Between 1995 and about 2010, Scott Fybush and I drove all around the US (and parts of Canada and a little bit of Mexico) visiting #radio and #television #studio and #transmitter sites. It was fun, albeit rather too many long days of driving, and I got to see 45 of 50 states and 5 of 10 provinces. We got to meet a lot of insiders, many engineers, numerous on-air personalities, and a number of senior managers and station owners.
This was during what can only be described as a period of "irrational exuberance", to use Alan Greenspan's phrase, for #broadcasting industry consolidation in the US, subsequent to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which eliminated most formal restrictions on how many stations one company could own. Many of these deals were as much real-estate plays as anything, and getting to those historic sites before they were sold and demolished was a continuing theme of our travels.
It was clear to me, though, that something was wrong. I remember discussing with industry veterans that we met, in the early 2000s, that no one I knew under the age of 30 listened to the #radio -- certainly not commercial radio -- and if the industry didn't figure out a way to fix that, there was no way they could possibly service all the debt they were taking on to fund those acquisitions. Television wasn't quite there yet: streaming wasn't practical over 56k dialup or 128k IDSL.
The people I was talking with dismissed my anecdotes as, well, anecdotal, and unrepresentative. They took great comfort in the fact that Arbitron surveys demonstrated that some large fraction of the US population was exposed to radio every week (unconcerned with whether those people were actually listening or indeed with whether advertisers would find a more cost-effective way to reach audiences).
In the good ole days of dialup, I expect that efforts to stream is why we went from 300BAUD to 128K in a handful of years, but that's after efforts to transmit images digitally that weren't via wire services or radioFAX kicked it all off.
Newer definitions of "radio" apply these days, I expect. You're counted as a listener to a broadcast station if you don't listen to radio but to their streaming website.
...which raises the question of what in the world do European broadcasters ever continue to see in DRM radio...
