Where the air isn't free

The crowds will be relatively small. The music unusual, and most likely, defiantly academic.

But when the Eyedrum art and music gallery hosts its Jump to the Eyedrum improvisational music showcase this weekend -- the same weekend as the super-popular, mega-moneyed Music Midtown festival -- it will unwittingly become part of a movement.

There is a small but growing chorus of people in the music business who, along with social critics and a handful of lawmakers, claim that commercial radio in America has gone to hell, and that giant corporations are the cause of the problem.

With its festival, Eyedrum will offer an alternative to corporate-planned music-making, a logical response to the mind-numbing pabulum clogging the nation's airwaves and amphitheater stages.

Music Midtown, by way of its promoter, Clear Channel Communications, embodies the very forces that are at the center of the bull's-eye fixed on what's known as media consolidation, the concentration of newspaper, radio and television ownership in the hands of just a few huge corporations.

Clear Channel has confronted claims of unfair business practices as it has taken control of about 10 percent of the country's radio market. Media and cultural critics such as University of Illinois professor Robert McChesney are saying more forcefully than ever that consolidation poses a real threat to consumers and our political system.

In Atlanta, as major stations have fallen into the hands of three main companies -- Clear Channel; Infinity, which is owned by Viacom; and Cox Communications -- the city hears redundant playlists on its airwaves. Meanwhile, Atlanta represents a microcosm of the industry as a whole as Clear Channel also has grabbed control of the city's major concert promoter and a number of venues.

"I know no one who likes the state of contemporary commercial radio in this country," says McChesney, author of Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy. "What that means is that you're seeing openings and cracks, because people are so bothered by it.

"In terms of news and journalism," McChesney says, "this accounts for a significant increase in the popularity of non-commercial radio, both public and community. It also accounts for [people] ... bypassing the radio system for music and culture. Radio, which used to be the center for musical culture in American communities, is increasingly irrelevant."

The debate about consolidation has at its heart fundamental economic questions. Will the market ultimately act in the best interests of the public or should the government play a role to regulate the market to protect consumers? At the national level, communications companies claim they need to be able to consolidate to compete in the global media market. Those companies have brought tremendous pressure to bear on the Federal Communications Commission and lawmakers to relax ownership regulations. Industry concerns have found a sympathetic ear in current FCC head, Michael Powell, a free market disciple.

This is one case, however, where it appears that wider market freedom has actually resulted in fewer choices for consumers.

"If Clear Channel talks about free markets, they should have their heads dunked into a toilet bowl," McChesney says. Nationally, four main radio companies control 90 percent of the advertising revenue. There are fears that in some markets just two or three companies will be able to gain control of advertising business and collude to set ad rates.

"This is the exact opposite of free markets," McChesney continues. "This is government-created monopolies. These [media] companies hate competition. They do everything in their power to eliminate it. And then when the government, which created these monopolies, might do something which remotely might protect the interests of the people who actually own the airwaves, then they start invoking the free markets. It's patented public relations garbage."

The San Antonio-based Clear Channel is the favorite punching bag for opponents of communications deregulation.

In 1996, before the Republican Congress passed the federal Telecommunications Act, corporations could own a maximum of 36 radio stations. The Telecommunications Act, cheered on by the very corporate interests that it would benefit, threw out ownership restrictions, and companies started gobbling up each other. Sixty percent of American radio stations have changed hands since 1996, and Clear Channel has led the charge. In the span of just six years, the company has grown to a 1,200-station behemoth that also controls about 100 concert venues across the country.

Laboring under a $9.5 billion debt from all of its purchases and four straight quarters of financial losses, Clear Channel has looked to consolidate its operations wherever possible to save money. That has not only meant combining so-called "back office" functions such as accounting, but also doubling up on-air talent, by broadcasting remote deejays into stations around the country -- such as Atlanta's modern-rock signal Buzz 96.7 FM.

Meanwhile, niche formats such as jazz and classical music have been disappearing from the dial. Two years ago in Atlanta, for example, when Cox Radio bought WALR 104.7 FM, an urban contemporary station, for $280 million, and the company moved the signal down the dial to 104.1 FM, it eliminated the jazz station that occupied the spot. (The Cox conglomerate also operates the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and owns a stake in CL.)

As consolidation continues, playlists have become increasingly redundant and restrictive because programmers don't want to take chances on music that might scare away listeners from all-important advertisers.

"Their criterion is one criterion, and that is profit," says Douglas Gomery, a professor of media economics at the University of Maryland, of the mega-media companies.

The result is sound-alike stations across the U.S. with programmers in Chicago playing the same songs a listener in Portland, Ore., hears all day long in between the same commercials a commuter in Atlanta listens to during her drive time. We're talking about the homogenization of culture and a loss of identity and community, say media critics.

"The lack of localism ... is the logical thing for Clear Channel to do," McChesney says. "Why if you own eight stations in a market and 1,100 nationally, why on earth would you waste a lot of money having local coverage when you can much less expensively put out generic, canned content from corporate headquarters?"

Clear Channel has been stung by accusations from the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists that it is "destroying" the radio and recording industries. U.S. Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) has alleged the corporation forces musical acts to play at company-owned venues if they want to be played on Clear Channel stations. The company did not return phone calls to its corporate headquarters.

There also are concerns that a concentration of station ownership will drive down competition and increase advertising rates, the cost of which will then be passed on to the consumer. It's a case of the market actually decreasing freedom.

"The consumer does better when he or she has alternative choices, both in terms of what the reporting is and what the advertising is," Gomery says.

In Atlanta, Clear Channel owns five radio stations (the legal limit is eight) -- 640 AM, 96 Rock FM, Peach 94.9 FM, the '80s music signal 105.3 FM and 96.7 FM the Buzz, while it has a sales agreement with a sixth, Mix 105.7 FM.

Meanwhile, in 2001, Clear Channel bought SFX Entertainment, which owned Concert/ Southern Promotions, giving it control of a vast national network of concert venues including the Cotton Club and the Tabernacle -- and this weekend's Music Midtown Festival.

Peter Conlon, who has promoted Music Midtown since its inception, says Clear Channel hasn't changed the way he's doing his job. Why would it want to? The festival sells out early every year, Conlon says.

And it's not like Clear Channel is going to corrupt Concert/Southern's elitist musical tastes. The hip factor at Music Midtown has always been low, a place where commerce wins out over art. As evidence, witness this year's rock lineup -- Counting Crows, Better Than Ezra, Stone Temple Pilots -- a strong list if it was 1995. Add to that group the kind of new rock -- Incubus, Adema -- favored by 14-year-old boys and the night deejays at 99X.

In fairness to Conlon, he has put an emphasis on bringing an increasingly eclectic mix of music makers, including members of radio-unfriendly genres such as zydeco, blues and world music, as well as a number of local acts, to appeal to a broad base of consumers.

"You might talk to any one or two people who don't like what we're doing, or three or four, but you get 20 people in a room, and they're going to tell you there's something there that they like," Conlon says. "And that's what we go for, the mass appeal."

Asked if his parent company has ever interfered with Atlanta's mega-festival, Conlon's answer is short and unequivocal: "Never. Uh-huh. Never." Has his alliance with Clear Channel made it easier to get some acts, more difficult to get others? Conlon is reluctant to say.

"I don't want to get into all of that," Conlon says. "I don't want to speak on a corporate article, because it's not really what I do."

With all the musical vanilla out there right now, even the slightly more exotic -- maybe a band like Wilco, for instance -- becomes radical. And that's when grassroots movements are born.

"As consolidation gets down to one or two or three players, and the abuses are recognized by ordinary citizens, the appeal for [the underground] goes way up," says Gomery, the University of Maryland professor. The corporations "in the end, will make a decision on the margin for profit versus community values, voices in reporting, different kinds of genres of music."

So now even Music Midtown has a counterweight, albeit one that wasn't initially planned as competition.

The Jump to the Eyedrum Festival runs the Friday and Saturday of Music Midtown. Stan Woodard, an Eyedrum board member says his group didn't realize they had planned the improvisational fest the same weekend but later decided it was a bit of providence.

"We represent a good alternative," Woodard says. "What's happened with stagnation ... is that it forces people who want to hear something different to come to a place like Eyedrum. It's almost a reaction to that stagnation that's allowed us to be successful in what we do."

The Eyedrum festival will feature avant garde jazz, improvised music, poetry and dancing, the sorts of things with little mass appeal or commercial potential.

"The two things can feed of one another, actually, hopefully, we can feed off of them," Woodard says laughing about Music Midtown. Eyedrum "is about art and about the chance to play in front of people and do what you love."

The best thing most acts at the improv festival can hope for is notoriety, a la Yoko Ono, or to be recognized as part of a movement, Woodard says.

But there are other bands out there -- hip-hop to indie rock -- that operate just out of sight of commercial radio. For those bands and for the promoters and managers that bring them to cities around the country, radio consolidation has yet to impact their business the way it has mainstream radio and concert promotion. The touring and recording foundation for those bands was laid in the late 1970s and early 1980s by bands like Black Flag and Husker Du and labels like SST and Dischord.

"For us, there hasn't been an effect," says Alex Weiss, who books bands for the Echo Lounge in East Atlanta. "The bands we deal with, generally, they're big enough for our room ... but as far as Clear Channel or any of the other concert promotions companies, they're kind of small. Also, what we've been doing hasn't been big on commercial radio. It's something they can't see any way to make money at, so they're not interested in it."

Atlanta's actually fairly lucky in the consolidation game. It has three strong college radio stations, local independent station 89.3 FM and enough independently owned concert venues that the city doesn't suffer invasions of Limp Bizkit clones every weekend. Many smaller communities haven't been so lucky, and that's why elected officials may eventually weigh in on the issue of consolidation.

Two congressmen, Berman from California and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York) have called on the FCC to hold hearings on Clear Channel, and Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-South Carolina), who is the chairman of Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, has been a frequent critic of concentrating media power in the hands of a few companies. According to Gomery, he's probably the one person who has made FCC Chairman Powell move more cautiously around the question of consolidation.

"It's not so much a critical mass," Gomery says of what may make Congress take a second look at the Telecommunications Act. "It's their own skins. They know to be elected or re-elected, they don't actually shake everyone's hands or go door-to-door anymore. They do it through the media.

"Let's say you're Senator Hollings; you want many different owners of media in your state rather than one single company," Gomery continues. "Let's say Clear Channel went in and bought a couple television stations in Charleston and a couple in Columbia and took over a couple of cable companies and dominated the radio side, and for whatever reason, didn't like Senator Hollings' policies, which they wouldn't. Then he would be faced with a very strong opponent.

"If there are numerous owners," Gomery says, "then he's got a much better chance. By and large, they're not going to come together and oppose him.

"From a rural state, it's much to their advantage to keep and even re-write the radio rules."

But that probably won't happen any time soon. Powell's leadership of the FCC, along with a number of recent court decisions, has furthered the cause of deregulation, not slowed it down. And the giant corporations that own mainstream media in America have more resources than the groups that oppose consolidation.

"The tragedy is that these are our airwaves that have been stolen by these companies, and we haven't gotten a dime in return for them," McChesney says. "They sit in the driver's seat of our journalism and culture on the airwaves and do nothing except rake in money for their billionaire shareholders. It's an outrage. It's a scandal. It's utterly criminal."