Tell me this isnt scary: (article reprinted copyright Wall Street Journal): BY ANNA WILDE MATHEWS Wall Street Journal On Feb. 15, disc jockey 'Cabana Boy Geoff' Alan offered a special treat to listeners of KISS-FM in Boise, Idaho: an interview with pop duo Evan and Jaron Lowenstein. 'In the studio with Evan and Jaron,' Alan began. 'How're you guys doing?' The artists reported that they had just come from skiing at nearby Sun Valley, then praised the local scene. 'Boise's always a nice place to stop by on the way out,' Evan Lowenstein said, adding that the city 'is actually far more beautiful than I expected it to be. It's actually really nice, so happy to be here.' Alan chimed in: 'Yeah, we've got some good people here.' Later, he asked Boise fans to e-mail or call the station with questions for the performers. But even the most ardent fan never got through to the brothers that day. The singers had actually done the interview in San Diego a few weeks earlier. Alan himself has never been to Boise, though he offers a flurry of local touches on the show he hosts each weekday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on the city's leading pop station. This may be the future of radio. The Boise station's owner, industry giant Clear Channel Communications Inc., is using technology and its enormous reach to transform one of the most local forms of media into a national business. In fact, Boise's KISS 103.3 — its actual call letters are KSAS-FM — is one of 47 Clear Channel stations using the 'KISS' name around the country. It's part of an effort to create a national KISS brand in which stations share not just logos and promotional bits but also draw from the same pool of on-air talent. Via a practice called 'voice-tracking,' Clear Channel pipes popular out-of-town personalities from bigger markets to smaller ones, customizing their programs to make it sound as if the DJs are actually local residents. "We can produce higher-quality programming at a lower cost in markets where we could never afford the talent," says Randy Michaels, chief executive of the company's radio unit. "That's a huge benefit to the audience." It's also a huge benefit to Clear Channel, which can boast of a national reach and economies of scale to advertisers and shareholders. The voice-tracking system allows a smaller station in Boise to typically pay around $4,000 to $6,000 a year for a weekday on-air personality, while a local DJ in a market of Boise's size would have to be paid salary and benefits that might run five times as much. That's why Clear Channel is developing multiple identities for a battalion of DJs like Alan, 29, who is based at KHTS-FM in San Diego but also does "local" shows in Boise; Medford, Ore.; and Santa Barbara, Calif. Alan does research to offer news items and other details unique to each city. DEAL-MAKING FRENZY The new sound of radio is tied to big changes in the industry brought on by a 1996 law that got rid of the nationwide ownership cap of 40 stations. The law also allowed companies to own as many as eight stations in the largest markets, double the previous limit. The shift sent broadcasters into a frenzy of deal-making, as stations rapidly changed hands. A fragmented business once made up mainly of mom- and-pop operators evolved quickly into one dominated by large publicly traded companies that controlled stations around the country. No one took advantage of the new law more aggressively, or successfully, than Clear Channel. The company started out with one FM station in San Antonio. A relatively little-known firm before 1996, it rapidly grew into by far the biggest player on the airwaves. Today, it operates more than 1,200 U.S. stations, compared with 186 stations owned by its biggest publicly traded rival, Viacom Inc. Privately held Citadel Communications Corp. has 205 stations, mostly in midsize markets. Clear Channel has combined its radio clout with a growing array of other media assets, including the nation's leading concert-promotion company and a major outdoor-advertising operation. Now Clear Channel is moving to exploit its size by linking up its different businesses and wooing major advertisers with the promise that it can deliver nearly any combination of geography, demographics and radio format. Part of that effort is the move to create national brands such as KISS, which can become familiar touchstones for big national advertisers and, eventually, listeners. While voice-tracking is not a new practice in radio, Clear Channel is pushing the concept on a far grander scale than ever, extending well beyond the 47 KISS stations to encompass most of its empire. BUCKING TRADITION Michaels compares his model to McDonald's Corp.'s franchise system. "A McDonald's manager may get his arms around the local community, but there are certain elements of the product that are constant," he says. "You may in some parts of the country get pizza and in some parts of the country get chicken, but the Big Mac is the Big Mac. How we apply those principles to radio, we're still figuring out." Indeed, as Clear Channel has moved to take advantage of its reach, it has run up against traditional ways of doing things in radio. To create a national brand based on a federal trademark, for instance, it has had to mount legal challenges in several markets, chasing off stations that had been using versions of the KISS name locally. (The U.S. station that actually has the call letters KISS-FM is an album-rock station based in Clear Channel's corporate hometown of San Antonio, owned by rival Cox Radio Inc.) Clear Channel is facing objections from union locals representing on-air talent, which likely stand to lose jobs as the company phases in more virtual programming. The company drew an investigation by the Florida attorney general's office into whether it was portraying national call-in contests to listeners as local. Clear Channel admitted no wrongdoing, but in 2000, it paid the state an $80,000 contribution to the Consumer Frauds Trust Fund and agreed not to "make any representation or omission that would cause a reasonable person to believe" that contests involving numerous stations around the country were actually limited to local listeners. Michaels argues that much of the static his company hears, particularly from competitors, is simply a battle against progress. He compares it with another point in radio's history: when the industry began phasing out live orchestras and in-studio sound-effects experts in favor of recorded music. "The guy making buggy whips and installing horseshoes should have gotten into making tires," he says. Change, he says, is "inevitable. All we can do is exploit it."76 responses total.
sheesh...Pretty soon you wont even know if your local radio is really local anymore. You hear somebody on the radio discussing the weather and local issues, and you assume he or she is somewhere around there. But not anymore. The wave..er radio wave...of the future
OK. It's not scary. Now what? Does it matter where entertainment originates?
I'm starting to regard the 1966 Telecomm Act, with its repeal of the limits on the number of stations one corporation could own, as the Destruction of American Musical Culture Act.
If Clear Channel found religion, it would matter to you. The only station in Ann Arbor they don't own is 1600 AM, and the fact that it's the only one they don't own is the reason that they don't yet own it. Get what I'm saying?
I don't get it, sorry. Do they own 91.8 FM now?
There is no radio station broadcasting on 91.8 FM (at least not in Ann Arbor).
I thought I read somewhere (the Ann Arbor News or the Observer) that WAAM, 1600 Am was sold to Clear Channel recently.
There are no FM stations broadcasting on *any* even decimal (like .8).
91.7 broadcasts from near Ann Arbor and considers itself independent.
That's a public radio station: Univ. of Mich. (They call themselves "Michigan Radio", as though there are no other radio stations in Michigan.) They broadcast mostly NPR material - very litle locally generated material.
Clear Channel had agreed to buy 1600, but I believe they were caught up in procedural issues relating to whether or not it would be a good idea for them to own everything. I apologize for omitting that earlier, but I *did* actually know it. Honest. :) I'm not sure if it is going to go through or not.
"Drivin' in my car, with the radio on, listenin' to WQIB" (I think it was, some DC station anyway.) Then, a year or so later, "Drivin in my car, with the radio on, listenin' to KEARTH101" in California. "Fire", in the late Seventies. It ain't new.
Clear Channel is also becoming a big player in concert promotion and venue management. And you can see where that leads. Clear Channel will see to it that its vast lineup of radio stations work with specific musical acts they have deals with. The day could be soon coming where no musical act can get their music played on commercial radio airwaves or tour succesfully without the Clear Channel "seal of approval" as it were. Which means that the suits in the Clear Channel offices are probably looking towards the day when they have substantial influence on popular music and culture in this country.
Can you say "payola"? I _knew_ you could.
Slippery slope arguments never hold much weight with me.
Is digital radio still under development? Supposedly it would open up a lot more stations.
Clear Channel owns 107.1 and 102.9 fm, as well as 1050 am, and one other AM station that I'm not remembering right now. 1050 is a sports talk station, most of the shows are local people, although they do pickup some ESPN radio personalities (Tony Kornheiser comes to mind). 107.1 is mostly local people, but they broadcast the Delilah show from 7-midnight weekdays. I have no clue about 102.9. (I know they play country music, but I don't know if the DJ's are local.
Is 106.7 owned by Clear Channel, or is it part of a different national chain?
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Sindi in resp:16 :: Just this morning I heard my first ad for the XM satellite digital radio system on WWJ-AM, so I guess they are now looking for customers in the Detroit area. The ad says they are offering 100 channels, of which 71 are music channels; it's a subscription service for $10/month and the radios, which I believe are oriented towards car use, start at $300. The competing satellite radio system, called Sirius, should be following imminently. XM and Sirius are both using their diverse selection of music as a marketing angle -- each is offering 3 or 4 classical channels, for example. If you want immediate gratification: I listened to about 10 hours of "digital radio" on various BBC radio channels this week, via Real Audio and the Internet. However, this requires a high-speed network connection for decent sound quality -- a 56K dialup gives a poor-sounding signal which drops out a lot -- and I don't think you can run Real Player on a DOS machine, you'll need at least Win95.
1290am - in the past known as WOIB, WNRS and WIQB-AM.
AM 1290 is currently WCAS, and has a "nostalgia" fomat.
Realaudio also requires an extra phone line if you don't have DSL. We are paying $12/month for the last party line they ever sold in Ann Arbor (no other party on it) and no tone service. Competitive in price with XM and you get more than 3 channels. I wonder when someone will come up with an appliance that is cheaper than a computer to play Realaudio on, which lets you change the software annually. We went to the local cable company once and checked out their three classical stations and they were not worth paying $40/month for (which would include Cable TV). No commentary, just a randomized selection of what they thought would appear to the buyer. Thanks for the info. Not very encouraging - I was hoping for a larger selection than you can get via analog radio.
www.xmradio.com. Depends what you count as a classical station. They do have live performances and commentary and interviews, from NY City. XMRadio appears to be Japanese. There is one 'classics' station with music from the last 1000 years (which they define as Renaissance to the present) and a VOX station with classical vocal music (opera to oratorio, they say), plus something called Pops (sort of classical) and 'Fine Tuning' - a mixture of classical, jazz, rock and everything else, an oasis of fine listening. Their sample program included a lot of modern popular music and Ravel's Bolero as the non-vocal selection. I count two classical stations here. On the regular radio I still get three. People with Realaudio can listen to samples of XMradio offerings. Do you need separate digital receivers for XM and Sirius?
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Yeah, it's interesting to see XM finally out-- the buzz had been on it for a while now, and yes, it did seem geared to the car market.
Sirius is also apparently only aimed at cars. They have symphony, chamber, and vocal classical stations, and also one folk station (in the 'variety' category). I wonder why nobody has come up with a broadcast radio equivalent of cable TV that would bring in radio stations from all over the country.
They have a cable radio thing that is the radio equivalent of cable tv. It isnt broadcast but instead comes in on the cable lines that also bring the tv.
One of the satelite radio systems apparently carries an NPR channel, the other has no public radio channel at all, which makes it absolutely out of the question for me, all other objections aside.
We went to listen to cable radio at the cable TV company and they did not have
any of the broadcast radio stations, only something created solely for cable
radio use, similar to the satellite digital radio, with about three classical
stations playing selections in random order without commentary. I was hoping
for stations from various places around the country or even better yet the
world, same as can be gotten now with a computer and dedicated phone line or
DSL line.
With three local NPR stations, why have a satellite NPR station?
For those occasions when I travel outside the range of the local stations. Why else bother with satellite radio?
Well, for me, the main appeal of satellite radio would be listening to music programming chosen by people for artistic reasons. But then, I'm one of a presumed minority of Americans who have tuned out commercial music radio almost completely, with the very occasional exception of the classic rock station in Livingston County, as I drive by it. The point of Sirius and XM, for me, isn't that they are digital, or that they are being delivered by satellite: the point is that they have found a way to bypass the crushing, unimaginative ad-sales mindset which has taken total possession of land-based radio. It might be useful to remember that the paying customers of Clear Channel and the other media corporations are the advertisers; the listeners are just the product being sold to the advertisers, and the programming has been relegated to the status of bait. For XM and Sirius, on the other hand, the paying customers are the listeners, so the digital satellite people are going to have to keep their audience excited and happy. It's an HBO approach to radio. (I still dunno if I'm going to buy into their service. Neither XM nor Sirius seems to offer a folk music channel which aligns with my definition of folk music, and listening to the services at home seems to be difficult, and at work, impossible. The business consensus which seems to have developed is that radio has dwindled to an in-car medium for most Americans.)
((Winter Agora #255 <---> Music #80))
I would listen to satellite radio if they played the same things as non-satellite public classical music stations, of which we no longer have any local ones. The non-local ones that you can still get on a radio come in hissy unless you have a very good tuner and listen in mono. And I would also appreciate stations that did not switch from music to news fro 4 pm to 7:30 pm, meaning stations from the west coast (with a 3-hour offset). And that did not switch to jazz on weekends, or all play only opera on Saturdays, or the same canned music from NPR late at night complete with blaring commercials for other NPR programs.
Except for NPR, I only listen to the radio in my car.
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I'd love to see mobile bandwidth become so common and cheap that you
could subscribe to an internet radio station in your car; I think that'd be
enough to bring me back to radio.
I would assume we would get there eventually; this would have horrible implications for the multi-billion dollar satellite investments made by XM and Sirius.
One of my coworkers has XM radio. He seems pretty happy with it, though I'm a little less than impressed with the variety of what I hear from his office. w.r.t. classical stations, I've still not seen a match for andante.com. I've started to check out bbc radio a little, based on ken's rantings :) but I've yet to find any shows that I'm really impressed with. Not ready to give up yet, though...
94.9fm is classic rock that rocks. The station pats itself on the back a bit less often, also.
flem in resp:39 :: are you paying for andante? Can you lay out some details about their audio operations? I've only used their site to read text articles.
Also, flem in resp:39 :: can you go into some detail about how your coworker gets XM Radio in his office? Thanks.
I'm not paying for Andante. They seem to have a couple of tiers of streaming audio. "Andante Radio" is free, linked to from the main page. No commercials, except thirty seconds every half hour or so advertizing their membership services. These seem to include live concert broadcasts as well as on-demand streaming of various recordings. I've not really looked into it a great deal. My coworker bought an XM unit that can be removed from the car and plugged into a second adapter/antenna thingy in the office. It has a normal audio output, that he plugs into a small desktop stereo system. He has had some trouble with the reception inside the office, but he has a window (pointing east, I think) and has found (and carefully marked) a couple of spots near the window that seem to do all right.
Can you buy one that is sold for use ONLY without a car? (one not two adaptor thingies)
This line is hear so I can find the item in general and forget it there, as agora is about to rap up.
What scares me about XM is it appears to be a proprietary system. I'd hate to buy a $300 head unit and have it become a $300 dash filler plate when the company went out of business. That and, well, if I want music in the car I don't get on broadcast radio, I can just use my MP3 player or pop in a cassette.
The original article (sorry to get back to that) may be scary, but no scarier than those old "pop star interview" LPs I've occasionally seen in used-record stores. They were distributed to local radio DJs along with scripts. You, the DJ, read the questions from the script, pop the needle down on the record appropriately, and - this is almost an exact quote from the blurb - it'll sound like Famous Star is RIGHT THERE in the studio with YOU! Early 60s, most of this stuff, IIRC. Nothing's changed.
What scares me is that it's proprietary and requires monthly subscriptions fees. I don't have that much use for coast-to-coast radio, since I travel out of the state about once per year.
For me, too, one of the fun parts of travelling is listening to different radio stations. I particularly like tuning around the AM dial at night. I can remember driving through Tennessee after dark listening to WABC New York. It was coming in strong, but with that periodic fading you only hear on skywave-propegated signals. Fun stuff. :)
The $10/month is instead of wasting time with commercials.
The commercials sometimes are pretty entertaining especially out in BFE.
What is BFE?
Anal intercourse, Egypt.
I'm skeptical. A lot of cable TV networks were commercial free at first, too, but that didn't last long. Now you pay a subscription fee to watch commercial breaks longer than those on broadcast TV.
Comcast continues Mediaone's sordid tradition of selling late-night
airtime to infomercial providers. It's virtually impossoble to find
programming after 2 am.
Do you have a VCR?
I wonder what the origin of the BFE reference is. I've known it most of my life.
Heh, I remember hearing BFE as a child although I didnt know what it stood for until later. Where would something like that come from? "Butt Fuck, Egypt" It makes no sense.
Slashdot pointed to an interesting article about the Sirius satellite radio system, the competitor to XM. I'm not sure I fully understand it, but I think Sirius is asking the FCC to restrict the usage of the 802.11 wireless networking frequencies, because those frequencies are close enough to the Sirius frequencies that the music service is seeing some interference issues.
Stupid f*ckers. Hopefully, they'll get slapped down.
It wouldn't surprise me. 802.11 is rapidly becoming the new Citizen's Band, complete with a total disregard for the legal limits on effective radiated power. ;)
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Oh? Are they operating under Part 15?
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Probably. Unless 802.11 frequencies are right on top of theirs, it's their own fault anyway -- this kind of problem can be solved with a better bandpass filter on the input, or steeper IF filter skirts, usually. That costs money, though. If it's like most consumer receiver designs they cheaped out on filtering and hoped no one would notice.
If I remember some of the more intelligent-sounding Slashdot commentary, Sirius may actually have a case here because they are a licensed service, analogous to TV or FM radio, while 802.11 wireless users are unlicensed. However, as STeve pointed out, there are maybe one million 802.11 wireless devices loose in the wild, so it's a bit late to be thinking about locking the barn door. Another commentator suggested that Sirius is finding out that it is very difficult to receive satellite signals without a directional antenna; this writer said that XM spent maybe a quarter of a billion dollars putting up terrestrial towers to reinforce its signal in high-density areas. The suggestion was that Sirius may have spent several billion dollars to start up a service which has unsurmountable technical problems.
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Re #66: It's illegal to intentionally interfere with a licensed service. If you're emitting a legal signal and it interferes with someone else's receiver, though, I think they have to accept that under Part 15. For example, it'd be illegal for me to jam a local TV station, but if my amateur radio transceiver (transmitting on a frequency I'm legally entitled to transmit on) overloads the front end of my friend's TV and interferes with his reception, that's not illegal. This is why Part 15 devices often have a message on the back saying something like, "this device must accept any interference, including interference that may cause undesired operation." Of course, it's possible the rules 802.11 is permitted under specify that the devices cannot cause harmful interference, in which case they may have a case. Anyone have an 802.11 device that has some relevent legal boilerplate in the manual?
Re #68: I believe that it is unlawful for a Part 15 service to interfere with a licensed service, and the Part 15 service must accept any interference it receives; the licensed service does not have to. If you want to be certain either way you can go to the FCC site and read the language itself; it's not nearly as obscure as most legal verbiage and is not hard to interpret IME.
Uhh... I was under the impression that wireless networking was using an unregulated portion of the spectrum. Specifically, it is the band used by microwave ovens, heart pacemakers and similar devices.
I think you're talking about the "industrial usage" portion of the spectrum, used by things like microwave ovens, RF light bulbs, and police speed radars. Basically it's a dumping ground for all kinds of things that could generate interference, to keep them away from other services. I'm not sure if 802.11 devices use those frequencies, but it wouldn't surprise me; being spread-spectrum they can tolerate a fair amount of narrowband interference. It's an unlicensed band, but I don't think it's accurate to say it's unregulated. There are limits on how much power you can radiate, I believe, and maybe other things too.
Salon has a recent story reporting that Clear Channel is starting to get some unwanted attention from the FCC and from the anti-trust world. The FCC is investigating allegations that Clear Channel is using shell corporations to conceal its ownership of some radio stations whose acquisition would be in violation of what feeble restrictions remain on the concentration of ownership. Antitrust interest is being piqued by Clear Channel throwing its weight around in the concert promotion business.
My 802.11 device works in the 2.4GHz range. I thought that was the standard.
Here's a business article on XM satellite radio which gives some customer numbers: http://musicdish.com/mag/?id=5575 In a press release on their 10K filing with the SEC, XM says it had 28,000 subscribers at the end of 2001, and they claim that makes their system "the fastest selling audio product introduction in the last 20 years." They say they are on track for 70,000 subscribers at the end of the first quarter of 2002.
Re #73: That's the industrial usage band, then. My microwave oven claims to operate on 2450 MHz. (They're quite frequency-unstable, though, so I doubt that's what you'd see on a frequency counter.)
Right; the 2.4GHz (2400MHz) band is "Medical, Science, Technology" and includes microwaves and pacemakers. That's why the warning signs about pacemakers are up in places that have microwaves: they really can interfere with one another, but the pacemaker is the more likely to notice.
You have several choices: