Don’t Wanna Play Monopoly

As I'm writing this, it's the last day for the secular format at WPLJ in New York (and Mix 107.3 in D.C., and whatever they were calling 106.7 in Atlanta by the end, and three other stations) before EMF takes over, and I'm not going to use it as an example of, well, anything, because it's not the day for that. I'm sad for the people whose jobs are being lost or who'll have to move or have their lives uprooted, but that's been how radio works forever. Things change, and radio's not exempt, but it's never fun to have to deal with the end of a radio era. (I'm also gonna admit that despite growing up in listening range, I didn't listen to WPLJ. Rock listeners in my school were mostly WNEW listeners, except for us weirdos who mixed in college radio or, with great effort, pulled in out-of-towners like WLIR and WMMR. What can I say? Radio geek.)

I did spend some time this week reading reply comments in the FCC's Quadrennial (sort of) Review of the broadcast ownership rules, and I read the NAB's reiteration that broadcasters really, really, really, REALLY need to be able to buy as many stations as they want, even if that results in one or two owners dominating a market (as if that's not already the case in large swaths of the country), because they're competing with digital and those people are unrestricted by regulation. Other parties pointed out that broadcast ownership is still extremely homogenous and that allowing unfettered market dominance by a few players is not exactly the way towards ownership diversity. You know the arguments by now.

This all gets back to defining the market, and I've discussed that here before. I think that as long as radio remains the dominant, path-of-least-resistance, easiest-to-access medium in the car (how else do you get those reach numbers the industry loves to tout while whole generations are choosing not to actively listen in such numbers that one station operator is actually "phasing out" FM broadcasting because the teens they're trying to reach are mostly listening online?), radio is still, in practice, a separate entity from digital. Saying that, well, they're competing for the same dollars is immaterial when you're also claiming that you reach more of the audience, by far, than everyone else, and there's scarcity in the chance to operate in that medium. You can still, as I recently wrote, compete for the digital dollars; there's nothing stopping you from that.

It all might be elementary, anyway. Nobody's queuing up for the opportunity to buy up all the radio stations. (EMF can't own every station, after all.) There's less opportunity for a private equity firm to strip-mine assets from radio than there's been for newspapers. The market might prevent further consolidation purely because all the growth you can squeeze out from consolidation has already been squeezed. But it's hard to argue that the public -- remember them? -- would be served by having one or two owners be able to own the entire dial, even if that's a hypothetical until the rule changes and someone could actually do that. We got where we are due to a combination of consolidation and technological changes.

You wouldn't want a small number of operators to control digital distribution, and whatever you think of Apple Podcasts and Spotify and Radio.com and iHeartRadio and Stitcher and whoever else you can name, there are plenty of other options and, so far, there's a level enough playing field for anyone to compete. Radio, by nature, can't be open to all comers because of the scarcity of frequencies, but it can be more diversely distributed. If that makes competing more difficult for current license holders, well, they knew the rules when they got into the business. If the competition for dollars is tilting towards digital, the answer is to keep creating digital content to compete. One or two companies dominating every radio market isn't going to end well for anyone.

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Even though I'm not listening to the end of WPLJ, I'm wishing the best for the folks working there and at all the stations ending their runs today. I hope the industry can find solid new jobs for all of the affected staffers. Radio can't afford to lose pros like them.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
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