future of music coalition

As he stews in his own political juice, with Congress breathing down his neck, FCC Chairman Mikey Powell can use all the friends he can get. One would assume those friends would include the business/finance community, seeing as how Powell’s a fervent acolyte for their religion.
Think again: BusinessWeek magazine published this piece online yesterday, which is a pretty straightforward indictment of Powell, ending with,
“Powell refused to make a public case for the merits of his proposal. Then, he skewed the data to try to fool people. Plenty of other telecommunications policy experts have the political skills to handle the FCC job less contentiously than Powell. He should leave, before he’s shown the door.” Continue reading “BusinessWeek Wants Mikey Powell's Head on a Stick”

The Future of Music Coalition, a group of independent musicians and socially-conscious inside-the-Beltway lobbyists, released a study today calling into question the FCC’s official reports on the effects of deregulation on the radio industry. FMC’s study uses a statistical analysis of radio industry ownership trends and the playlists of radio formats, coupled with a small public survey, to paint a significantly different picture of the state of radio than the FCC’s analysis.
According to the report, the idea of judging diversity of voices on the airwaves by the number of program formats available is absurd. Some formats overlap in their choice of music – some by as much as 76% – while in many markets there is quite a bit of format redundancy (two stations that basically play the same stuff). And when it comes to news, four companies program all the stations that two-thirds of Americans listen to for news.
Among survey respondents, an overwhelming majority favor localism over cluster-programmed stations, think there’s too much advertising on the radio now, and want the new low-power FM service expanded. Continue reading “FMC Rebuts FCC; Miscellaneous Piracy Afoot”