Why has Spain largely failed to adopt digital audio broadcasting?

One of my readers has asked me to compare the progress of digital audio broadcasting in Spain (DAB/DAB+) to the rest of the European Union.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Spain followed the lead of the United Kingdom, Germany and Norway in moving toward DAB. But while those countries established legal frameworks, timeframes, progressive coverage and awareness campaigns, Spain remained stuck in an experimental phase, mainly due to the lack of a clear roadmap from successive governments, along with the absence of incentives for broadcasters to migrate to a digital environment.

The result? There is no official FM switch-off schedule (unlike in Norway and Switzerland, nor any plan to support a transition. Naturally, in a highly competitive market awash with FM stations, Spanish broadcasters are skeptical about the investment needed to invest in new infrastructure with no clear return on investment.

In much of Europe, radio digitization has been driven by three key factors: first, many countries began the process before the online revolution created new formats such as streaming and podcasts; secondly, and fundamentally, there has been no bloc-wide policy, with governments putting in place or not, their own policies: Norway became the paradigmatic example by setting the FM shutdown…