The death of radio

The BBC has an article by Bryan Lufkin about the end of radio:

Disc jockeys around the world all have one thing to thank for having their jobs, especially in this age of endless entertainment options. It’s not their listeners they should be thanking; it’s their listeners’ cars.
Entertainment media becomes obsolete at the speed of light. VCRs, CDs, Walkmans, all have come and gone. But there’s one medium that’s been around even longer than all of those, and it’s still going strong today. It’s radio, and it’s all because of the automobile.
Thanks to cars, humans have nurtured a relationship with radio that’s lasted more than eighty years. The reason? Few things in life require more attention than driving. When you’re listening to radio, with its hands-off format for music and news that's pre-curated by DJs, you can keep engaged on the task at hand, while still keeping your eyes on the road. Although satellite and digital radio threaten to kill terrestrial-based FM, and while self-driving cars threaten the existence of all radio, the medium has proven incredibly resilient, although its survival story hasn’t been a short or easy one.
The inside of a car is an experimental petri dish fit for the latest entertainment technology trends of the day. Throughout the years, all the flashiest tech of the time has appeared on dashboards the world over— 8-tracks, cassette tapes, compact discs— and yet all those have faded away. But radio's stuck around. Even when television replaced radio as a family pastime in the home, the inherent need for entertainment that's fit for multitasking is what's allowed cars to keep radio alive.
According to a report by the Pew Research Center last year, the number of Americans who listen to online radio (like Pandora, iHeartRadio, or Google Play Music) has doubled since 2010. Nearly three-quarters of those total listeners tune in via their smartphones. Within that group, the number of people who listen to online radio in their cars has spiked substantially: a third of adult smartphone owners listen to online radio in the car, up from twenty percent in 2013, and way up from six percent in 2010.
One thing is clear: the radio format is still popular. Why? It’s because the medium has been able to swiftly adapt to shifting technological landscapes. Whether it’s AM, FM, or now XM; whether it’s using transmission towers or satellite signals, radio continually morphs to stay in the ears of motorists.
The romance between cars and radio is sort of a surprising one, considering that in the 1930s, some states tried to outlaw car radios, as there was fear of radios distracting drivers or the music lulling them to sleep. Instead, the installation of radios in cars proved to be a long-lasting, lucrative synergy of entertainment and transportation.
Fast forward to present day and, curiously, consumers are still hungry for radio, and not even the online or satellite varieties, necessarily. They want to listen to good old FM, a technology that stretches back to the 1930s. In fact, Pew reported in 2014 that ninety percent of people in the US ages twelve or older had listened to radio in the week before they were surveyed.
But FM’s days might be numbered. Not everyone is on board with keeping our beloved dinosaur technology alive and well. British Culture Minister Ed Vaizey says the country is reaching the “tipping point” for FM: Within two years, his government aims to double the amount of local digital transmitters, including the number of digital radio-equipped cars, by 2017.
Even if FM goes extinct, though, radio will still thrive on the internet. And as the cloud increasingly connects the Internet with everything in our lives, from our phones to our cars, it’ll still be easy for people to listen to the radio, regardless of what happens to FM. Radio’s latest evolution is satellite radio, like Sirius XM. The company, which uses the familiar DJ format, says that three-quarters of new cars in the US come factory-installed with Sirius XM right now. Its aim is to double its fleet of enabled vehicles by 2025, which would hit nearly two hundred million cars.
“I joined the company in 2004 when it had six hundred thousand subscribers,” says Patrick Reilly, Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications at Sirius XM. “Now we have more than thirty million, despite the growth of streaming competitors and the advent of the connected car.”
With each iteration, radio combines the latest technology) with two things that are timeless: that people like to be entertained, and that people need to drive. It’s why radio can remain popular in an age of Spotify or Pandora. But you can expect your next car to have one of those services pre-installed, as well.
Don't touch that dial!
A brief history of in-car entertainment:
1930: Galvin Manufacturing Corporation introduces the Motorola radio, one of the first car radios to become commercially successful. Illinois state police departments are among the first customers.
1936: The Motorola Police Cruiser radio receiver is introduced, which the company describes as “a rugged two-way car radio designed to receive police broadcasts”.
1952: German electronics manufacturer Blaupunkt introduces the first FM car radio. FM appeared as a more stable, smoother alternative to AM that helped eliminate static.
1956: Chrysler introduces the Highway Hi-Fi, an eighteen-centimeter-wide, under-dash turntable that played records. It flopped.
1965: 8-track tapes— the clunky precursor to cassette tapes— will be played in dash players in 1966 model cars, Ford announces.
1983: Toyota and Fujitsu team up to develop the world’s first car audio CD player.
“I was recently talking to a few automotive senior managers that are now seriously looking into providing a Spotify flat rate with purchase of a new car,” says Chris Fangmann, director and CTO of Global Manufacturing Industry at IT firm CSC.
But Sirius XM, Spotify, and other online music and radio providers can expect a formidable opponent in the next couple of years: the self-driving car.
If you don’t have to keep your eyes peeled for stop signs, highway exits, or even have your hands on the steering wheel, radio’s entire competitive advantage goes out the window. “Basically all that’s happening in the backseat rows and passenger seat will be consumed in the driver seat,” says Fangmann. “So, yes, that will threaten consumer preference for radio.”
And the self-driving car is coming. Soon. Nearly every major automaker and tech company under the sun is racing to get robotic rides on Earth’s streets, including tech giants like Google, Uber, Baidu, and Samsung, to iconic car names like Toyota, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, BMW, and Volvo. Their timetables are all roughly the same: they want self-driving cars on the road within the next four years, if not sooner.
Additionally, the notion of the connected car is a potentially disruptive one for radios. More car and tech companies are partnering to connect cars to the Cloud and bring the Internet of Things into the driver’s seat. You could soon connect your smartphone or tablet to your car, and with a simple voice command, order your device to start streaming content from the internet without lifting a finger, from audiobooks to your tracks from your iTunes library.
But industry analysts think that it’s going to take a lot to kill radio once and for all. After all, plenty of people are still listening to radio, in general, whether it’s in their car or not.
“I expect that ‘radio’ will remain being the primary form of in-car infotainment,” Fangmann predicts. “But the radio itself will continue to change. It will leverage new services and will of course continue to be the early adopter for new technological disruptions that we don’t know of today.” As long as people can continue enjoying simple pleasures like driving, they’ll be able to enjoy other simple pleasures, too, like listening to this week’s Top 40 on the drive home.

Rico says he doesn't own a car, nor drive, but the fiancée does have a CD player, in addition to a radio, in her car.