"A Browne" wrote in message
...


Comparing the early days of FM to now, has a nice ring, but the media
landscape has changed dramatically since then.
Within the next 10 years, wireless internet networks like 4G, Wimax,
and wifi will be everyplace and as common as cell phones are today.


Thats great. Radio will use that technology too.

The days of someone else choosing your play
list are dying.

That is if you see the role of radio to only "pick a playlist".

Radio serves a much larger role.

Pray tell, what is that larger role?

True, radio used to have a larger role than just 'entertainment', but that
role has largely been abrogated in these days of large corporate ownership
and downsizing of stations.

Almost no stations carry any form of local, or even network, news anymore.
This is not counting the so-called 'newstalk' stations, which are not
generally actual news outlets, but merely Jerry Springer type entertainment.

Even the few that have news do not have much, if any, local interaction such
as used to be common 20 years ago. If they have any such interaction, it
usually takes the form of flashy promotional events that serve primarily to
make more money for the station.

As has been said before, radio now is basically a jukebox with commercials,
and someone else is picking the records in the jukebox. Worse still, so
many stations are just satellites of a single studio that feeds programming
to various stations (how many hundreds of stations carry the various
Superaudio satellite feeds? How many carry Coast to Coast AM?)