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FCC Updates Station Count
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How many radio stations
are there in the United States? Once again RW brings you the current numbers as announced by the Federal Communications Commission.
(As always, the answer to the question depends on which ones you count. If someone asked us on the street how many radio stations there are, we would say 15,906, which counts licensed AMs and FMs, including LPFMs, and excludes translators and boosters, which might be separate stations to some of us in the industry but probably not to most people; that total also excludes types of radio not listed by the FCC, such as unlicensed stations -- pirates -- as well as any operations that call themselves radio but broadcast only online. And it does not include shortwave stations based in the United States. And so on.)
These are as of the end of June, with comparisons from a year ago based on RW research:
AM STATIONS 4754 (-16 stations from a year ago)
FM COMMERCIAL 6568 (+41 stations)
FM EDUCATIONAL 3760 (+247 stations)
TOTAL
15,082
FM TRANSLATORS & BOOSTERS 6105 (-19 stations)
LOW POWER FM 824 (-28 stations)
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