It was just a year ago when CC managers and lawyers sued the banks to force the loans to go through with the buyout previously agreed upon well before the credit crisis. They forced the banks to hold their noses saying it was the honorable thing to do even though so much had changed…and some people watching said lend to them including a judge somewhere! Now less than 12 months later management is holding their hands up saying “wow, times have changed, we need to renegotiate!” And since no one is prepared to take over these properties they figure they will get the better deal.

Here’s the thing; no matter what happens the deal is a loser for the banks. The market for ad spots is weak and not likely to get up and start running very soon but, the market for radio properties is worse and likely to get much worse if you use a multi year time frame. Digital is now effectively competing with radio and in a few years the distinction will not be enough to justify these assets prices. So add a new category of toxic debt to the list.

thanks for the explain on A.O.R., I hear that, now.

james hogan, above, makes a good point. Monoculture (“neutered, sanitized and syndicated”) blows.
~~

Frank Zappa was a genius. His point about cableTV was inspired. similiarly, even, a portion of, the Broadcast signal, otherwise unused, could have been used to transmit Music/Data.. a company called WavePhore was trying to make that happened (can’t find any remaining mention of it ‘on the web)..

The one in our area “Q-95″ (home of the infamous Bob&Tom Show, which is now neutered, sanitized and syndicated by Clearchannel), got bought, turned into “classic rock” and plays the same 500 songs that Clearchannel deems as that genre—even though there are thousands more out there.

There were three types of radio that pushed the edge- A.O.R. , college radio, and the shock/entertainment jocks (Howard Stern, Bob&Tom, the guys out at K-Rock, some others…) All got “Gerberized” so it was palatible to the general public and could be syndicated, and licensed (ie. leveraged).

Nowadays, Ryan Seacrest is what you have to look forward to in almost any metro area for at least part of the day as well as some other satellited in talent that I don’t even know…my wife listens to radio still–I do NPR, iPod, and the occasional CD.

You won’t find music like this on CC stations:
==============
Devil Doll @ Key Club – St Christopher
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av7QNQWj4K0&

Bourbon in your eyes by Devil Doll
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLrKdPOyva4
==============

For those who want to try some internet radio, here’s a good free player:
http://www.radiosure.com/download/

Did Frank Zappa Come Up With A Business Plan For File Sharing In 1983?
from the looks-like-maybe… dept

Reader SunKing sends in this little tidbit that I’d not seen before (perhaps some of you have). It comes from The Real Frank Zappa Book and discusses his response to “the home taping movement” and the attempt to get everyone to rebuy their old albums on CD by proposing a system where you could subscribe to whatever genre of music you wanted and get it delivered in batches. He first talks about how ridiculous it is to focus just on selling discs of music:

MUSIC CONSUMERS LIKE TO CONSUME MUSIC . . . NOT PIECES OF VINYL WRAPPED IN PIECES OF CARDBOARD.

Then he talks about how to “embrace” home taping:

It is our proposal to take advantage of the POSITIVE ASPECTS of a NEGATIVE TREND afflicting the record industry today: HOME TAPING via cassette of material released on vinyl…. First of all, we must realize that the taping of albums is not motivated by ‘stinginess’ alone …. People today enjoy music more than ever before, and, they like to take it with them wherever they go. THEY CAN HEAR THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GOOD AUDIO AND BAD AUDIO . . . THEY CARE ABOUT THAT DIFFERENCE, AND THEY ARE WILLING TO GO TO SOME TROUBLE AND EXPENSE TO HAVE HIGH QUALITY ‘PORTABLE AUDIO’ TO USE AS ‘WALLPAPER FOR THEIR LIFESTYLE’.

So he makes the following suggestion:

We propose to acquire the rights to digitally duplicate and store THE BEST of every record company’s difficult-to-move Quality Catalog Items [Q.C.I.], store them in a central processing location, and have them accessible by phone or cable TV, directly patchable into the user’s home taping appliances, with the option of direct digital-to-digital transfer to F-1 (SONY consumer level digital tape encoder), Beta Hi-Fi, or ordinary analog cassette (requiring the installation of a rentable D-A converter in the phone itself . . . the main chip is about $12).

All accounting for royalty payments, billing to the customer, etc. would be automatic, built into the initial software for the system.

The consumer has the option of subscribing to one or more Interest Categories, charged at a monthly rate, without regard for the quantity of music he or she decides to tape.

Providing material in such quantity at a reduced cost could actually diminish the desire to duplicate and store it, since it would be available any time day or night.

Monthly listings could be provided by catalog, reducing the on-line storage requirements of the computer. The entire service would be accessed by phone, even if the local reception is via TV cable.

The advantage of the TV cable is: on those channels where nothing ever seems to happen (there’s about 70 of them in L.A.), a visualization of the original cover art, including song lyrics, technical data, etc., could be displayed while the transmission is in progress, giving the project an electronic whiff of the original point-of-purchase merchandising built into the album when it was ‘an album’, since there are many consumers who like to fondle & fetish the packaging while the music is being played. In this situation, Fondlement & Fetishism Potential [F.F.P.] is supplied, without the cost of shipping tons of cardboard around.

We require a LARGE quantity of money and the services of a team of mega-hackers to write the software for this system. Most of the hardware devices are, even as you read this, available as off-the-shelf items, just waiting to be plugged into each other so they can put an end to “THE RECORD BUSINESS” as we now know it.

Just imagine how different the music industry might be today if he’d been able to move forward with that idea. 1983 was probably too early, but jump forward ten years… and we’d be facing a very different sort of music industry.

The latest edition of the book has that number down to 6 corporations which control most of what America sees, reads, and hears. So much power, so few hands.

Have any of you ever eaten in New Orleans? Do you know why the food is so good there? It isn’t because of the geography, or so much the availablility of fresh ingredients, although that certainly plays a part.

It is because there are (or were) over 2,ooo seperate dining establishments in the city. Everything from the mom-and-pop po-boy shop on the corner to Commander’s Palace. Not a single one of them a part of a chain. If your food isn’t very good, then you are toast. Simple as that. Be good, or be gone.

That’s what’s wrong with the media today. There are dozens of media venues, but everthing looks and sounds so very predictible on every station. It is predictible because it represents only the interests of the owners.

Innovation is not only allowed, but is encouraged. Too bad that Clear Channel had none of it.

what do you mean by: “These are the killers of A.O.R radio”?

link(s)?

Fortunately, thanks to the internet, my Denon let’s me “tune” into some of the few remaining great radio channels. WOXY in Miami of Ohio, WXRT in Chicago, KCRW in L.A., KEXP in Seatle…plus stuff from around the world.

Clear Channel did to radio what Gannett did to newspaper–except with radio it wasn’t inevitable like with newspaper.

The FCC has a great low-power radio station program that is helping a new crop of creative stations pop up. They discovered that in Hurricane Katrina, these were the only ones who stuck it out and continued to broadcast critical information, so there is funding for the small indy that is looking for a start…