Free FM by Richard Neer Page A

worthless equipment. Also, advances in AM technology had improved its sound to acceptable levels, especially to nonaudiophiles who were content with the status quo.
    By 1954, Armstrong was a bitter and beaten man. He’d suffered a stroke and when his wife refused to give up their retirement money to continue the legal battle with RCA, an ugly domestic incident ensued. He realized that his obsession with FM had now cost him the thing most dear to him, and after writing a poignant letter of apology to his wife, he finally gave up the fight, leaping to his death from a thirteenth-story window. His estate settled with RCA for a million dollars, essentially what they’d offered over a decade earlier. FM was left without a champion, although Armstrong’s widow continued lawsuits against lesser opponents and eventually won them all.
    The next major obstacle facing FM was the dawn of the television era. Consumers were faced with the option of buying improved radio technology at a time when the medium’s future was in doubt, or investing in television, obviously the next big thing. To further simplify the decision, manufacturers threw their efforts into television, leaving FM an orphan, abandoned in favor of the newer toy.
    By the mid-fifties, vast improvements were developing in phonograph technology. Thirty-three-and-a-third rpm albums, better phonographic cartridges, and improved speakers were reaching the mass market. When ears were awakened to the sparkling potential of near-perfect sound reproduction, AM radios didn’t sound so good anymore. Stereo albums were widely released for the first time, and high-end users began purchasing component systems with separate turntables, amplifiers, and speakers. And when consumers heard FM for the first time, they were blown away by its advantages over the muddy AM sound. FM receiver sales grew exponentially and FM converters for the car allowed one to take home-listening preferences on the road until AM/FM car radios became available in 1963. A system for FM stereo was approved in 1961, and the race was officially met.
    Still, broadcast fare consisted mostly of the exact same thing you could hear on AM, albeit with increased clarity. With many big-city, network-affiliated stations, FM was “bonused” to advertisers, as an extra incentive to reach a slightly wider audience. Companies saw no advantage in spending money on additional facilities and staff for FM when there was no money to be made. Those who did offer separate programming operated on a shoestring budget, hoping only to break even.
    The picture changed in 1964 when the FCC declared that in markets of more than 250,000 listeners, owners of AM-FM duopolies had to provide original programming on FM for at least half the broadcast day. The commission did so under pressure. The AM spectrum was cluttered with over four thousand stations, and there was simply no more bandwidth to accommodate the increasing number of license applications. Since the airwaves were ostensibly owned by the public, if operators were to serve the public interest, more diversity of programming was needed. If FM could be made commercially viable, then formats appealing to more heterogeneous tastes might be carved out.
    Amazingly (by today’s sensibilities), broadcasters fought the decision tooth and nail. Witness the rights fees paid for cellular telephone bandwidth recently, and compare it to 1964, when untapped gold mines were available with the FM frequencies that companies already owned. Gordon McLendon and Todd Storz, the radio innovators who were given credit for inventing Top Forty, resisted the order mightily and suffered the consequences. The new technology was repulsed rather than embraced.
    Some of this distaste was based on principle: Broadcasters resented the FCC’s incursion into programming. They had always been wary of Washington proscribing how they should serve their audiences, anticipating that so-called public service segments would