The 1970s was the decade FM won. At the start of it, FM was still mostly where you went for classical music and late-night experiments. By the end, more Americans were listening to FM than AM, rock had found a permanent home on the band, and public and commercial radio had both been reshaped in ways that still define the dial.
FM goes mainstream
The free-form “underground” FM of the late 1960s didn’t stay free for long. Station owners saw its audiences and turned it into a business. The result was AOR (album-oriented rock): rock albums, played in stereo with better sound, but chosen from a researched playlist rather than a DJ’s whim. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, and the Eagles became the sound of FM.
Better sound mattered. Hi-fi systems were a status symbol, car stereos improved, and music was being mixed in rich stereo that AM simply couldn’t carry. By the end of the decade, FM’s share of US listening had overtaken AM’s. That shift pushed AM towards talk, news, and sport, and our piece on AM radio today picks up that thread.
Formats split apart
Radio in the 1970s stopped trying to please everyone on one station. Programmers began dividing the audience by age and taste:
- Adult contemporary for softer pop and older listeners.
- AOR for rock fans.
- Disco stations in the second half of the decade, some of which shot to the top of big-city ratings.
- Country and beautiful music (lush instrumentals) for other slices of the audience.
This splitting into formats is the direct ancestor of the format system explained in our guide to radio station formats.
Countdowns and syndication
In 1970, American Top 40 with Casey Kasem launched. The weekly show was recorded once and sent to hundreds of stations, and it proved that a single nationally syndicated programme could feel local and personal everywhere. Syndicated shows became a staple of weekend radio.
Public radio is born
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 led to the creation of NPR in 1970. Its first big programme, All Things Considered, began in 1971. It sounded unlike commercial news: longer stories, real sound from the scene, and time to explain. Public radio gave America a national non-commercial network for the first time, decades after Britain had the BBC.
Britain gets commercial radio
In the UK, the 1970s brought the end of the BBC’s monopoly on legal domestic radio. Independent Local Radio launched in 1973. LBC in London went on air in October 1973 as a news and talk station, followed days later by Capital Radio for music. Over the decade, licensed commercial stations opened in cities across the country, each with a duty to serve its local area. It was the start of the commercial sector that, much consolidated, still exists today. Our history of UK radio follows what happened next.
The CB craze
For a few years in the mid-1970s, millions of people bought CB (Citizens Band) radios, two-way sets originally used by truckers to warn each other about traffic and police. CB slang, songs like “Convoy”, and handles (nicknames on air) became a pop-culture fad. It was not broadcasting, but it showed how much people loved the idea of talking on the radio, an urge that phone-in shows would also tap into.
What the 1970s handed on
FM as the main music band, carefully researched formats, nationally syndicated shows, public radio news, and a commercial sector in the UK. Strip away the technology changes since, and the dial you hear today was largely assembled in this decade. The 1980s, which we cover in the 1980s radio sound, mostly refined it.