With his graying, grizzled beard and booming Popeye voice, 42-year-old Mike Watt still plays punk rock as if his life depended on it. So he had everyone’s attention at the Double Door a few days ago when he stood on stage and sized up not only the town he was playing in, but also the consolidation-crazed era in which punks and non-punks alike must live.
“City of neighborhoods, eh?” he said, squinting beneath a sweat-splashed brow, fingers tapping on the bass guitar slung over his flanneled shoulder. “It’s like each neighborhood is their own genre. ‘Cause you know what? There’s no such thing as a hip majority.”
It was Watt’s oblique way of addressing an issue that has become something of a cause celebre in the musicians community: the need to license small community micro-radio stations at a time when more commercial stations are in the hands of fewer corporate owners than ever before. “Consolidation is all about getting rid of competition,” Watt said in an interview. “In a business sense it’s scary, but in a cultural sense it’s suicide. It’s strip malls of the mind.”
Watt is one of dozens of artists in the Low Power Radio Coalition — including Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Ellis Marsalis (patriarch of the Marsalis jazz clan), Sonic Youth, Fugazi and the Indigo Girls — who have signed a petition urging the Federal Communications Commission to expedite a plan to license a new class of low-power (10 to 1,000 watts) radio stations. This week, the grassroots coalition is staging more than 55 concerts in 36 cities nationwide, including several shows at Lounge Ax, to draw attention to the plan, which could come to a vote as early as next month in the FCC. If approved, it would open the door to hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of niche FM stations to operate legally by next year.
Recent developments give the initiative new urgency. A few days before Watt’s Double Door concert, the latest and biggest in a long line of corporate radio mergers took place when Clear Channel Communications Inc. of San Antonio bought AMFM Inc. of Dallas, creating a $23 billion 830-station behemoth with a daily audience of 100 million listeners. That’s the most extreme example yet of a trend that has seen the number of radio station owners shrink from 5,222 to 4,241 in 1998 alone, with the top three ownership groups controlling 35 percent of the industry’s $13.8 billion advertising revenue.
Even some radio-industry veterans find it hard to put the trend in a positive light. Bill Gamble, program director at classic-rock station WXCD-FM 94.7, said corporate consolidation has led to cookie-cutter playlists across the country, and increasing reluctance by programmers to experiment with new acts.
“There is pressure on people like never before to deliver (listenership) numbers, and it’s generally more conservative than it’s ever been,” Gamble said. “There is a franchising, insert-the-format approach to radio across America, and a lot of companies will argue that we’re bringing high-quality programming into small markets by syndication or (by using non-local) virtual deejays. But you have to have local connections, otherwise you’re going to lose.”
Exactly the point the micro-radio backers are trying to make. In 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, which deregulated the radio industry and set off an “unprecedented feeding frenzy . . . that surprised a lot of people,” said William Kennard, chairman of the FCC, the agency entrusted with protecting the nation’s airwaves. “The jury is still out whether consolidation will be in the long run better for consumers. But we know one of the immediate impacts is that it’s harder for smaller businesses and less conventional broadcasters to get access to the airwaves. Low-power FM is a counter-insurgency, an effort to give the airwaves back to local communities in ways that allow local voices — musicians, churches, non-profits, community groups, minority companies, small business — to speak to their communities.”
Kennard, who has championed the low-power radio initiative, is up against a well-financed lobby group in Washington, the National Association of Broadcasters, whose allies include Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications. Earlier this year, Tauzin blasted the FCC for even considering the micro-radio plan: “I’ve never been so offended by an agency of the federal government,” he said.
In a recent interview, Tauzin struck a more statesmanlike tone, even as he enumerated the reasons he thinks the initiative is a bad idea. Introducing more stations would cause “serious interference problems” for existing broadcasters, he said. And, though the AMFM-Clear Channel merger would have “made me terribly alarmed” a decade ago, he said, “as new technologies advance, these old relics of ownership and the questions of who owns what become less important. There are 1,700 stations on the Internet already, and as more and more people connect to it, the need for local programming is going to be met in different ways.”
Micro-radio backers said potential interference problems are being exaggerated by the broadcast association. “The radio spectrum will barely notice the addition of these lower-watt stations,” said Cheryl Leanza, deputy director of the non-profit Media Access Project, which hired a respected Virginia Tech University engineer, professor Theodore Rappaport, to examine the broadcasters’ claims.
Leanza contended that the broadcasters are trying to bog down the issue on technicalities because they “fear competition and new innovative programming on the dial.”
Broadcast association spokesman Dennis Wharton denied that. “There are plenty of voices on the radio,” he said, citing surveys that show the number of station formats increasing to 91 this year from 70 in ’94. “If there is a niche not being filled, there are radio stations out there who will try to fill that niche,” Wharton said. “If a radio station is not successful with its format, that station will go out of business.”
Economic strategies and engineering studies mean little to listeners who depend on micro-radio broadcasters, however, many of whom operate illegally because they don’t have the billions of dollars required to buy into the broadcast consolidation sweepstakes. Though Internet broadcasting represents the industry’s future, there are still 190 million Americans who do not have Internet accounts. Those who depend most on micro-radio for information, news and music live in isolated communities ignored by corporate radio, from Native Americans in South Dakota reservations to housing-project residents in Decatur.
David Huff found a similarly underserved community last year in Canyon Falls, Texas, a relatively remote town of 25,000 between Austin and San Antonio. He set up an all-volunteer, non-profit station called Canyon Lake Radio in his garage to broadcast everything from music by unsigned local bands to church yard-sale announcements. And when a flood hit the community last fall, his station kept residents informed.
Yet he was repeatedly warned by the FCC that he would be shut down because he was operating without a license, and last February federal marshals made good on the threat when they confiscated $3,000 worth of equipment, plus dozens of compact discs donated to the station by local bands.
Within weeks, community residents staged a benefit and raised enough money to get Canyon Lake Radio back on the air. “Several people at the benefit told us that if it weren’t for us broadcasting during the flood, they would be dead,” Huff said. “Because other than us, there was no coverage.”
Huff has since filed a suit in U.S. District Court against the FCC, asserting his free-speech rights to broadcast. Now, the chairman of the federal agency he is suing is leading the charge to keep broadcasters like Huff on the air, perhaps because they agree on one essential point: There should be room for the little guy on the nation’s airwaves.
“The airwaves shouldn’t just be a revenue stream for large companies,” said Jenny Toomey, a Washington musician who is spearheading the Low Power Radio Coalition. “We’ve lost sight of the fact that as citizens of America, we actually own the airwaves. They’re a natural resource, and handing them over to the corporations is like giving all our forest land to the loggers.”
