According to a 2022 study by Edison Research and Triton Digital, 32% to 39% of American households do not have a traditional physical AM/FM radio receiver in their home.
Younger people report even lower in-home listenership. 57% of Americans aged 12–34 reporting no AM/FM radio in their home. Not one single radio!
Is there any bright side to this? Not really. Only 60% to 68% of Americans still report having at least one radio device, and most car-owning households still have access to a vehicle radio, but none of this indicates a rosy future for the radio industry.
I still have a clock radio. It’s tuned to WETA from Washington DC, as it has been for the last 30 years. (Call me peculiar but I enjoy waking up to Classical music.) I once mentioned this to a co-worker (aged 56) who found the idea of a clock radio mind boggling and told me he didn’t have any radios in his household, so it’s not just younger people who are giving up on the medium.
This thread is over 3 years old, so I’m wondering if companies have followed through on this and actually removed AM radios from their production. I have a 2021 Honda H-RV with AM. I’m wondering if my next one, maybe a couple of years away, will have one.
Yes, I’m aware of who Hannity’s audience is and what they believe. He is not on the station I listen to, so I’m not sure what point you are trying to make. An emergency response system has nothing at all to do with Hannity.
I’m 62 and I don’t have one. I haven’t listened to radio since I got SiriusXM in my car in like 2013. I was a college radio dj and yeah it’s sad but it’s on life support. My car doesn’t have AM. It has FM but I don’t know where to even find it.
Do you think you could find it among the menus in your car if you had a reason to and 5 minutes sitting in the car to do so? Or is that a too-difficult task for either you or the typical Tesla driver?
I’m not being accusatory here, just using you as a handy informed example.
Obviously I could figure it out in a short amount of time. It was more to explain that I have no use for it nor have I seen it in my normal interactions with the UI. In my previous car (2106 Civic) AM and FM were on the same main menu as the Bluetooth, SiriusXM, etc.
Hold on a sec…
Yeah, that was pretty easy. Menu->Radio and then it put up the icons for every FM station that was in range. About half of them had little logos that gave a clue what sort of station it was. There were way more stations than I expected. I even played a few of them briefly.
It just occurred to me that I actually do listen to FM radio most Saturday mornings because my friend has a show on the college station. I listen to it over streaming though.
Had I not read this thread, it would never have occurred to me to use an AM radio in a disaster. I’d be surprised if more than 10% of Americans would know that either, present company excepted.
No, they will talk to other people near them (physically or electronically.) Which is why i think subsidizing AM radios in police stations, post offices, and elementary schools would give us plenty of emergency coverage. SF still relies on a ham radio network for when everything else is down. That doesn’t mean everyone has a ham radio, it means that emergency personnel have a way to talk to that network.
Not to mention that lots of cars will continue to have an AM radio, even without a mandate. My new EV does.
How about a law that requires new cars to clearly indicate whether they have an AM radio. So consumers can decide. In the Midwest, where AM radio is useful to a lot of drivers, there will be pressure on manufacturers to include it. Most will. A few won’t. At an extremely low cost.
And this. I don’t think the mandate is some secret subsidy to right wing radio. I just think it’s silly and outdated.
I completely agree with you however I am certain that the right wing radio folks are lobbying for this as it benefits them greatly. They certainly don’t care about the greater public benefit. So there is a grain of truth to this.
And many of those young people have never used their car radio (if they have a car, an increasing number of young people don’t) and wouldn’t really know what to do if their phone announced, “tune in to AM 530”.
Nope. I have a 2025 Kia EV, and it has a working AM radio. I checked after reading much of this discussion. There’s nothing on it i want to listen to, though, so i didn’t pre-set any stations, and the only way for me to get to it is to dig moderately deeply into a bunch of menus. Not something i will ever do while driving.
I listen to FM radio every time i drive alone. And if i were shopping cars, and one didn’t have an FM radio, that would be a factor in my decision. I honestly think it would be cheaper and effective enough to simply mandate that new car buyers are aware of whether the car has a radio. I don’t think “people who have never used the radio” are going to turn to their car radio in an emergency. They will be sitting at home, their phone might say, “tune into FM 90.7” and it won’t even occur to them that there’s a radio in their car.
There probably is. But the vote in Congress was bipartisan. I think there’s some truth to the emergency use, probably some lobbying from the radio industry, and mostly, i think Congress is made up of old people who overestimate the presence and usefulness of AM radio in the lives of their constituents.
There really is no reason to remove AM from non-electric vehicles. All of the tuner chips made for automobiles have both AM and FM as default and are very cheap. An AM antenna is cheap as well. The software and hardware validation is pretty much cookie cutter, so there is no savings in getting rid of it, especially in the face of pending regulatory requirements.
Automakers are already designing the 29 and 30 model year cars and unless its an electric vehicle it will still have AM.
The desire of the auto industry is to have no visible antennas and electric vehicles are the driving force to remove radio stations. Once satellite phone service becomes common we will see the end of radios and SXM in cars. Europe does just fine without SXM now, they stream that service because there are no satellites over Europe. Few choose to stream it because there are many better options.
SXM has streaming just like Spotify and all of the other music streaming services, at least in the US. I use it in my Tesla without an antenna over cellular. I could also Bluetooth from my phone. Other cars have Bluetooth or CarPlay or the Android equivalent. No need for satellites except in the ever shrinking areas with no cell service.
I had planned to do that, but couldn’t tell if any was a news channel at all when i flipped through them. So i didn’t. And I’m unlikely to dig into that menu again. I have never used the AM radio on my prior car.
And EAS push notification alerts and warnings, and access to any emergency information which you might try to get at via your phone. Which we have also been talking about in this thread.
“I don’t need a traditional radio, I have a smartphone” only really works as long as the cell network or wifi (and the electricity to operate wifi) are up and running. Hurricanes and other severe storms are notorious for knocking those out.
If you’re willing to tell me where you are, I’ll look up what station or stations in your market have a News/Talk format. Outside of a major market, you’re unlikely to have a station strictly dedicated to news. More likely there is a station with a (usually) conservative talk format that has some semblance of a local news department, and may even have a local talk show here and there.
Well, i googled it, and there are two stations that are mostly news (one local, but not my location, so not terribly interesting, the other broader), a sports station, a “cultural” station, and a right wing talk show station. And others that have fewer listeners. I suppose i could tune to the broader news station, if i remember sometime when i don’t mind mucking with the thing.
Tuning into a station i don’t ever expect to listen to isn’t all the compelling. Also, I’m old. I do have radios in the house.
If i wanted news in an emergency, I’d probably tune into one of the NPR station FM stations that i can hear. Counting weak local ones, and distant ones that i can usually tune in because they are around, i think there are at least five of them. And if we had an emergency, i think at least one of those would do. I’m not hundreds of miles from an urban center.