The Baby Boom, Radio, and Recordings

This revolution in radio coincided with the baby boom. Because advertisers in the 1950s were interested in reaching members of this generation—known as "boomers”—many radio stations dedicated their air time to playing rock *n' roll and featuring disc jockeys that spoke in the lingo of the day. Other stations targeted different age groups with different styles of music and DJs.

This new sort of station that focused on particular music preferences caught on because radio was now more portable than ever. The development in 1948 of the transistor, a much smaller replacement for the Audion vacuum tube, led to the miniaturization of radio receivers. Now radio became something that people could literally take with them throughout the day. Suddenly, the medium had a new life, and companies rushed to get new licenses. The number of stations jumped dramatically, from about 1,000 in 1946 to nearly 3,500 in the mid-1950s.

Ethics and Payola

The new station formats made local radio more important to music marketers than ever before. The music that DJs around the country decided to play grabbed listeners' attention, and that translated into record sales. Recording firms pressured their promotion personnel to persuade DJs to give “airplay" to the singers their company was pushing. The pressure was so great, and the influence of certain DJs on audiences was apparently so strong, that many promotion people started paying DJs to highlight their company's recordings—a process known as payola. The amounts of money delivered to one DJ could run into the tens of thousands of dollars.

In many cases, disc jockeys were being paid by their stations to choose songs that they genuinely thought their audience would like, not songs that companies bribed them to play. The DJs who were caught accepting bribes could argue that they took money only for songs that they would have played anyway; the cash was just a perk of their job. Song salespeople, in turn, noted that paying to publicize songs was nothing new. (Recall that back in the days of vaudeville, song pluggers greased the palms of performers to sing their publishing firm's songs.)

When newspaper articles exposed the payola to the public, many DJs were fired, Congress held hearings on the subject, and lawmakers amended the Federal Communications Act to make the practice illegal. Many radio stations took song selection away from individual disc jockeys and centralized the activity in the hands of the station's program director. Radio was so critical for the promotion of records, however, that the prac­tice continued in one way or another—often with the program director as the focus of the activity. Expensive gifts, including sex and drugs, often took the place of money and payola remains an ethical issue even today.

Fm Radio and the Fragmentation of Rock Music

Frequency modulation (FM) a means of radio broadcasting, utilizing the band between 88 and 108 megahertz; FM signals are marked by high levels of clarity, but rarely travel more than eighty miles from the site of their transmission

amplitude modulation (AM) a means of radio broadcasting, utilizing the band between 540 and 1,700 megahertz; AM signals are prone to frequent static interference, but their high- powered signals allow them to travel great distances, especially at night

Despite public controversies over payola and over the airing of rock n' roll music, the growth of radio formats continued, based on the targeting of certain age groups and musical tastes. One factor that encouraged the changing of radio to include longer songs and the expansion of the number of station choices was the development of FM radio—which stands for frequency modulation—an invention of Columbia University engineer Edwin Armstrong during the 1930s. From the start, leading radio executives realized that the static-free sound of FM was far superior to the sound produced by the AM (amplitude modulation) technology upon which existing radio transmitters and sets were based. But for technical reasons, the FM technology could not simply be used to improve AM radio. FM would have to either replace AM or co-exist with it. Broadcasters worried that their huge investment in AM would be threatened if they developed FM as a substitute. They also worried that the development of a whole new set of FM stations would reduce their profits by dividing both audiences and advertising money. For these reasons, radio executives tried hard to influence the FCC to derail the development of FM radio. At the same time, however, they protected their business interests by getting FM licenses and simply duplicating on FM stations what they were airing on AM—just in case FM caught on. The debate was so strong and so ugly that FM's inventor, Edwin Armstrong, became deeply depressed over what he saw as the radio industry's attempts to derail his invention, and committed suicide.

FM radio did emerge, though years later than its supporters wanted. By the 1960s, the FCC was not handing out new AM licenses, and the amount of money needed to buy an existing AM station was soaring. In the face of these developments, new business interests saw opportunities in FM radio and pressured the FCC to encourage the growth of FM by passing a nonduplication rule. The FCC passed this rule in 1965, stating that an owner of both an AM and an FM station could not play the same material on both stations more than 50 percent of the time. The rule had the effect the supporters of FM wanted. FM stations, looking for things to play and not having many commercials, developed formats that played long cuts or even entire albums, an approach that AM stations resisted. Many listeners migrated to FM; they liked the music and the static-free sound. FM radio began an astounding rise in popularity. Ir. 1972, FM had 28 percent of the radio audience in the top 40 radio markets, with AV taking 72 percent. By 1990, these figures were reversed.