What little creative spirit left in Seattle commercial radio is likely to get washed away. Longtime local station boss (and former Sonics owner) Barry Ackerley is retiring from the broadcasting biz and selling all his remaining properties (including KUBE-FM and KJR-AM) to Clear Channel Communications, the current 1200-lb. gorilla of U.S. media.
We first wrote about Clear Channel when it bought and promptly killed our second-favorite online radio station, Luxuria Music. That was the least of its crimes against culture. Thanks to government “regulators” allowing nearly unlimited industry consolidation, CC’s acquired over 1,100 stations. It runs them on the cheap: Firing local DJs, running centralized and automated playlists, bullying any remaining local competitors into cutting ad rates beneath break-even levels.
With this enormous airplay clout, CC’s become mighty pushy toward record companies. While it’s still legally prohibited from directly charging the labels to play their records, it manages to force other “considerations” from them.
Especially now that CC also owns one of North America’s two main concert promotion companies. It bought SFX Entertainment, of which The Stranger said in 1998 that “they could crush TicketMaster like a little bug.” As part of CC, it’s gotten even bigger and pushier, adding ticket surcharges and cutting artists’ fees. Many cloutless acts are even expected to perform for free at shows charging $25 or more per ticket, in exchange for airplay consideration on CC’s stations.
Clear Channel can easily be called the Microsoft of music and broadcasting. This is not a favorable comparison. Its strategies are clearly not competitive but monopolistic. It operates not to directly make money (indeed, it’s fiscal performance is at least as sorry as that of any media company in this ad-slump year) but to maintain and expand its power. And no politician has spoken out against it, not even the ones who love to bash the media. (Did I mention that Rush Limbaugh is now a CC employee?)
Seattle was the last big U.S. city not to have a CC-owned block of stations. Now our radio will likely suck as much as the radio everywhere else.
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