Armed Forces Radio and Television Service

The AFRTS Broadcast Center, located at March Air Reserve Base near Riverside, California, is the sole programming source for military radio and television outlets overseas. These outlets serve American service men and women, Department of Defense (DoD) civilians, and their families stationed in over 175 countries around the world where English language broadcast service is unavailable or inadequate. Known as AFRTS-BC, the Broadcast Center is responsible for reflecting an accurate cross-section of what is widely available to stateside audiences of the American radio and television industry.
For more than 40 years, Armed Forces Radio and Television Service locations around the world spun record albums also known as LP’s or vinyl on turntables.
AFRTS began replacing records with compact discs in 1991. The increase in sound quality and the durability of CDs, coupled with ease of storage, spelled the doom of the LP. By 1994, military radio stations around the world had received their last pieces of vinyl.

When the military used to acquire record albums, AFRTS would negotiate contracts with record companies for rights to the albums. Instead of purchasing the entire album, the military repressed records, most often choosing four or five top songs from an original album. Each record was then copyrighted for AFRTS use only. Since government copyrighted property cannot be sold or given away, the records were headed for destruction.