In today's Washington Post, Frank Ahrens has a very long opus on XM satellite radio, the history of FM, and the person in whom they intersect, Lee Abrams:

Why does radio sound the way it does today? Why does it sound like it's been prepped, packaged and served up in easy-to-digest bites, like tiny bits of Spam stuck on toothpicks?

We're talking about music radio, so we're talking about FM. Staticky AM remains the province of news, sports, talk and such utility-style information. Silken FM, as it has been for the past 35 years, is the home of music, thanks to its static-free stereo sound.

Owing to a growing sophistication in audience research, light-speed consolidation of radio ownership and the attendant rise in value of FM stations, the commercial FM dial has been essentially reduced to six musical formats: Pop/rock, hip-hop, country, classical, Spanish-language and variations on the theme of "adult contemporary," a sort of light pop or R&B. Research has shown radio owners that these are the moneymaking formats, and this is where they've flocked. Swept off the dial are niche formats, such as blues, bluegrass, easy listening and jazz, except for Kenny G-style "lite jazz," which falls neatly in the adult contemporary category.

Today's broadcasters will publicly tout what they call the diversity of the radio dial, but they know better. "It's not like the old days," they lament, though never in public.

....FM still manages to capture that magic, once in a while. But the response FM increasingly engenders is, "I'm so sick of that song."

But are we sick enough to pull out our checkbooks? Lee Abrams and his colleagues at XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. are betting their reputations and considerable money that we are. XM is a fledgling business, a company that beams satellite radio to your car or home for a monthly fee. Abrams, an FM radio legend for more than 30 years, is the man who dreamed up XM's 100 channels. He thinks XM can find that perfect song at the perfect moment for enough paying listeners that it can became a sustainable business.

He arrived at XM five years ago like a man stumbling onto an oasis, saved from what he believed had become the wasteland of FM. At XM, he was told to create a new kind of radio. There would be no howling morning shows, no dumbed-down deejay blather and almost no commercials. It would be like starting HBO all over again, except starting with what HBO has become — the sophisticated "Sopranos," not the polka shows and second-rate movies that marked the channel's early days. It would be a wonderland.

....For our purposes, Abrams's story — and, in a way, XM's — began on a summer night in 1967, on a sidewalk outside a grungy VFW on Chicago's South Side. Abrams was 15, skinny and longhaired. Teenagers were rolling out of a sock hop, where they had just heard a local cover band called the Dimensions of Thyme play "Louie, Louie," "In the Midnight Hour" and other garage standards. Abrams buttonholed a sock hopper and his best girl and asked, "What kind of music would you like to hear the Dimensions of Thyme play?"

page 1 | 2 | 3