At least you still have music stations on AM in your area. I live in a small town some 35 miles east of Cleveland; the AM stations from the city are almost all talk now (except for very short music programs on two stations--only an hour or two long on each station). One of those stations, a 0.5-kW pipsqueak in a suburb of Cleveland, used to be all oldies, but about three months ago it switched to 99.9 percent talk. I gave up on that station as soon as it switched; it's just as well, as their signal isn't meant to reach my area anyway--at least not at night. The Cleveland station plays good music when its program is on, but I live in an apartment building where the noise levels are often so high good AM reception is next to impossible, even on my 1963 Zenith K-731, which is usually pretty good when it comes to sniffing out weak signals.
Because of these reception problems and the absence (for the most part, except for the two short music programs I mentioned) of music programming on AM radio here (not to mention the signal strength from the Cleveland stations, AM, FM or TV, is not that great in this area, with most Cleveland stations except the big 50kW operations [at least one of which doesn't even run 50kW at night] fading into the noise after sundown), I have just about completely given up on AM. Most (as in 99.999 percent) of my radio listening these days is to FM stations (the rest of my music listening is to CDs, cassettes and cable music channels), which I think still have fidelity of sound far superior to even the best AMs; remember, AM frequency response only extends to about 6,000 Hz, give or take (and the low end is even worse).
BTW, the foregoing is probably why AM stereo broadcasting went belly-up a while back. The so-called "local" AM station here, which is actually in the next town south of me by about five miles, used to be community programming/top-40, but they now simulcast a classical FM which is not heard here by virtue of a strong country-western station 200 KHz down the dial. The AM station applied for and received a 24-hour license; eventually, it was going to install an AM stereo transmitter as well, but the latter didn't pan out. So now, what's coming from the town 5 miles to the south of here? A low-fidelity AM simulcast of an FM radio station that plays serious music. Come on already! Serious music (i. e. classical) was not meant to be broadcast over low-fidelity monophonic AM radio. The company that operates WQXR-AM and FM in New York must have realized this early on, as WQXR-AM is now the New York area's Radio Disney affiliate. New York's classical music now is broadcast over WQXR-FM, where it should be.
I wish the broadcast group which operates the classical FM in Cleveland (which isn't even in the city--the transmitter is some 50 miles west of town, in another county yet; no wonder it doesn't reach this far east, even without the interference from the station 0.2 MHz down the dial) would realize the foregoing as well, and free up the AM station so it can be a local service operation, as it once was. The FMs owners have at least one alternative: to put up a low-power FM translator on top of a tall building in one of the few cities of any size in this area (there are no major cities here; the largest city in this entire county is about eight miles southwest of me).
I wonder why they didn't think of that before they took over (and I do mean took over) this area's only local AM radio station. The only thing I can come up with that makes any sense is that the station's ratings may not have been very good the last few years, so the owners decided to simulcast the classical FM over its 0.5kW AM signal instead. I can only wonder how many people actually listen to that simulcast.
The reason Cleveland's classical FM is broadcast over an out-of-area station today is that the station's owner, for reasons I have never understood (and have given up trying to), thought, about three years ago (!), it would be best to put a music station (not classical) on 95.5, where the Cleveland classical station used to be. The man obviously did not stop to think that, by broadcasting his station's classical programming over a station 50 miles away, and just next (on the FM radio dial) to a country station that drowns it out in fully half the area, he has effectively lost half his listening audience. It makes about as much sense as when the area's only oldies AM radio station dropped the music and went 99.999 percent talk three months or so ago--but I guess that's business. AM stations are mostly talk in most cities anyway these days, so such a move doesn't surprise me in the least.
I think some day AM radio may go completely silent, as many local stations have done already. The FCC is already starting to auction off certain frequencies in the FM and UHF TV spectra; who's to say AM won't eventually be next? The transition from analog to digital TV, scheduled (if the FCC has its way about it) for 2006, is only the tip of the iceberg, with some FM stations already broadcasting so-called "high-definition" signals (technically known as IBOC, a technology which might revolutionize FM radio, as digital HD will revolutionize TV, if it catches on).