<story><title>Norway to switch off FM in 2017</title><url>http://radio.no/2015/04/norway-to-switch-off-fm-in-2017/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bane</author><text>Right, there are basically two things I listen to in my car these days. Music or podcasts coming off of my phone, and FM radio news. But other than that, poor industry choices killed FM years ago as a viable place to find anything worth listening to.&lt;p&gt;In my market, Clearchannel and friends pretty much screwed up the music stations and nobody listens to them by choice. They either played the same tired songs over and over, pumped so many commercials into their broadcast there was effectively nothing to listen to (and coordinated commercial breaks between various stations so there was no reason to switch) or &amp;quot;changed the format&amp;quot; of popular stations without warning or alternative, wiping out decades of legacy.&lt;p&gt;I remember when it happened with one of the most popular and historic stations in the D.C. Baltimore area, WHFS. I was driving to lunch, jamming out to some great music, they cut to a commercial break and the commercials suddenly started talking about the latest Latin American bands. I ignored it, until about 10 minutes later when I realized this was no longer a commercial, but the broadcast!&lt;p&gt;According to WP, the station&amp;#x27;s staff didn&amp;#x27;t even know about the switch until about an hour before it happened.&lt;p&gt;AOL, despite all the bad things you can say about them, was headquartered in the same market, and ran a large-ish (at the time) internet radio system. They ended up launching a streaming radio station with pretty much the same format. But HFS was gone.&lt;p&gt;The local alt&amp;#x2F;prog rock music market has never recovered.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;WHFS_(historic)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;WHFS_(historic)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve &lt;i&gt;tried&lt;/i&gt; to listen to music radio recently, and I think during my hour long commute, I encountered maybe 4 songs, the entire rest of the drive was absolutely &lt;i&gt;packed&lt;/i&gt; with commercials and station filler. I also found that stations try to coordinate their commercial breaks with each other, when one goes on break, good luck finding another station of any genre that&amp;#x27;s not on break. And the breaks go on for 15-20 minutes. It&amp;#x27;s just unlistenable.&lt;p&gt;Supposedly, everybody is broadcasting better things on HD radio, but I&amp;#x27;m not even sure if new cars I&amp;#x27;d by support HD radio, they only advertise XM.</text></item><item><author>rplst8</author><text>Getting rid of these older analog radio technologies is short-sighted unless there is a real compelling and complete replacement already cheap and widely available.&lt;p&gt;FM (and AM) radio are great technologies.  Just because they are &amp;quot;old&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t mean there is something better.&lt;p&gt;In the US, Internet streaming (of existing stations), digital HD radio, and XM satellite rarely achieves a fidelity that equals FM (when the FM reception is clear).    All of them suffer from unpleasant distortion.  FM is not without it&amp;#x27;s warts, but the &amp;quot;errors&amp;quot; are less distracting IMO.  They also all suffer from binary operation.  They either work or they don&amp;#x27;t.  FM fails somewhat gracefully in that the signal just gets noisier the further from the source you are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bufordsharkley</author><text>The noncommercial band of the FM dial is a godsend-- college and community radio stations exist in nearly every city, and serve a very special niche in allowing human-curated broadcasts to exist. (No commercials, no repetition)&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m perhaps a bit biased-- I work as a program director for one of the bay area noncommercial stations (KZSU, 90.1 FM), and help with the Soundtap project.[1]&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;soundtap.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;soundtap.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Norway to switch off FM in 2017</title><url>http://radio.no/2015/04/norway-to-switch-off-fm-in-2017/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bane</author><text>Right, there are basically two things I listen to in my car these days. Music or podcasts coming off of my phone, and FM radio news. But other than that, poor industry choices killed FM years ago as a viable place to find anything worth listening to.&lt;p&gt;In my market, Clearchannel and friends pretty much screwed up the music stations and nobody listens to them by choice. They either played the same tired songs over and over, pumped so many commercials into their broadcast there was effectively nothing to listen to (and coordinated commercial breaks between various stations so there was no reason to switch) or &amp;quot;changed the format&amp;quot; of popular stations without warning or alternative, wiping out decades of legacy.&lt;p&gt;I remember when it happened with one of the most popular and historic stations in the D.C. Baltimore area, WHFS. I was driving to lunch, jamming out to some great music, they cut to a commercial break and the commercials suddenly started talking about the latest Latin American bands. I ignored it, until about 10 minutes later when I realized this was no longer a commercial, but the broadcast!&lt;p&gt;According to WP, the station&amp;#x27;s staff didn&amp;#x27;t even know about the switch until about an hour before it happened.&lt;p&gt;AOL, despite all the bad things you can say about them, was headquartered in the same market, and ran a large-ish (at the time) internet radio system. They ended up launching a streaming radio station with pretty much the same format. But HFS was gone.&lt;p&gt;The local alt&amp;#x2F;prog rock music market has never recovered.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;WHFS_(historic)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;WHFS_(historic)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve &lt;i&gt;tried&lt;/i&gt; to listen to music radio recently, and I think during my hour long commute, I encountered maybe 4 songs, the entire rest of the drive was absolutely &lt;i&gt;packed&lt;/i&gt; with commercials and station filler. I also found that stations try to coordinate their commercial breaks with each other, when one goes on break, good luck finding another station of any genre that&amp;#x27;s not on break. And the breaks go on for 15-20 minutes. It&amp;#x27;s just unlistenable.&lt;p&gt;Supposedly, everybody is broadcasting better things on HD radio, but I&amp;#x27;m not even sure if new cars I&amp;#x27;d by support HD radio, they only advertise XM.</text></item><item><author>rplst8</author><text>Getting rid of these older analog radio technologies is short-sighted unless there is a real compelling and complete replacement already cheap and widely available.&lt;p&gt;FM (and AM) radio are great technologies.  Just because they are &amp;quot;old&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t mean there is something better.&lt;p&gt;In the US, Internet streaming (of existing stations), digital HD radio, and XM satellite rarely achieves a fidelity that equals FM (when the FM reception is clear).    All of them suffer from unpleasant distortion.  FM is not without it&amp;#x27;s warts, but the &amp;quot;errors&amp;quot; are less distracting IMO.  They also all suffer from binary operation.  They either work or they don&amp;#x27;t.  FM fails somewhat gracefully in that the signal just gets noisier the further from the source you are.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mark-r</author><text>I think HD support is now just a given, they don&amp;#x27;t bother mentioning it.&lt;p&gt;I also feel FM is a superior format to HD in most cases. The compression required by digital to fit into the spectrum is just too excessive for my taste. The only reason the stations are into it is so that they can sell the same commercial time multiple times for each of their digital sub-stations.</text></comment>