Radio's Audience Before Television

     The earliest information about radio listeners was at best anecdotal. Stations received letters from listeners (usually responding to a program), which revealed some sense of a program's geographical spread, but little else. What little research there was focused on who purchased receivers-and thus, presumably, who listened. The 1930 census gathered information on radio set ownership showing that half the urban but only 21 percent of the farm families owned a receiver. Whereas 63 per­ cent of homes in New Jersey owned a radio, only 5 percent of Mississippi homes did.

     In the early 1920s, and to some degree for several years after that, radio appealed to an upper-class audience. Manufactured receivers were often quite expensive (upwards of $1,000 in current values for better models), and only upper­ income people could afford them. Programs and advertising reflected this audience. The Depression and the appearance of a variety of popular programs made radio more attractive to a wider audience.

     The first concerted attempt to study patterns of the radio audience more deeply was the work of psychologist Daniel Starch, whose consulting firm conducted personal interviews with some 18,000 families across the country in 1928 and again in 1929-30 under contract to the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). The Starch researchers found that 80 per­ cent listened daily, that radio was used about 2.5 hours per day, that listening was largely a family affair that took place in the evening, and that nearly 75 percent of the audience tuned to one or two favorite stations most of the time.

     By the end of the 1930s, more than 90 percent of urban and 70 percent of rural homes owned at least one radio (half the homes in the country had two), and whereas ownership was universal in higher-income households, radios were also found in 60 percent of the poorest homes. The average receiver was on for five hours a day, and listeners developed a fierce loyalty to the characters in favorite programs (especially daily soap operas, one of the first formats whose audiences were carefully studied). Radio was also trusted, as became clear in the panic caused by the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. Research was finding, however, that as a listener's income and educational level rose, the time spent listening to radio dropped.

     During the 1941-45 war, radio became the prime source of news, and listening levels reached their peak. Radio's variety of programs appealed at some time of the day to virtually everyone. Radio was available in nearly 90 percent of households and in a quarter of all cars by 1945. At the end of the 194os­ and the end of radio's monopoly of listeners-studies found that most people liked most of what they heard. Indeed, radio was ranked as doing a better job than most newspapers, churches, schools, or local governments, although its reputation slipped a bit from 1945 to 1947, perhaps reflecting the end of wartime news (newspapers replaced radio as the primary news source over the same period).

     Growing from related studies of the movie audience, some concern was raised about how radio affected young listeners. Programs that featured suspense and horror were said to keep children awake. Crime programs might encourage violence on the part of listeners. Considerable research was undertaken, especially at universities, but no clear results were forthcoming.

Radio Since Television

     The public's growing fascination with television after 1948 initially cut down on radio listening, especially in cities with the handful of early television stations. Network audiences dropped sharply in just a few years. Radio rebounded in the 1950s, but patterns of listening were changing-radio was now largely a daytime (especially morning) medium, whereas television dominated evening time. Ironically, as radio diminished in the eyes of some of its listeners, it became the focus of more academic research. Studies began to assess the sociological and psychological reasons why people listened, but most of what was known about radio's listeners grew out of ratings and other commercial research.

     As popular music formats (e.g., Top 40) appeared and as car radios became more common (half of all cars had radios in 1951, 68 percent by 1960), radio became a medium with considerable appeal to a teenage audience. Stations developed many gimmicks to keep young people listening-chiefly the use of contests and giveaways. Most parents were totally lost in this new format.

     Another audience was attracted to radio, especially to the relative handful of FM stations offering classical music. These were the high-fidelity buffs who were interested in the best quality audio they could buy. They listened to AM-FM stereo broadcasts in the late 1950s and flocked to FM after stereo standards were approved in 1961. This was a relatively high­-brow audience with considerable appeal to some advertisers.

     By the mid-1960s, radio was in use for about 25 hours per week in the average household, with half of that from portable and car radios (in 80 percent of cars by 1965), showing radio's expanding ability to travel with its audience. Listening peaked in morning "drive time" and slowly dropped off for the rest of the day, reaching low levels in the evening. Most people turned to radio for news and weather reports and some type of music-and despite the growing number of outlets, most people still listened to only a handful of favorite stations. Radio in many cases had become background sound for other activities at work and at home. Nearly So percent of households listened to radio sometime during a typical week.

     Until the 1970s, radio still meant AM stations for most people, because FM was a limited service catering primarily to an elite audience interested in fine-arts programming. However, as the number of FM stations grew and began to program independently of AM outlets, that medium's appeal increased. FM stations began to appear in ratings in major cities, and in 1979 national FM listening first exceeded that for AM. By the 1990s FM accounted for three-quarters of all radio listening.

     The minority listening to AM were tuned to various talk formats, and they wanted to participate. Call-in talk shows became wildly popular, especially those with controversial hosts. Radio became almost a two-way means of expression for such listeners. Some controversy arose in the 1990s over the likely effect of some youth-appeal music lyrics that seemed to promote violent behavior.

     By 2000 radio was reaching a wholly new and largely unmeasured audience-listeners tuning in via the internet. A station could now appeal to listeners well beyond its own market and even in other countries. This new mode helped to promote the splintering of radio formats-and their audiences­ into more specialized categories.