Re: Atlanta radio musings

I’m too lazy to post any new content, so here’s a rant I wrote regarding the state of broadcast radio:

What we’re seeing now is the continued twitchings of the rotting corpse that is Broadcast Radio. The Beast was live in the 70s, tumorous in the 80s, and died in the 90s. Once the FCC allowed single corporate entities to own more than a small number of radio stations, the way was made clear for the ethnic cleansing of the radio waves by ClearChannel and other media orporations.

By the mid-70s radio stations had fully adapted to — and expected — payola. Radio’s financial system moved from one that centered on locating its market’s interests and catering to them to a financial system that located more and more creative ways to obtain payola from the record companies. By the 90s, radio stations were almost entirely playing ‘hits’ handed to them by record company shills, ‘hits’ created by pre-fab boybands and failed heavymetal dudes turned grunge-gig. The big media companies — by this time they had extended into every media format — created the bands, paid the radio stations to make the bands famous, and made profit. At the same time, the public grew less and less attached to and focused around radio.

In 2005, as a previous commenter noted, nobody cares about radio. It is completely and irrevocably irrelevant to anyone, anywhere, except for the few poor souls caught up in its collapsing flesh. The only small twitches of life in the vast, inward-looking desolation that is 2005’s broadcast radio are personality-driven shows like Boortz, Limbaugh, Stern, etc.

I can assure you that these sparks will soon be extinguished, once the middle-edgers catch wind from their cutting-edge friends about podcasts: there are far more interesting and powerful personalities out there on the Internet than any radio station would dare unleash on FCC-controlled wavespace.

The final hammerblow will come when the middle masses realize that whereas they have enormous amounts of unheard-of personalization in every other facet in their life, from custom Nikes to personalized Amazon pages to the 10,000 possible options for their new car, they have absolutely no choice when it comes to broadcast radio. In fact, the junk that’s playing wasn’t even meant for them. It was meant to put more of Sony’s money into ClearChannel’s pocket. Once Joe Middle realizes he’s been cut out of the loop, he’ll go shell out $100 for a used iPod, and sync up with the rest of the edge, and drop out of the broadcast market for good.

And good for him.