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Radio

Radio Goodness

A long time ago, I blogged about Rev105. Without rehashing all of that history again, Rev105 is being re-created by Minnesota Public Radio. The purchase of WCAL, St. Olaf’s classical radio station, was met by animosity in Minnesota, as MPR bought out the classical competition in the city. But MPR’s vision for the new KCMP is a radio station dedicated to local music. Following the template of LA’s KCRW and Seattle’s KEXP, 89.3 KCMP will have a focus first on the local scene, and then dedicated to playing music no one else does.

How is this re-creating Rev105? Well, their station director is Steve Nelson, the former co-host (with Brian Oake now on Clear Channel’s 97.1) of Rev105, who left after some time after the Capital Cities buyout to go to NPR. Steve was also a founder of Radio K 770, and has been on their board of directors for quite some time. Thorn, KCMP’s music director, was the afternoon drive-time DJ on Rev105. And their newest DJ is Mary Lucia, who hosted nights on Rev105, and mornings with Brian after the buy-out and Steve leaving.

MPR is hosting a blog dedicated to the launch of KCMP as they prepare to go live. No go live date yet, but my anticipation is building.

Don't Vote Campaign

I saw on Daily Kos, a liberal weblog, this morning, that Clear Channel has put up 11 billboards across the Twin Cities saying “Don’t Vote“.

According to a Clear Channel spokesman, the billboards are a teaser ad for an ad campaign that will be unveiled on Oct. 11th. The billboards are in predominantly minority neighborhoods. Clear Channel claims that at first they said no to the campaign until they saw the whole thing, which will be in good taste.

No matter what the ad campaign, even if it’s for their radio stations (of which they have almost 50% market share here in the Twin Cities), this is in poor taste, even if it’s nothing to do with this years election.

At some point, I need to get my old blog imported here, so I can link back to the stories I did on why Clear Channel is evil, and why radio here in the Twin Cities sucks (Thanks Clear Channel and ABC Capital Cities Radio!).

And don’t forget, Clear Channel executives have a nice history of giving to the Republican party…

Go Howard!

Check out Howard’s Stern website!

He’s a little pissed at the Bush Administration, and urging folks to register to vote. His entire front page is dedicated to his effort.

I listened to Howard when I lived in Philadelphia, and enjoyed his show (though he has so many commericals…), and listened off and on for the brief time he was on here in Minnesota.

What’s interesting to me, is that I would assume his listener base would tend to vote Republican. This isn’t new for him, the last 6 months to a year he has been railing against the administration, especially after the Clear Channel debacle around the FCC fines when Clear Channel dropped him on a handful of stations (he’s distributed by Clear Channel’s largest competitor, Infinity).

It will be intriguing to see what impact this may or may not have on the general election.

Yahoo Radio & MNF

Speaking of Yahoo Radio yesterday, what a disappointing service.

From a broadcast perspective, it’s gotten better. It used to be when they cut to commercial, it was dead air with no sound. Now you get local commercials.

But I’m a geek – I use Red Hat 9 on the box I listen to the game on. Well, doesn’t work with Linux. Fine. Use the KVM and pull up the other Windows box. Fire up Mozilla Firebird and go back and try and load it and Yahoo tells me I’m not running the right OS again. Takes me a few minutes to realize that I’m running the right OS, just not the right browser. Fire up IE, and bam, get the popup to choose RealOne or WMP as my player. Their OS / player detection page needs to define better the problem. And they should at least be Mozilla compliant. (Hmm, just thought of putting the plugin information in for WMP, but I don’t think that would fix it anyway).

And how about those Colts last night? By the definition of the Leaping rule as Al Michaels read on TV, Simeon Rice did break the rule – even if he landed late. But even to that point, for the Colts to score 3 TDs in 3:44, on the Bucs Defense, is amazing.

Sitting around watching the game last night, we all looked at each other and said this was a defining moment for Peyton Manning – and it was. Good for Dungy, especially after how the Glazers screwed him.

Radio Follow-up

So I’m in Madison, WI with my wife last weekend spending some time together, and I tune to the radio to 92.1 WMAD, one of my all-time favorite alternative radio stations. And what do I find? Some light alternative called “The Mix”. So another one bites the dust. In the last couple of years they had gotten a bit harder, but still played awesome alternative with some Limp Bizkit, Staind, etc thrown in. Almost a cross of Drive105 and 93x here in the Twin Cities.

So I google for information about the format switch, turns out it took place Oct. 29th, 2002. Figures, right about when football season ended and I hadn’t been to Madison in a while.

So I found some articles talking about “it was just an evolution” for the format switch, and other lame excuses.

But then I came across the Upper Midwest Broadcasting website. This must be one of the most depressing websites ever.

It’s a site dedicated to radio and TV news in the Upper Midwest (Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota). It details format changes, anchors / DJs coming and going, and ownership changes. What makes it so depressing is seeing all the consolidation. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen Clear Channel discussed, and then ABC. Even smaller regionals consolidating to fight back. Whoever said less choice is good? And the number of DJ’s doing the voictracking thing – where they pre-record snippets of conversation from one city and are replayed as if “live” if another city or on multiple stations depresses me.

What’s interesting, and maybe a bit inspiring, is the number of low power stations that have been granted. Maybe there is hope yet.

Check out the Dead Radio Stations Website page. Rev105 guestbook, 93.7 The Edge, 93x, lots of old stations who have their old sites mirrored. Good stuff to keep alive!

Radio Follow-up

So today was the big vote on relaxing media ownership rules at the FCC. As you can see from this link, the FCC voted party lines, with the Republican majority approving the relaxation of how much any media company can own in a given market. Here’s the highlights from an AP article:

The FCC said a single company can now own TV stations that reach 45 percent of U.S. households instead of 35 percent. The major networks wanted the cap eliminated, while smaller broadcasters said a higher cap would allow the networks to gobble up stations and take away local control of programming.

The FCC largely ended a ban on joint ownership of a newspaper and a broadcast station in the same city. The provision lifts all “cross-ownership” restrictions in markets with nine or more TV stations. Smaller markets would face some limits and cross-ownership would be banned in markets with three or fewer TV stations.

The agency also eased rules governing local TV ownership so one company can own two television stations in more markets and three stations in the largest cities such as New York and Los Angeles.

The FCC kept a ban on mergers among the four major TV networks: ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.

“The more you dig into this order the worse things get,” said Michael Copps, one of the commission’s Democrats. He said the changes empowers “a new media elite” to control news and entertainment.

Fellow Democrat Jonathan Adelstein said the changes are “likely to damage the media landscape for decades to come.”

The Democrats said the new rules mean a single company can own in one city up to three TV stations, eight radio stations, the cable TV system, cable TV stations and the only daily newspaper.

Slashdot has been covering this for the last week or so, with a great article that covers many links, including a fantastic piece at the Washington Post: More on Media Consolidation/Deregulation; a follow-up piece covering the history of copyright: Media Monopoly: Thomas Edison to Hillary Rosen , and today’s followup with over 700 user comments.

In addition, last Thurdsay Kuro5hin posted a great editorial on the Consolidation of American Radio. It’s a great look of how this started to happen – in the 70’s, and even the role computers and advertising played.

It’s another sad chapter in the history of American copyright. Our forefathers specifically granted rights in our Constitution – but never this broad in scope. Not only did they believe in copyright, but they believed in passing that same information into the public domain – not this version of locking everyone out. Now we are surrounded by the loosening of rules regarding the media, so they can continue to tell us what to think in even more ways. Great. Because I like having a lack of choice in how I’m told to think I get my news.

Thankfully, there is the Internet. I’ll leave you with this:

<img src="https://i0.wp.com/www.silwenae.net/images/murdoch-small.jpeg?w=700" align="center"

Evil Corporations #2: Clear Channel

Fortune has a great article up about Clear Channel radio.

Lowry Mays, the CEO of Clear Channel has clear ideas about what business he’s in. From the article:

“If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn’t be someone from our company,” says Mays, 67. “We’re not in the business of providing news and information. We’re not in the business of providing well-researched music. We’re simply in the business of selling our customers products.”

Personally, I’m extremely disturbed what’s been going on in radio for years. When I left Minnesota in 1994, I left behind my favorite radio station ever- Revolution Radio, Rev105. Founded by one of the Cargill Corp heirs, the station never made money, only breaking even, but they played whatever they wanted. When they said Alternative radio, they meant it. This is the station that introduced me to Semisonic (I won tickets on Rev105 to see Pleasure before they were Semisonic!), Soul Coughing and Ani DiFranco. (Ani DiFranco on the radio. It’s 6 years later and I’ve never heard her on the radio again – though I’ve bought all her CDs).

I moved back to the Twin Cities in January of ’97, and after watching the alternative station in Philadelphia die in ’96, I was subjected to it again. On March 11, ’97, the station flipped over to hard rock – which explains why when I got in my car that night to go home I heard Van Halen playing. Only later was I to find out that ABC / Capital Cities bought out Cargill Communications for $11 million and made them sign a non-compete. Now ABC owns all the rock – classic rock on 92KQ, Alt-rock on 93.7 The Edge, and hard rock / heavy metal on X-105. Through the last 6 years ABC has gone from Hard Rock (X-105), to alt-rock (Zone105), classic alt-rock (Zone105), R&B, and now alt-rock again (Drive105) while turning 93.7 the Edge from alt-rock to heavy metal (93X).

The irony comes in that Drive105 has just started adverstising: Not a Clear Channel radio station! But yet they’re Capital Cities, the #2 radio company in the U.S. Playing popular “alternative” music. To 40 spins a week.

There’s not much left on the web about Rev105, though Google comes up with 4 pages of results, not much works when you follow the links. I’ve found a couple though – here and here. Rev105 will always live in my heart – and my coffee cup! (Which is a Rev105 cup, the only choice for me to drink cofee out of).

Rev105