No Static at All

You won’t be moving up and down the dial in Norway after next year:

Norway’s Minister of Culture announced this week that a national FM-radio switch off will commence in 2017, allowing the country to complete its transition over to digital radio. It’s the end of an era.

As Radio.no notes, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) will provide Norwegian listeners more diverse radio channel content than ever before. Indeed, DAB already hosts 22 national channels in Norway, as opposed to FM radio’s five, and a TNS Gallup survey shows that 56% of Norwegian listeners use digital radio every day. While Norway is the first country in the world to set a date for an FM switch-off, other countries in Europe and Southeast Asia are also in the process of transitioning to DAB.

I haven’t turned on FM radio since shortly after leaving the industry more than 20 years ago — video might have killed the radio star, but Clear Channel killed the disc jockey. Homogeny makes for a miserable work environment, and the listening experience isn’t much better.

Maybe digital radio can breathe new life into music broadcasting.