I am sure most of us can look back on something that happened to us when we were young that changed our lives. When I think back personally, I look to an important event of the early 1960s.
That’s when my brother Tom and I received a gift from our parents….we each now had a 2-transistor radio. In today’s world, that is not very high tech, but in those days, having a battery-operated radio you could take anywhere was a new and neat thing to have.
You couldn’t separate me from my little radio after that. I listened all the time. All that listening sparked my interest about how radio works, how it is broadcast and mostly sparked my curiosity about the people speaking into the microphones.
That fascination turned into a profession in the late 1960s. I graduated from a broadcast trade school and set out to be on the radio. That is how I made my living until the summer of 1983.
Those memories came back when the news broke just days ago that Jeff Smulyan, owner of Emmis Broadcasting, announced that he had sold all his Indianapolis radio stations to the national chain, Urban One.
It is hard to compare the broadcasting business where I toiled to the industry of today. In my day, no one person or company could own more than 7 AM radio stations, 7 FM radio stations and no more than 7 television stations. Most broadcast company owners were small enterprises by today’s standards. Let’s just say the broadcast property owners of those days were often very colorful characters.
Also, in my broadcasting time, you had to be a U.S. citizen to own an American broadcast property. A man named Rupert Murdoch lobbied to get that law changed.
Based on reporting from the Indianapolis Business Journal, Urban One paid roughly $25 million to buy WIBC-FM 93.1, WYXB-FM 105.7 (B105), WLHK-FM 97.1 (Hank FM), as well as WFNI-FM 93.5 and 105.5 (both known as The Fan)
Emmis only owns 2 radio stations now, both in the New York City market and one wonders how long they will remain Emmis properties.
The fact is, radio is on a downhill slide as a business and I write this with no joy. These stations were once gold mines. There was only so much room on the spectrum, so there were only so many radio frequencies available . That meant, if you were a radio station owner, you were holding a valuable property.
Because of that, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) demanded that radio stations serve the public. One important component of that was having a news department.
I was working in radio news in the early 1980s when Ronald Reagan was elected president. His appointees to the FCC had a different view – station ownership no longer needed to serve the public or provide local news operations. If you want to be a juke box and play nothing but music and commercials all day, that was suddenly fine with the government. That is a major reason I left the business in July of 1983, knowing there would be less news on radio.
Then the federal regulation of radio was loosened even further, allowing larger collections of stations for one owner. For example, iHeartMedia today owns roughly 855 radio stations in the U.S.
In an era when you can stream all the music you want and can instantly call up news on your cell phone, radio is not as relevant as it once was. The sale of the Emmis stations, a company that was once one of the largest holders of radio properties nationally, means that firm is clearly getting out of the business
When television blossomed into American homes in the 1950s, many opined that radio was done. But radio reinvented itself, made the product something different and continued to thrive.
My question is this – will radio reinvent itself again, or is the business I once loved headed to history?
Time will tell.
