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Homogenized Music
Mansing writes "The connections between broadcast radio and music industry are well known. In the old days, payola was the method to increase a song's (or album's) exposure. But now, the same "free market" corporate music that infects the music industry is also infecting the broadcast radio industry as well. What makes the article so informative is not the business angles, but how business has changed what is broadcast. Seeing the parallels between the recording industry's force fed music and Clear Channel's "nothing is left to whim or chance" programming, I now understand how hard it is for any non-corporate sanctioned music to become widely heard."
College radio tends to have very low power broadcast, and hence low range. If you don't live in a college town, or even on the outskirts, you don't get it.
Besides, from the last slashdot article on payola in the music industry, seems like a lot of the big college radio stations are where the corporate fuzz do their test runs.
i think the problem here is one of bandwidth... here in the UK, we have a small number of large indepedent radio networks, as well as regional stations that are currently peddling almost exactly the same type of music as each other, all going for the least offensive (to the average listener) and most bland music 'product' that they can find, in order to maximise advertising revenue - a 'one size fits all' system.
However, I can't see that this will last for long, as soon as any of the following technolgies reach the average consumer household: Net radio, Stand alone recievers for audio-only channels over satellite, digital radio (we are a long way ahead of the US in this field, I believe, as the BBC have pushed the technology) and increased spectrum avaialbilty due to theproposed switch off of terrestrial analogue TV transmitters (which the UK governement are keen on as they stand to rake a fortune in from selling the bandwidth off).
When any (or all) of the above technolnogies are mature, then it will be possible to deliver cost-effective radio to much smaller markets (with tightly targetted adverts), so the constant search for the lowest common denominator will no longer be the best way to maximise advertising revenue, providing a wide spectrum of choice will be more cost effective.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Check out the extensive coverage they've gotten over at Salon for the past year or so. There's about a dozen articles about various aspects of their business practices.
http://www.salon.com/ent/clear_channel/Did you even think to research this before you spewed it out?
The
-- "Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?"
Clear channel was pushing that top-level domain, and originally had changed all their radio and television stations and even provided sponsors websites .cc domains. (as in clear channel)
It does stand for Cocos Islands, but was being sold as meaning "Clear Channel"
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
the only commercial radio i listen to is talk radio, otherwise it's college radio. though i will admit i am biased because i work at one. having been involved with an urban (philly) college, non-commercial station now for about 10 years i can see how dedicated people are to the station.
we, WKDU 91.7fm play pretty much "music not heard on other stations". we are the only free format, student run station left in Philadelphia. our programming cover punk/hardcore, indie, reggae, techno/hjouse/trace and whatever else. one thing about our programming... we do not follow the generic college block programming for styles of music. basically every 3 hours the DJ changes and most all of the time it's not the same style of music. a program guide (online or in print form) is helpful, but most people don't seem to care. they still listen most all of the time. i guess being the last Philly student run station and the only one without programming (DJ picks 100% of their own music) makes us pretty much the only broadcast option for many people.
We have been webcasting for a few years now (and hopefully will be able to in the future if those damn fees don't kill us) and have seen a pretty good online response. though we are not always on 24 hours a day, we do not shut down for holidays or summer (Drexel U runs full year... 3 months quarters). our webcast listeners are a mix of people in the local area, and around the world. i guess the bonus we have over other internet radio stations is a bigger budget than many with cool musical tastes, a lot of DJs and a record/cd collection we have been building up since 1968. i'm all for people starting their own webcasting stations, but there are some things bedroom run stations can't do as easily (live bands, DJ marathons, buy a lot of rad hardware)
the coolest thing about webcasting is the ability for a station like ours to reach everywhere. there are a lot of decent little stations out there, but unless you live in the right area (area often being small due to low power transmitters), you miss out.
corporate radio will always suck, but thanks to the internet we all have more options.
All that the payola laws and hearings of the 60's did was take the power of music influence from the individual (disc jockey) and put them in the hands of the corporations. The large radio corporations of the day (rko, gannet, etc...) saw that the control of their content was being usurped to the talent of their stations. The DJ was the all important business and creative liaison at the stations. Record labels did anything to get to the talent, including bribes and perks. All the payola hearings and laws did (brought about from the investigation of the Miami DJ convention) was remove the personality from the equations. Enter the more influential role of the program and music director of stations in the late 60's and 70's. The only real exception would be the "progressive" radio essentially invented by Tom Donahue in SF. Payola was seen as a threat to the radio corporations of the day, God forbid that an indiviual (ie: dj) could have that much control over their (the corporations) widget. So a public spectacle was made. And the dj was villified as a wolf, while the real wolfs were in fact the corporations afraid of loosing control of their publicly liscenced product... that was supposed to be in "the public interest."
Today in the corporate mentality of the radio world, the individual, the station DJ or the program/music director has any real say as to the music being played on the station. All edicts are essentially made by the corporate programming heads. Everything from play lists, national contesting and yes... even talent. Most talent is run on an automation system (usually prophet) that essentially has destroyed the job market for radio talent and stifled any creativity and the talent pool, stagnating radio to where it is in the present day. Radio listenership is down in the last few years. There just not much compelling. As my daughter puts it, "radio sucks." Hopefully something will happed to shake it up soon, so some rebel out there can get back to creating something compelling again on the radio dial.
From a recent Bill Moyers report:
ClearChannel refuses to play up-and-coming bands that won't sign up for their concert promotion and booking services. (They won't do this to Britney or n'suck just yet).
Concert promoters bid a certain amount to 'get' a show, then book the venue, promote it, sell tickets, etc. CrapChannel overbids the fair market value (what the other promoters can expect to bid) by as much as 50%, some say in an effort to 'dry out' the local promoters and drive them out of business. This means that you, the consumer, get to pay 50% more for the ticket to the show! Ever wonder why it costs $50 to see a decent mainstream show?
For more info on U.S. call letters, see http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/statid.html. If you loathe what's available on radio now, start your own station. The FCC Media burea has some information on how to do that, see http://www.fcc.gov/mb. Yes, that's nontrivial.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
While the article talks about Clear Channel's massive amount of stations, I don't think most people realize just how many stations they have until they see a list of them.
So, on that note, check out the list of stations that Clear Channel owns:
http://www.cjr.org/owners/clearchannel.asp
Go ahead, pick out the stations in your town. There are 5 in mine, and all of them are just awful; they play the same songs on an almost daily basis.
Clear Channel owns stock in XM. The info can be found in the links from this previous story about FightCloud CDs
those stations wouldn't be popular if the music wasn't popular (for whatever reasons that music is...
The music is popular because Clear Channel makes it popular.
the fact that those mom-and-pop stations voluntarily sold their stations
How are you sure it was as voluntary as you claim? How are you sure they weren't somehow blackmailed into it?
It means those people who feel they are disenfranchised need to start their own radio stations, non-commercial
The low-power FM program you speak of has been, in effect, discontinued. From http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/getstat.html: "Applications for construction permits for new LPFM stations or major changes to LPFM permittees or licensees cannot be filed until the next application filing window period. We cannot advise as to when the next application filing window might be." This is government-speak for "We cannot guarantee that there will be a next application filing window." According to this list of prior window dates, there hasn't been a new filing window in nearly a year.
or commercial
If you are commercial, you and your advertisers will be harassed by Clear Channel, as coyote-san wrote.
Will I retire or break 10K?
No, they're pretty careful about their stations competing against each other. Those several stations, however, are almost assuredly guaranteed to play the same thing that their several stations play in all the other markets they're in.
Without knowing what city you're in, I'm betting they have a modern hard rock station (Staind, Disturbed, Kid Rock, Korn, Godsmack), a "Good Times, Great Oldies" station, playing "hits from the 70s, 80s and 90s", a Classic Rock station which for some reason mixes in quite a bit of 80s hair metal (Bon Jovi, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Styx, Van Halen...and 50-50 says they have a "Two-fer Tuesdays program), A top-40 station that caters to the teenybopper crowd (Britney, N-Sync, O-Town, Enrique, etc), a "No-repeat workday" light-rock mix-it up station for the office-crowd (They might even spice things up with an all 80s lunch or something), and/or a "Talk-Radio" with call-in shows hosted by a crowd of conversers who hash and re-hash the same 30 minutes of subject matter over and over their 3-hour show segments.
And like it says in the article, almost all their stations probably air 16-20 minutes of commercials per hour during peak times.
I don't know if anyone else mentioned it (and apologies if they did - I didn't read the whole thread), but Salon.com ran a series of articles last year (roughly) that exposed the extent of this radio silliness... Much more info than this article, and an uglier painting too.
The zillions of dollars of debt, it seems to me, are going to be the downfall of clearchannel. Okay, so they aggregated 30% of the US market for a while... after another while, it all falls apart. Lather, rinse, repeat. Isn't there a Norse myth like this?
woo hoo! glad that here in LA the 'left-wing masses' have a few more choices which, fortunately, rarely play The Cure.
KPFK a pacifica station. they don't take any corporate funding and are completely free from the government (uh, except for the FCC)
KXLU which is a decent good college radio station
KILL! (corporate) RADIO well, it's web only but it's a cool project started by the LA Independent Media Center and RE:Generation TV. very 'college radio' style but has some great shows (and they occasionally play the cure)
KCRW the NPR/PRI station with some good shows (chocolate city!) but mostly i don't like the music. but at least i can agree with the format...
but that doesn't mean that i won't complain about radio here -- community radio licenses are not available here as they are in some other cities. community radio licenses were to enable underserved communities the ability to broadcast using a 10 to 100 watt transmitter. it was strongly opposed by NPR (of course, it would be a strong alternative)
and the LA 'hip hop' stations plays only gangsta rap -- there is A LOT of good hip hop and rap out there (well, i like it) that doesn't have anything to do with benzes, ho's, or fo'ties.
fear is the mind killer