The Future of Radio (part VI): Managing the decline of AM

By Steve Faguy IT WAS SUPPOSED to be to FM radio what FM was to AM: Better audio quality, a way to expand to more channels, and a future replacement with some cool bells and whistles. In the 1990s, Canada's radio broadcasters spent millions of dollars on new transmitters and devoted a lot of airtime to marketing the new technology: DAB, or digital audio broadcasting. "The radio industry is primed to reinvent itself for the digital age and 1997 will be the first year of the revolution," read a 1996 article from the Vancouver Sun. "Within a generation, AM and...