Homogenized Music

Mansing writes "The connections between broadcast radio and music industry are well known. In the old days, payola was the method to increase a song's (or album's) exposure. But now, the same "free market" corporate music that infects the music industry is also infecting the broadcast radio industry as well. What makes the article so informative is not the business angles, but how business has changed what is broadcast. Seeing the parallels between the recording industry's force fed music and Clear Channel's "nothing is left to whim or chance" programming, I now understand how hard it is for any non-corporate sanctioned music to become widely heard."

McRadio

[freality]

Memes need a name :)

Re:crapola is more like it

[DNS-and-BIND]

College radio has no advertising. Nobody knows it's there. And most people are scared to go below 92 on their radio dials, because that's where the boring classical stations and *shudder* NPR are.

Great Timing

[ch-chuck]

this subject dovetails nicely with a recent Onion [theonion.com] piece, hehe.

Re:raido sucks

[BankofAmerica_ATM]

I am intrigued by your talk about radios. Perhaps I could one day learn how to do CONSCIOUSNESS-TRANSFER over the radio waves? This would surely break the ProjectFaustuslike strangehold that Clear Channel has over music distribution...

Re:Clear Channel == Devil

[Nilatir]

Hey Taco! Any chance of getting a "Full of Crap" moderation option?

Re:raido sucks

[spatley]

The most horrible thing about it clearcast is not making a dime
The company lost money every quarter last year, piling up an annual loss of $1.1 billion. Clear Channel also is shouldering $8 billion in debt -- the legacy of its deal-a-minute expansion spree. With a long advertising slump afoot, the company's stock is selling at about half its peak price of two years ago.

so they are becoming neither cool nor rich now that really sucks!

Re:The problem is not a failure of the market

[Zoop]

We have this too: National People's Radio [npr.org]. It's a command system, ruled by the government even though they only have a 10% stake. The only problem is that in order to be alternative there needs to be diversity--and only in large cities is there market enough for public radio stations to do anything than run "Talk of the Nation" all day long, which is just NPR trying to compete with AM radio. So what you have is this:

The unwashed masses listen to pablum.

The right-wing masses listen to AM radio and country music stations.

The monied left-wingers listen to NPR.

The monied right-wingers listen to NPR and complain about the slant.

The left-wing masses (college students who wear black and listen to the Cure) listen to College Radio and bitch about how the man is opressing them by playing Meat Beat Manifesto instead of the Cure.

And guess what? It's been like this for years and CC's ownership has been a marginal change at most.