AM Devitalization

Been to a shopping mall lately?

It's not pretty. Vacancies dot even the most successful malls. The lesser malls feel abandoned, like modern ruins, isolated and scary. One mall near us is so barren, they've marked off part of one end and use it for pickleball. Even the mall walkers are gone. If a mall can't draw mall walkers in South Florida, that's a harbinger of doom.

The reasons that big indoor malls aren't thriving anymore aren't a secret. Habits changed. Tastes changed. People shop online now, or go to discounters like Walmart or Target. Department stores have fallen out of favor. Teens don't hang out in the food court anymore; they're congregating on TikTok. What's left are traditionalist shoppers who want to try stuff on or handle it before buying, or people who want to see stuff in person before firing up the Amazon app and buying it there. Other than Apple stores and a few other chains with loyal customers, there's not a lot to draw people to the mall anymore, and what's left is kinda creepy. Some malls are now mostly occupied by local businesses trying to make a go of it, and things like gyms and churches and DMV offices. I got my Florida driver's license in a half-repurposed mall. It was strange.

Okay, it's story time. Back where we used to live in California, there was a mall that was once a reasonably successful operation, but it slowly began to wither away. Nordstrom moved to a better mall down the street and was replaced by some kind of children's playground with dinosaurs. Storefronts emptied, stores moved out. It's now mostly local stores of which you've never heard and a bunch of empties.

Down the street. one mile away, visible from the mall parking lot, is an AM radio tower. It's a 50,000 watt nondirectional monster signal, there since 1938, sitting in what was once an open field and is now mostly a park with a condo complex out front. The AM station using that tower is now simulcasting on an FM signal coming from Mount Wilson.

Yes, here comes the AM-empty mall analogy.

The AM dial is, largely, like the lesser malls, increasingly barren, with scattered successes. FM is where most people still shop for their radio entertainment and information; call it the equivalent of the more successful malls. Streaming and podcasts are growing, maybe not quite Amazonian but, for the purposes of this analogy, let's say that it's where consumers are going.

So, that big AM station (yeah, KNX) is now on FM, too. It's where the target listeners are. They stream, too, because that's also where the listeners have gone. Meanwhile, in a few weeks, two AMs will be shutting down in Las Vegas, one continuing on an FM translator, the other continuing on an HD subchannel, and there is no shortage of radio old-timers mourning on Facebook, upset that the AMs are being dumped in order for the owners to sell off the land under the towers.

But if it was your business and someone wanted to pay that much money for your property, you'd sell it, too. And, let's face it, the programming is going to reach the people it needs to reach through the FM translator and streaming. If radio stations could monetize the far fringes of an AM signal, the part that is outside the rated, populated market, there might be a case for saving the big AM signal. You can't really sell that fringe audience, though, and the noise floor has gotten so bad in most areas that you can't assume anyone would actually be listening out there in the desert, anyway.

Does AM, then, make sense in 2023? In some cases, yes, but it's getting harder to justify the expense and to justify using what might be a large swath of valuable real estate for AM radio towers. It's still harder to find new places to put AM transmitters, and even diplexing or triplexing doesn't address the simple fact that the land is often worth way more for other purposes than it is with sticks on it.

What then? Maybe it's time for the FCC to let AM stations migrate to FM translators without needing to keep the AMs on the air. Maybe it's time to look at ways to migrate more AMs to FM by loosening interference rules -- after all, the dial's already been compromised by Docket 80-90 and the avalanche of translators and LPFMs dropped in after that. Stations unable to find FM frequencies would at least have a somewhat cleaner AM band and more opportunity to increase power, but more stations could go where listeners have gone. And if there's a use case for the rest of the AM band -- low power, Part-15-style community radio, or uses for underserved communities -- let's use it for that.

In the meantime, you can't blame anyone for abandoning AM, even if you think there's still more than a little life left for the medium. It's 2023, not 1963, and if you want to serve the public, there are new and better ways to do it than a buzz-plagued, century-old technology, just as there are new and better ways to sell stuff to people than a storefront in a mall.

You can't, however, convert an AM radio station to a pickleball court. That's where the analogy falls apart.

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What? Super Bowl? Did they play that already? I hadn't noticed... oh, okay, it was a great Eagles season anyway, congratulations to Kansas City, wait 'til next year, it's basketball season now, baseball's back, too, whatever. Moving on....

Perry Michael Simon
Senior Vice President/Editor-in-Chief and News-Talk-Sports-Podcasting Editor
AllAccess.com
psimon@allaccess.com
Twitter @pmsimon
Mastadon @pmsimon@c.im