The rapid growth in FM translators appears to have leveled off, at least for now … the number of FM NCE stations continues to grow … while 40 more AM stations have gone silent.
Those are three of the data points we can glean from the latest station totals from the Federal Communications Commission.
Radio World has compiled year-end data for the past decade to give you a frame of reference. You can see the chart at bottom.
As of Dec. 31, 2023, there were 4,444 AM radio stations licensed in the country. The AM number has been declining a little bit year after year for some time. This year it fell by 40 stations compared to a year earlier. The AM total is down 175 stations, or almost 4%, compared to five years ago.
The number of FM educational stations grew this year by 79 to a total of 4,286 and should continue to grow; the commission held a filing window for new stations in 2021. But the number of FM commercial stations shrank this year by 23 to 6,663.
For the first time in recent memory and on the chart below, the category of FM translators/boosters shrank, if only a little, dropping by 23 licenses to 8,927.
And the low-power FM category has been declining from its peak in 2018, falling back under 2,000 during the past year. But it will grow again once new stations come on the air after the recent filing window for new CPs.
