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Radio Broadcast
MANY PURELY COMMERCIAL CONCERNS
Have gone into broadcasting, presumably directly to influence their sales. This photograph shows the bank of batteries used to run the station which is maintained by a battery manufacturer
would resent any lavish expenditure for talent on the part of a municipal broadcasting station. City officials are not elected for the purpose of giving nightly musical entertainments. So, while municipal stations may perform certain modest functions very capablv, the people who sign "Irate Tax-payer" to their letters "to the editor" can be depended upon to sit on the municipal lid.
HOW GOOD A JOB IS BEING DONE
C DUCATIONAL institutions, churches, *-* national guard, chambers of commerce, hotels, department stores, grain and feed establishments, monument dealers, lawyers, a chiropractic school, newspapers, musicstores — so runs the list of broadcasters. Plainly, they are using radio to advertise everything from the Gospel to "$2 Dinners With Dancing."
Day after day and night after night these stations pour forth programs. Take a pencil and figure out the staggering quantity of stuff that is annually being pushed into the air. Suppose each of the 550 broadcasting stations operates two hours a day, and suppose that the average length of each program number is six minutes, or ten items an hour. Multiply 550 by 2 by 10. The answer is 11,000; for
this is the daily number of program items required to fill in the time of America's broadcasting stations. Now multiply 11,000 by 365, to get the annual number of items. The answer is 4,015,000. If you're conservative, cut this in two and you'll find that at least 2,000,000 songs, dance numbers, sermons, Republican, and Independent conventions, talks on the rubber heel industry, and bedtime stories have to be gathered and disseminated annually by the broadcasters. The wonder is. not that they do such a bad job, but that they do such a good one.
Broadcasting is still very young. It began in September of K)2 1 . In January, 1922, the licensed broadcasting stations numbered only 28 for the whole United States. By fall, or October i to be exact, the number had jumped to 539. At that point the swiftly rising curve flattened out and ever since then the number of licensed broadcasters has hung around the 550 mark. On July i, 1924, there were 549 stations; only ten more than on October i, 1922.
The mortality is heavy; as many as 80 stations having been deleted from the list in a single month. Twenty deletions is about the average. Always, however, other new anc1 hopeful advertisers have come along to throw their waves out into the great unknown, so that the total number of stations steadily stays between 500 and 600.
Of the 549 stations which were licensed up to July ist, last year, 224 were pretty definitely advertising radio. That is, these 224 statior included radio manufacturers, radio jobber, radio stores, garages handling radio equipment as a sideline, department stores featuring radio sections (of which there were 20), and music stores which were taking no chances on having their phonograph and piano business literally vanish into the air. To this classification could be added 1 1 stations operated by such concerns as the American Telephone & Telegraph Co., the General Electric Co., the Radio Corporation of America, and public