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The Future of Radio Essay examples

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The Future of Radio

During the increase in popularity of radio, Arthur Edwin Kennelly said (1926) "through radio I look forward to a United States of the World. Radio is standardizing the peoples of the Earth, English will become the universal language because it is predominantly the language of the ether. The most important aspect of radio is its sociological influence." Kennelly was foreseeing the potential power and impact that radio would soon come to have. By the late twenties, we would see radio become quite the sensation in the household, and this sensation would continue to prosper even through the Great Depression with aid of soap operas and popular programs such as the Lone Ranger. Radio would see a decrease in popularity …show more content…

Part of the blame for the gradual falling of the radio industry is attributed to homogenization. “While Costello and the punks and New Wavers did their best to push back against increasing homogenization, the promise of radio-long the most democratic of the traditional mass media-continued to be squandered. Big media corporations and their allies in Congress and on the Federal Communications Commission quietly rewrote the rules during the 1980s and '90s to clear away barriers to consolidation, thereby ushering in an era in which the news was dumbed down, dissent was stifled and the music all started to sound the same” (Radio Waves, 2005, p. 3). A reaction to predictable and bland radio programming is specialized stations that are genre or topic specific. Given the limited band of frequencies in FM for music stations, it would be tough to have specific radio stations for the hundreds of genres that music can be categorized into. One possibility is to have stations play a certain genre for a few hours a week. Some stations such as college radio stations will do this. Although this would allow for more specific content, the listener loyalty would not be as high. This would be because the targeting user would only tune into the station for those few hours that their desired music is on. Internet radio can solve this problem.

With a virtually unlimited number of Internet radio streams, radio stations

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