Before hopping a flight from Seattle recently, I found myself with an hour to spare and the Experience Music Project on my remaining tourist to-do's. So I strolled over to Seattle Center, site of the city's 1962 World's Fair, and thus of its Space Needle and monorail. The EMP sits athwart the elevated tracks of the latter, Frank Gehry's rain-stained metal panels forming a funhouse tunnel for the transportation relic. Both, oddly enough, look a little stale.
I joined a line at the door, reflecting sourly that 10 a.m. Sunday morning might be the least-rockin' hour of the week. This was confirmed when I discovered I pretty much had the place to myself. The dozen or so others picked up credentials for a conference on "Fixing Radio."
Part of me wishes I had forged a name tag and joined them. For one thing, it might have been more engaging than the EMP. It turns out the most interesting thing about music is music, even given Beatles ticket stubs and Hendrix guitar splinters. But I would have liked to have heard a little of the kvetching about contemporary radio.
I read in The Seattle Times' online edition a few days later that attendees were concerned not only about media concentration and corporate control, and the resulting dearth of musical variety on the airwaves, but the crackdown on "offensive" programming. The previous week, Clear Channel Communications, the nation's largest owner of radio stations, had dumped Howard Stern from its outlets, in the cleansing wake of Janet Jackson's Super Bowl stunt.
Stern's gasbag schtick would seem to epitomize everything music lovers find wrong with radio. In fact, it could be argued that scooting Stern from the studio, along with all the other loquacious drive-time "personalities," might actually open some airwaves to more music. But of course it's hard to ignore a threat to free speech. Those who silence Stern today could be quieting Eminem tomorrow, and so on.
Clear Channel and the other broadcasters launching self-purifying campaigns are doing so in self-interest. They were happy to bank the profits Stern and others earned them. And, in fact, they created the platform for him. As Paul Farhi pointed out recently in The Washington Post, FM radio was all about music until the 1980s, when the FCC started increasing licenses, thus intensifying competitive pressures for attention and breeding "shock jocks."
Hiking the number of licensees did not make room for more variety but instead heated competition over the most popular "formats." This was something broadcasters wanted, just as they wanted to be able to gobble each other up and consolidate ownership of local stations.
It's all about minting money with the public airwaves, and it matters not what you broadcast to do it. But this could spell tough times for Clear Channel and other broadcast conglomerates. Just as TV networks must compete with freewheeling cable while wearing FCC-imposed fig leaves, radio networks find themselves dependent on "personalities" to pull in listeners, while kids download music and burn discs. Even if advertisers shun Stern wannabes, shock jocks lift the ratings for the station, and thus ads rates, as The Wall Street Journal noted recently. It also reported "weak demand for local ads" and flat fourth-quarter earnings for Clear Channel.
But weep not. Clear Channel will find its profits again, and its very name hints at the reason. What it owns is indeed clear channels, empty vessels, blank slates. It does not produce content, but rather provides the conduit.
AOL's fall from master to vassal of Time Warner seemed to confirm the point of view that content would be the new king in Medialand. But Comcast's bid for Disney could prove them wrong again. Comcast produces little. The New York Times reported recently that Comcast's growing high-speed Internet business makes it attractive to Wall Street, and thus a powerful suitor for a content-maker like Disney. This line of thinking, that cable will lead the way with television, Internet and eventually telephone service, makes content the vassal of the vessel.
This ought to be clear in Las Vegas, of all cities. For Las Vegas is the ultimate clear channel for its audience's changing desires, effortlessly shifting shapes every couple of years to keep pace.
No doubt new Sterns, if not the actual one, will return to the airwaves, because all those stations need to pull in ears. And we've proved that we want raunch, however much we might complain when someone crosses a nebulous line. Music, meanwhile, shows signs of following other, perhaps more promising paths than either the radio or the recording industries have afforded it. Others have imagined more informal and innovative production and distribution, given the nature of both the Internet and cable, which serve narrow audiences. But it remains to be seen if the owners of the vessel, in this case Internet access, will foster or stifle that.
In the end, whether by radio, television or Internet, the big vessels will keep pouring what most of us want. The trick is to make it serve all of us.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.