Legislation history (esp. Telecom Act of 1996) questions?

So I've been reading a lot of stuff about the structure of the music industry lately, and I feel like there's some significance to the deregulatory effects of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, especially on local and genre-based radio stations among other things, that I don't understand. If it does come up, it's always sort of swept under the rug by the moral panic that followed with piracy and Limewire.

If i did want to learn more about this, and find more music journalism on the industry itself, rather than stuff that serves mostly A&R/consumer guide functions, what would be the best place to look?

when is your paper due?

lol

be nice

I am being nice! This was one of the major things I studied in grad school. I don't want to recommend something long and dull if he only has until Friday.

I wish I studied this in grad school instead of living it in undergrad

By the time I left WUTK 90.3 we had a computer running the entire night shift and weekend daytimes, and the rotation was the smallest it had ever been. Consolidation killed the supply of interesting stuff to free form radio imho

I was at WBRU 95.5 from '92 to '95 (as an undergrad) -- that was a "unique" college radio experience.

I wasn't in radio at the time but yeah my impression was this directly brought us ClearChannel and its ilk, computerized/standardized playlists, homogenization of markets etc.

and then the internet happened and no one gave a fuck

xp - the computer systems that standardized the playlists were independent of the Telecomm Act. Same with the automation. It just allowed companies to own/operate more stations and do this on a larger scale than before. 'BRU got its first computer in 94. Before that, rotation was a box of index cards and we made commercials and bumpers using reel-to-reel tape.

well I know that technology predated the Act, I just figured the corporations that bought up all the stations made their use more common/standard practice

CMJ tho

it definitely did in terms of automation, because they would have numerous stations of the same format in different markets, and they would just use the same playlists. Also, when they had multiple stations in the same market, they would operate them out of one building, so they could have fewer staff. I remember being interviewed for a job that was basically a playback technician for night shifts at one of those places. This was in the late 90s

The technology was independent of the consolidation enabled by the act. But you put the two together and it just murders the jobs in radio and in the labels upstream and programming diversity goes out with the bath water

I interned at a "real" radio station right before dropping out of college in 1999 and I learned an important lesson from the fact that my supervisor had to work at 3 stations, 60 hour weeks to make a decent living.

WBRU-FM was a commercial alt-rock station but owned by the college, so the DJs were all unpaid students (except during breaks where we got paid), but they had paid professional sales, management, and engineering staff. I made so many commercials for the Strawberry's record store chain ... it was sad because we had more creative control over the music used in commercials than we played on the air. Even our all-request hour was pre-programmed.

We were free form until after I left. They renamed it and I think it turned into that thing you just described.

can't recall these details beyond what's been mentioned re: consolidation but this thread is making me very thankful that I do a radio show on a station where 75-80% of what DJs can play is freeform and their choice.

imo the whole legal Low Power FM thing that started in 1998 (?) was a token gesture towards all the folks who got shut out by the merger-fest that followed the 1996 act.

it was sad because we had more creative control over the music used in commercials than we played on the air.

I remember our local Alt-Rock station using sampled riffs from Sleater-Kinney (a band you would never hear there otherwise) as sound beds for station I.D.'s and bumpers circa '99/'00.

Going back to automation for a second, another role it played was in drastic station format changes. A device would be brought in to handle all the programming for a few weeks after a station would fire their on-air talent upon a "sudden" format change.

The biggest effect of the Telecom bill was the massive consolidation of radio stations. You'd have two or three stations under one roof, either independently owned or part of some regional corporation. But after '96, big national companies would come in and buy half of the market. In our city, Clear Channel took over six or eight different stations, pulled them up from their little studios facing Main Street and clustered them all together in a "metroplex" way out on the west side.

You're starting to see it more and more with television stations. The old rule that one company can't own more than one station in a given market has had loopholes stabbed through it in the past 20 years. We've got one group, an NBC affiliate and a FOX affiliate, who share a newsroom together. The NBC station is owned and operated by Nexstar. It also operates the FOX station, which is technically owned by Mission, a company run out of a broom closet somewhere in Ohio.

In our city, Clear Channel took over six or eight different stations, pulled them up from their little studios facing Main Street and clustered them all together in a "metroplex" way out on the west side.

That's exactly what happened in Houston, except to a higher degree: They bought at least one station of every genre*, consolidated them into a few floors in a high rise in the Galleria, and have rolled on ever since, occasionally selling off a station to a lesser conglomerate.

*I say "at least" because at one point they had three Rock stations (Classic, Alt-, and Album/Active) going simultaneously--Only one of which is still running that format.

this isn't for a paper (i wish), i just read a bunch of eric harvey's articles and papers (s/o if you read this, eric) and some interviews with the black madonna about old dance stations in chicago (that still have a real impact in terms of widespread knowledge of old-school house among a lot of ppl) and realized how much the radio experience was different from the one i came into growing up. it's really eye-opening to hear about the changes as they happened in real time.

as for the stuff that came in before the deregulation, were these a bunch of different devices/automated tech? or were they all ClearChannel operated

thx for all the stories regardless yall

I worked for an anomaly, two stations under one roof owned by a family from Texas*. After Clear Channel and Citadel came to town, all of the DJs and talk show hosts that we had previously competed against came through the door. Some of them only stayed for a few months, some are still there.

*A family who also started Texas Instruments, but good folksy people nonetheless.

were these a bunch of different devices/automated tech?

After I turned 16 in 1989, I got my start in radio at a little country station in a rural area of the state. My boss got up at five in the morning, came down to the station and turned on the signal around six. From seven to eleven, he'd play music, host the swap shop hour, and give the weather.

At eleven, he'd turn on the automated DJs. We'd get these reels shipped to us every week where out-of-state announcers backsold a coordinated programming list of our country format. Sometimes, a tone would get skipped and you'd have the announcers backselling the wrong song. It was kinda like the radio scenes from Night of the Comet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X1q8gtS-jg

I'd come in at five, re-run the morning swap shop show that my boss recorded on a reel. Play a few more hours of automation and then become a Star of the Ozarks with my one hour of live radio from between eight and nine. Mrs. McCrosky would call me every few nights and request "Tie Your Dream to Mine" by Marty Robbins. At nine, I'd sign off, turn off the transmitters, and go home.

Our commercials played off of one of these things, a "carousel cart" filled with recordable eight-tracks, each with only 40 or 70 seconds worth of tape inside 'em.

http://i.imgur.com/jC03kHl.jpg

Between the swap shop and the live hour, I'd print off the next day's sheet of commercials, highlight every other four-digit number, and then program them into a numeric keypad on the carousel.

Also gasoline cost a dollar and you could get a Coke out of the machine for just 50¢. The quarters had eagles on the back of them, not like the mesas and valleys you see on them now-a-days.

that carousel cart is so fancy! we just had the single cart players, we had 3 of them, but it was rare that all 3 worked at any given time. occasionally we'd have a song that had to be played on a cart -- the occasional radio edit we did ourselves that the labels didn't send us -- I think one was a NIN song -- and if it was scheduled right before a commercial break then it was a nailbiter to see if the song cart would recue and stop before the commercial in the other working cart machine ended.

We had a station ID cart that was old enough the woman's voice had bled through and created a tape delay effect. It was awesome. We didn't replace any of that crap until 1999.

My first shift was 2-4am. The DJ on 1-2 am immediately quit about 2 weeks into the semester, thank god.

In college, we had all the local bands on cart. We didn't play cassette tapes. And the band giving us a CD copy of their music would've been just too darn expensive.

Going back to the country station, we used a single cart player for IDs, news we taped from the Arkansas Radio Network and weather.

We should've used a single cart for the commercials, since after six it was all spots for Golf Digest anyway.

Anyway I keep reading this as being about the Elvis Telecom act of 1996.

haha me too!

"Drone rock mandated when driving through the desert at 2 am."

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/34789-democracy-in-peril-twenty-years-of-media-consolidation-under-the-telecommunications-act

https://www.wired.com/2004/10/xmradio/

Abrams has another advantage: a surfeit of available DJ talent. When he arrived at XM three years before launch, many of the country's best DJs were disillusioned, disenfranchised, or out of the industry. Conglomerates, newly empowered by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to own multiple radio stations, were consolidating and shedding overhead – particularly the salaries of creative, engaged DJs

this is p amazing if you want a picture of what Bay Area radio pre-Telecom Act sounded like

https://archive.org/details/schweizerairchecks?&sort=-downloads&page=2

Anyway I keep reading this as being about the Elvis Telecom act of 1996.

I was going through a lot back then.

I did a few shows at BRU (AM though, haha). Starting in about.. 1994 I guess? Just dumb sound collage weirdness, I thought I was Negativland or something :/