> Advertisers mainly want to pick from this menu Stations publish their ratings by demographics and their rate card. Most national ads are moved by agency and

> Advertisers mainly want to pick from this menu Stations publish their ratings by demographics and their rate card. Most national ads are moved by agency and this is all they look at. "Popular with women 25-35 at less than $60/minute? Perfect." Local advertisers might care a little more, but not much, typically. If they're a long lasting business, they get media buying savvy pretty quickly. It's not absurdly complicated and the whole process is generally shepherded by sales executives that make pure commission. > That put AM in a down-market position The ratings and demographics drive this. AM is mono at 10kHz and doesn't penetrate buildings or daylight particularly well. FM is stereo at 30kHz and has far fewer issues. There is a station driven side, but it's mostly costs. AM stations are more expensive to run. There are more modern modulation techniques, but standard AM is a power hog. FM is far more forgiving and allows you to create gain with multiple antennas in a way that AM does not. FM is easier to make directional and allows for co-location and combination in much less physical space and cost than AM. Complicated AM arrangements require an "array" of up to 5 towers to create the correct directional day/night pattern signal granted by the license. > which is a big sign pointing to the "niche" door of relative commercial obscurity. It was around 2006 that AM started to lose it's ratings ground. Unsurprisingly it's when you saw things like "Air America" come into existence, and XM and Sirius launching satellites and gobbling up talk formats. In my view from the time it was all a response to the big killer.. the internet. It was at this point in time it was starting to become obvious that the internet could entirely replace radio, and for national syndicated talk formats, it could most easily replace those. For those in the industry who knew where to look, they could see the writing on the wall. They were viewed as pariahs and it fell on entirely deaf ears, but they were there and they were trying to communicate all of this. > but the decisions are made entirely on commercial grounds. That's where I disagree. It was technical grounds. The listeners moved. Advertisers follow the listeners. It's not some sad story of purely monetary pressures destroying an old industry, it's a hopeful story of a new industry still desperately trying to break free of the vestiges of the old ways of operating and thinking.