Post Four: Number One Listener

The development of radio is a fascinating one because every factor correlates to one another in a way that without one of them, radio may not have become such a popular and defining entity in America’s media culture. Many forces helped to precipitate the rise of the radio including technological change (Marconi’s “wireless telegraph”), industries and institutional factors (competition between networks), regulation and government intervention (Federal Radio Commission), and audience demand. However, the most influential force behind the spread of radio had to be and still is the audience’s constant demand which consequently leads to the other aforementioned factors.

Radio stations started to compete with one another to provide for the audience’s demands. Media is always a fickle industry because it is based on communication—a process that needs two or more parties. Obviously, radio stations can only be successful if they can find someone to listen to them. Radio stations applied networking which is “the linking of stations together to share programming costs” (Straubhaar 163) and allowed each station to keep up with the expenses. Further competition forced stations to gather affiliated ones and to adopt a variety of shows and music genres to appeal to different audience members. The stations experimented with comic books, adventure shows, and pulp-fiction westerns. Furthermore, radio stations created radio personas that helped promote advertisements on shows. They also tried to create regular programming so that listeners would invest themselves into the shows as part of their daily routine.

Since then, radio has had to work extremely hard in order to keep up with the wavering audience demand. In the late 1940s, television’s popularity grew exponentially; radio struggled to keep its stability within its audience members. The radio had to figure out quickly how to regain some of its power and focused on cheaper entertainment such as localized content including music, news, and talk shows. Even today, radio stations have to constantly change and keep up with the audience’s wandering attention spans in order to stay profitable. Nowadays, radio stations have to keep tabs on and research who their targeted listeners are and how they can succeed in reaching them. It is crucial that the medium tries new innovative ways to stay current whether it is playing popular music or offering their sounds through the internet.