Via a blurb at Eschaton, I came across this post at Down With Tyranny, in which radio mega-giant Clear Channel is caught with its memos out, attempting to deny air time to the new Springsteen album. I don't normally write about this stuff, but it does kind of fit with (a) my deep and abiding love for music; and (b) my disgust with the strange mating of bad business models and even worse government decision-making. Having said that, I thought I would add a cent or two.
First, while the lack of radio airplay will not effect the sales of the new release (any more than it hurt the Dixie Chicks, as noted in the blog post), Springsteen is a special case, a kind of transcendent musical figure immune to the vicissitudes of fashion and time (although, as also noted in the Down With Tyranny post, his concerts have become a tad shorter as he has gotten older; two hours from a guy on the threshold of Social Security isn't bad, though). Other artists, however, especially new and more local artists, aren't quite so lucky. Behind this kind of thing is a strange way of doing radio, something that seems counter-intuitive, viz., restricting access to certain types of music and allowing others that industry insiders have decided, for no particular reason, would have greater appeal, therefore raking in more bucks.
One of the way this is driven home is the formatting process. Radio stations work within a designated format - playing only certain types of music - already restricting what disc jockeys play. Even more restrictive rules apply when considering rotation rules - certain songs get played more often than others. Thus, we get heavy rotation for some artists (their songs are played so many times each hour, or two hours), with a scale going back to those songs that might get played just once a day, or perhaps twice. These decisions used to be made by disc jockeys themselves (with the help of grease money from independent labels, of course, a practice known as payola). I was once in the offices of a radio station in a small town in north central Illinois. Actually, it was several radio stations in one, as most are these days. At a desk sat a woman in her mid-fifties, with a scroll list, copying and pasting on to a formatted page the playlist for the next day for the FM station operated out of the office. I was told that the program had guidelines, e.g., if she chose a song that had been designated low rotation too much, an error message would crop up. She had no knowledge of the music, no understanding of grouping songs together by certain similarities (known as a set list). It was all just words on a computer screen to her.
This is the way radio really works today, ladies and gentlemen. It should be stopped.
The nice thing is, of course, that with the advent of Satellite Radio, the growth of the internet (especially YouTube), and the collapse of the business model used by the major record companies (how many record/CD stores are in your local mall? The Sam Goody's at the CherryVale Mall down the road closed two years ago) offer an opportunity to think creatively about the possibilities for allowing greater access to a wider variety of music to the listening public. Unfortunately, as the rules are currently gamed in favor of giants like Clear Channel (and becoming even more so; the market dominance of Clear Channel is appalling) there are no incentives for smaller, more inventive ways of doing commercial radio. Of course, with a diminishing audience (how many times can one hear "Smoke on the Water" or "Fergalicious" without beating one's head against a cinderblock wall until one passes out?) the threat posed by any new player is immense. If a radio station, even a micro-radio station of say 100 or 200 watts, with an open format, playing six to ten hours a day, opened in this area, it would blow away the competition, threatening their ad revenue. The business violence done to competition for dwindling market share can be horrific.
So, we have the vast wasteland of radio as it currently exists. We have idiotic morning drive-time shows like the Bob and Tom show, syndicated around the country, where we get to hear a bunch of ninnies laugh at how stupidly clever they are. We have AM talk radio infecting our body politic like a cancer out of control. If one drives anywhere around the country, there is a dismal sameness to the music the floods one's ears; a country station in Wichita sounds the same as one in Minneapolis, Helena, or Charleston, SC; an urban contemporary (rap and r&b) station sounds the same in New York, Chicago, Denver, or Dallas; an adult contemporary station plays the same, tired songs (including, most likely, a call-in show in the evening where people request the same insipid love songs every night). There is no sense of any city having a unique, thriving local music scene with a tenor and flavor all its own.
In the 1920's, a Republican Congress and Administration pushed through a bill federalizing the radio spectrum - those airwaves are ours, ladies and gentlemen. Any radio station that operates on those airwaves merely rents the space, with the promise to serve the public's interest. Those latter regulations were all but lifted during the Reagan Administration (along with the so-called Equal Time clause, whereby any political issue discussed had to include the exactly equal amount of time to both, or all, sides of an issue), and need to be not only reintroduced, but enforced. Rules about market share within a listening area need to be made stronger, and enforced. This is one case where the market is failing not just the people who ostensibly are the owners of the airwaves, but the industry that uses radio as a revenue generator. Greater government regulation, tighter restrictions on station ownership, formatting (this is my own personal beef; let the damn jocks decide what to play for crying out loud), and access need to be set in place and enforced. Finally, Clear Channel's near monopoly in most major markets needs to be ended the same way AT&T's monopoly was ended, by breaking up the company.
