When the first radio station, Pittsburgh's KDKA, went on the air in the 1920's, no one knew how to make money from radio broadcasting. In only fourteen years, broadcast radio moved from amateur stations in garages, airing phonograph records, to elaborate studios with highly paid performers; and from a widespread rejection of any commercialism to a system financed through direct advertising. Yet the fully commercialized form of radio, in place by the mid-1930's and carried over into television in the late 1940's, was not a technological, cultural, political, or even economic imperative. The development of a radio system supported by the sale of time resulted from a series of decisions that were unforeseen when radio broadcasting began.

Chapter 1 describes the early uncertainty about how radio would be financed. The first steps toward a private, commercialized broadcasting system came with the choice of a technology to provide national radio service. The technological experiments undertaken in the search for a method of providing national radio service, as well as the technological, economic, and cultural factors which entered into the choice of a wired network system are outlined in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 discusses the impact of national radio service and the increased commercialism of broadcast radio on programming. The form and content of the effort to promote broadcast advertising and the changes it brought in both broadcast advertising and the organization of the broadcast industry are detailed in Chapter 4. Opposed to the commercialization of radio broadcasting were a small but vocal group of educators and reformers who feared a system controlled by advertisers and worked to prevent one. Chapter 5 explores the efforts of the protestors and their lack of influence on the 1934 Communications Act.