On Jul 12, 8:04 pm, "David Eduardo" wrote:


this excellent article pretty much vindicates me, and refutes you.

http://www.pugetsoundradio.com/cgi-b...?m-1247417728/

How Clear Channel destroyed its own radio market

By Paul Waldman

July 12, 2009

A year ago, Atlantic Monthly writer Virginia Postrel, in an article
entitled "In Praise of Chain Stores," argued that the homogenization
of our commercial landscapes is on balance a good thing. Mom & Pop's
Hardware may be charming, Postrel contended, but with the exception of
Mom and Pop themselves, most of us will be better off if there's a
Home Depot in town.**

But what about the homogenization of our cultural and informational
landscape? That, it turns out, is a different story, a part of which
Alec Foege attempts to tell in Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear
Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio. Though today Clear Channel
has fallen from the heights it reached just a few years ago, if you
have any opinion about the company at all it is probably not a good
one. As it ballooned in size to become the dominant player in the
radio industry, Clear Channel came to symbolize for many people
everything that's wrong with media today: a rapacious corporation,
unleashed by its Republican friends to pillage its way across the
American landscape, leaving in its wake hundreds of formerly unique
and public-minded outlets, which were suddenly sucked into the
corporate maw and spit back on a powerless public, delivering the same
soulless excuse for news and culture to every community unlucky enough
to suffer under its pitiless rule. Or so the story goes.

Clear Channel began in 1972 when its founder, L. Lowry Mays, cosigned
a loan for some associates who wanted to buy an FM radio station in
San Antonio. When they ran into financial difficulties, Mays found
himself the owner of the station. When Mays and a group of investors
bought an AM station three years later, Clear Channel Communications
was formed. They chose the name because the AM station had a "clear
channel," the term used to denote those stations that had exclusive
use of their frequencies during nighttime hours, enabling them to
broadcast to most or all of the nation (unlike FM signals, AM signals
can travel hundreds or even thousands of miles, depending on the
topography and weather conditions).

As it slowly expanded through the 1970s and into the '80s, Clear
Channel did something unusual: it ran radio stations like businesses.
At the time, the typical station was a poorly managed, family-owned
operation whose owners may have had little idea if they were making or
losing money. Though its penny-pinching earned it the nickname "Cheap
Channel," the company made excellent profits. In 1984, Clear Channel
went public, and by the end of the year it owned twelve radio stations—
close to the ownership limits of seven FM and seven AM stations the
FCC imposed at the time.

The corporation expanded its businesses, buying television stations
and, in 1997, a billboard company (or "outdoor advertising"), becoming
the dominant player in that sector as well. But what truly transformed
Clear Channel was a piece of legislation that passed in 1996. Mays
understood that in order to vertically integrate his business and
squeeze major savings from economies of scale, Clear Channel had to be
big—and the bigger, the better.

It was the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that enabled Clear Channel
to become a behemoth. Seldom in the annals of American history has a
piece of legislation with such wide-reaching consequences passed with
such little public notice, in no small part because the media
companies that might have reported on it critically had an interest in
not doing so. Newspapers, television, and radio (not to mention the
phone companies) all were affected dramatically by the legislation,
and all in ways that allowed the largest corporations to grow larger.
But none were affected as much as radio, where the ownership caps that
had prevented any one company from achieving a dominant position were
not just lifted but removed altogether. (There are still some limits
on how many stations a company can own in one market, but there is no
national limit, as there was before.) Instantly, Clear Channel began
buying up stations as fast as it could.

And they were not alone. Literally within hours of the act's passage,
the radio industry was overtaken by a feeding frenzy of acquisitions,
as upstart corporations moved to gobble up as many stations as they
could. According to a lengthy report published in 2006 by the Future
of Music Coalition, in 1995 Clear Channel owned thirty-nine radio
stations, more than any other corporation in America. Five years
later, they owned 1,100. They would eventually own more than 1,200
radio stations, around six times as many as their closest competitor.
Clear Channel gobbled up a series of other radio companies, a spree
that culminated in its purchase of AMFM, a company owning more than
four hundred stations. At $23.5 billion, it was the biggest deal in
the history of the radio industry.

Clear Channel's enormous size was enough to make people who care about
media diversity nervous. But it was two other factors—the particular
manner in which they cut costs and boosted profits, and their
conservative political leanings—that gained them a reputation for
corporate villainy.

Clear Channel, Foege writes,

eradicated radio's localism, making it more formatted and formulaic,
less personalized and more national. The world's biggest radio company
deconstructed a medium that prided itself on its intimate connection
with its listeners and made it as uniformly bland and anonymous as
anyone could bear.
The way they did it was with a now-infamous system known as "voice
tracking." Instead of having deejays drawing salaries at individual
stations, radio companies realized they could take one deejay, have
him spin tunes and deliver patter from corporate headquarters, and
feed his signal to as many stations as they wanted. They could even
have him record brief bits with local references for each station and
integrate them into the program feed, and thereby give the illusion
that the program being aired in Minneapolis or Sacramento actually
involved a deejay sitting in Minneapolis or Sacramento. Clear Channel
didn't invent voice tracking, but they spread it farther and wider
than anyone had before.

This practice may make perfect economic sense, but it also reveals at
best an indifference, and at worst a contempt, toward the role of
radio as a cultural arbiter, the place where people can go to hear new
or locally produced music and find the touchstones of their
generation.

Foege begins his preface with a story of driving through New England
listening to a Clear Channel station, when "for the fourth time in
four states, I've unwittingly tuned in to 'Kashmir,'" by Led Zeppelin.
Foege may have grown tired of "Kashmir" long before the rise of Clear
Channel, but the company, as Foege relates, managed during that time
to whittle "a familiar play list of thirty- to forty-year-old rock
songs into what sometimes [felt] like the same hour-and-a-half mix
played over and over ad infinitum"—and "Kashmir" was in that mix.
Because Clear Channel was so dominant in the radio marketplace,
everyone was listening to the same music all the time.

Clear Channel's attitude is best summed up by what the head of their
television unit would tell the studios that owned syndicated programs.
"Programming," Foege quotes him as saying, "is the **** we run between
the commercials." The product that media companies like Clear Channel
sell isn't the programming; the product they sell is audiences, and
advertisers are their customers.

Despite its title (which may or may not, of course, have been Foege's
choice), Right of the Dial doesn't spend a great deal of time on the
political implications of Clear Channel's rise, or even fully answer
the question of just how political the company really is. Was the
company's Iraq War boosterism (with pro-war rallies organized by
multiple Clear Channel stations), or the fact that a list of banned
songs (including John Lennon's "Imagine") was circulated within the
company after September 11, 2001, a true expression of a corporate
ideology, or merely an attempt to capitalize on the sentiment of the
moment? What about the reports of deejays being fired for expressing
opposition to the Iraq War, and the company's refusal to place some
antiwar ads on its billboards?

These are important and interesting questions, but for the most part
the book leaves them unresolved. Foege is more straightforward when
relating the kind of hardball tactics—or, as more than a few claimed,
predatory and monopolistic behaviors—Clear Channel engaged in while
building its business in concert venues. Utilizing their expanding
venue holdings and their radio stations as double cudgels, they all
but forced bands to book concerts only at Clear Channel sites for fear
of being shut out of future concerts and airtime on influential
stations. It has used its other holdings in similar ways. For
instance, Clear Channel owns Premier Radio Networks, which syndicates
some of the country's biggest radio hosts, including Rush Limbaugh and
Dr. Laura. In 2001, Premier informed many of its clients that it was
pulling shows from their stations and transferring them to Clear
Channel-owned stations in the same market, leaving them holding the
bag for the efforts they had invested to promote those personalities.

Then there's the question of how Clear Channel treats its own. While
Foege interviewed many of the key upper-management players in the
company's relatively brief history, other reporters—notably Eric
Boehlert in a series of pieces for Salon in 2001—have gotten rank-and-
file Clear Channel employees (many anonymously) to talk candidly about
the company. The portrait they paint is of an absolutely sinister
organization awash in sexual harassment, threats, and intimidation of
both competitors and employees. The topic of the company's internal
culture could have used further exploration in this book.

In the epilogue, Foege describes Clear Channel as "Colonel Parker
without his Presley," good businessmen who built a behemoth on a base
of fiscal prudence combined with innovative tactics and extraordinary
aggressiveness when circumstances allowed. But they never cared about
the culture they were using to sell audiences to advertisers, and that
indifference ultimately played a large part in their undoing.
Commercial radio audiences have been steadily decreasing, a decline
abetted by the rise of satellite radio and, of course, the Internet,
which provides people ways to learn about and acquire (legally or
otherwise) the music they previously would have discovered on their
local radio stations. The Internet, for example, allows people to
download a podcast of the influential KCRW Santa Monica music show
Morning Becomes Eclectic anywhere in the world, which somewhat
obviates the need to have a version of Morning Becomes Eclectic
broadcast on your local radio station. This development made the
situation for local stations bad enough. But the way Clear Channel
treated its listeners—like simpletons who wouldn't mind hearing the
same ten songs over and over—made things worse.

There is little doubt that Clear Channel's model of content delivery
has contributed to the decline of commercial radio. At a time when—
usually, if not always, for the better—technology is diminishing the
power and authority of cultural gatekeepers, Clear Channel's
homogenized, narrowed slate of offerings becomes less and less
appealing. So it shouldn't come as too much of a shock to learn that
the terrifying corporate monster is less imposing than it was just a
few years ago.

In response to declining profits and listener disgust, the company
announced in 2004 that it was cutting back on the number of
commercials it broadcast. In 2006, it unveiled Format Lab, a sort of
radio think tank, to devise original formats with greater variety and
more room for local improvisation. Finally, this January, the FCC
approved the sale of Clear Channel to two private equity firms for $20
billion, which took the company private. Alongside the deal, Clear
Channel announced it would sell all of its television stations and
more than four hundred of its radio stations in smaller markets. Its
stock, which neared $100 per share in 2000, has dipped below $30 this
year. The company won't be going out of business anytime soon, but
with its own missteps—and the possibility of a regulatory environment
much less friendly to unlimited media consolidation in the near future—
Clear Channel's days of world domination may be over.

...................
Paul Waldman is writer and senior fellow at Media Matters. His most
recent book is Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, coauthored with
David Brock