Radio dominated the first half of the 20th century but the advent of affordable TV sets in the 1950s seemed to spell doom for the format. Yet, radio endured. Radio was able to create a distinct image for itself, separate from TV. I have own theories as to why (cars, transistor radios and the music industry) but nothing conclusive.
Why are podcasts (read talk radio) still crazy popular? Cause sometimes you just want to listen without having to pay attention visually
I listen to the radio a lot. The BBC has some excellent radio on offer. My favourite is Radio 6 Music, a DAB-only station that just plays music all day. Various DJs, a bit of chat, but mostly music. No ads. Like others have said, it doesn’t demand attention, you can listen or not.
Cars. For the majority of the 20th century, radio was pretty much the only way to listen to music in a car. That alone was likely enough to keep it economically viable.
IIRC Motorola started out making car radios and the name is motor(car) and the at the time popular -ola suffix for forming product names.
The amount of attention. You never sit down and say ‘I’m going to listen to some radio’. Radio gets half your attention at best. When it’s a movie or a streaming service or a TV then there’s a battle on. When it’s a background thing that requires little effort and (if you choose your station), it’ll be broadly acceptable, why would you move away? Whether it be in your workplace, car or home, easily delivered engaging content wins. Unlike TV and physical press, Radio is not a ‘burning platform’, it has a few years left. Citation. I Ieft radio recently after 35 years in it. I wouldn’t advise joining it as a career choice, but as mentioned, I think it’ll be around for a while yet. (To the guys who say ‘Cars’. All new cars are online now)
To the guys who say ‘Cars’. All new cars are online now
To be fair, I bet there’s a large market of people too cheap for a Spotify subscription but also too lazy to load music on their phone, who just want some sort of distraction while driving. After all, cars have had alternate ways to play music for decades now (8 tracks, cassettes, CDs, MP3 players via Aux).
Radio and TV are like apples and oranges. Sure, they’re both fruit, but they’re different enough to occupy different niches in our diets
I’d agree with you on cars — cheap and easy to keep throwing radios in.
Sidebar: Not many classic radio shows made the transition to tv. Jack Benny, literally the most popular of shows, had a rough switch to TV because the timing was so different. For example: Instead of a foley guy doing a doorbell sound and immediately having it open, you now have a camera spending a couple seconds tracking someone walking across the room to answer a door in silence. The vaudeville structure of having a song in the middle, or trying to put on a show as the premise of the show, didn’t work (until the Muppets). Then there’s the whole laugh track or laugh box juicing issue that some railed against or over-embraced, and it all kind of fell apart. A few managed, but it was rare.
Radio didn’t survive TV. It didn’t totally die yet, but it’s been trending towards death. Lots of radio shows couldn’t transition to TV and died out. Lots of stations simply stopped existing, or relied more heavily on syndication. It wasn’t all TV related, as systems advanced, you didn’t need a DJ selecting and playing individual songs. Companies were also allowed to own more stations from the 80s to 96 when all caps were removed, which led.to massive consolidation.
Podcasting has led to a resurgence of the talk show format, but less so radio.
Radio still exists, but it’s mostly due to the last vestiges of public good legislation.
Idk if this is TV tho. I think consildiation did a lot of this work. Like radio shows are too regionally huge now. Imagine you had a radio station that both played decent music and it was based in your specific neighborhood/town. It kept you up to date on cool stuff going on there. That would actually be useful to tune in to from time to time. But now its just “that city within 50 miles of me”. Small town radio died.
They are two different offerings. I listen to a lot of radio and I watch television too. For instance, radio is great for concerts (letting your fantasy run with the music), or listening to while you work. For tv you need to sit down and can’t really do much else, the experience is much more intense.
TVs weren’t portable.
1950s were before my time but later in the same century, FM radio was what we had instead of internet music and streaming. You could call radio stations and request particular songs, or sometimes they would announce that they would play some new album nonstop starting at 7pm, so you would be ready with your cassette deck. Or in general, they’d just play music all day, so you’d always have something to listen to. That’s sort of what people do now anyway, except it’s whatever the youtube algorithm is promoting instead of what the record labels were paying the radio stations to play. TV was never a 24/7 music medium like that. I guess MTV was a thing for a while but that was still different.
AM radio on the other hand was mostly for news and sports updates, particularly in cars. So the most valuable advertising slots were during “drive time”, i.e. commute hours.
It takes a long time for new technologies to saturate the market. It would have taken decades from the release of the first TVs until 80% or more of people had one in their home. Likewise, it took decades before a sizable proportion of people had internet access. It is only now that cable television is not a thing that most people pay for access to–replaced by streaming services.
As TV was taking over, Radio and Cinema would have had their place. Radio still has a place in nearly every automobile sold across the entire planet.
Well, why would radio be superseded by TV? Imagine any situation in which a person could listen to radio. Could they just switch to a TV? Would they want to switch to a TV?
