BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (U-WIRE) — It’s 1972. Enter Lowry Mays, aspiring San Antonio banker. Mays co-signs the note to purchase a local FM station as a favor to a local investor. Thirty-one years later, Mays owns 1,225 stations in 250 U.S. markets and an audience of 66 million. Mays is the founder and CEO
of Clear Channel, a $25 billion media conglomerate currently manipulating local entertainment options somewhere near you.
Senator Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., introduced the “Competition in Radio and Concert Industries Act of 2003” bill at the end of January. He is asking Congress to rethink the wording of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, where the FCC eliminated national ownership rules for radio stations. The bill says that since the Telecom Act was passed, radio station owners dropped from 5,100 to 3,800. Concert ticket prices increased by 50 percent. Now the top-50 radio groups collect 62.5 percent of radio station revenues.
People are starting to connect the dots between owning radio stations and venues in the same area, and are claiming a decrease in local options. Mays says his company takes local flavor into account and sticks it into Clear Channel’s many rotations.
Yet, the company has had legitimate legal trouble. Two years ago, Florida officials fined Clear Channel $80,000 for not telling participants to a radio call-in show that they were competing against listeners from across the country,
instead of locally. The FCC fined Clear Channel $8,000 the same year for accepting money from a record company to play a Bryan Adams song — this practice is called payola, one of the causes that started federal regulation of the airwaves in the first place. A Bryan Adams song — is it worth it?
Decide for yourself. Listen to a Clear Channel station here and one in your hometown, and see if Mays’ claim that his company provides for local listening is true.
If you want at least part of your music and media back, call your senators and ask them to support the bill. Look them up at www.senate.gov. Tell them corporate radio has, and still does, suck.