April 2015
Discussions and Strategies Surrounding “Radio”
Ichiro Higashiyama
It has been 90 years since the commencement of radio broadcasting. Since then, radio has been dramatically changing, both in terms of its form and its roles and functions. This series reviews in omnibus fashion how radio has transformed itself in various periods of history. This first part features “radio in the TV age.”
The major transformation of radio was prompted by the emergence of television in 1953. The arrival of television marked the beginning of the reconstruction of radio. In this issue, the author outlines and explores how the role and potential of radio were discussed and what types of strategies were crafted from the mid-1950s to around 1970.
“Radio in its prime” in the 1950s offered general programming with multiple genres, centering on entertainment, and the whole family listened to it with concentration. However, the advent of television forced radio to yield both the general programing function and concentrated listening by family to television. In search of a breakthrough, various approaches were discussed for radio to survive, such as “generating imagination by sounds,” “letting the people listened to music while doing something else,” and “offering specialized programs for personal use.” Consequently, a direction for long-hour live variety shows based on “listening while doing something else” was taken. In the early 1960s, however, argument for making radio programs that people would “love to listen,” not the radio that was “heard but not listened to,” prevailed. Through these debates, an idea of offering content best suited for limited target audience for specific time slot—“audience segmentation”—came to light. Then, an idea of “radio personality” was added to “audience segmentation” and “long-hour live variety shows,” which created a boom in late night radio programs among the youth in the late 1960s, which led to the reconstruction of programs as a “new radio.” This period of the “reconstruction of radio” is not only a process of departure from “radio in prime” and “radio as a mass media” but also a process of creation of new strategies and new functions of this media.