The messy suicide of commercial radio series; (part 3) Regulations? We don’t need stinking regulations (continued)

Throughout 1996 and 1997, rarely did a month go by without the announcement of some Sillerman acquisition. Then he sold off all his radio stations to the AM/FM chain and went off to corner the market on concert promotions and venues.

About two years later, another huge radio chain, Clear Channel, bought Sillerman’s former stations in a deal for the 443-station AM/FM chain, creating the largest radio broadcasting company in the United States. Then in March 2001, about five years after deregulation began, Clear Channel bought out Sillerman’s concert promotion and venue business for $2.7 billion in stock. When the sale was announced, David Lieberman proposed the following scenario in USA Today:

Consider what could happen when a big act such as KISS, Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Marc Anthony, or Cher comes to your town.

Their songs will be virtually unavoidable, particularly on the radio stations sponsoring the concert. If the radio’s off, or on a different station you won’t miss all the billboards [Clear Channel’s original business and still a big one] advertising the event.

The radio sponsor’s website will be one of the easiest places to buy tickets to the performance. Fans will probably go there anyway when it hosts a cybercast or chat with the artist.

Then, at the arena, you’ll find yourself surrounded by merchandise and ads – many of them for the radio station and upcoming concerts.In short, there’ll be no escape.

Or, as one record company head summed it up, “You cannot have a hit record without Clear Channel.”

The most astonishing part of all this is that Clear Channel had to have a fire sale to bring itself within even the lenient ownership regulations. It sold around 25 percent of all its stations. But even now, Clear Channel owns six stations in New York City and nine in L.A., respectively the #1 and #2 markets in the United States, and over 1,200 stations total.

A few other major players also took advantage of deregulation, including:

• ABC Radio, with three stations in New York and three in L.A., and over 60 total U.S. stations

• Emmis Broadcasting, which owns three stations in New York and two in L.A., and 25 total U.S. stations

• CBS Radio, which owns six stations in New York and seven in L.A., and over 180 in the United States

These are only four of the biggest players as of this writing. In 2002, 21 companies owned over 40 stations each. Clear Channel has as many as all 20 of these other chains combined.

This centralised concentration of media and money has had a chilling effect on music. With the high financial stakes of keeping dozens or hundreds of radio stations solvent, radio needs to guarantee profits. The music is flypaper and the listeners the flies, and the owners want to catch as many flies on a strip as they can by programming to the lowest turn-off rate possible.

“Radio stations are becoming more and more homogenised,” Patricia Seybold observed, “so they are less interested in new or niche music.”

This had led to disposable pop, regurgitated rock, and repetitive rap; everything on the radio sounds the same, a seamless stream of sonic syrup. Anything with a modicum of personality or potential to offend has to develop somewhere outside the broadcast frequencies.

“In the next five or 10 years,” artist Todd Rundgren predicted in 1992, “I think that radio stations are going to continue this downward slide. What they’ll be good for is what they initially were good for, which is bringing live events, events that are not part of the database, but being created extemporaneously.”

He proved prescient, right down to referring to the recorded content on radio as “the database.”