ClearChannel Complains About XM, Sirius Radio

andyring writes "In the latest attempt by a big corporation with a failing business model to win by legislation and not in the marketplace, ClearChannel is whining to the FCC about XM Radio's recent foray into localized traffic and weather reports." Here I was thinking that satellite radio was a good thing for competition in radio.

Comments

Re:You've got it backwards.

[Zeinfeld]

Congress has a right to regulate commerce. AM/FM Radio is under the commerce clause because it is in the 'public domain'. XM is not, it's a subscription service, so while they can be regulated, they can't be regulated as much.

Thats not quite what Ithiel Pool argued. The argument made in Technologies of Freedom was that media regulation should be prohibited under the first ammendment, it is a license on the press. The loophole that the FCC uses is the fact that radio spectrum is 'scarce'. Pool showed that this scarcity was actually artificial, due to the government arbitrarily reserving huge chunks of spectrum it never used.

That book is what set in motion the current scheme of auctions of radio spectrum.

I don't see how the FCC get to maintain a rule against local programming. It is not a necessary control, there is no necessary interest protecting a market monopolist like Clear Channel which actually holds all the stations in some markets.

XM radio is actually broadcasting all the material to all the radios. All they are doing is providing a gizmo that automatically selects material based on relevance.

The FCC is not going to touch this one, but not for the reason most would expect. Congress gets re-elected by taking in bribes from business to buy legislative favors (See Bob Dole / ADM as an exampole). They then use those bribes to outspend their opponents in elections. The scheme only works if people are listening to local rather than national stations.

Polticians are the only product that is intrinsically local in scope. Pretty much every other trade has been organized arround a handful of national brands with franchises serving local markets. That structure is the result of the media structure which is national.

I expect that in a short time we will see Howard Stern moving to Satelite Radio, the FCC can't censor him there. We will probably see the emergence of talk radio that is not 100% right wing idiots too. Rush Lumbago and co are profitable because there are lots of local business owners who will buy advertising on channels that tell them how important and right they are. Rush tends not to attract the type of national advertiser that uses sophisticated monitoring to check effectiveness.

Re:No, they only own less than 10%

[Gizzmonic]

They are also allowed to own up to 49% share of as many stations as they like.

And they do...plus they own concert booking and huge amounts of billboard advertisting. Put this together and you can see how they could have a 'chilling effect' on the ability of independent or lesser-known radio stations or artists to break in to the business.