Transmitting Silence

This is probably a no one but me cares post (or may be an everyone already knows, but I'm guessing more of the former).

It just occurred to me that when you tune your radio to your favorite FM station and instead of hearing music and/or talk you hear silence it is not that they're not transmitting. If they weren't transmitting then you'd hear static like when you tune to an empty station, as your radio tries to pick up any little signal out on the air (or even the internal electrical noise of the stereo). But rather you are getting silence which for FM means that the radio is picking up one dominant signal, but the frequency of that signal is not changing (or changing too quickly - the key is none of the change is in the 20 Hz to 20 kHz range). So it is not that the station's transmitter is broken or turned off, it must be an earlier stage that isn't working.