‘Radio is cleaning up the nation’

I’ve almost given up on listening to the radio. Having grown up with the old WNEW in New York in the late 1970s, I find myself without a radio home. The reason is that my tastes are pretty eclectic, stretching from classic jazz (John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk) across the full rock spectrum through country and blues and folk and there are few stations that capture even a portion of that musical spectrum (WXPN out fo Philly comes as close as anybody, I guess).

I’ve written in the past about my own vision for a station that would play Jimi Hendrix and Nona Hendrix, The Beatles, English Beat and Beat Happenings, “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane and “Train in Vain” by The Clash.

But we’re beyond that, living in an age where the musical tastes of America are dictated by computerized playlists, sales figures and the incomprehensible logic of conformity. The idea is that if one band will sell — say The Backstreet Boys — then a carbon copy — 98 Degrees, say — will sell as well. In this kind of world, there is little room for the new and the quirky (say ArtBrut).

The situation, which is not new, has only grown worse in recent years, as this report from The Future of Music Coalition (I saw this in John Nichols’ blog). To sum things up:

Data in the report shows that station ownership consolidation at the national and local levels has led to fewer choices in radio programming and harmed the listening public and those working in the music and media industries, including DJs, programmers and musicians.

Key points included in report:

• The top four radio station owners have almost half of the listeners and the top ten owners have almost two-thirds of listeners.
• The “localness” of radio ownership – ownership by individuals living in the community — has declined between 1975 and 2005 by almost one-third.
• Just fifteen formats make up three-quarters of all commercial programming. Moreover, radio formats with different names can overlap up to 80% in terms of the songs played on them.
• Niche musical formats like Classical, Jazz, Americana, Bluegrass, New Rock, and Folk, where they exist, are provided almost exclusively by smaller station groups.
• Across 155 markets, radio listenership has declined over the past fourteen years, a 22% drop since its peak in 1989. The consolidation allowed by the Telecom Act has failed to reverse this trend.

It used to be that, when faced with dull radio, we could change the station, possibly find something worth listening to. That’s becoming increasingly difficult and, while satellite radio offers an out, it seems a violation of radio’s democratic spirit to ask us to pay. There is the internet, which has become my new WNEW, but it is limited — I don’t have a soundcard at my work computer and there are times I just can’t (or don’t want to) be near a keyboard.

I’m not naive enough to believe that altering federal ownership rules will drastically change things — too much of the bad has become entrenched in a new status quo — but breaking the near-monopoly that exists now has to have some positive impact.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet