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I think the proliferation of divergent standards is what has kept digital radio from taking-off, and giving streaming services the upper-hand. DAB in Europe, DMB (based on DVB-H) in parts of Asia, proprietary HDRadio in the US, DAB+ trying to usurp DAB, then DRM on shortwave making little headway.

If everyone would have standardized on DRM for their SW & MW frequencies, China would be turning out dirt-cheap recievers for it, it would be cheap enough to be built-in to almost every radio sold, so most everyone would have one.

For FM replacements, there's no clear winner. DAB and DAB+ requires several (independent) broadcasters to all operate together from the same broadcast tower, making it a difficult conversion. It does potentially offer CD quality audio thanks to the lossy codec, but that makes it a poor choice for squeezing in lots of lower-quality sub-channels. DAB+ fixes this latter issue, but takes away the advantage of the former, and being completely incompatible destroys the installed-base. DMB has too much overhead and no particular benefits. The IBOC (in-band on-channel) standards are much better options, but HDRadio is expensive and proprietary for no good reason. So once again, I'd be happy to see DRM adapted to operate on those higher FM frequencies as well. But countries that chose DAB are planning on repurposing their FM bands, so not even the frequency range is close, world-wide, and proliferating incompatibilites even more.

The ability of a broadcaster to merge their FM, MW (AM), & SW offerings into a single, seamless data stream would be incredible. Driving away from the city, your radio would just seemlessly jump from the FM station to a longer-range AM station carrying the same content, at slightly lower quality, without a hiccup. When going back into a city, the switch to higher-quality FM channels would be seamless as well.

A nation-wide network of MW transmitters with the same content would be relatively easy to do, thanks to their huge footprint, taking the band from the least valuable, to the more valuable spectrum for broadcasters. And potentially having a SW station or two as a backup even further out, would mean you'd have satellite-radio like coverage at pretty good quality, without the fees.

BUT, since DRM hasnt caught-on yet, I'd rather see a new IBOC transmission standard which uses patent-free modulation and error correction, the better & patent-free Opus codec, and require radios to include SD card slots for dowloading data broadcasts, as well as optional video screens, so radio stations can occasionally send images to listeners, wheter just album cover-art, traffic maps, personality headshots, relevant news images. etc