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

On Jul 13, 10:55*am, "D. Peter Maus"
wrote:
On 07/13/09 10:31, David Eduardo wrote:





"D. Peter Maus" wrote in message
...
On 07/13/09 08:51, David Eduardo wrote:

"dave" wrote in message
news:Cf6dnXCFBcsJvcbXnZ2dnUVZ_rOdnZ2d@earthlink .com...
David Eduardo wrote:
The reason there are no more is that
listeners as a group don't like any more songs, no matter how deep
the research goes.

People don't listen in groups. Your research is flawed.

Radio audience is a group. To form a group, you have to attract
listeners with common likes and dislikes, and satisfy each of them.

No, Radio listening is done by individuals. It's done by individuals,
mostly in separate locations, under separate conditions, with
individual intent, tastes and needs of the moment. Radio listening is
an individual experience. Not a group marketing construct.

No disagreement. But from the persective of a radio staiton, one can
only form an audience, which is a group, by finding common appeal among
many, many individuals. The process consists in finding the common
thread among large groups of listeners, and providing it. The listener
wo thinks, "I like this music" or "I like this show" must be joined by
thousands if not tens of thousands of other people all at once for a
station to be successful.

The first step has to be that identification of broad likes. Then, the
content is delivered as if it were directed at each listener
individually. That is where one on one comes in... in the delivery, not
the design.

In airchecking, I often suggest that jocks put a picture of a loved one
or family menber over the mike so they talk to a person, not a crowd.
But, again, this only works if the program content is selected to appeal
to a bunch of listeners, a group.

Reread my statement... "Radio Audience is a Group." Each listener is an
individual, but the audience is a group.

* *I read it the first time, David. Or I wouldn't have had a response..

* *The 'audience' doesn't exist. It's an artificial construct to
gather together the numbers into a manageable device. But it's an
artificial construct, nothing more.



A good resstaurant may have a few customers who like beets. But maybe
80% of the customers hate them. So they would never serve beets as a
standard side. That's because they know most of the clients would not
enjoy their dining experience as much as were they to serve potatoes and
mixed veggies. The restaurant knows the base offerings must have broad
appeal to a group of clients. Otherwise, they fail.

* *Every restaurant I frequent will serve an alternate, if I ask.
They understand that general offerings don't get it, even for
patrons who seek out their restaurant based on genre.

* *Interesting you should mention beets. I get beets frequently.



The rest of your post was clipped, as you are harping on the idea that
we as an industry don't get that listening happens person by person. We
get that, but a station has to appeal to each person who belongs to a
group with common music likes and dislikes and which is large enough to
make the station successful (by whatever metric that is measured). And
that is where the concept of a group, a collection, an assembly enters
in. The key part of "broadcasting" today is "broad."

* *I"m sure that you get that listening happens person by person.
The fact you clipped the rest and reduced it to 'harping'
underscores my point that Radio isn't about the listeners. It's
about Radio. And for the bigger groups, the stock price.

* *The listeners are only a tool to a commercial end. Your job is to
sell us on the idea that we want what you offer.

* *Radio does what's good for Radio.

* *The listeners serve that end.

yep, there is a chinese buffet in my area, that also serves enough
america type of food, enough of a choice, that they drag in a large
group of repeat customers.

Russian Leaders Refuse to Shake Dumbass Five Names, the USURPER'S Hand.
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/r...?ArtNum=269200

Good for them.
Dumbass Five names.
cuhulin

On 7月14日, ��6:22, dave wrote:
David Eduardo wrote:
"Selling what we want you to offer..." is an old concept. It's, from the
radio point of view, about "us." It's the "50,000 watt voice of the
Great Southwest." Who cares? Good radio today is about "you," the
individual listener. It's the difference between "La Nueva, the concert
station, where you can win tickets to the Vicente Fernandez concert..."
and "Imagine yourself in the front row at the Vicente Fernandez
concert... it may not be a dream...."

If the programming is so good, why do you have to give away prizes?




,,, reason" to reveal " tell" ,,, up cloy or",,,?" clear" to mean
stand ,,, which is"
,,, this is ,,, point of view",,, an indemnity ,,, offer prize ,,,"

Ahhhhh,,,,,,, White Heat is on the TCM channel.
When I get done with my old trailer, I am going to need a new project to
work on.I think a new fourteen feet by fourteen feet shed in my back
yard should do the trick.Then I can move my 1914 Ford T Model car off of
my trailer and into the shed, and also my 1948 Willys Jeep.Because I
wants to restore my Jeep, it has two burnt valves and is slap worn
out.It was like that when I bought it for $300.00 about seven sumpin
years ago.
cuhulin

"Nickname unavailable" wrote in message
...
On Jul 12, 12:55 pm, "David Eduardo" wrote:

we had 2 top 40 stations back then, including the one where i got to
pick my own top 40. we listened to other stations because there was a
wide selection and variety available to people back then.

Top 40 stations played 40 songs, give or take. And WDGY was a Storz station,
and Todd Storz was very rigid about playing the list and nothing but the
list.

properly
interpreted, it means we had options. but even our top 40 stations
played a wide variety. today you get a selection some corporate toady
picks for you.

The music is picked the same way it was done 40 years ago.

And variety, as a perception, is not created by playing more songs, it is
created by playing songs the indivudual listener likes without the ones they
don't like. That means commonality and concordance on the biggest hits, and
nothing else.

Now, there are many more stations. For example, in the case of Northport,
they had two AMs giving day, but not night service, in 1960. Today, it has
over a dozen usable signals day and night. They have 8 or 9 distinct
formats
to chose from, and have no need to listen to static and fading on distant
AMs.


we know music went to f.m. that does not mean they are locked into a
playlist some corporate toady has chosen for us to hear.

And, of course, that is not the way it happens. In the best of cases, all
but the brand new songs are picked by the listeners themselves.

Yes, I am sure that not-so-subtle references to drugs amuse you... uh,
pardon me, befuddle you.

it was funny. just like itsibisty yellow polka dot bikini, monster
mash, or purple people eater, nether of those could make it with
today's corporate feverish grip on the media.

I doubt anyone would play the drug reference song, as that would likely fall
under being outside community standards and subject a station to a $325
thousand dollar per play fine. But I know of plenty of novelty songs like
Monster Mash and the like that have been played in the last decade...
nothing has changed.

"Nickname unavailable" wrote in message
...
On Jul 12, 1:12 pm, "David Eduardo" wrote:


then i must have gotten wdgys jockeys all fired.

It's more likely that either you picked a song they were going to play or
you are fibbing.


Untrue. If you go down in size to groups that own 50 stations or less,
which
excludes only about 10 or 11 companies, you will see that about 12,200
stations are not owned by big companies.


we have few independents here. but we do have clear channel, and more
than one of them.

Again, over 12000 stations are not owned by the big 10 groups.


there is a place for ridged playlists, but, that model si shrinking
fast

It's worked for about 50 years or so... since Storz and McLendon and the
other Top 40 pioneers proved that playing only the top hits got more
audience.

"Nickname unavailable" wrote in message
...
On Jul 12, 1:42 pm, "David Eduardo" wrote:

you have insinuated that f.m. caused the demise of these stations,
but in my area, many moved to f.m. once they were bought out, then
came the ridged playlists. that is what we are really discussing.

In her area, there was no local Fm, but the ones nearby took all the
audience of the AM, which was power-challenged, and the AM turned in its
license.

Relatively few AMs moved their programming to FM. When the simulcast ban in
metro markets went into effect in 1967, stations that had an FM put
different programming on the FM. Later, many realized the FM was going to
make more money than the AM... so they kept the formats.

I went through a list of major markets... just a sample of the top 25, and I
can't think of more than a couple of cases in the 10 years after the
simulcast ruling where an AM format moved to a co-owned FM. The Top 40
stations that were big on AM got beaten by challengers on FM... like WMYQ
(FM)and WHYI (FM)in Miami, and AMs WQAM and WFUN, owned by others,
eventually both changed formats. That happened in markets from Birmingham to
Phonnix. In a couple of cases, staitons that got waivers, like KUPD Tempe,
AZ, fired up a bigger transmitter on the FM and the FM became the dominant
part... but there was no mass migration anywhere to FM by existing
formats... because the AM owners were too late in reacting and someone had
already claim jumped the format on FM.


FMs have essentially all the music audience, so there is no issue between
AM
and FM here. It is just a radio issue, with no band distinction.

nope, its a corporate mentality that limits choice.

No, it is reality. In the 70's, one by one the Am music staitons died
against the challenge of FMs doing the same typé of format.... WABC, KHJ,
WIXY, WQXI, WQAM, WCAO, WLS, KLIF, KQEO, KTSA, KILT, KXOK, WHB, KIMN, KFRC,
KCBQ, KCPX, KENO, KTKT, KLEO, KOMA, KAKC, WRBC, WHBQ, KELP, KERN, KRIG,
WMAK, WKGN, WKIX, WISE, WILS, WSNX, KQV, WHHY, WBSR, WAPE, WABB, WLCY, WLOF,
WLEE, WPOP, WKBW, WDAK, WCOL, WROV, WGH and many other Top 40s that
dominated their markets in the 60's were almost gone by the end of the 70's,
beaten and crused by FMs. Listeners did not want the limited signals, the
night directional nulls and the low-fi quality combined with man made noise,
so music went to FM. Those big AMs did not give up easily... they simply
lost as more and more audience went to FM as the formats people wanted
appeared there.

I was in a top 15 market when the most attractive format suddenly appeared
for the first time on FM. The total share of about 15 FMs had been around 15
share points before that. In 6 months, the total FM share was over 50, and
that one station reached levels of 33.5 share in one book. People
immediately moved to FM when the format they wanted appeared there.

Radio uses techniques to determine the appeal of each individual song in a
specific genre (or "format") and they play, as a rule, all the songs that
have wide appeal and don't play the ones that a significant numbers of
listeners don't want to hear. In each format, there are different numbers
of
songs that tend to define these formats, in every market, often even in
different countries.

that's why people are loading up ipods with music they cannot hear on
the radio, plugging them into their radio jacks, and ignoring
corporate owned bland radio.

Actually, most of what is on iPods, per several studies, is exactly the kind
of music that is on the radio, or has been on the radio. The interest in
offbeat songs is restricted to a small group of people, and the main reason
to have an ipod is to play only the songs you like, which is often less than
the playlists of the three or four radio stations the average person listens
to weekly.

Country stations average in the 600 to 700 songs, Tallahassee or Spokane.
Soft ACs go from 300 to 350 songs. CHR's (today's term for Top 40) around
120. And so on. The reason there are no more is that listeners as a group
don't like any more songs, no matter how deep the research goes.


corporate research is so good. or, is it that corporate research only
chooses what the corporation makes money on.

Research like that is not corporate. It is simply finding a group of people
who like the general kind of music your staiton plays, and asking them to
score each song that has been played or is being played.


And every so often there is a station that plays 1500 songs in a 700 song
format, and dies, proving the rule. The reason playlists are the size they
are is that the listeners who selected the songs indicated that that was
all
they liked enough to play.

you ignore what is going on, on the internet.

What has been going on on the internet in the last few weeks is the
downloading of millions of Michael Jackson songs that were hits on the
radio.

And I suppose you have never had the experience of going to see a favorite
singer or group, only to have them play a bunch of new songs from the new
CD, and then performing a perfunctory medley of your favorite hits by that
performer. Didn't the audience complain, moan or boo? They came to hear
hits, not unknown songs. A lot of people don't get that.

"Nickname unavailable" wrote in message
...
On Jul 12, 2:00 pm, "David Eduardo" wrote:


No PD in the 60's would have postponed adding a new Beatles or Stones or
Supremes cut to play the Castaways chanting "Liar, Liar, you're pants are
on
fire..." But enough of the new songs get played that we have a nice crop
of
newcomers in country, CHR, Urban, and every other format that plays an
amount of current music.

its not that the castaways pushed off the beatles and stones music
off the air,

Nobody said that. I said that the Beatles song would likely be considered
first for play, and then if there was room for another add that week, the
Castaways might get played. Same then as now, just different artists.

its that we had a choice, and that choice enriched the
music listening, and also the health of the music industry. the music
industry uses your research, and we see how well they are doing.

Oh, how little you know. How truly, truly little. The music industry hates
radio research, because it gives fast feedback and often causes a new song
the label is pushing to be pulled in 2 or 3 weeks because it stiffed.... the
record business does not "use" radio's research because the research is
proprietary and confidential and part of each station's competitive edge. It
is certainly not shared with the record ducks.

Again, the music industry hates radio's research, and some record executives
even blame radio research for all of the music industry's problems. They are
as clueless as you are.

"dave" wrote in message
. ..
David Eduardo wrote:

"Selling what we want you to offer..." is an old concept. It's, from the
radio point of view, about "us." It's the "50,000 watt voice of the Great
Southwest." Who cares? Good radio today is about "you," the individual
listener. It's the difference between "La Nueva, the concert station,
where you can win tickets to the Vicente Fernandez concert..." and
"Imagine yourself in the front row at the Vicente Fernandez concert... it
may not be a dream...."

If the programming is so good, why do you have to give away prizes?

Because there are lots of good stations in each market, and the average
listener uses 4 or 5 of them regularly. We use prizing as an incentive to
those interested in such things to keep them tuned to us and not another
station they like.