Post #3941544
2026-07-19 06:35 UTC
Replies (2)
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@newsgoth@infosec.exchange 2026-07-19 20:16
@james@bne.social No doubt you've seen the number of stations in the United States and Canada turning in their licenses. Some were quite robust stations, such as Vancouver's CKWX. But the ad dollars are evaporating. Then there's the big drop in sale values. For example, a San Francisco cluster was bought for a mere $10 million earlier this year. Gigantic iHeartRadio is having layoffs on a regular basis. American broadcasters seem to be stuck in their 40-year-old programming dogmas and totally are lacking in any vision for a future very different than the landscape of the recent past. They're in survival mode at best. I was in Europe last month; the one saving grace for radio there may be DAB+, but it's got its own problems. In the Netherlands, I noticed a couple of local stations in the west that had given up their FM allocations in favor of a DAB+ channel. And coverage in France can be spotty (still) outside major regional centers. Few commercial broadcasters there seem to be asking the question, "is there something other than the adult contemporary hits my ten competitors are playing?" By the way, I also happened to be within listening distance (Rennes) for the shutdown of BBC longwave on 198 kHz toward the end of June. It was eerie to hear the audio loop telling people to use other means to hear Radio 4.
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@rae@bne.social 2026-07-20 07:49
@james@bne.social "down 50 minutes from 20 years ago". That's a lot, all things considered. I suspect personal music streaming is really killing the generic music stations, and talk stations tend to have smaller TSLs to start with.