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> While I'm a geek and love the idea of broadcast over free airways, practically how is radio any more useful now than cable tv?

Broadcast radio has fewer deadzones than cell service. Additionally, while audio streaming is relatively low bandwidth, my current cell plan charges all bits against my usage allowance and there's a hard cap; if I used streaming audio instead of terrestrial radio while driving, I'd hit my usage cap most months.

While there's a lot of syndicated radio, local stations with real studios provide a real source of local information and character. My local dance station [1] doesn't provide a news show, but does give snippets about major local incidents. My streaming dance station [2] did do news content once, in 2001, but they're unlikely to tell me about things local to me.

[1] https://www.c895.org/

[2] https://www.di.fm/

> Broadcast radio has fewer deadzones than cell service

I guess this depends a lot on where you live, but my experience has been the opposite. E.g., I get cell coverage inside buildings, basements and tunnels where FM turns to static, and there are more cell repeaters in mountains where the FM gets radio shadow

Even if you had an unlimited plan, the part that makes it feel yucky is the need to pay for a plan just to gain access in the first place. That feeling radio gives can never be recreated over toll-roaded channels.

Sometimes the ephemerality of the medium is what makes it special. Radio exists just while you hear it. Having it be accessible everywhere via the internet ruins that sense of place. I don't know, maybe I'm just old.

On the other side of this, that ephemerality is sometimes worth being preserved.

Since the 1970s, Boston DJ Oedipus has put on a Christmas Eve show from 6pm to midnight, with Christmas music from around the world, and even just from the local music scene. It started on WBCN, then moved to WFNX, and most recently landed on WGBH.

Oedipus doesn't maintain a set list - it's just whatever he's feeling like playing as he's doing it. His immense talent aside, it means that it's hard to learn about those songs, or even those bands. For the last few years, I've been recording it and trying to build the set list myself, from either what he says (he doesn't always!), or from Google searches.

Does it take the magic away? Maybe, but I feel that it's what little I can do for preserving something that's been actively disappearing.

This is another point that OTM's "The Divided Dial" series covered.

It's both a creative feature of the medium and one which makes systematic study of it challenging, as there's often no official recording and study requires either researches making their own recordings or listening live, and in either event, listening at best at perhaps 2x realtime speed, which means that analysis is slow.

(How much AI and speech-to-text services might assist in this I don't know.)

Your average Joe can listen to radio completely anonymously on a device which the government has no control over.

Tor and similar tech is mostly outside the reach of the government, but is also way out of reach for the general population.

Even if they weren't way out of reach for the general population, you can't get around the fact that you need to connect to a service end-point to receive anything and you're going to have to cast something to make the connection. Nothing over a digital network is ever going to recreate the magic of being able to shout freely into infinite space allowing anyone with a basic understanding of science to pick it up.

This. People in less free countries can still get unfiltered news even though all internet connections were severed and/or all local stations have been shutoff or are controlled by the government. All it takes is a small pocket receiver which does not radiate anything. ...well actually it does, but that's another story, and detection is quite hard if not performed from close distance.

WNYC's On the Media ran a great six-part podcast/broadcast series "The Divided Dial" about radio, its reach and significance, and of course the increasing polarisation of the medium:

<https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial>

Several times the point was made that radio is cheap, is accessible by virtually anyone, and in particular is effective at reaching rural regions and those travelling (often in cars or trucks), whether commuters, on-site work (construction, farming, etc.), or transportation work.

For many such audiences, radio is largely the only effective means of reaching them.

I heard something (I think it was on youtube comments) about text-over-broadcast, which would be useful for even AM stations. That's interesting, because with the Text-to-speech technology becoming almost indistinguishable from a real person, it would open new possibilities for digital broadcasting - albeit talk radio only. Plus you'd still likely need to download the voice software separately, but you could have "talk radio" at only a few hundred bps.

> The obvious issue is whether radio adds any value now that we can stream over the Internet, with unlimited channels

It has a lot of value for me. I don't have to subscribe to a streaming service, I don't have to have special equipment beyond the ubiquitous radio, it works in areas where there is no cell or internet service, etc.

Streaming has its place, but it has a different use case than radio.