Slashdot Mirror
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.
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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
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.
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.