaccessible, or some subtle variation?
OTOH, CB radio has been lately getting harmonised and deregulated all over, and AM is one of the legal modulations (along with FM and SSB). So a lot of opportunity to enjoy "warm AM sound" with your neighbors, even if the cell goes down.
[edit] they even have portable ones! (look up "Randy", no SSB though). And with a half decent SDR you can record the whole 40 channels at once, to see if there is anything worth joining in.
AM radio is no different than any other radio: If the content is good, people will listen.
It's worth noting that for decades, FM was considered a graveyard of talk programming, with occasional classical mixed in. Today, the situation has been reversed.
In cities where there is enough money to produce good content, AM radio does well. In smaller places, where there isn't enough money available to create good content, AM stations are very often relegated to satellite- and internet-fed formats.
The most recent Chicago ratings I can quickly find¹ (June, 2022) show AM doing well, with AM stations ranking #5, #11, #23, #25 and #27 in a market of over 50 stations.
But even in small places, while the FMs will dominate all day long, a good AM or three will dominate the morning drive when they present local programming.
Electric cars are starting to be a problem for AM radio, which is why so many now have FM translators, and free internet streams. But AM will have a place on the air for a very long time to come.
/I've worked for about a dozen different AM stations in my lifetime.
The OP listed some AM stations that were near the top of the rating in the Chicago market. I looked at the list and the top two AM stations were no surprise: WBBM and WGN.
It's not really a good idea to look at these two stations to get an idea of the health of the entire AM market. These two are giant class A clear channel stations that date back to the 1920s and the origination of AM radio licenses. Being in the center of the continent they can do omnidirectional broadcasting without "wasting" power like a station on the coast would. They're among the few that can still afford to be "local" station with very little syndicated content (and broadcast a lot of sports to vast swaths of the US and Canada that have no local professional sports team), and they'll probably be among the last of the AM stations to shut down.
We generally haven't been using pre-TV big console radios for decades now too. In places where range matters less (such as Europe) AM has been pretty much dead for a while already, not even speaking about transmitting music.
Ok sure, but "AM is not currently used for music" is a far cry from "You can't put music down [AM]".
I invoked the old radios because you certainly heard a lot of music through them and they all used AM, whether over medium-wave or short-wave frequencies. Same for the ubiquitous All-American Five tabletop/kitchen radios; I've owned them, they sound just fine if you can find an AM station that's playing music.
You can put music through a PC speaker too. Some old games even managed to play some real bangers this way; but these days I'd say that stating "you can't put music through a PC speaker" when talking about commercially viable means of music playback is justified even if not technically true.
There is nothing wrong with the quality of AM radio.
It transmits almost the same audio bandwidth as does FM. The problem is the cheap and crappy radios designed for the USA market which have flooded the market.
Whatever, try getting a high-quality AM radio and having a listen. For example one of the upmarket SDR radios with variable IF filters.
I've never listened to AM radio on purpose, and I'm not young. From what I've heard, it's a content desert that consists primarily of religious/crackpot programming. As fewer and fewer new cars support AM¹, the writing is on the wall, and there should be concrete plans to reallocate that spectrum for something more useful.
The only time that I've actively listened to AM purposefully (other than curiously "just to see what's there") is AM 1610. [0]. 1610 is often used in the US for Visitor Information -- short 3-10 minute recordings on automated loop [1]. I find them useful when visiting a new park for the first time, and before I stop in the visitor center.
As a kid, my parents got me a cheap AM transmitter toy that broadcast on 1610.
Cutting edge tech in the early aughts, it ran on AA batteries and had a tape player, a microphone, and an aux in. My broadcasts made it across the cul-de-sac from my room. It was immensely enjoyable.
My dad bought me a little 0.5W FM transmitter kit, and taught me how to solder putting it together. I definitely spent a bit of time making believe I was a radio DJ back then.
I can’t readily find when these became a thing but search for ‘pantry transmitter’ - I’m fairly sure that, whether for kids to muck around with, or to play the sound of your own vinyl records on another radio in your own home, these kinds of micro transmitters have been in use for decades.
This is really interesting, and also very foreign to me given that all of this is available on-demand in any form you like (i.e. YouTube videos for car repair). Do you happen to be a trucker? I'm trying to imagine the scenario where AM radio specifically is the best way to deliver this content.
The problem with on-demand is that it takes time and energy to go actually demand it. With radio, if you are working in the garage or garden or on a jobsite, you just tune into some station, and you get guys talking about fixing cars or something and that's it. With youtube or spotify or whatever, you have to go search for something interesting, it lasts for 15 minutes, and then you have to search again. Or maybe you get a podcast that last an hour. But it's never set and forget like radio. It's all just a waste if time unless you have something very specific you want to hear, rather than just background chit chat.
Not a trucker. there are some areas where data is not available. In some countries I use pre-paid mobile phones. I turn off data in those places.
I (try to) walk at least an hour a day. I also hike trails. Ever seen a bear wait for Click and Clack[0] demonstrating the noise a worn CV join makes? Nor have I. ;-)
I have several hobbies which involve manual labour, but no major attention required (weeding, kneading, etc.). I can listen to the radio and still enjoy my hobby.
I have heard some here and there, but nothing close to them. :'(
I have heard a station in California (do not know call sign), the motor man, or the motoring man. There was also in Detroit a station where two guys tried to pick up similar like C&C, car show or something.
Those guys were unreasonably entertaining for people who were also so unbelievably knowledgeable about cars. Diagnosed some of the most bizarre things from the tiniest of details.
British guy here: sorry if this is a silly question but are you talking about an actual radio station which is just people talking about repairing cars? That’s so interesting! Nothing like that here. Maybe the odd specialist show once a week like Gardener’s Question Time or whatever.
Mostly, yes! Not quite just talking about repairing cars, but cars in general with a core of repair related stuff. One of them passed away in 2014 and to me the show can't be the same. But you can check out past episodes here: https://www.cartalk.com/radio/browse/
I'm not even remotely a car guy but they're super entertaining. Perhaps one (two) of a kind talent.
Some (many?) new cars don’t have AM radios. And since people in cars seems to be a huge chunk of AM/FM radio listenership that’s a very big problem for AM stations.
I know the Mustang Mach-E removed it in the newer models.
That is not correct, you cannot add AM. The radio fee is for people who upgraded their computer hardware and want a new radio that is compatible with the new computer. The new radio does not have AM.
It is dead to me and has been for decades. Once in a while I'll put on the AM band when driving and there is nothing for me.
- hispanic music -- i don't speak spanish and not growing up with it, I have no connection
- conservative talk radio -- as a liberal, I find it more terrifying than anything. hosts and callers will declare that liberals think this or that, or that we are trying to do this or that, things that I and none of my liberal friends would identify with. I was surprised to find out that liberals hate freedom and want to force our kids into being gay. I guess I'm way behind the curve.
- biblical literalism
- (edit) I forgot sports. does nothing for me.
It's certainly 99% dead for me personally but based on the ad dollars still flowing in, I'm assuming there is a still a big audience, even if it's on the decline.
What's more surprising to me at this point is Sirius. I just don't understand how this is still a $22 billion dollar company, doing $9 billion in revenue and is still growing revenue. I don't see where the value is. I haven't subscribed in almost a decade but when I left, the audio quality was really bad -- terrible digital compression artifacts -- and there wasn't really anything that interesting in terms of musical programming that couldn't be had with a streaming service like Spotify. Maybe it's all Stern and sports content that's driving revenue or is there still a big legion of people who actually subscribe for the music?
Are there that many people or places though? Even from my small hometown with a population of 300 tucked away in the mountains, there's 5g cell service from the major providers.
I'm certain places like that exist, but I'm guessing it's far less than most would imagine.
My bet is a non-insignificant amount of sirus's money today comes from their model of making subscriptions really annoying to cancel. And, of course, preying on old people that may have forgot about their subscription or don't get streaming.
I didn't realize how sparse coverage was in the West until I moved out here. Once you're 5 minutes off of an interstate outside of a metro area it's pretty common still to have no signal.
Verizon and AT&T do pretty well as long as you stick to highways, though there will still be a few dead zones even on the interstates. T-Mobile is hopeless once you are 5 miles outside the suburbs of any city. My wife has T-Mobile for her work phone and there are a few dead zones in our suburb of 100,000 people.
Driving up from the SF Bay to Tahoe, you'll lose cell service as you pass through the mountains - especially if you take the Highway 50 route. Drive up to Oregon, and you'll lose cell service for a long stretch roughly near Klamath Falls. (As an aside, that part of the country doesn't even have NEXRAD weather radar.)
And this is all while on the freeway or major highways. There's plenty of places out west without a reliable cell signal, or sometimes a signal that's so weak that it's not usable for data.
Where I live in New Mexico has consistently poor reception withing about 60 miles. My Spotify is almost always in offline mode since it chokes on poor signal. Radio and TV have repeaters on a nearby mountain that rebroadcast a few stations. Meanwhile Sirius works everywhere except in my garage.
For me it mostly replaces my CD changer, which doesn't exist in newer cars. When I can't decide what to listen to, have poor signal, or don't want to fiddle with the controls, it gives me a nice selection on fallbacks.
Sirius XM is still sold as a subscription and addon package to a lot of new vehicles so the revenue probably comes in from recurring monthly subscription payments that people just get used to paying for so they can have satellite based music wherever they are.
As another reply said, there are plenty of places where you still can’t get a cell signal but you can get satellite. Sirius is huge for Truckers for this reason. But even where I live (Rural) If I drive East I don’t have cell signal pretty much until I hit I-5 once I leave the area around my town. It takes an hour ish to hit I-5 directly but the route I prefer to take if I’m headed to Longview or Portland which is the only reason I’d go that way is along the Columbia River and there is no cell signal for what is about an hour and a half of the drive.
I mean my music is downloaded for offline use and I don’t want a radio style of listening experience, but for my parents it is the only viable way for them to listen to music on that drive. And with regular radio you’re going to be trying to find stations you want to listen to as you live in and out of range.
Granted my parents also have a grandfathered lifetime membership.
I subscribe and enjoy it. It's great to catch Formula 1 when I'm out and about doing errands, and for 99% of my use case the music side of it is just fine. Commuting to and from work I don't need much more than "random playlist of genre x"
It works out to be $120/year, and that's with Howard Stern, and all the sports etc.
Could I do all this streaming with my phone? Most likely, however with this I don't worry when I drive down into the States that I'm now "Roaming" or really worry about data usage at all. Also I don't have to think about it.
If you look through their releases, the growth appears to be coming from doing a better job of getting a free-trial included in almost every new car and like half of used cars (I assume this is done through dealer networks).
Given that, if free-trials convert at a steady rate, voila, you have growth.
In terms of why people like it:
1) There's something somewhat Tik-Tik-like about having hyper-specialized music served to you without putting in the work of building a playlist
2) Streaming services have the somewhat annoying tendency of 'recommending' new songs to you so they can pay the artists less, since they were a 'discovery' mechanism. This leads to bad outcomes if all you want is 80's on 8 (said differently, if you like 80's music, chances are you know the songs you like already)
3) The lowest their is $13/month, which is cheaper than a phone plan with more data for a lot of people
4) There's a certain 'Sunday Ticket/League Pass' element, since you can get the radio coverage of nearly any pro sports game (even in home markets I often struggle to find the radio coverage of certain games)
5) For the traditional satellite service, they're broadcast only so they have no idea what any subscriber is listening to at any point, and some people like that.
Had it for years on the road for work and it was a life saver, never having to search for stations and listening to ads all the time. When I started working local I dropped it for streaming and that was good enough.
A few years later I was taking a multi state trip and reactivated, when I got back I re-subbed both vehicles. It's any kind of radio with almost no interruptions and it's worth the price.
> For the traditional satellite service, they're broadcast only so they have no idea what any subscriber is listening to at any point, and some people like that.
Newer cars collect data on what you're listening to and report back. At least on mine it can be disabled, but it is something that's out there.
I actually really like SiriusXM. I have 3-4 stations that I play nearly constantly whether in the car, on the house sonos system, or while on transit. My 3-year-old car has a decent (stock) sound-system, and I honestly don't hear any compression artifacts. Their IP streaming is high-quality.
Most of their music stations are basically well-curated, 4-hour playlists. Most channels have guest hosts/DJs that are legitimate to the genres (e.g. Diplo hosts his station at times) that update the playlists periodically. I still augment my music with Apple Music and podcasts, but I spend far more time with Sirius.
The unfortunate part is that they still play stupid and hostile pricing games. "Promotions" that you have to call to renew to get the stupid $25/month charge reduced to like $7/month. At that price it beats Pandora, terrestrial (am/fm) radio, and even Spotify/Apple Music if you primarily listen to curated playlists.
You sound pretty close to me to be honest. When my wife and I go on a long trip it makes it easy to put on in the car. I tend to have it on when I'm working around the house during the weekend. For me it fills in a void of wanting to listen to something more than background music, but not wanting to choose more than a genre that fits my mood. For whatever reasons all of the algorithmic "stations" that I've had on other services either deviate too much from what I originally wanted, or are too narrow and don't get enough variety.
Another thing that Sirius does that a lot of people aren't talking about is their data services. Having updated weather and fish maps live while you're offshore is pretty handy and satellite internet connections can be very pricey.
...you don't need a (relatively) expensive single sideband set and radio-nerd tendencies to pick up weather data offshore where you live? That is pretty great if so. Would that there were more of it.
This is stuff like fishing recommendations by species, sea surface heights, temperature contors, 30m deep temperature condors, plankton concentrations, weather radar, storm tracks, wave heights, and more and then integrated into common Garmin, Raymarine, Lowrance, Simrad, and other equipment that many boats would already have. All of that data constantly updated and refreshed live even when you're miles out to sea and can't pick up common line of sight style transmissions.
Its not just a METAR weather report from an airport kinda near the shore.
I know the stuff. I wasn't clear, and was asking, quite what the parent poster is mentioning people getting here as it didn't sound quite like the forms of this service I'm aware of - I'm not sure there is something like it everywhere. Setups I've seen with full "straight onto your plotter, live" stuff have only been satellite.
The reason I subscribe to Sirius/XM is for simulcasts of news and business channels, listening to live sports events (while driving or not in front of a TV), and some of the music genre channels that are hosted by DJs, in that order.
I am switching my subscription from satellite to streaming because I will save a pretty significant portion of the monthly fee, I stream everything else I listen to or watch at home, in the office, or in the car, and the CarPlay experience is much better when you are using 100% streaming audio.
huh never thought about radio games. all of the streaming packages seem overpriced but radio might be a much crappier but tolerable option, with the bonus of having other radio channels.
>Maybe it's all Stern and sports content that's driving revenue or is there still a big legion of people who actually subscribe for the music?
My dad subscribes for Bruce Springsteen's channel/show/whatever. Dude just can never get enough of Springsteen. I'd imagine there are other fans of other artists doing the same.
I think a large part of their market is that the radios come pre-installed in new cars. I dislike how it is impossible to subscribe to the middle 2 tiers of programming without actually placing a telephone call. I have zero interest in Stern or sports.
I subscribe to the Sirius XM app. I like the music stations. I have Apple Music too so I could get along without it, but I actually like the DJs, and although I could probably find similar channels on Apple, some of the Sirius mixes are a bit unique so it’s worth $10 a month to me.
The app. Not the satellite. The satellite sound quality is horrible. I can see how satellite was worth it before 4G, but now I just use my phone in the car.
I like road trips. And then I really find Sirius XM well worth the money. FM coverage is too local and choppy when going through hills / mountains. 5G? Yea, right. The closest you get is 4G from another provider, which throttles you (e.g. using T-Mobile, which will jump to AT&T where there is no T-Mobile. It'll show 4G but the speeds are slower than 56K).
Tmobile jumps to AT&T? What did you do for that to happen? We have good AT&T service in our house but when I tried the Tmobile test drive (or whatever it is that gets you a free hotspot for a while) it struggled to stay connected at all.
If I drove more I'd probably fork over the money for Sirius. I had it for free in my car for a while and it was certainly much better than FM stations. I did one week-long road trip in the Western U.S. and it was pretty cool to just keep it on the same station and it works even when there's no cell signal. Even their pop/hits stations are way better than my local FM stations, both in music selection/variation and obviously no ads/terrible DJ chatter.
But with my current driving habits that's maybe one or two weeks a year where I would really care to have it.
I can't speak for anyone else, but for $5/month or whatever discount I'm paying, it's well worth it to have a wide variety of music available on demand. I learn things I didn't know, hear music I'd not otherwise hear, occasionally they'll have well-established musicians & producers do a set and talk about people they know and why they like their music so much.
I'm sure Spotify has its own advantages (I'm a long-time Pandora user, haven't tried it) but not having to plan anything in advance and having full access to all of the stations in the middle of nowhere is quite nice.
Based on my limited time with the service (bought a new vehicle last January) if I let the trial period subscription lapse, they'll offer the lower price after a couple of weeks to lure me back in.
I just let myself be lured, and anticipate doing so next time.
I refuse to support that business model of quadrupling the price for customers who forget to beg for the intro price every year. It feels so scummy. So Sirius gets no money from me.
I agree, they also make it really hard to cancel, requiring waiting on hold and arguing with them a la AOL. They don’t seem to realize that the fact they behave this way is objectionable to whatever my demographic is… millennials I guess. I love the programming on Sirius XM but refuse to use it on principle.
It is always possible to get the service for about $5-7/month by contacting customer support and mentioning the price and switching to a competitor. They’ll put you on a promo that lasts a year for $5-7/month. You, in turn, will put another “save $100” reminder into your calendar for next year before the billing date.. and the cycle will continue. The cycle is well documented on the subreddit, no need to take me at my word.
Yes it’s dumb but sxm also works better for my personal situation than Spotify etc.
I already pay for Apple Music and use that the vast majority of the time, especially when I’m by myself. But I still put the local FM hits station on regularly, either as background music when driving with friends or family or just when I can’t be bothered to choose something on my phone. I’d probably check out their genre stations and non-music content from time to time. It just doesn’t add up to enough to make it worth the cost, but it could if I found myself driving more.
Locally stored podcasts work, but Spotify over the air can accidentally rack up some nasty data roaming charges that you don't realize until later. And there are significant stretches of the highway where cellphone data is spotty (pun not intended).
Siris radio works everywhere you aren't driving next to something blocking the line of sight to the sky. It maintains the channel across significant distances so you're not hunting for "ok, what to listen to next?" (one time when driving to my grandparents house for Thanksgiving and changing the station as one faded I heard Alices Restaurant four times).
The main thing with Siris for driving is that its got DJs and news and such.
On my great road trip I had an iPod loaded up with songs and had that on shuffle for a few months... and while I had a few hundred hours of songs, they were all things I heard before.
Part of listening to the radio, Spotify, or Siris is that the next song might be something different.
> Download content for listening when you lack cell coverage?
That's how I use Spotify, and I've gotten the impression that nobody at Spotify has actually eaten their own dogfood w.r.t. offline listening:
- Downloaded songs/albums/playlists will occasionally un-download themselves
- Even when they're already downloaded, the UI will occasionally insist on loading some online resource, preventing me from actually picking something out of my downloaded library until either I regain cell reception or the UI eventually gives up
Meanwhile, Spotify's radio feature seems to be getting progressively worse, and gaps are popping up in its library. Spotify was at one point the thing that got me to stop pirating music; I'm about ready to start doing so again (or buying from Bandcamp for the select few artists I listen to with music on there).
I feel the same confusion about why anyone would want to download content. I don't want to pick specific bands/albums/songs. I want to always be listening live to new stuff. I also think all podcasts are awful (boring and toxic).
My in laws are in their 70s and still drive. They have CarPlay and Apple Music but Sirius works like the radio. I think sometimes companies like Apple, for all their UI genius, miss the obvious option to just mimic the thing they are trying to kill. In this case, just have an option to just make a fake dial of station and skip around. If feel similarly about tv services like YouTube tv and Hulu, just mimic the think you’re trying to kill.
The new things that become popular aren't strictly better than the things they replace. In many cases, it seems like the newness factor that makes it popular to people at all
I subscribe mostly for the music (maybe 15+ years now?), Spotify's algorithms are pretty crappy IMO. TIDAL's are better, but they're really expensive. Sirius has very good curation. And I like some of the DJs. News, stern and sports also factor in as nice to haves. It also doesn't hit my mobile data plan in the car.
TIDAL's Hifi Plus was the main reason to get it, for $20. Though I guess it's fair that doesn't restrict access to their (overall better) recommendation algos.
Sirius still exists because FM radio is absolute dogshit in the US thanks to the Clear Channel/iHeartMedia conglomerate effectively owning everything.
Your FM dial is absolutely terrible unless you happen to live near a good college radio station or an unusual city (San Diego can pick up some interesting Mexican stations, for example).
> the audio quality was really bad -- terrible digital compression artifacts
I've been subscribing for about a decade and I haven't experienced this. Possibly something in the tech stack here has improved.
> there wasn't really anything that interesting in terms of musical programming that couldn't be had with a streaming service like Spotify
It's easier and cheaper to get satellite radio in a moving car than reliable Internet. You can save music offline (although I find a USB stick a much easier way of doing that than a smartphone with an app with offline storage, but then again most of the music I listen to is at least a couple of decades old), but you can't get live broadcasts of things like sports events or concerts.
> I've been subscribing for about a decade and I haven't experienced this. Possibly something in the tech stack here has improved.
I've listened to Sirius in several environments across many years, spanning most of its existence. In just about every case, I found the audio quality to be intolerably terrible. This is in multiple cars in different years. Curiously, I've noticed a strain of people that claim that it sounds good. Sometimes, I've been in the same car with them at the same time, listening to the same thing. I can't account for it. I'm generally not an audio snob, but satellite radio sounds so bad, I can't stand it at all. I'd rather have silence.
I'm not sure the underlying reason for this, but I guess some people just hear differently.
> I've noticed a strain of people that claim that it sounds good.
I would say it sounds good, exactly; I can notice a difference between it and, say, listening to a high quality recording from a USB stick. But I wouldn't say it's intolerably terrible, either. Is it that you literally can't hear music, just noise? Or is it that you can hear music, but with other noise overlaid on top of it?
I can hear the music. There's some noise on top, but also the high frequency components seem to be pretty scrambled and mostly missing. Depending on the channel.
I think it depends on the channel too. I've read the low number channels get more bandwidth and the channels above 300 are a newer more efficient codec that not all radios support.
I've also read the Sirius version is worse than the XM version. Yes, they merged many years ago but they still run two incompatible systems. Ford was still installing Sirius until 2021.
> I've also read the Sirius version is worse than the XM version.
I wasn't aware of this. This would explain why I am not seeing the sound quality issues that other people in this discussion are describing; my latest vehicle has XM.
My folks had Sirius in their cars when they were still driving, in a mountainous pretty rural area (town of <15k in mountainous terrain within national forest). I'm not sure what if any radio stations even exist for them, when I tried tuning a clock radio in their house I found nothing. Sure there's streaming or podcasts via phone or other Internet connection, but you're paying for those as well - and there are significant chunks of the drive to that town that still don't have cell service even on a state highway.
> I left, the audio quality was really bad -- terrible digital compression artifacts -- and there wasn't really anything that interesting in terms of musical programming
I'm about to leave. Every time I go to cancel, they hook me in with a pretty good deal. Last time it was "How about $9 for the next six months?" I thought they meant $9/month. Nope, a one-off charge.
But if I listen to any channel over the course of a day, I am guaranteed to hear the same song three-four times and their diversity/catalog seems very limited.
AM is here to stay for at least a few more decades. In the US it’s a lot more scarce to find AM broadcasts that aren’t either political or religious (often extremely so) because of the market for renting airtime and the longer reach than FM.
But AM is still bread and butter for South/Central America and Africa. Not sure how much it is used in Southeast Asia but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was still very popular there too.
Eventually it’ll be gone due to the inevitable March of technology, but it has plenty of life left in it.
Well, he's in St. Louis and it isn't doing well there.
1430 AM ("The Crazy Q") was the last bastion of oldies in the 50s, early 60s sense. Its license, as well as a few others, were held by a man who was a convicted felon and apparently that's a no-no. Anyway, it folded and that was that.
I dig around and there's just not much else I can find on the AM band aside from talk, some kind of Catholic radio, sports ...
I want to hear the technical side here. So, sure, AM radio is fading. But audio content delivery is alive and very active. So in practice everyone will just move over to podcasts and it'll be fine.
But what happens with the spectrum if we just turn it off? The ~1MHz band is basically useless to digital transmission. There's not enough (literal) bandwidth to put anything modern on it, and the transmission characteristics lack the ionospheric reflections of short wave, so it's only a to-the-horizon kind of thing anyway.
So do we just turn it off? Is there anything useful to do with it? Or is there interesting astronomy we could do without the interference?
Maybe the reason AM radio continues limping along is that there really aren't any takers and this is just junk spectrum?
1 MHz doesn't give a lot of room for frequency hopping and frequency modulation, but that doesn't stop it from being useful for digital transmission. You can still transmit zeroes and ones with amplitude modulation. (The hybrid HD radio tried that, though few Americans bought into that.) The biggest problem with that from micro-usage of the spectrum by personal devices is interference and error correction, but we're doing a veritable ton with Bluetooth today in one of the noisiest and easily interfered with bands in current regulation so there's certainly ideas out there to try.
That said, there's also probably nothing wrong with leaving spectrum quiet. We don't need to fill every band possible of the electromagnetic spectrum with digital noise, despite how hungry our devices seem for additional bandwidth.
I have a dozen or so DRM channels programmed into my SDR. Even a couple of MW AM ones.
And I tune through them every day or two.
The problem is that the performance of DRM is terrible. It takes a hugely strong signal before it is free of drop-outs, plus is very intolerant of any interference on the same channel. And of course drop-outs with DRM are very jarring, as they lock up the channel for many seconds.
When compared with a conventional AM Transmitter from the same city, at the same power, the AM TX is far more pleasant to listen to.
AM radio is still my go-to for sports. Nothing like summertime and MLB on the radio while I work on a side project in the garage. College football and basketball too. Love those hometown announcers!
I would like to see a "national public" satellite radio. Pump the National Weather Service and another channel or few with public domain entertainment on it, to get people to buy them (eg. Eton radios) and chuck them in the closet for a severe weather or disaster event.
I understand the science decently, but I don't understand the economic feasibility. I assume if it were feasible, it would have been done by now.
But it seems like something that will become more economically feasible in the near future as space transport progresses.
In rural Saskatchewan, where I am from, farmers listen to AM radio literally all day long because they don't get good FM reception. It's too sparse and the demographic is too non-technical to even know what Spotify is.
My city has a newsradio AM station that's still doing well and lots of people listen for the traffic reports, but they started simulcasting on FM as well recently to futureproof themselves. The FM signal has far better sound quality of course but thats not really necessary for news reports. But the AM signal can frequently be heard when the FM is completely lost to interference.
I dont know of any other big am stations, my car has separate presets per band, so newsradio is permanently on for the AM signal and their FM is frequently on the fm preset.
> On the other, companies like Tesla stopped shipping AM radio entirely, and if you want to add it on, they'll gladly retrofit your EV for $500.
Reason #27 for not buying a Tesla. When you're on the highway and see the flashing lights saying "Tune to 520 AM for adverse road conditions" what are you going to do?
Usually these signs are on interstates in the middle of nowhere (e.g. mountain/forest/desert). It's not unusual not to have a signal.
And frankly, even if you did have a signal, it's not likely Waze will be of much help. There are often few travelers on that road, and chances are none of them is using Waze.
How do the signs get the updates? Could be satellite but it’s probably 3G/LTE unless someone is manually setting it, but then it’s probably made it’s way into Waze when it was last online.
Let me give you a real scenario. I was entering a hilly/mountainous region, and the sign said "Tune in to AM 520 for rock slide information when lights are flashing" and the lights were flashing. You're just going to ignore that?
Yes, that is exactly what I, and most other people, would do. Do you REALLY believe that anything other than a minuscule percent of drivers would tune into such a warning? I doubt that even one out of a hundred would.
US2 over Stevens Pass near me has a similar useless warning that some miniscule percent of drivers ever tune in to. The AM radio broadcast us just going to say to use caution because rocks may appear on the roadway unexpectedly. A normal person is able to infer that caution is needed based on the terrain and the “rock slide information broadcast” sign.
It's not a Tesla thing, really, it's an EV thing. You'll have to stick with ICEV for the foreseeable future if you need access to AM. The electric motors cause a lot of interference.
It's not that simple. Ford, GM, Hyundai and Kia at least have figured out how to put an AM radio in an EV. Tesla and some European EVs don't have AM radios[0].
Someone started an AM radio station in my small town which has managed to survive for 7+ years now so there must be a workable business model there. They focus on hyper-local news & sports coverage that you just can't get anywhere else. The really clever thing they did was to use the launch of the radio station and broadcast location downtown as advertisement for their streaming app. They got a lot of local news coverage and public interest simply by doing something unusual like starting a new AM radio station in a tiny town. They still do AM but I believe the vast majority of their listeners stream. Super clever because someone like my Dad would never know a streaming station existed but he knows they exist because he can drive by the studio and see them broadcasting through the window.
What's the station's call? I’m always curious about these small broadcasters. I believe there's still a lot of potential left in terrestrial radio. The domination of the airwaves by private equity, however, is only going to squeeze it to death.
I would love to see AM radio opened up to private citizens. Take podcasting and move it to AM radio, where a person can pay or subscribe to a frequency and broadcast on it. Not so much as a corporation but something easier, cheaper, and more accessible to average citizens. Maybe that's a recipe for disaster but it's an idea..
> U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens explained the attitude of the FCC, in his opinion, in a 1978 decision on George Carlin's famous "Filthy Language" piece about the seven dirty words:
> “Patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen, not only in public, but also in the privacy of the home, where the individual's right to be let alone plainly outweighs the First Amendment rights of an intruder.”
The handbook goes on in detail about what the station will accept and what it won't, but the point is simple: The airwaves are not as free as the Internet, and giving the broadcast booth to the average person is legally dangerous to the station. Getting the average person to understand copyright is one thing, especially since most of the oiks insist it's about plagiarism and attribution, but allowing someone who thinks Carlin's Seven Words are a good starting point to broadcast without a filter is going to get the station shut down.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadAM may have it's technical limitations, specifically when compared to FM, but as a medium it's not dead and I doubt it's about to be anytime soon. It's still very popular amongst political talk, at least here in the U.S.
Edit: spelling
I can get an AM signal in the middle of nowhere with a diode and a bunch of wires.
To be clear the shift to all digital is happening but am/fm radio has a long ways to go before being irrelevant and this shift will likely take a few more decades. Don't sleep on traditional media.
Others say $25 billion globally for terrestrial/OTA and satellite combined, and those physical mediums appear to be a shrinking slice of that. You can see the industry scrambling to redefine all live-streaming audio as "radio" as radio-the-medium evaporates.
Something about just broadcasting whatever you want into a protected frequency band for anyone with an antenna to hear seems really cool.
And even low-power AM transmission stations need an annoying amount of physical plant maintenance—cutting grass, trimming overgrowth, fixing all the random annoying issues that crop up when maintaining any kind of equipment at a remote site (theft, rodents, water ingress, cooling, power, comms, etc.).
Lots of fire and brimstone, and right wing talk radio. Which isn't that weird, it's what you'd expect given our media ecosystem.
But also really niche stuff. A friend of mine told me there's an AM radio station in NYC which plays nothing but Black Metal.
Many of these stations carry Coast to Coast late at night, which is about as weird as you get.
Anything a little less mainstream which is cheap to get into.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Hai
But late night AM, you get "Ministry in the Marketplace with Dr. Richard Hamlet" on WEZE 590. This is the craziest right wingnut radio I've ever heard, even including shortwave. Last week they were ranting on about the "death vaccine".
"By the 1950s, America had forgotten the Biblical principles that it was founded on. In the mid-60s, government-controlled education was implemented. At that time, The Foundation for American Christian Education was formed to help limit that control by educating families and even schools on the . . ."
As for the Loving Hut restaurants... oh, that's what I went to downtown? It did seem culty. They were playing some video on a loop about world peace, etc. I've gotta say, though, their vegan shrimp were quite good - a very good approximation down to the texture.
but that's not exactly true unless you wear an eye patch, roll your Rs when you speak, have a wooden leg, and have a parrot perched on your shoulder.
that $200k buys you equipment and land. it does not include any licensing or royalty payments for the content you ultimately decide to broadcast. if you have a full 100k flamethrower of a transmitter, the utility bill for that bad boy is not something I'll envy from you.
don't know the level of urban legend, but i have heard that BASE jumpers that climb to the top of a tower to jump will start to feel their fillings heat up by the time they get to the top.
I guess that’s not really a thing, but it’s gotta be cheap if you’re sharing some portion of revenue that they weren’t otherwise getting.
That's like asking how long is a piece of string?
How much is part of negotiations. The more people following, the higher the number. The larger the ego of the podcast producer(s), the higher the number. The more desperate the radio op is, the higher the number. If the podcaster has a set price tag type of licensing, then they must be new or are very naive or just don't feel like negotiating. In content licensing, you always shoot high in negotiations. If they come back with a yes on the first offer, you learn to shoot even higher the next time as you're leaving money on the table. If they do the more natural response of a much lower counter, then you get to play the traditional game. If they are someone so big of a broadcaster that they come in with an offer, never accept on first offer either. Always make them provide at least a second offer.*
*I'm not a professional anything in this regard, so don't take the word of rando inteweb person. Talk to your lawyers regarding licensing offers. I'm just someone who has been near/around these things for a long time.
Bought an old Cambridge AM station for cheap.. runs at low power to keep the costs low.
Check out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WJIB (740 AM)
For years they had no commercials, but took donations (but they were never non-profit).
If I ever get ridiculous amounts of money that could be burned on frivolous stuff like this without a worry, I'd make something similar to Fallout's radio stations.
[edit] they even have portable ones! (look up "Randy", no SSB though). And with a half decent SDR you can record the whole 40 channels at once, to see if there is anything worth joining in.
It's worth noting that for decades, FM was considered a graveyard of talk programming, with occasional classical mixed in. Today, the situation has been reversed.
In cities where there is enough money to produce good content, AM radio does well. In smaller places, where there isn't enough money available to create good content, AM stations are very often relegated to satellite- and internet-fed formats.
The most recent Chicago ratings I can quickly find¹ (June, 2022) show AM doing well, with AM stations ranking #5, #11, #23, #25 and #27 in a market of over 50 stations.
But even in small places, while the FMs will dominate all day long, a good AM or three will dominate the morning drive when they present local programming.
Electric cars are starting to be a problem for AM radio, which is why so many now have FM translators, and free internet streams. But AM will have a place on the air for a very long time to come.
/I've worked for about a dozen different AM stations in my lifetime.
¹ https://robertfeder.dailyherald.com/2022/06/13/chicago-radio...
I'll occasionally find a decent AM music station even these days, and when it's not being overwhelmed by all the modern RF noise, it sounds just fine.
It's not really a good idea to look at these two stations to get an idea of the health of the entire AM market. These two are giant class A clear channel stations that date back to the 1920s and the origination of AM radio licenses. Being in the center of the continent they can do omnidirectional broadcasting without "wasting" power like a station on the coast would. They're among the few that can still afford to be "local" station with very little syndicated content (and broadcast a lot of sports to vast swaths of the US and Canada that have no local professional sports team), and they'll probably be among the last of the AM stations to shut down.
I invoked the old radios because you certainly heard a lot of music through them and they all used AM, whether over medium-wave or short-wave frequencies. Same for the ubiquitous All-American Five tabletop/kitchen radios; I've owned them, they sound just fine if you can find an AM station that's playing music.
It transmits almost the same audio bandwidth as does FM. The problem is the cheap and crappy radios designed for the USA market which have flooded the market.
Whatever, try getting a high-quality AM radio and having a listen. For example one of the upmarket SDR radios with variable IF filters.
¹ https://www.thedrive.com/news/heres-why-some-automakers-tune...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1610_AM
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers%27_information_stati...
[2] Yellowstone National Park 1610 recording. https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=E4A26B7F-1DD8-B7...
Cutting edge tech in the early aughts, it ran on AA batteries and had a tape player, a microphone, and an aux in. My broadcasts made it across the cul-de-sac from my room. It was immensely enjoyable.
I (try to) walk at least an hour a day. I also hike trails. Ever seen a bear wait for Click and Clack[0] demonstrating the noise a worn CV join makes? Nor have I. ;-)
I have several hobbies which involve manual labour, but no major attention required (weeding, kneading, etc.). I can listen to the radio and still enjoy my hobby.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Talk
I have heard some here and there, but nothing close to them. :'(
I have heard a station in California (do not know call sign), the motor man, or the motoring man. There was also in Detroit a station where two guys tried to pick up similar like C&C, car show or something.
I'm not even remotely a car guy but they're super entertaining. Perhaps one (two) of a kind talent.
There's quite a lot of that stuff -- but it's not the only kind of programming in the dial.
Some (many?) new cars don’t have AM radios. And since people in cars seems to be a huge chunk of AM/FM radio listenership that’s a very big problem for AM stations.
I know the Mustang Mach-E removed it in the newer models.
What's more surprising to me at this point is Sirius. I just don't understand how this is still a $22 billion dollar company, doing $9 billion in revenue and is still growing revenue. I don't see where the value is. I haven't subscribed in almost a decade but when I left, the audio quality was really bad -- terrible digital compression artifacts -- and there wasn't really anything that interesting in terms of musical programming that couldn't be had with a streaming service like Spotify. Maybe it's all Stern and sports content that's driving revenue or is there still a big legion of people who actually subscribe for the music?
I'm certain places like that exist, but I'm guessing it's far less than most would imagine.
My bet is a non-insignificant amount of sirus's money today comes from their model of making subscriptions really annoying to cancel. And, of course, preying on old people that may have forgot about their subscription or don't get streaming.
I wonder if it's worth waiting for T-Mobile's satellite features, or if I should move to Verizon?
Driving up from the SF Bay to Tahoe, you'll lose cell service as you pass through the mountains - especially if you take the Highway 50 route. Drive up to Oregon, and you'll lose cell service for a long stretch roughly near Klamath Falls. (As an aside, that part of the country doesn't even have NEXRAD weather radar.)
And this is all while on the freeway or major highways. There's plenty of places out west without a reliable cell signal, or sometimes a signal that's so weak that it's not usable for data.
For me it mostly replaces my CD changer, which doesn't exist in newer cars. When I can't decide what to listen to, have poor signal, or don't want to fiddle with the controls, it gives me a nice selection on fallbacks.
I mean my music is downloaded for offline use and I don’t want a radio style of listening experience, but for my parents it is the only viable way for them to listen to music on that drive. And with regular radio you’re going to be trying to find stations you want to listen to as you live in and out of range.
Granted my parents also have a grandfathered lifetime membership.
It works out to be $120/year, and that's with Howard Stern, and all the sports etc.
Could I do all this streaming with my phone? Most likely, however with this I don't worry when I drive down into the States that I'm now "Roaming" or really worry about data usage at all. Also I don't have to think about it.
Given that, if free-trials convert at a steady rate, voila, you have growth.
In terms of why people like it:
1) There's something somewhat Tik-Tik-like about having hyper-specialized music served to you without putting in the work of building a playlist
2) Streaming services have the somewhat annoying tendency of 'recommending' new songs to you so they can pay the artists less, since they were a 'discovery' mechanism. This leads to bad outcomes if all you want is 80's on 8 (said differently, if you like 80's music, chances are you know the songs you like already)
3) The lowest their is $13/month, which is cheaper than a phone plan with more data for a lot of people
4) There's a certain 'Sunday Ticket/League Pass' element, since you can get the radio coverage of nearly any pro sports game (even in home markets I often struggle to find the radio coverage of certain games)
5) For the traditional satellite service, they're broadcast only so they have no idea what any subscriber is listening to at any point, and some people like that.
A few years later I was taking a multi state trip and reactivated, when I got back I re-subbed both vehicles. It's any kind of radio with almost no interruptions and it's worth the price.
Newer cars collect data on what you're listening to and report back. At least on mine it can be disabled, but it is something that's out there.
Most of their music stations are basically well-curated, 4-hour playlists. Most channels have guest hosts/DJs that are legitimate to the genres (e.g. Diplo hosts his station at times) that update the playlists periodically. I still augment my music with Apple Music and podcasts, but I spend far more time with Sirius.
The unfortunate part is that they still play stupid and hostile pricing games. "Promotions" that you have to call to renew to get the stupid $25/month charge reduced to like $7/month. At that price it beats Pandora, terrestrial (am/fm) radio, and even Spotify/Apple Music if you primarily listen to curated playlists.
This is stuff like fishing recommendations by species, sea surface heights, temperature contors, 30m deep temperature condors, plankton concentrations, weather radar, storm tracks, wave heights, and more and then integrated into common Garmin, Raymarine, Lowrance, Simrad, and other equipment that many boats would already have. All of that data constantly updated and refreshed live even when you're miles out to sea and can't pick up common line of sight style transmissions.
Its not just a METAR weather report from an airport kinda near the shore.
I am switching my subscription from satellite to streaming because I will save a pretty significant portion of the monthly fee, I stream everything else I listen to or watch at home, in the office, or in the car, and the CarPlay experience is much better when you are using 100% streaming audio.
still gonna donate to Soma.FM tho
My dad subscribes for Bruce Springsteen's channel/show/whatever. Dude just can never get enough of Springsteen. I'd imagine there are other fans of other artists doing the same.
The app. Not the satellite. The satellite sound quality is horrible. I can see how satellite was worth it before 4G, but now I just use my phone in the car.
So Sirius XM there it is.
But with my current driving habits that's maybe one or two weeks a year where I would really care to have it.
In no way am i able to understand how radio would be a better alternative, but thats just my own bias.
I'm sure Spotify has its own advantages (I'm a long-time Pandora user, haven't tried it) but not having to plan anything in advance and having full access to all of the stations in the middle of nowhere is quite nice.
I just let myself be lured, and anticipate doing so next time.
Yes it’s dumb but sxm also works better for my personal situation than Spotify etc.
Siris radio works everywhere you aren't driving next to something blocking the line of sight to the sky. It maintains the channel across significant distances so you're not hunting for "ok, what to listen to next?" (one time when driving to my grandparents house for Thanksgiving and changing the station as one faded I heard Alices Restaurant four times).
The main thing with Siris for driving is that its got DJs and news and such.
On my great road trip I had an iPod loaded up with songs and had that on shuffle for a few months... and while I had a few hundred hours of songs, they were all things I heard before.
Part of listening to the radio, Spotify, or Siris is that the next song might be something different.
---
https://4m3ric4.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33217395
That's how I use Spotify, and I've gotten the impression that nobody at Spotify has actually eaten their own dogfood w.r.t. offline listening:
- Downloaded songs/albums/playlists will occasionally un-download themselves
- Even when they're already downloaded, the UI will occasionally insist on loading some online resource, preventing me from actually picking something out of my downloaded library until either I regain cell reception or the UI eventually gives up
Meanwhile, Spotify's radio feature seems to be getting progressively worse, and gaps are popping up in its library. Spotify was at one point the thing that got me to stop pirating music; I'm about ready to start doing so again (or buying from Bandcamp for the select few artists I listen to with music on there).
Sirius still exists because FM radio is absolute dogshit in the US thanks to the Clear Channel/iHeartMedia conglomerate effectively owning everything.
Your FM dial is absolutely terrible unless you happen to live near a good college radio station or an unusual city (San Diego can pick up some interesting Mexican stations, for example).
I've been subscribing for about a decade and I haven't experienced this. Possibly something in the tech stack here has improved.
> there wasn't really anything that interesting in terms of musical programming that couldn't be had with a streaming service like Spotify
It's easier and cheaper to get satellite radio in a moving car than reliable Internet. You can save music offline (although I find a USB stick a much easier way of doing that than a smartphone with an app with offline storage, but then again most of the music I listen to is at least a couple of decades old), but you can't get live broadcasts of things like sports events or concerts.
I've listened to Sirius in several environments across many years, spanning most of its existence. In just about every case, I found the audio quality to be intolerably terrible. This is in multiple cars in different years. Curiously, I've noticed a strain of people that claim that it sounds good. Sometimes, I've been in the same car with them at the same time, listening to the same thing. I can't account for it. I'm generally not an audio snob, but satellite radio sounds so bad, I can't stand it at all. I'd rather have silence.
I'm not sure the underlying reason for this, but I guess some people just hear differently.
I would say it sounds good, exactly; I can notice a difference between it and, say, listening to a high quality recording from a USB stick. But I wouldn't say it's intolerably terrible, either. Is it that you literally can't hear music, just noise? Or is it that you can hear music, but with other noise overlaid on top of it?
I've also read the Sirius version is worse than the XM version. Yes, they merged many years ago but they still run two incompatible systems. Ford was still installing Sirius until 2021.
I wasn't aware of this. This would explain why I am not seeing the sound quality issues that other people in this discussion are describing; my latest vehicle has XM.
I'm about to leave. Every time I go to cancel, they hook me in with a pretty good deal. Last time it was "How about $9 for the next six months?" I thought they meant $9/month. Nope, a one-off charge.
But if I listen to any channel over the course of a day, I am guaranteed to hear the same song three-four times and their diversity/catalog seems very limited.
It may as well be dead because if you removed the regulation it would still be 90% noise.
But AM is still bread and butter for South/Central America and Africa. Not sure how much it is used in Southeast Asia but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was still very popular there too.
Eventually it’ll be gone due to the inevitable March of technology, but it has plenty of life left in it.
1430 AM ("The Crazy Q") was the last bastion of oldies in the 50s, early 60s sense. Its license, as well as a few others, were held by a man who was a convicted felon and apparently that's a no-no. Anyway, it folded and that was that.
I dig around and there's just not much else I can find on the AM band aside from talk, some kind of Catholic radio, sports ...
But what happens with the spectrum if we just turn it off? The ~1MHz band is basically useless to digital transmission. There's not enough (literal) bandwidth to put anything modern on it, and the transmission characteristics lack the ionospheric reflections of short wave, so it's only a to-the-horizon kind of thing anyway.
So do we just turn it off? Is there anything useful to do with it? Or is there interesting astronomy we could do without the interference?
Maybe the reason AM radio continues limping along is that there really aren't any takers and this is just junk spectrum?
That said, there's also probably nothing wrong with leaving spectrum quiet. We don't need to fill every band possible of the electromagnetic spectrum with digital noise, despite how hungry our devices seem for additional bandwidth.
Podcasts and radio are very different mediums. I don't think one adequately replaces the other.
And I tune through them every day or two.
The problem is that the performance of DRM is terrible. It takes a hugely strong signal before it is free of drop-outs, plus is very intolerant of any interference on the same channel. And of course drop-outs with DRM are very jarring, as they lock up the channel for many seconds.
When compared with a conventional AM Transmitter from the same city, at the same power, the AM TX is far more pleasant to listen to.
I understand the science decently, but I don't understand the economic feasibility. I assume if it were feasible, it would have been done by now.
But it seems like something that will become more economically feasible in the near future as space transport progresses.
I dont know of any other big am stations, my car has separate presets per band, so newsradio is permanently on for the AM signal and their FM is frequently on the fm preset.
Reason #27 for not buying a Tesla. When you're on the highway and see the flashing lights saying "Tune to 520 AM for adverse road conditions" what are you going to do?
Look at Waze to see what's actually happening, like I always do.
And frankly, even if you did have a signal, it's not likely Waze will be of much help. There are often few travelers on that road, and chances are none of them is using Waze.
US2 over Stevens Pass near me has a similar useless warning that some miniscule percent of drivers ever tune in to. The AM radio broadcast us just going to say to use caution because rocks may appear on the roadway unexpectedly. A normal person is able to infer that caution is needed based on the terrain and the “rock slide information broadcast” sign.
It's not a Tesla thing, really, it's an EV thing. You'll have to stick with ICEV for the foreseeable future if you need access to AM. The electric motors cause a lot of interference.
[0] https://www.thedrive.com/news/heres-why-some-automakers-tune...
https://www.1015kfgm.org/_files/ugd/7578a3_dcafddc8fa53435d9...
And the relevant quote:
> U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens explained the attitude of the FCC, in his opinion, in a 1978 decision on George Carlin's famous "Filthy Language" piece about the seven dirty words:
> “Patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen, not only in public, but also in the privacy of the home, where the individual's right to be let alone plainly outweighs the First Amendment rights of an intruder.”
The handbook goes on in detail about what the station will accept and what it won't, but the point is simple: The airwaves are not as free as the Internet, and giving the broadcast booth to the average person is legally dangerous to the station. Getting the average person to understand copyright is one thing, especially since most of the oiks insist it's about plagiarism and attribution, but allowing someone who thinks Carlin's Seven Words are a good starting point to broadcast without a filter is going to get the station shut down.