No matter what happens, I will always love AM radio. Here’s why.
[This was my column for Global News,ca. – AC]
It’s been a tough couple of years for anyone who loves AM radio.
Things began to wobble before the pandemic as new, younger media buyers — people who did not grow up with radio — started shuffling advertising dollars towards digital platforms away from traditional media. That hurt all terrestrial radio, but AM in particular because it tends to attract an older demo.
Things got worse when it became apparent that big foreign tech companies — Google, Facebook, and so on — sucked more ad dollars out of the Canadian ecosystem.
Next, manufacturers of electric vehicles claimed that they couldn’t offer AM radio in their dashboards because of the electromagnetic interference caused by EV motors. Depending on who you talk to, this claim may or may not be bogus.
This issue reached the U.S. Congress, resulting in the introduction AM Radio for All Vehicles Act of 2023. But time is running out. It still needs to pass the Senate, House, and the president before it can become law. With a presidential election just a few months away, it may die on the agenda.
Further pressure came from abroad with stories of medium wave (Europe’s term for AM) stations either going silent or moving to other bands, notably DAB (digital audio broadcasting), something that we don’t have — and never will have — here in North America.
The financial situation, compounded by an aging and decreasing audience, has become so dire that broadcasting companies have been letting some of their AM stations go dark, including CHML/Hamilton, which began broadcasting in 1927, one of half a dozen Canadian transmitters that have been turned off so far this year.
