Ask Lemmy

You can listen passively during work (household, cooking, construction work) or while driving. You often need your eyes. Also radio often plays music which doesn't consume a lot of active thoughts. It depends a bit on the station though, some talk a lot and play less music.

Cars. The answer is cars.

Why are podcasts (read talk radio) still crazy popular? Cause sometimes you just want to listen without having to pay attention visually

Price. You can buy an AM/FM radio on an integrated circuit for probably under a dollar ready to integrate. I've seen radios given away as swag including wired earbuds.

Ubiquitous access to portable devices that show video is close, but the devices are expensive, data is expensive, and watching video while driving is illegal.

Cars. For the majority of the 20th century, radio was pretty much the only way to listen to music in a car. That alone was likely enough to keep it economically viable.

It's basically all of those things, but also that a newer technology doesn't necessarily mean the older technology has no use. People still use bicycles even though cars and motorcycles exist. People still read books even though audiobooks and TV shows exist. The number of people doing those things may have gone down, but they have a specific use case and need that the "better" technology doesn't satisfy.

On the other side, there are technologies that get entirely replaced by the successor. because it's just flatly better even in the same scenarios. 8-Tracks being made completely irrelevant by Cassettes, for example.

I don't understand how the two technologies even compete. This post makes no sense to me.

You can't drive safely while watching a TV.

I feel like once self-driving vehicles are the only kinds that exist and they have TVs in them, radio will crash big time.

No portable TVs, you can listen with your eyes closed, music.

Radio and TV are like apples and oranges. Sure, they're both fruit, but they're different enough to occupy different niches in our diets

well music did not benefit from a tv at all until music videos became popular in the 80's when video killed the radio star. Seriously though then there is the car which tapes and then cds and such sorta ate into but I know for myself I still just throw the radio on in the car. I real don't want any more of a distraction than that. I bet most people listen to broadcast radio now more often than watch broadcast tv if you look over the whole population. Maybe not but I would not be surprised. Its way cheaper to.

Radio was portable pretty early on. Also, the first TV stations didn't play music. TV was for stories, Radio for music.

Radio didn't survive TV. It didn't totally die yet, but it's been trending towards death. Lots of radio shows couldn't transition to TV and died out. Lots of stations simply stopped existing, or relied more heavily on syndication. It wasn't all TV related, as systems advanced, you didn't need a DJ selecting and playing individual songs. Companies were also allowed to own more stations from the 80s to 96 when all caps were removed, which led.to massive consolidation.

Podcasting has led to a resurgence of the talk show format, but less so radio.

Radio still exists, but it's mostly due to the last vestiges of public good legislation.

They are two different offerings. I listen to a lot of radio and I watch television too. For instance, radio is great for concerts (letting your fantasy run with the music), or listening to while you work. For tv you need to sit down and can’t really do much else, the experience is much more intense.

TVs weren't portable.

It takes a long time for new technologies to saturate the market. It would have taken decades from the release of the first TVs until 80% or more of people had one in their home. Likewise, it took decades before a sizable proportion of people had internet access. It is only now that cable television is not a thing that most people pay for access to--replaced by streaming services.

As TV was taking over, Radio and Cinema would have had their place. Radio still has a place in nearly every automobile sold across the entire planet.

Well, why would radio be superseded by TV? Imagine any situation in which a person could listen to radio. Could they just switch to a TV? Would they want to switch to a TV?

I’d agree with you on cars — cheap and easy to keep throwing radios in.

Sidebar: Not many classic radio shows made the transition to tv. Jack Benny, literally the most popular of shows, had a rough switch to TV because the timing was so different. For example: Instead of a foley guy doing a doorbell sound and immediately having it open, you now have a camera spending a couple seconds tracking someone walking across the room to answer a door in silence. The vaudeville structure of having a song in the middle, or trying to put on a show as the premise of the show, didn’t work (until the Muppets). Then there’s the whole laugh track or laugh box juicing issue that some railed against or over-embraced, and it all kind of fell apart. A few managed, but it was rare.

1950s were before my time but later in the same century, FM radio was what we had instead of internet music and streaming. You could call radio stations and request particular songs, or sometimes they would announce that they would play some new album nonstop starting at 7pm, so you would be ready with your cassette deck. Or in general, they'd just play music all day, so you'd always have something to listen to. That's sort of what people do now anyway, except it's whatever the youtube algorithm is promoting instead of what the record labels were paying the radio stations to play. TV was never a 24/7 music medium like that. I guess MTV was a thing for a while but that was still different.

AM radio on the other hand was mostly for news and sports updates, particularly in cars. So the most valuable advertising slots were during "drive time", i.e. commute hours.