The FM Non-Duplication Rule was adopted by the U.S.
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdiction ...
(FCC) on July 1, 1964, after a year's consideration. It limited holders of
FM licenses in
cities
A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...
of more than 100,000 who also held
AM licenses to
simulcasting
Simulcast (a portmanteau of simultaneous broadcast) is the broadcasting of programmes/programs or events across more than one resolution, bitrate or medium, or more than one service on the same medium, at exactly the same time (that is, simultane ...
no more than 50 percent of their AM signal on the FM station. The commissioners considered the excessive simulcasting wasteful and an impediment to the development of FM broadcasting. A year later, the FCC reaffirmed the rule, and, after a delay requested by broadcasters, set its effective date for October 1965; some stations were granted exemptions if they could demonstrate their simulcasting served the public good.
Broadcasters generally resisted the rule at first, claiming it was overregulation that would impose considerable costs on stations for new personnel and equipment. It was challenged in court as a violation of the
First Amendment
First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1).
First or 1st may also refer to:
*World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement
Arts and media Music
* 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...
and upheld in a decision written by future Supreme Court Chief Justice
Warren Burger
Warren Earl Burger (September 17, 1907 – June 25, 1995) was an American attorney and jurist who served as the 15th chief justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Burger graduated from the St. Paul Colleg ...
. Later the FCC extended the rule's requirements to 75 percent original content on FM stations and its applicability to stations in cities of more than 25,000.
The rule's implementation led to the rise of
freeform radio
Free-form, or free-form radio, is a radio station programming format in which the disc jockey is given total control over what music to play, regardless of music genre or commercial interests. Freeform radio stands in contrast to most commercia ...
in the late 1960s, where
disc jockey
A disc jockey, more commonly abbreviated as DJ, is a person who plays recorded music for an audience. Types of DJs include Radio personality, radio DJs (who host programs on music radio stations), club DJs (who work at a nightclub or music f ...
s played whatever music they wanted without regard to
genre
Genre () is any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed-upon conventions developed over time. In popular usage, it normally describes a category of literature, music, or other for ...
or
format
Format may refer to:
Printing and visual media
* Text formatting, the typesetting of text elements
* Paper formats, or paper size standards
* Newspaper format, the size of the paper page
Computing
* File format, particular way that informatio ...
, taking advantage of FM's higher sound quality and
stereo
Stereophonic sound, or more commonly stereo, is a method of sound reproduction that recreates a multi-directional, 3-dimensional audible perspective. This is usually achieved by using two independent audio channels through a configuration ...
capability. Most of their playlists tended toward
rock
Rock most often refers to:
* Rock (geology), a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals or mineraloids
* Rock music, a genre of popular music
Rock or Rocks may also refer to:
Places United Kingdom
* Rock, Caerphilly, a location in Wales ...
of the era; in later years the canon of music and artists that developed evolved into the
album-oriented and eventually
classic rock
Classic rock is a US radio format which developed from the album-oriented rock (AOR) format in the early 1980s. In the United States, the classic rock format comprises rock music ranging generally from the mid-1960s through the mid 1990s, primar ...
formats.
This growth often came at the expense of the
classical music
Classical music generally refers to the art music of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk music or popular music traditions. It is sometimes distinguished as Western classical music, as the term "classical music" also ...
stations which had previously dominated the FM dial. By the late 1970s FM music stations had more listeners than their AM counterparts, even as they had largely moved away from their freeform roots, and in the 1980s the FCC repealed the rule to help AM stations, which had declined as FM grew.
Background
Since the advent of commercial
radio broadcasting in the United States during the 1920s, broadcasters and listeners had lamented the problem of
static
Static may refer to:
Places
*Static Nunatak, a nunatak in Antarctica
United States
* Static, Kentucky and Tennessee
*Static Peak, a mountain in Wyoming
**Static Peak Divide, a mountain pass near the peak
Science and technology Physics
*Static el ...
on its
AM signals, usually created by
interference
Interference is the act of interfering, invading, or poaching. Interference may also refer to:
Communications
* Interference (communication), anything which alters, modifies, or disrupts a message
* Adjacent-channel interference, caused by extr ...
from
electrical storms
A thunderstorm, also known as an electrical storm or a lightning storm, is a storm characterized by the presence of lightning and its acoustic effect on the Earth's atmosphere, known as thunder. Relatively weak thunderstorms are someti ...
. Engineers began to work on developing technology to transmit and receive higher-frequency signals above 40
MHz
The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to one event (or cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose expression in terms of SI base units is s−1, meaning that one he ...
over great distances. By the mid-1930s,
Edwin Howard Armstrong
Edwin Howard Armstrong (December 18, 1890 – February 1, 1954) was an American electrical engineer and inventor, who developed FM (frequency modulation) radio and the superheterodyne receiver system. He held 42 patents and received numerous aw ...
had developed
frequency modulation
Frequency modulation (FM) is the encoding of information in a carrier wave by varying the instantaneous frequency of the wave. The technology is used in telecommunications, radio broadcasting, signal processing, and Run-length limited#FM: .280. ...
(
FM) technology that could propagate signals widely with no static at all.
Several issues hindered FM's commercial establishment until the late 1940s. One was litigation over
patents
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...
between Armstrong and
RCA
The RCA Corporation was a major American electronics company, which was founded as the Radio Corporation of America in 1919. It was initially a patent trust owned by General Electric (GE), Westinghouse, AT&T Corporation and United Fruit Comp ...
, Armstrong's former employer. RCA had chosen to invest heavily in television, another new technology. Regulatory disputes with the newly-created
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdiction ...
and the intervention of World War II also played a role. Many FM stations soon had to shut down for lack of a market, despite the superior audio quality they offered, since listeners had to purchase FM-capable receivers. Armstrong's suicide in 1954 further adversely affected FM since he had financially supported Continental, one of the few FM networks at the time.
FM's fortunes began to turn in the late 1950s with television's rapid growth and AM radio's increasingly crowded dial.
Popular music
Popular music is music with wide appeal that is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. These forms and styles can be enjoyed and performed by people with little or no musical training.Popular Music. (2015). ''Fun ...
formats replaced scripted radio programming and
variety show
Variety show, also known as variety arts or variety entertainment, is entertainment made up of a variety of acts including musical theatre, musical performances, sketch comedy, magic (illusion), magic, acrobatics, juggling, and ventriloquism. It is ...
s migrated to TV.
This left broadcasters looking for new directions to expand their markets. In 1957 the number of applications for FM licenses increased for the first time in almost a decade,
primarily in smaller markets that had run out of space for new television or AM channels.
In larger markets, the proliferation of AM stations had led the FCC to restrict many of the newer ones to
daytime-only to avoid interference; since the FCC did not require that restriction for FM radio, it was a logical place for broadcasters to go.
The increasing popularity of
stereophonic
Stereophonic sound, or more commonly stereo, is a method of sound reproduction that recreates a multi-directional, 3-dimensional audible perspective. This is usually achieved by using two independent audio channels through a configuration ...
recordings also helped FM's growth. In 1952,
New York City-area classical music station
WQXR had hit on the idea of
simulcast
Simulcast (a portmanteau of simultaneous broadcast) is the broadcasting of programmes/programs or events across more than one resolution, bitrate or medium, or more than one service on the same medium, at exactly the same time (that is, simultane ...
ing on its AM and FM stations, with each carrying a different channel, so listeners could use two radios to create a stereo experience; other stations, mostly classical and jazz, followed the practice. Because the FCC frowned on that as a waste of spectrum, in 1961 it approved technical standards for
wideband
In communications, a system is wideband when the message bandwidth significantly exceeds the coherence bandwidth of the Channel (communications), channel. Some communication links have such a high Bit rate, data rate that they are forced to use a ...
FM stereo broadcasting via the
multiplexing
In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource - a ...
capability of the higher frequencies and the first full-stereo wideband FM stations began broadcasting within months. Many existing FM stations still carried the same signal as their AM sister stations, assuming that FM was merely an added bonus for listeners who wanted the higher sound quality and were willing to pay for equipment to get it. Broadcasters at the time saw such little value in their FM stations that they gave advertising time away with purchases on their AM stations.
Rule
Proposition, adoption and criticism
By 1963 the FCC was dominated by
Kennedy administration
John F. Kennedy's tenure as the 35th president of the United States, began with his inauguration on January 20, 1961, and ended with his assassination on November 22, 1963. A Democrat from Massachusetts, he took office following the 1960 p ...
appointees, led by chairman
Newton Minow, who were interested in increasing competition in certain sectors of the radio market.
That year the commission first discussed the possibility of restricting AM-FM duplication. While it had tolerated the practice initially since it allowed FM stations to get on the air, it now saw it as a waste of spectrum.
The commissioners settled on a rule that limited AM stations
licensed in cities of more than 100,000 people to no more than 50% duplication of their AM signal on an affiliated FM station. Duplication was defined as either the simulcasting of the signal or its rebroadcast within 24 hours. Stations had until August 1965 to comply.
"
e broadcast of a single program by two channels is inefficient" the FCC explained in its 1964
annual report
An annual report is a comprehensive report on a company's activities throughout the preceding year. Annual reports are intended to give shareholders and other interested people information about the company's activities and financial performance. ...
. "The Commission feels that this is a significant move toward the time when AM and FM will be regarded as component
parts of a total aural service for assignment purposes" it said. It hoped also that it would "give new impetus to FM
developments."
Many broadcasters resisted the new rule, citing the costs it would impose on them to hire air staff and find studio space for the additional FM content.
In early 1965, the FCC extended the deadline for compliance two months, until October of that year, and announced that stations that could demonstrate their simulcasting served the public good would be exempted from the rule.
Commissioner Kenneth Cox spoke in defense of the rule at the 1965 convention of the
National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the industry trade group. Generally, he said, duplication was "a luxury we can't afford".
More specifically, he also pointed to the unfair advantage simulcast FM stations had over those that had no AM counterpart, since the former sold their advertising time at no additional charge to advertisers who bought time on the AM station.
In response, Ben Strouse, president of
Washington
Washington commonly refers to:
* Washington (state), United States
* Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States
** A metonym for the federal government of the United States
** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered o ...
's
WWDC-FM and chair of the NAB's FM committee, said that his market was already well served and that requiring additional programming would leave many stations pursuing market segments too small to support them, to the detriment of the industry and the FCC's good intentions. "
metimes the love of a government agency can be the kiss of death" he warned.
While praising the FCC's general support for FM, he said, the agency "loves
ttoo much."
At least one broadcaster from a smaller market did not seem to mind. Oliver Keller, the president of
WTAX in
Springfield, Illinois
Springfield is the capital of the U.S. state of Illinois and the county seat and largest city of Sangamon County. The city's population was 114,394 at the 2020 census, which makes it the state's seventh most-populous city, the second largest o ...
, told ''
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' he welcomed the rule as serving the public interest. He was already offering different programming anyway on his AM and
FM stations, telling the newspaper that the next day the former would be broadcasting live coverage of the
Gemini 3
Gemini 3 was the first crewed mission in NASA's Project Gemini and was the first time two American astronauts flew together into space. On March 23, 1965, astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young flew three low Earth orbits in their spacecraft, ...
spaceflight launch while the latter would continue playing music.
Almost 150 stations filed for exemptions; the FCC granted 30 of them on a long-term basis. Most were for stations whose AM signal was still restricted to the daylight hours. Two were for New York stations that broadcast in foreign languages and also had constraints on their programming. WHOM (now
WZRC
WZRC, known on-air as "AM1480" (), is a radio station licensed to New York City. The station is owned by Multicultural Broadcasting and airs Cantonese programming. It is one of two Cantonese radio stations serving the New York metropolitan area, ...
and
WNYL respectively), was a daytime-only station which
broadcast in Spanish, and
Yiddish-language
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ver ...
WEVD
WEVD was an American brokered programming radio station with some news-talk launched in August 1927 by the Socialist Party of America. Making use of the initials of recently deceased party leader Eugene Victor Debs in its call sign, the statio ...
, which shared its frequency with two other stations. Two
stations in Puerto Rico were also granted long-term exemptions for purely technical reasons: their FM transmissions were the only way their signals could reach the entire island. An additional 12 stations were granted short-term exemptions for economic reasons, because they needed more time and money to get a separate FM service set up.
Legal challenge
By the beginning of 1967,
after several additional delays and requests for exemptions, Section 73.242 of the FCC's code of regulations
had been amended and the rule had taken full effect.
Shortly afterwards,
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
's
KKHI, one of the stations to which the FCC had granted a temporary exemption good through April of that year, appealed the denial of its application for a permanent exemption to the
United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (in case citations, D.C. Cir.) is one of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals. It has the smallest geographical jurisdiction of any of the U.S. federal appellate cou ...
, which has
appellate jurisdiction
A court of appeals, also called a court of appeal, appellate court, appeal court, court of second instance or second instance court, is any court of law that is empowered to hear an appeal of a trial court or other lower tribunal. In much of t ...
over administrative actions of federal agencies. KKHI also challenged the Non-Duplication Rule itself as being outside the FCC's authority and an unconstitutional infringement of its right to
freedom of speech
Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recogni ...
under the
First Amendment
First or 1st is the ordinal form of the number one (#1).
First or 1st may also refer to:
*World record, specifically the first instance of a particular achievement
Arts and media Music
* 1$T, American rapper, singer-songwriter, DJ, and rec ...
.
KKHI had sought its exemption primarily on the grounds that it was the only
classical music
Classical music generally refers to the art music of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk music or popular music traditions. It is sometimes distinguished as Western classical music, as the term "classical music" also ...
station in the
Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Gov ...
. As evidence that the exemption was in the public interest, it introduced a survey of its listeners showing that they strongly supported continued simulcasting, especially since they liked to listen both at home and
in their cars. Further, KKHI argued that the costs of compliance would be prohibitive and that it had the exclusive right to decide what programming to offer its listeners without the FCC's interference. It made an additional argument on
procedural grounds, that the commission should have at least held a
hearing
Hearing, or auditory perception, is the ability to perceive sounds
In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave, through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.
In human physiology and psycholog ...
before denying the exemption application.
The circuit's chief judge,
David L. Bazelon, was chosen for the panel that would hear the case. With him were
E. Barrett Prettyman, a former chief judge of the court now on
senior status
Senior status is a form of semi-retirement for United States federal judges. To qualify, a judge in the Federal judiciary of the United States, federal court system must be at least 65 years old, and the sum of the judge's age and years of servi ...
, and
Warren Burger
Warren Earl Burger (September 17, 1907 – June 25, 1995) was an American attorney and jurist who served as the 15th chief justice of the United States from 1969 to 1986. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Burger graduated from the St. Paul Colleg ...
, chosen several years later to be
Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court
A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of courts in most legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, apex court, and high (or final) court of appeal. Broadly speaking, the decisions of ...
. It heard
oral argument
Oral arguments are spoken presentations to a judge or appellate court by a lawyer (or parties when representing themselves) of the legal reasons why they should prevail. Oral argument at the appellate level accompanies written briefs, which also a ...
s in the case in November.
In May 1968, the court handed down its decision. Unanimously, it
held
Held may refer to:
Places
* Held Glacier
People Arts and media
* Adolph Held (1885–1969), U.S. newspaper editor, banker, labor activist
*Al Held (1928–2005), U.S. abstract expressionist painter.
*Alexander Held (born 1958), German television ...
for the FCC. Burger wrote for the court that the commission had said that it would not consider exemptions based purely on a station's choice of programming alone, unless there was something exceptional about that programming as there was in the cases of WEVD and WHOM. Two other classical stations, New York's WQXR and Washington's
WGMS, had applied for exemptions on the same grounds as KKHI and been denied, Burger noted, while
KDFC
KDFC (90.3 FM) is a non-commercial radio station in San Francisco, California, that broadcasts classical music 24 hours daily. It is owned by the University of Southern California. KDFC is the radio home of the San Francisco Symphony and the San ...
, another San Francisco classical station, was granted its exemption since, unlike KKHI, it was daytime-only.
"The major premise on which the rule was postulated — wasteful frequency usage and loss of spectrum space", Burger continued, addressing the overreach argument, "was clearly the kind of judgment entrusted by Congress to the Commission." The court did not find that the requirement for 50% original programming on the FM station seriously limited the station's programming choices, since it could easily tape and rebroadcast content from either station later. Burger also noted that KKHI's economic concerns had indeed been taken into account when the commission granted the extension until April 1967.
When considering the procedural issue, Burger allowed himself ''some'' criticism of the commission, noting that given its explicit consideration of technical factors and programming as issues on which its decisions turned, it should have explicitly cited those considerations in promulgating the rule rather than refer to the nebulously defined public interest. But "
though it may well be that the rule could have been more precise, it is adequate and the Commission has given it a consistent interpretation." The rule did not explicitly state that a hearing would be granted if desired, and "
these circumstances we hold that the Commission acted within its discretion in refusing to grant a hearing" as KKHI had not shown that the FCC had not considered its reasons for desiring the exemption.
Aftermath
Many stations scrambled to find new staff to handle their FM-only broadcasts, and did not care about what they chose to play as long as it was enough to comply with the new rule and other FCC regulations.
The newly hired staff were often young, recent college graduates who did not demand high salaries. Since the FM audience was generally older than the Top 40 AM audience, management gave DJs more independence in what they chose to play.
On the air they chose to follow the example of
freeform radio
Free-form, or free-form radio, is a radio station programming format in which the disc jockey is given total control over what music to play, regardless of music genre or commercial interests. Freeform radio stands in contrast to most commercia ...
stations, where the disc jockeys could play whatever they wanted without a
playlist defined by management. Some stations, such as San Francisco's
KPFA, the first noncommercial FM station in the U.S., and
Seattle
Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...
's
KRAB
KRAB (106.1 FM, "Alt 106.1") is a commercial alternative rock music radio station in Greenacres, California, broadcasting to the Bakersfield, California, area. The station is owned by iHeartMedia, Inc. Its studios are located in southwest Ba ...
, had been freeform since even before the Non-Duplication Rule was adopted.
While the freeform DJs' tastes were often fairly eclectic, including
soul music
Soul music is a popular music genre that originated in the African American community throughout the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It has its roots in African-American gospel music and rhythm and blues. Soul music became po ...
,
blues
Blues is a music genre and musical form which originated in the Deep South of the United States around the 1860s. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads from the Afr ...
,
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major ...
, and
world music, their programming was dominated by
contemporary rock
Contemporary history, in English-language historiography, is a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present. Contemporary history is either a subset of the late modern period, or it i ...
. Artists closely associated with the
counterculture
A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.Eric Donald Hirsch. ''The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy''. Hou ...
had developed audiences from their live performances and from released recordings but many did not get played on
Top 40
In the music industry, the Top 40 is the current, 40 most-popular songs in a particular genre. It is the best-selling or most frequently broadcast popular music. Record charts have traditionally consisted of a total of 40 songs. "Top 40" or " con ...
AM stations of the time, thus earning them the term "underground" music, which was also applied briefly to the FM stations that played it.
[''Resource Interdependence'', 173–74] Many freeform DJs played not just singles by those bands but
album tracks, beginning what later became the
album-oriented rock
Album-oriented rock (AOR, originally called album-oriented radio) is an FM radio format created in the United States in the 1970s that focuses on the full repertoire of rock albums and is currently associated with classic rock.
Album-oriente ...
format.
Adding to the natural advantage of FM's higher sound quality, the new stations also broadcast fewer commercials between songs.
In San Francisco,
Tom Donahue Thomas or Tom Donahue may refer to:
* Thomas R. Donahue (born 1928), American trade union leader
* Thomas Michael Donahue (1921–2004), American physicist, astronomer, and space and planetary scientist
* Tom Donahue (DJ) (1928–1975), pioneerin ...
, a former Top 40 AM DJ who had written an article in the then-new ''
Rolling Stone
''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first kno ...
'' calling that medium dead, took over as program director at
KMPX
KMPX (channel 29) is a television station licensed to Decatur, Texas, United States, serving the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex as an affiliate of the Spanish-language Estrella TV network. It is owned by Tegna Inc. alongside Dallas-licensed ABC ...
and expanded its freeform content from one overnight DJ's shift to the entire format.
He paid particular attention to those bands coming out of the
Haight-Ashbury
Haight-Ashbury () is a district of San Francisco, California, named for the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets. It is also called The Haight and The Upper Haight. The neighborhood is known as one of the main centers of the counterculture ...
hippie
A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to different countries around ...
scene, such as the
Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead was an American rock music, rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California. The band is known for its eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, Folk music, folk, country music, country, jazz, bluegrass music, bluegrass, ...
and
Jefferson Airplane
Jefferson Airplane was an American rock band based in San Francisco, California, that became one of the pioneering bands of psychedelic rock. Formed in 1965, the group defined the San Francisco Sound and was the first from the Bay Area to ac ...
, whose
San Francisco Sound became the soundtrack for the 1967
Summer of Love
The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco's neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury. ...
.
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English Rock music, rock band, formed in Liverpool in 1960, that comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are regarded as the Cultural impact of the Beatles, most influential band of al ...
' ''
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'', also released that year, proved an ideal album for the new rock FM stations,
which also included New York's
WNEW and
WPLJ
WPLJ (95.5 FM) is a non-commercial Christian adult contemporary music radio station licensed to New York City. It is owned by the Educational Media Foundation (EMF) and broadcasts EMF's flagship programming service, K-Love. WPLJ's transmi ...
,
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
, image_map =
, map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago
, coordinates =
, coordinates_footnotes =
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdivision_name ...
's
WXRT
WXRT (93.1 FM), also known as XRT and 93-XRT is an adult album alternative (AAA) radio station in Chicago, Illinois. For many years, their slogan has been "Chicago's Finest Rock". "Chicago's Home For Music Lovers" has been used as its slogan si ...
, Detroit's
WABX and
WHFS in
Baltimore
Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...
.
Freeform FM's DJs were, as their program directors had believed, more inclined to engage the audience as equals. Eschewing the frantic patter of their AM counterparts, they talked in conversational tones, avoided playing jingles, drops or talking over the music, and addressed the audience, sometimes even engaging in on-air telephone conversations with them. They grouped work they played by a common theme they would point out to the audience, and sometimes found
segues between songs that demonstrated these connections. Their willingness to play longer and less accessible work in turn led bands to record more work in this vein, giving rise to the
progressive rock
Progressive rock (shortened as prog rock or simply prog; sometimes conflated with art rock) is a broad genre of rock music that developed in the United Kingdom and United States through the mid- to late 1960s, peaking in the early 1970s. Init ...
of the early 1970s, which had in turn come from "
progressive radio", another term for the new FM rock stations.
The growth in FM programming and listeners also had an economic effect. In 1968
ABC
ABC are the first three letters of the Latin script known as the alphabet.
ABC or abc may also refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Broadcasting
* American Broadcasting Company, a commercial U.S. TV broadcaster
** Disney–ABC Television ...
began putting together an FM network. That same year,
Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Sinc ...
's
WDVR
WDVR (89.7 FM) is a community radio station serving parts of western New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania in the United States. The station, which broadcasts a variety format, is licensed to Delaware Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey.
WDVR ...
became the first FM station to sell a million dollars in advertising. FM stations as a whole reported positive
operating income
In accounting and finance, earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) is a measure of a firm's profit that includes all incomes and expenses (operating and non-operating) except interest expenses and income tax expenses.
Operating income and ope ...
for the first time.
This growth continued into the early 1970s even as many of the freeform stations became more standardized and formatted in response to the increased investment.
In 1973 FM once again reported an aggregate net positive operating income, and has continued to do so every year since. By the middle of the decade most new radios included the FM band,
and in 1976, the year the FCC extended the rule to limit duplication to only 25% of content in cities of more than 25,000,
car radios followed suit.
Finally, in 1978, FM stations achieved a greater share of the national listening audience than AM;
[''Sounds of Change'']
138
/ref> in New York this shocked the city's radio community when all-disco
Disco is a genre of dance music and a subculture that emerged in the 1970s from the United States' urban nightlife scene. Its sound is typified by four-on-the-floor beats, syncopated basslines, string sections, brass and horns, electric pia ...
WKTU
WKTU (103.5 FM) is a rhythmic adult contemporary formatted radio station licensed to Lake Success, New York, a suburb of New York City. WKTU is owned by iHeartMedia and broadcasts from studios in the former AT&T Building in the Tribeca neighbo ...
, the former WHOM-FM whom the FCC had exempted from the rule initially, ended WABC (AM)
WABC (770 AM broadcasting, AM) is a commercial Radio broadcasting, radio station licensed to New York City, New York, New York, carrying a Conservative talk radio, conservative talk format known as "Talkradio 77". Owned by John Catsimatidis' R ...
's long reign as the city's top-rated music station.
One unexpected consequence of FM's ascendance was a decline in the number of the classical music stations that had been early adopters of the technology. While at first many had pleased their listeners, who expected the rule would create more space for classical on the air, by offering more classical programming on FM, they soon saturated
Saturation, saturated, unsaturation or unsaturated may refer to:
Chemistry
* Saturation, a property of organic compounds referring to carbon-carbon bonds
** Saturated and unsaturated compounds
**Degree of unsaturation
** Saturated fat or fatty ac ...
what had always been a small segment of the total radio audience. To become profitable in the new environment, many had to change their formats, to the consternation of aficionados. In New York, this led to a listener backlash that forced WNCN
WNCN (channel 17) is a television station licensed to Goldsboro, North Carolina, United States, serving the Research Triangle area as an affiliate of CBS. Owned by Nexstar Media Group, the station maintains studios on Front Street in north Ra ...
to return to its classical format in 1975 after nearly a year as a rock station, WQIV, so named for its effort to broadcast in quadraphonic sound
Quadraphonic (or quadrophonic and sometimes quadrasonic) sound – equivalent to what is now called 4.0 surround sound – uses four audio channels in which speakers are positioned at the four corners of a listening space. The system allows for th ...
.
Repeal
In 1985, after one broadcaster, AGK Communications, proposed to the FCC that the hours between midnight and 6 a.m. be exempted from the rule, the commission responded by proposing to repeal the rule entirely. After taking comments, mostly from the NAB and broadcasters, the FCC repealed the rule in March 1986.
The commission concluded the rule had long since accomplished its goal. The number of FM stations had increased by almost a dozenfold in the two decades since it had gone into effect; FM stations now claimed nearly three-quarters of all radio listeners. "FM radio service is now fully competitive", the commission had said when proposing the repeal the year before. "In fact, we believe that for many AM-FM combinations it is now the case that the viability of the AM station depends on its association with a stronger FM facility."
Specifically, the FCC hoped that AM stations would now broadcast around the clock since they could depend on FM again to carry their stronger signal. It did not think many would do so, and while many broadcasters agreed there was no reason to return to full duplication, some said they hoped the repeal could help them strengthen now-struggling AM stations through this expansion of their broadcast hours. Several also believed the decision had always best been left to the market.
Two companies that commented to the FCC on the proposed repeal opposed it. Osborn Communications worried that rather than help AM, it would result in the complete collapse of the medium as all listeners would prefer to hear a station's superior sound quality on FM whatever the content. Conversely, Press Broadcasting in turn feared that AM stations that duplicated an FM signal would have a competitive advantage over those that were independent of an FM station.
By the time of the repeal, FM music stations had become as formatted and commercially driven as the AM stations had been at the time the rule went into force.[''Resource Interdependence'', 169] Lee Abrams
Lee Abrams (born 1952) is an American media executive who has held a number of posts for large and influential companies, and is generally credited with developing the Album Oriented Rock format first heard at WQDR Raleigh and thereafter employ ...
, an influential consultant, had developed the album-oriented rock
Album-oriented rock (AOR, originally called album-oriented radio) is an FM radio format created in the United States in the 1970s that focuses on the full repertoire of rock albums and is currently associated with classic rock.
Album-oriente ...
format ("designed to sound unstructured, even if it was not", in one historian's words.) which narrowed down the FM rock playlist by focusing on popular albums, in the mid-1970s. By the 1980s this had been further reduced to classic rock
Classic rock is a US radio format which developed from the album-oriented rock (AOR) format in the early 1980s. In the United States, the classic rock format comprises rock music ranging generally from the mid-1960s through the mid 1990s, primar ...
, which largely treated the songs that had become audience favorites during the medium's less controlled era as an oldies
Oldies is a term for musical genres such as pop music, rock and roll, doo-wop, surf music (broadly characterized as classic rock and pop rock) from the second half of the 20th century, specifically from around the mid-1950s to the 1980s, as we ...
playlist and largely avoided work by any newer artists.
See also
* 1964 in radio
* 1964 in the United States
* Regulation of radio broadcast in the United States
Notes
References
{{reflist, 30em
Broadcast law
History of radio
Radio in the United States
United States communications regulation
Federal Communications Commission
1964 in American law
1964 establishments in the United States
1986 disestablishments in the United States