In 1894 Lord Kelvin, the president of the Royal Society, predicted that radio had no future. The first radio factory was opened 5 years later. After the invention of the transistor in 1947, several US electronics companies rejected the idea of a portable radio. At the time, radio sets were rather large. When Bell Labs put the transistor on the market in 1952 they had few takers apart from a small Japanese start-up called Sony. Sony introduced the transistor radio in 1954. The rest is radio history. Video never killed the radio star. In fact, today there are more than 7 000 radio stations in the world – more than 5 000 listed at Mike’s Radio World – attracting some 1.5 billion active listeners. In the West, more than 80% of people listen to radio, one in three of them listening via the Internet. 18% have downloaded shows after they were broadcast by visiting the station’s web site. A staggering 42% of people listen via digital TV, with 36% using a DAB radio. 21% use a digital music player, while 82% use the good old analogue radio.
