Blog #2: Tune In and Tune Out

The Italian inventor and engineer Guglielmo Marconi is largely credited with the invention of the radio system in the last decade of the 19^th century. Less than half a century later, nearly every home in the United States and homes across the world had their own personal radios. From the 1920s to the 1950s, the home radio was the dominant entertainment medium, and this era in the US is known as the Golden Age of Radio. Though we may scoff at such an idea now, the notion that you could communicate audibly with people a long distance away was surely a revolutionary idea. In the world of entertainment, communication and entertainment are often inextricably linked together and this is absolutely the case when it comes to radio. It revolutionized entertainment and, in my opinion started our modern trend towards entertainment culture.

            Radio was a true entertainment medium, filled with original programming in all kinds of different genres. Soap operas, quiz shows, detective shows, and serials all made the airwaves during the Golden Age of Radio. These programs captivated the listening audience, as kids and parents alike would gather by the radio to listen to programs, hanging on the edge of every word. One episode of the show The Mercury Theatre on the Air in 1938 was especially memorable, still widely known today. The episode was titled “The War of the Worlds”, an adaptation of H.G. Wells novel of the same name. The entire episode was presented as a series of news bulletins, which allegedly caused mass panic as listeners believed there was a real invasion by Martians occurring in real time. Listen to the original broadcast here. Would you have thought it was real?

             Not only was the radio was the main entertainment medium for shows, but recorded music exploded in popularity thanks to the radio. Music of every style and genre could be found on the radio and listening to music on the radio was a popular pastime and could play in the background in the family home. Eventually, the popularity of the radio was a natural addition to other incredibly popular and booming technology, the automobile. In 1930, Paul and Joseph Galvin, along with William Lear, developed the first car radio and placed it inside of a Studebaker. 

 By the latter half of the 1930s, these “auto radios” were standard components of many vehicles. However, it wasn’t until later that music and FM radio was incorporated. For all of those boring car rides, there was now entertainment for you wherever you went! This kind of transition is indicative of the transition that has occurred over the past 100 years.

            Two other aspects of culture that were transformed by radio were news and sports. For news, a home radio meant having access to that same day’s news for the first time. People no longer had to wait until next day’s newspaper to hear of that day’s news because news programs on radio stations would inform you. Think of The War of the Worlds. People believed that the alien invasion was happening in real time and those news bulletins were the most current information. Secondly, sports were forever changed by radio. Perhaps most significantly for the United States, baseball games were called on radio and people tuned in to hear how their team was doing today. On August 5, 1921, the first baseball game on radio was broadcast between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies. Over the decades, baseball on the radio has never gone away. Even today, one of my biggest loves is to listen to Bob Uecker call a Brewers baseball game on the radio. Fans during the Golden Age of Radio felt the same thing. Fans fell in love with the soothing voices of broadcasters like Red Barber and Mel Allen. Take a few minutes to listen to this: Game 7 of the 1934 World Series and imagine that you're in the ballpark yourself. 

In many ways, I love radio baseball because it gives you a strong sense that you are in the ballpark, even more so than television in my opinion. However, this new development initially provoked fear in some baseball people who believed that people would no longer go to games because they could just listen to the game on the radio. Somehow, that fear has never quite materialized. Ultimately, radio has faded from its heyday as more technology as emerged (see: television), but the impact of radio is still clear today.

            The Internet, as the champion technology and dominant entertainment medium of the 21^st century, has had a significant impact on radio. It is true that radio business adapted to the Internet, but the Internet has fundamentally changed the way we entertain ourselves with radio. First, the presence of the Internet and its growth as an entertainment medium forced the hand of radio business to adapt. Today, you can listen to pretty much any radio station directly on the Internet at the radio station’s website. This illustrates one of the greatest effects of the Internet’s effect on radio: it allows people to tune into the radio no matter where they are. If you’re not near a radio, which is increasingly common today, just go to that radio station’s website and listen there. This is increasingly common. On a related note, apps like iHeartRadio allow you to listen to any station in the country. If a given station is a designated iHeartRadio station, you can tune into any given station in the county at any time. This is a gamechanger! This eliminates all distance limits of radio and falling out of range of a certain station.

            Furthermore, auxiliary cords and Bluetooth technology in cars allows people to use music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music on the car radio. For myself personally, I rarely listen to radio stations in the car, but I prefer to play a custom playlist from Spotify using the radio. We’re no longer bound to what music is playing on any given radio station! This illustrates another theme of how the Internet is changing the way we entertain ourselves: entertainment is way more readily accessible than ever!

Radio news is not immune to the effect of the Internet. For millennials such as myself, I don’t rely on radio news whatsoever anymore, thanks to Twitter and other social media sites that give me updates on breaking news events by the second, faster than radio or even TV can do. On the Internet, we have access to news of all kinds! If you have an interest in board game news, there’s a place for that! If you’re interested in world news, there’s a place for that! The Internet allows you to customize the news you receive to your own interests as you choose what kind of accounts to follow and which websites to read. Though this section is not about television, it is important to note that the Internet is likely hurting the TV news industry. According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 4 in 10 Americans often receive news online, with the younger demographics being twice as likely to read news online. I’ll link to the survey here. This kind of survey stands in stark contrast to the news world of the 20^th century, where figures like Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather were household names. Today, the Internet is chocked full of news sites, with rather anonymous authors who will never be household names. That’s kind of the way we like it.

As I hope is clear now, the Internet has radically changed the way we entertain ourselves with radio by incorporating radio stations into the fabric of the technology. Listening to radio online and apps like iHeartRadio are contributing to the evolution of what radio entertainment means. More and more, however, the Internet is replacing the radio in certain aspects. As smartphone prevalence increases, use of streaming services may largely replace the car radio. Podcasts are a good, natural replacement for the radio program. Radio and TV news are decreasing in their significance, and as the younger generation grows up and new generations replace them, there is no reason to think this will stop. Next, we’ll look at how the Internet has changed the way we entertain ourselves when it comes to the ruler of entertainment culture since the middle of the 20^th century: the television! The good old TV could never be dethroned and usurped from its rightful place in entertainment power…right?