Clear Channel taking over the radio world

Mar 8 06:21 UTC 2002

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."

response 2 of 76:

Mar 8 06:42 UTC 2002

OK. It's not scary.  Now what? Does it matter where entertainment
originates? 

response 4 of 76:

Mar 8 12:29 UTC 2002

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?

response 6 of 76:

Mar 8 16:06 UTC 2002

There is no radio station broadcasting on 91.8 FM (at least not in Ann 
Arbor).

response 8 of 76:

Mar 8 17:09 UTC 2002

There are no  FM stations broadcasting on *any* even decimal (like .8).

response 10 of 76:

Mar 8 18:08 UTC 2002

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.

response 12 of 76:

Mar 9 01:30 UTC 2002

"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.

response 14 of 76:

Mar 9 03:44 UTC 2002

Can you say "payola"?  I _knew_ you could.

response 16 of 76:

Mar 9 16:50 UTC 2002

Is digital radio still under development?  Supposedly it would open up a lot
more stations.

response 18 of 76:

Mar 9 17:31 UTC 2002

Is 106.7 owned by Clear Channel, or is it part of a different national chain?

response 20 of 76:

Mar 9 19:05 UTC 2002

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.

response 22 of 76:

Mar 9 22:11 UTC 2002

AM 1290 is currently WCAS, and has a "nostalgia" fomat.

response 24 of 76:

Mar 10 00:37 UTC 2002

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?