New initiatives, 1960–80

FM growth

During the 1960s FM radio became the fastest-growing segment of the broadcast business in the United States. In 1961 the FCC approved technical standards for stereophonic radio, a decision that helped place FM at the centre of the country’s growing interest in high-fidelity sound while also providing a service not available on AM. The commission’s mid-1960s decisions to limit program simulcasting by co-owned AM and FM stations also greatly helped FM’s expansion. By 1970 FM stations were appearing in major market audience ratings, and by the end of the decade total national FM listening had surged ahead of AM. At this point FM programs covered the musical gamut from classics to the latest popular trends.

Japan experimented with FM for a decade before stations opened in major cities in 1969. The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications sought to have an FM station in every prefecture and at least two in each major city, and all of them were to be advertiser-supported. For a time in the 1970s and ’80s, a raft of FM minitransmitters called “free radio” were very popular, broadcasting music and advertising over a radius of only about 1,000 metres (3,000 feet). Few were licensed, however, and many were later closed down.

Probably the most extreme examples of the potential of local FM radio took place in the 1970s in both France and Italy. A number of unlicensed small FM stations went on the air in Italy in late 1974 and into 1975. When an Italian court held that the state broadcasting authority did not have a monopoly on local radio, hundreds of new stations followed, and by mid-1978 some 2,200 were on the air, providing Italians with the most radio stations per person of any country. Stations programmed music and advertising and often strongly political viewpoints (from both the right and the left). France went through a more limited version of the trend: by the early 1980s there would be more than 100 such stations in Paris alone.

Pirates and public-service radio

Despite (or perhaps because of) their high-quality programming, Europe’s monopolized public-service radio systems provided little popular music and no opportunity for broadcast advertisers. In 1958 the first “pirate” (unlicensed) broadcasters appeared, using transmitters built into small ships moored beyond territorial limits. The first, Radio Murcur, began service off Denmark in July 1958; it was followed by Radio Veronica two years later. A Swedish pirate station began operating in 1961, and Radio Veronica provided transmissions into Britain the same year. Radio Caroline began popular music broadcasts into Britain in 1964. Shipboard stations were soon also stationed off Italy, France, and New Zealand. All the affected countries passed laws to limit advertiser support and provision of supplies to such broadcasters, but the transmissions continued, rapidly building huge audiences. Land-based pirate stations appeared in several countries (several hundred in France alone, for example), but many were short-lived because of stringent laws limiting their operation (though in smaller communities they were often left alone).

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) finally responded to the growing appeal of the pirates with the creation in 1967 of a popular music network, Radio 1, and the first of nearly three dozen local radio stations not programmed from London. The first approved commercial radio competition for the BBC appeared in 1973 (two decades after the British introduced competitive television). Similarly, in an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach, many other pirate-targeted countries offered more popular radio channels and even advertising on licensed stations. Radio France began its own local radio stations in the late 1970s.

The common ingredient of most pirate stations was American Top 40 music, which was otherwise unobtainable over national public-service radio systems in Europe. The fastest way for a pirate to achieve success with both audiences and advertisers was to develop (or import) American-style disc jockeys and their fast-paced music-and-talk formats. A number of British deejays moved over to the establishment (legal) broadcasters, who slowly incorporated popular music into their repertoires in response to the pirates. Johnny Walker, for example, became popular on Radio Caroline and later shifted to BBC’s Radio 1; in the mid-1970s, he even worked on American radio. Doing it the other way around, John Peel began in American radio in the 1960s, later joining pirate Radio London and then transferring to Radio 1.

In the face of competition from American commercial stations rather than pirates, broadcasts from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) network reached virtually all of English- and French-speaking Canada by the mid-1960s. The first Canadian FM stations were developed as part of a continued expansion of the CBC. In the late 1950s a dedicated service to indigenous people in Canada’s north was begun, and in the next decade it was expanded to use shortwave. Resisting American commercial counterpressure in the 1960s, Canada restricted imported radio programs (chiefly from the United States) in what turned out to be a hugely successful attempt to promote Canadian music and musicians.

In the United States, which was already enjoying a surfeit of local outlets, the first new radio networks in decades appeared; these were tailored to the needs of stations, rather than the other way around. Early in 1968 ABC unveiled four new radio networks to replace its traditional single feed. Each network focused on a different format (e.g., music, news, talk, FM), and in less than a year ABC’s networks collectively were serving more than twice as many affiliates as the single network had enjoyed earlier. Even more dramatic was the arrival two years later of the first American national public-service radio network.

National Public Radio (NPR) appeared in 1970 as the first American national network linking noncommercial stations. It developed a slowly expanding schedule of news and culture, and it distributed programs produced by member stations in major markets. Rather than the receiver licenses common in Europe, NPR was supported in large part by corporate and individual donations (or “memberships”), plus some federal and state tax revenues. By the late 1970s the 300 NPR member (affiliate) stations—which would more than double in number in the next two decades—were carrying the highly popular All Things Considered afternoon public-affairs program, among many others, and had developed a small but loyal audience. NPR did not serve hundreds of smaller FM outlets that were deemed too marginal to contribute to a national service. Hundreds of smaller community stations, therefore, unable to participate in NPR funding and membership, were forced to rely heavily on volunteer employees and community-based programming.