On Jul 12, 1:56*am, "David Eduardo" wrote:
"Nickname unavailable" wrote in message

...
On Jul 12, 12:56 am, "David Eduardo" wrote:



It was always so for the vast majority of decades and stations. Just as
someone at a supermarket determines what products, sizes and varieties of
products to stock... and not stock, someone in each radio station
determines
what songs are played and not played.

today, a playlist from some corporate goon in new york determines
what gets played, and what does not. in my youth, i got to hear lots
of local garage bands get air time, then make it national.
*today, that would not happen, its the playlist, and nothing else.

Actually, in most rated markets significant stations do local music research
and determine the playlist based on that local data. Given the hard economic
times, many stations have reduced such costs, but they make themselves
vulnerable to competitors...


yea right, 10 companies, own 90% of almost all media. in some small
cities, one or two companies own it all. you switch the channel, and
hear the same thing. you really do need to get out more.


It´s precisely the local research that shows that there is no interest in
the generally bad songs by the local bands, so they don't get played.



a corporatists response.



And just like the supermarket, which uses research, sales tabulations and
such to deteermine desirable procuts, radio does the same thing to decide
on
each song.

you are a kool aid drinker aren't you. many local grocery stores
stock products from small suppliers, with out all of the above goobly
gook.

How many people go to little local grocery stores if they have a choice? The
prices are higher, the assortment is limited, etc. *In any case, customers
are going to want their preferred products no matter where they buy. The
bigger markets analyze sales data, and combined with promotional allowances
and such, calculate what will sell and have the most shelf turns and most
profit. They can even analyze how many inches of facing to give and at what
level and the resultant sales.



have you even been in the natural, or organic stores in your area? or
smaller chains, you would be amazed. in my metro area, there are 3
smaller grocery store chains, one has a whole aisle of soda pop, made
with pure cane sugar, in glass bottles mostly, but also pony kegs, and
many brands get wiped out over the weekend, and the pony kegs go even
faster. you really need to get out more. you are locked in a
corporatist mentality.



The idea that there are musicologist-type DJs rummaging through
thousands
of
records is a myth, and in the few cases such exists or has existed, most
have failed.

most have been taken over by corporate america, then came the play
lists.

Not so. Playlists existed back to the time of live bands at local radio
staitons... someone determined the songs the bands would play. And since
recorded music has been a staple of American radio, going back to the
rejection of the AFM rules and Petrillo's policies, stations have
pre-programmed music in almost every instance. In fact, the format concept
that "saved radio" in the early and mid-50's, Top 40, was based entirely
on
the concept of a playlist and zero deviation from it.

*yes there has been in the past, except, they were flexible. today,
see if a jockey was to sneak in something not on the playlist, see
what would happen to such jockey. its why independents can no longer
get airtime, but when i was a kid, they did.
*you are simply a hard wired free market apologist.

Stations had playlists in the 30's, just as they had lists of the
commercials they had to run, called a log.

yes they did. but the disk jockeys would not get fired if they dared
to play something not on the play list.

Hmm... in the mid 60's, the first person I fired as a PD was a guy who
played one song that was not approved.

*at your station. back then, there were 1000's of independently owned
stations. are you telling me that they all operated the same?

And if you worked for Storz or McLendon or Burden or Crowell-Collier or
any
of the big operators of music stations in the 50's and broke format, you
were gone.

*but, was there 10 companies or less that own just about all radio
stations in america? not!

nice try, in free market america, you have tons of choices, that are
almost all the same.

And that, in radio, is quite untrue.

i live in a metro area with about 3.5 million people, not only is
radio ****, so is t.v., and both daily papers. prior to 1981, it was
not so.

Probably the stations have adjusted to contemporary taste of the target
audience, which is generally 18-49 or 25-54, and you are either out of the
demographic or have not kept up with current taste.

*snicker, infomercials are entertainment, that is how far we have
sunk. you are part of the problem, that is why corporate media is
failing.

Hey Nickname, My alter ego nickname is Alice.
cuhulin

wrote in message
...
Hey Nickname, My alter ego nickname is Alice.
cuhulin


Lay off the sauce, feed Blueberry dog and chill.

It is True, my alter ego, pretend gal's name is Alice.I named ''her''
myself.Maybe that married Irish woman wayyyyyy over yonder across the
big pond is right, maybe I am getting old and penile.y'all should have
seen what I was wearing under my Dickies work pants and my shirt last
Tuesday when I stopped off at the Goodwill store on my way to the Lowe's
store.I am going to the Lowe's store again in the morning for some more
2'' by 4''s for my old trailer.Of course I will stop off at the Goodwill
store first. www.shopgoodwill.com From the Lowe's store, I will go
across Highway 18 to the GNC store.I want to see if GNC sells some
testosterone blocker stuff.
I haven't had any booze since last February.
cuhulin

wrote in message
...

I haven't had any booze since last February.
cuhulin


Congratulations. That's a significant achievement. How's the dog?

Doggy is sleepin with her head on my right leg.Night of the Hunter movie
just now finished up on the TCM channel.Next up, The First Auto.

U.S.prezes Murdered By the Rothschild Banking Cartel.
www.rense.com/general86/pres.htm

www.devilfinder.com
Lyndon Baines Johnson's involvement in the murder of John F.Kennedy

www.devilfinder.com
George H.W.Bush's involvement in the murder of John F.Kennedy

Heh, politicians Murdering politicians.

The More the Better, I always say.
cuhulin

"Nickname unavailable" wrote in message
...
On Jul 12, 1:56 am, "David Eduardo" wrote:

Actually, in most rated markets significant stations do local music
research
and determine the playlist based on that local data. Given the hard
economic
times, many stations have reduced such costs, but they make themselves
vulnerable to competitors...


yea right, 10 companies, own 90% of almost all media. in some small
cities, one or two companies own it all. you switch the channel, and
hear the same thing. you really do need to get out more.

The top 10 commercial broadcast companies in radio own around 1600 stations
today, with the #10 clocking in at just over 70 stations. That's out of
14,000 and some stations in the US, not counting LPFMs and translators.

So the top groups own 12% to 13% of all stations, and the next tier, 11 to
20, represents only about 300 stations, and among them is a group in the
Dakotas and surrounding areas where some of the markets are 30,000 people.

It´s precisely the local research that shows that there is no interest in
the generally bad songs by the local bands, so they don't get played.

a corporatists response.

Nah. I've watched local unsigned artist music, with one or two exceptions,
tank quite royally from the Bay Area to Buenos Aires. And by watching, I
mean this... local people who listen to local stations and go to local shows
and local clubs... take a look at it
http://www.davidgleason.com/Radio%20Research.htm

How many people go to little local grocery stores if they have a choice?
The
prices are higher, the assortment is limited, etc. In any case, customers
are going to want their preferred products no matter where they buy. The
bigger markets analyze sales data, and combined with promotional
allowances
and such, calculate what will sell and have the most shelf turns and most
profit. They can even analyze how many inches of facing to give and at
what
level and the resultant sales.

have you even been in the natural, or organic stores in your area? or
smaller chains, you would be amazed. in my metro area, there are 3
smaller grocery store chains, one has a whole aisle of soda pop, made
with pure cane sugar, in glass bottles mostly, but also pony kegs, and
many brands get wiped out over the weekend, and the pony kegs go even
faster. you really need to get out more. you are locked in a
corporatist mentality.

There will always be niche markets, where people who are looking for
specialized products will drive farther and spend more money. But that kind
of store is the equivalent of narrowcasting... and for that, we have today
iPods and the web and all kinds of other distribution models.

Not so. Playlists existed back to the time of live bands at local radio
staitons... someone determined the songs the bands would play. And since
recorded music has been a staple of American radio, going back to the
rejection of the AFM rules and Petrillo's policies, stations have
pre-programmed music in almost every instance. In fact, the format
concept
that "saved radio" in the early and mid-50's, Top 40, was based entirely
on
the concept of a playlist and zero deviation from it.

yes there has been in the past, except, they were flexible. today,
see if a jockey was to sneak in something not on the playlist, see
what would happen to such jockey. its why independents can no longer
get airtime, but when i was a kid, they did.
you are simply a hard wired free market apologist.

There is no difference in whether an independent can get a song played today
than in the past. In fact, with so many more formats than there were in the
50's and 60's, the number of new songs played per week in a market is many
times more than it was when you had multiple top 40, multiple MOR and a
couple of r&b or countrry stations.

And if the guy at the Mercedes plant near Tuscaloosa puts a green fender on
a gray car, he gets a warning, and then fired. Why would we not exepect our
product to be as finely crafted as any other? Like I said, the stations you
mentioned in the Twin Cities would not allow deviation from the playlist...
and a jock that did so would be warned, and then fired.

Hmm... in the mid 60's, the first person I fired as a PD was a guy who
played one song that was not approved.

at your station. back then, there were 1000's of independently owned
stations. are you telling me that they all operated the same?

Yeah, the ones that were successful did.

And if you worked for Storz or McLendon or Burden or Crowell-Collier or
any
of the big operators of music stations in the 50's and broke format, you
were gone.

but, was there 10 companies or less that own just about all radio
stations in america? not!

No, and that is not true today, either. The largest owns about 800 stations,
with a significnt number in a trust pending their sale. The next largest has
about half that, and by the time you get to the 6th largest, they have
around 75 stations. And, to put things in perspective, the average McDonalds
grosses about twice what the average US radio station did 2 years ago. Now,
it's probably 3 to 1 in favor of the Mickey D place.

Probably the stations have adjusted to contemporary taste of the target
audience, which is generally 18-49 or 25-54, and you are either out of
the
demographic or have not kept up with current taste.

snicker, infomercials are entertainment, that is how far we have
sunk. you are part of the problem, that is why corporate media is
failing.

Infomericals are what stations that can't compete do... or they sell
brokered hours... or run religious shows that are paid based on donations...
or they rent the station to someone who does a format in Hindi or Russian or
Farsi.

Those stations, mainly AM, can't compete because 90% of major market AM
stations do not cover the market fully day and night, so they can't
challenge the bigger stations, and they do whatever it takes to bring in
revenue. Of about 1800 AMs in the top 100 markets, about 210 are viable. The
rest can run the stuff that pays the bills and leaves a little on the side.

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