For me it's about forty years or so since I regularly listened to AM, and then I was a youth listening to Radio Luxembourg and other channels I could find that played music. The listening was done on old tube radios like from Tandberg that people just threw away! The FM content was pretty slim and heavily regulated at that time, and well beyond that time. We actually had "bandit" FM radio stations that drove around to avoid being caught. How the world have changed
Radio Luxembourg: that takes me back a bit. I was never a listener, but I know a lot of people were. For US members, Radio Luxembourg was a powerful AM radio station in the principality of Luxembourg. It was commercial radio very much as the US knows it. Commercial radio was not legal in the UK until comparatively recently.
Radio Luxembourg eventually got competition from "Pirate Radio" ships moored in the North Sea outside UK territorial limits. The most famous was Radio Caroline. They eventually had three ships, off the Essex Coast wide of Shrewsbury Ness. The other issue was that that did not pay licensing fees or royalties. This started in 1964. Radio Caroline eventually acquired a legal license in 2017, from a transmitter at Orford Ness. From 1998 they broadcast via satellite and via Internet since 2000.
There was an hilarious movie made about a pirate radio ship. It was released originally as the "Boat that Rocked" and later renamed "Pirate Radio". It is available on Amazon Prime for a cheap rent. It is actually a movie well worth watching. Anybody associated with these stations had to stay clear of the UK, as in 1967 the Marine Offences Act, made it illegal to be associated with them.
One of the intriguing parts of this story were the ingenious gyroscopic mechanisms to keep turntables level while boats were tossed around in the not infrequent fierce North Sea storms and gales. This really is one of the fascinating stories in the history of audio and broadcasting.
