Predictions of FM radio's demise are overrated. FM radio in Estonia.

This was written as an AC and as a reply to a post on Slashdot, but turned out to be too long. There's plenty of discussion, among which there's a U.S.-centric notion, that FM channels there do not play much good music, and a substantial amount of airtime is devoted to ads.

So, I'm in Estonia, and the local public (national) broadcaster ERR has five channels, of which four are broadcast nationwide, while Raadio Tallinn airs just around the capital and its surrounding counties.

Of these, Raadio 2 is like BBC Radio One. It is youth-oriented, plays current music, has some talk programmes; its evening programmes are themed by music genre. Raadio Tallinn plays adult contemporary, jazz, and world music with just news a the top of the hour. Klassikaraadio is self-explanatory. There are promos to events, but no ads. Raadio Tallinn almost has no promos at all. It's all free to listeners, and ad-free ERR channels are entirely paid for by the taxpayer.

Across the country, there are 33 channels in total, but not all are broadcast nationwide. 28 channels are privately-run; of these, there are about four or five that are Christian; six are broadcast in the Russian language (seven total with ERR). Some are only regional. In the north of the country, I could sometimes pick up two Finnish channels.

The non-Christian privately-run channels typically play music geared toward different listeners: one plays only Estonian-language music; another only Russian-language music; another one is extremely conservative, dislikes the state and does conspiracy theories; yet another one is mainstream talk radio. Most others are in-between, vacillating between retro and pop.

Across Estonia, there's music and great (and not-so-great) content available to all tastes, and I don't know of anyone who'd be complaining about radio.

With the exception of Norway with only digital radio, I can imagine, that Finland and other EU/EEA countries have a similar radio landscape.

Because of the large installed base of FM receivers, it would seem really pointless for a country -- as it seems pointless in my view -- to switch FM radio off in its entirety. While digital radio broadcasting has its advantages, then it would be better to implement it side-by-side with FM radio in order to counter planned obsolescence. The side-by-side method is transitional.

Estonia's switch-over to digital tv in 2010 was a major thing. By then, most people had already transitioned away from Soviet-made SECAM sets to those made in the West because of a need to adopt the PAL standard, so anything with a SCART outlet was good for a digital box.