Two countries, two different problems
In 1967 radio was still the main way most people discovered new records, and the medium was reshaped on both sides of the Atlantic. The causes were different. In Britain, the problem was a monopoly: the BBC had little room for pop, and the young audience had turned to unlicensed stations broadcasting from ships. In the United States, there was no shortage of pop stations. The issue was that AM radio had settled into a tightly formatted routine of short singles, and a new group of listeners wanted something else.
The end of the offshore stations
Beginning with Radio Caroline in 1964, a series of commercial stations broadcast pop music to Britain from ships and platforms anchored in international waters. They were popular, particularly with young people, and they played far more records than the BBC then did. They also gave the public a taste of personality-led disc jockey radio. Their legal position was awkward: they were outside British law at sea, but the government regarded them as a threat to international agreements on broadcasting and to the licensed system, and the record industry, which had concerns about royalties, had its own objections.
The Marine, &c., Broadcasting (Offences) Act received Royal Assent in August 1967 and came into force in the middle of that month. It made it an offence for British subjects to supply, advertise on or otherwise assist such stations. Most of them closed down as the law took effect, with Radio London among the best known to sign off. Radio Caroline was the main exception and continued broadcasting for some time afterwards, with a reduced operation, though its position was difficult.
The wider story of the stations themselves is told in the history of pirate radio. What matters here is the effect on the industry: the government had removed the stations but could not remove the audience.
The launch of BBC Radio 1
The BBC’s answer was Radio 1, which went on air on 30 September 1967. Its first presenter was Tony Blackburn, a disc jockey who had worked on the pirate ship Radio Caroline and then on Radio London, and who opened the new service. Several other former pirate presenters joined the network.
The new station did not simply copy the pirates. The BBC remained constrained by agreements on how much recorded music it could play, usually described as “needle time”, and Radio 1 relied in part on live and specially recorded sessions by artists in BBC studios, as well as sharing some programming with Radio 2. For many listeners that meant the sound was recognisably more conservative than the offshore stations. Even so, Radio 1 gave Britain a national, daytime service devoted to pop for the first time and became very successful. It also drew a large audience that was not necessarily interested in the album-oriented rock beginning to emerge elsewhere.
The American FM revolution
In the United States, the radio story ran in the other direction. FM was a high-fidelity, stereo-capable band that had been widely neglected. Many FM stations were owned by AM operators and often simply repeated the AM broadcast. The Federal Communications Commission adopted a rule, in the mid-1960s, which required stations in larger markets owned by the same company to produce separate programming for a share of the day. That is generally credited with creating space for experiment, though its timing and effect varied from market to market.
Some of the most influential experiments happened in 1966 and 1967. Disc jockeys such as Tom Donahue in San Francisco, who worked at KMPX, and Larry Miller at WOR-FM in New York moved away from the rigid Top 40 formula. They played longer tracks and whole album sides, spoke in a quieter, more conversational voice, and mixed rock with blues, folk and other material at their own discretion. The approach became known by names such as “progressive” or “underground” radio, and it later hardened into album-oriented rock formats.
This was a good fit for the year’s music. Albums like Sgt. Pepper and many of the new San Francisco and Los Angeles records were not designed to be cut into three-minute segments. FM radio gave them a home. It also helped to turn San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene and the rest of the American counterculture into a market that record companies could address directly.
Differences that mattered
It would be wrong to say that FM overtook AM in 1967. AM radio kept the great majority of listeners for years, and FM only became dominant later, in the 1970s. The year was an early turning point rather than a completed change.
The comparison with Britain is useful all the same. British audiences got a consolidated, centrally controlled service, with the BBC becoming the leading source of pop. American audiences got a fragmented market in which small, independent-minded stations could create new formats. Both reflected the same underlying fact: the young audience for popular music was large enough to demand its own broadcasting, and by the end of 1967 neither country could ignore it.