In short, a small group of radio station owners now controls most of the radio stations in the country, and they use computers to send out the playlist to every station in their group. This results in the peculiar scenario that anyone who’s driven across the country has discovered: each city has all the same radio stations as every other city and their playlists are incredibly predictable.
In 2007, the four largest radio station group owners, Clear Channel, CBS Radio, Citadel, and Entercom, were fined by the FCC for playing music that the major labels had payed them to play, a practice known as “payola” that has plagued radio for the past fifty years. Payola, which is not illegal unless listeners have not been told about it, has long been blamed for the crappy and unoriginal state of radio because the major labels were effectively pushing their artists onto the playlists of the major radio stations to the exclusion of independent music. At the time of the FCC punishment, the largest radio station owners agreed to curtail payola and they also promised to play more independent music, which represents 30 percent of all music sales in the United States, but which receives only scant “slivers of airtime“.
In April of this year, the Future of Music Coalition issued a report on the aftermath of the FCC decision, asking the question, “Has anything changed?” For anyone who’s turned on the radio recently the answer is regrettably obvious: radio playlists are as predictable now as they’ve always been.
In the report, titled: Same Old Song: An Analysis of Radio Playlists in a Post-FCC Consent Decree World, researcher Kristin Thomson concludes that little if anything has changed since the FCC’s consent decree in 2007. One problem with radio is that a group of owners enjoys near monopoly control.
Thomson writes,
By 2002, virtually every geographic market was dominated by four firms controlling 70 percent of market share or greater. In addition, nearly every music format was controlled by an oligopoly. In 28 of the 30 major music formats nationwide, four companies or fewer controlled more than 50 percent of listeners. As a result, an increasingly small number of companies determined what music was played on specific formats. In addition, radio station group owners introduced cost-cutting measures that reduced local staff and centralized programming decisions at the regional, or cluster, level. With individual station autonomy drastically limited and a broad trend toward shorter playlists, musicians had far fewer opportunities to receive airplay.
In short, a small group of radio station owners now controls most of the radio stations in the country, and they use computers to send the playlist out to every station in their group. This results in the peculiar scenario that anyone who’s driven across the country has discovered: each city has all the same radio stations as every other city and their playlists are wholly predictable. In this way radio has become as predictable as McDonald’s, even while small music scenes across the country are spewing out more and more unique, independent music.
Thus, in the aftermath of the FCC’s consent decree, the FMC found that radio station playlists haven’t changed much at all. Somewhat more surprisingly, they discovered that radio stations play mostly old music, because it’s safe and won’t turn off listeners.
“Radio relies on the hits,” Thomson writes.
When looking at airplay share by release date, in almost every format measured, more than 50 percent of the spins on the playlist were of songs more than five years old. This demonstrates that radio tends to play it safe; it sandwiches new material in between recognizable hits from the past to keep its core audience from changing the dial when content becomes too unfamiliar. But this strategy also points to the problems of the forced scarcity that commercial radio represents. Because there are so few slots available for new material on any given playlist, these slots become highly coveted and valuable. This is the environment where payola becomes attractive, as moneyed interests try to buy their way onto the air.
At some point, of course, listeners will likely get tired of hearing songs that are more than five years old when there’s so much new music being created. In addition, radio, like newspapers, is under threat from the world of new media, even if its medium (music in a car) hasn’t been made totally obsolete by the internet yet. An interesting component to this discussion, however, is that the internet has been offering more and more free music options and with the rise of mobile computing and internet resources like Pandora garnering greater success, it’s only a matter of time before people stop listening to music on the radio. Thus, as it offers greater airplay to the artists of tomorrow, the internet is sure to kill off radio as effectively as it has hurt the newspapers.
At least in the case of newspapers, there may be some regrets.
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