Video Didn't Kill the Radio Star
Podcasting did
In July, I was interviewed by New York news station WCBS 880 AM to talk about Billy Joel’s 150th and final Madison Square Garden show, the culmination of his decade-long residency there. (The producers wanted to talk to me, for a second time, because I had written Bridge & Tunnel Boys about Joel’s and Billy Joel’s careers). I got a kick out this because I had listened to WCBS over many years. It was kind of background noise to my life—except when there was a prospect of a snowstorm that might result in a school cancellation, when I listened obsessively to “Weather & Traffic on the 8s.” The station specialized in local news, but also staccato-like reporting of national headlines.
In August, WBCS went off the air. An era in New York radio—but to my mind an era in radio broadcasting generally—was over. It prompted me to write a piece for Current magazine that was published on Friday.
I want to be clear here that what I’m talking about is broadcasting: the notion of content originating from a single source that is received by multiple people in real-time over a large geographic area. This was the great media breakthrough of the twentieth century, first in radio and then in television. At first, there was a widespread belief that television would make radio obsolete, just as it would the movies. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. I used the example of how the rise of MTV actually invigorated radio:
Video did not kill the radio star. In fact, radio broadcasting underwent a renaissance during the MTV era. The rise of the Contemporary Hit Radio (CHR) format worked symbiotically to rocket-boost the careers of superstars like Prince, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. In 1987, WFAN in New York became the nation’s first all-sports radio station, launching careers that crisscrossed with the anchors of the immensely profitable ESPN, founded in 1979. This was also the golden era of talk radio, led by Rush Limbaugh, who, right-wing politics aside, took pride in considering himself first and foremost a broadcaster.
Other reports of mass media deaths have also proved exaggerated. Broadcasting did not, as feared, destroy the record business. Television did not destroy the film industry. Instead, they ended up reinforcing each other and/or staking out new spaces. If you can’t watch a TV show and drive a car, you can listen to the radio.
And yet for all this, there’s no guarantee an old medium will survive the advent of a new one. What actually killed the radio star was the Internet, which represented a move away from broadcasting to time-shifted content. It wasn’t until the advent of streaming at the turn of the century that this really began to affect broadcasting. But the effect has intensified over time. Streaming services such as Spotify began siphoning off listeners—and, even more importantly, advertising dollars. As with the television business, there’s some overlap, in that radio hosts and programming straddle broadcasting and online formats (especially in sports). But the momentum is increasingly with the latter. The golden age of the disk jockey has long since passed. Today we listen to podcasts, not broadcasts.
Radio has become a curio. Like television, it’s something my students know exists, but it’s a medium they never actually access themselves. (When I told my mother I was going to be on the radio, she missed it because she didn’t know how she could hear me.) In our minds and in our cars, we can’t go back, we’ve gone too far.