Blog #4 Radio

Radio Commercials

FM and AM radio has been around for many years, and has entertained most Americans ever since its existence. The one thing that most people want to know is, “how much of the radio we listen to is actual entertaining information and how much of it is commercials?” After asking my self this question I did a little experiment to enlighten my self as well as enlighten others. I listen to one FM radio station and one AM station and listen to the station for at least 20 minutes, and listen to see how much of the station was comprised of entertaining information and how much of it was comprised of commercials. First, I listen to FM station (Wink 104.1) at 9:35am, a station that plays a mixed genre of rock and pop music with commentary in the morning. The local station had a guest on their show that had appeared on the reality T.V. show Bachelorette who had lost, and spoke on his behalf about his experience. The remainder of the show comprised of commercials and music. After gathering this information, I found it interesting to see that 18% of the station contained commercials while 82% represented actual entertaining or informative information. I did the same experiment as well with an AM radio station (WHP 580), a news station that would often transition from local news, to news that was from the Glen Beck program, which seemed to portray more commentary then actual news. However, I found the information to be quite entertaining, as they talked about an incident with a Comcast Cable customer wishing to cancel his service. However, the Comcast operator would not cancel the man’s service because the operator could not understand why the man would want to cancel his service due to Comcast being one of the number one Internet providers with the fastest Internet. The man however, would not state why, and the operator became irate and said he would not and could not cancel his service over the phone because he could not give any reason for canceling their Internet service. As a result, I found that only 3% of the station was comprised of commercials and the remaining 97% to be actual entertaining or informative information. After looking at these results, it is clear that FM radio stations contain far more commercials then AM stations. It is my belief that the reason for this is that the majority of actual radio stations are FM stations. Therefore, advertisers will want a station where more people will tune into and here about their product of service. Where as, AM stations are often hit or miss in finding a station that works and does not create the same amount of listeners as those who tune into FM radio.