What would you say if I told you the reason the music industry has been in decline every year in the 2000s wasn’t because of illegal downloading and the digital age, but mainly because of a piece of legislation passed in Washington, DC in 1996? (Thanks Brad Meltzer for the interrogative intro sentence)
Along with the formation of the Federal Communications Commission, a federal regulatory body for the budding broadcasting industry, the Communications Act of 1934 was all about everyone getting a piece of the pie. The Communications Act of 1934 stipulated that one owner or one company could not own more than two radio or television stations in a given market, therefore encouraging and creating market competition. To simplify it a little more, look at it like this; the New York City metro area is an example of what is considered a “market.” Of all of the radio and television stations that are on the dial, one person couldn’t own more than two of them (which is why you have NBC, CBS, ABC, etc).
In terms of radio and music in general, the monopolization of broadcasting being illegal proved to be very healthy and compared to what we have seen over the past decade and some change, vital to their survival.
In the spirit of de-regulating everything set in place during and after the Great Depression in the 1980s and 1900s, the de-regulation of the broadcasting industry was no different. Driven by a powerful lobby, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 signed by President Bill Clinton did a number of things. Most notably, the act deregulated media ownership. Previously, it was illegal for one person or one company to own more than two stations in a given market. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996, that law was no more. This allowed the corporate conglomerates that lobbied for the bill to be passed to go on an all out buying spree of media outlets in the United States to absorb the advertising revenue. Leading this charge was Clear Channel Communications, who immediately purchased more than 70 additional media companies and individual radio stations right off the bat. As of 2005, they owned 850; which in turn netted them one billion more dollars in profit than the number two media group owner, CBS.
Common sense tells the average thinker that a move of this magnitude is not going to turn out well for your local radio station, no matter the format be it talk, country, sports, or rock. Clear Channel owning a 100,000 watt station (which is the most powerful an FM radio station can be) in a market like Charlotte, NC can quickly shut the doors of its lower-level competitors by lowering local advertising rates well below the competition, which shuts out every bit of revenue in which others are competing. Look at Clear Channel like the “Wal-Mart of radio” kind of like how David’s Bridal is the “Wal-Mart of weddings.” Nothing close-by can operate when they settle in and open up shop. With so much advertising revenue, Clear Channel had the power to buy any other station in a market that they felt was a threat and either convert it to their business model or close its doors with no regulation from the U.S. government. It’s capitalism at its finest.
Like any business, Clear Channel wants to operate itself as cheap as possible to increase their bottom line of profits and assets. (This, kids, is what drives stock prices if you weren’t aware) There was an easy way for this to be accomplished; it’s called syndication and streamlining. Many Clear Channel locations are operated as if they were the same station, therefore transmitting the same programming and disc jockey to multiple markets simultaneously. For example, a listener can hear the same DJ playing the same song in Miami, FL at the same time the exact same thing is happening in Portland, OR. What this does is cut out “Local” radio. Yes, the listener hears local ads (along with national) but in most cases they don’t hear a local disc jockey. Some stations can completely be operated with little to no staff with this use of “cyber-jocks” and music playlists broadcasted from Clear Channel itself. Of course there have always been syndicated shows that local stations have picked up such as “Casey Casem’s Top 40 Countdown,” but this was the first use of entire stations’ 24 hour clock being syndicated from one corporate source (Jack FM anyone?). This ultimately results in local on-air career positions and radio personalities being eliminated.
Corporate radio has also gone to the extremes of censorship, particularly in the 2000s. This past decade was a time of turmoil in the United States that resulted in many conflicting political opinions and schools of thought. Musical artists that had made their careers from making art as self-expression such as Rage Against the Machine found themselves banned from all Clear Channel’s music programming following September 11th, 2001. Not because their music represented anything dangerous to the government establishment, but because key words such as “bullet” and “fire” were contained in song titles. Self-expression also virtually ended the career of country music artist The Dixie Chicks when singer Natalie Maines expressed during a concert in England that she was ashamed that George W Bush was from the same state as she was. In response to this statement, Clear Channel pulled the music from the most popular band in the genre’s music from all of their stations (which with Clear Channel being so large it cut the band off from the public almost completely). As Americans, we have freedom of speech according to the first amendment. However, the saying is sometimes true: “I dare you to use it.”
To take things a step farther, corporate radio has also been known to hire actors to call into their radio talk shows and request lines to pose as listeners to plant pre-determined content and music. Corporate radio has taken payola to the next step and completely out of control. The practice has always been around since radio began, but has always been highly frowned upon and at certain points illegal. Payola is when a radio station accepts money or gifts to play certain programming (or songs). It is widely known that Clear Channel stations carved themselves out an additional form of revenue from record companies by putting in heavy rotation what they are compensated to play. There is a reason Nickelback is one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. This is why. If the entire nation has Nickelback shoved down their throats every hour on the hour in every market nationwide, sooner or later that is what the masses are going to be accustomed to and that is the CD they are going to buy and the concert they are going to buy tickets to see. “It’s good music because we say it is.” Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s good. Also, just because something is good doesn’t mean it’s popular.
The music industry and radio are a symbiotic relationship. One can’t survive without the other. Look at it like in nature. Any organism that requires oxygen can’t survive without bees and pollination. The music industry which requires exposure of their product cannot survive without a way to transmit it to the world. With one group at the controls operating the majority of the country’s radio who is selling to the highest bidder, then we have the overly-deteriorated music industry that we are seeing today. If three record companies are paying radio for airplay for 5 to 10 artists across all musical genres each year and corporate radio plays the same programming across all markets, is it hard to guess which 5 to 10 artists are going to sell records in that timeframe? That’s what makes the modern Grammy Awards a joke. Those same 5 to 10 artists that Clear Channel has in constant rotation are all that is heard, therefore a Grammy has to be awarded by default. Why else would anyone care or watch?
What makes the situation ultimately more saddening is that it makes it virtually impossible for a local musical movement to occur. Would Nirvana and Alice in Chains have exploded to mainstream in the early 1990s if radio in Seattle, WA had not been allowed to play their local bands on the air because some disc jockey saw them at the Off-Ramp Café tear up the stage or at a keg party and picked up one of their demos? Would “Stairway to Heaven” (a song the band wasn’t particularly fond of and never played live) have catapulted Led Zeppelin into the stratosphere in the 1970s if some disc jockey or program director didn’t like the song and began playing it? Even a band like Creed in the late 1990s would never have become a platinum-selling artist if not grown from a local radio following like they did in Florida. Anytime the music industry became stale in the past, there has always been a “musical movement” that transitioned one style from the masses to another style; like stadium rock to punk rock, punk rock to new wave, new wave to hair metal, hair metal to grunge, grunge to aggro nu-metal, now……Nickelback and Britney Spears for 13 years. Without local and regional radio personalities and creative program directors that have now been mostly replaced by corporate voices and actors, it is nearly impossible for a new movement to arise and cleanse into something else. It is nearly impossible for a group of friends working as busboys to get together in an apartment and start a band, play local bars, save up the cash for a cheap demo recorded in someone’s basement, get that demo in the hands of the local station, and get airplay to the point of starting a local following that catches the attention of a record company like Sony or BMG. The only way to do that now is to go sing glorified karaoke on “American Idol.”
Record companies have sung the blues about losing profits and blaming college kids in dorms for destroying an entire industry for well over a decade. Their complaints are- nobody buys records anymore. There are platinum albums every year. People are buying them. However, they seem to coincidentally only be buying the albums that the record companies are pumping capital into Clear Channel to play incessantly. Consumers will buy what they hear. If they only hear Foster the People and LMFAO, then that is all they are going to buy. Today’s consumer has an extremely short attention span. They aren’t going to go search for the most part. The product has to be readily accessible and available. Art has to have a chance to flourish before it can become business. When Cameron Crowe gave us the warning (set in the 1970s) in the film “Almost Famous” that money and marketing would rip out the soul of rock n’ roll and destroy everything we love it about, he couldn’t have been more correct or prophetic. That was then. We have gotten to the point now of not much rock n’ roll being out there to destroy. Simply said; record companies and rampant media ownership have taken a wide world of art that could once be seen in an omni-directional sense and reduced it to s simple pin-point, or a dot on a map.
The once corporate giant, Clear Channel, has in recent years gone private and has made unsuccessful attempts to sell some of its radio stations in smaller markets. The economic climate in the United States has prevented and slowed the “little guy” from buying those properties back. However as long as the deregulation of ownership that was allowed in 1996 is in place, it is open season for the next company with a few billion dollars to invest to take it all over just as Clear Channel did in 1996.
Give the world art and access to it and they will embrace it ten-fold.
Dustin M Pardue
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