JUDGING CRIMES

Over at Crim Law, Ken Lammers offers convincing proof that the record industry is insane.  There was a time, not that long ago, when record companies routinely gave away whole songs for free.  The medium they used was called radio.  I still have a cassette of The English Beat's Special Beat Service that I recorded directly from KUNM, the local college station.  The hippie DJs at KUNM used to announce in advance what albums they would play in their entirety, and those of us eager to hear new sounds would make a date with the radio to record the albums that promised to be interesting. 

Special Beat Service was so good I wound up buying the record, and later the CD, and all the other English Beat albums, and even those of successor groups Fine Young Cannibals and General Public.  I recommended them to everybody who would listen.  That KUNM broadcast was responsible for dozens of album sales and who knows how many concert tickets.  Today the station would be sued.

The worst thing Bill Clinton did as President was to sign the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which did away with caps on the ownership of radio stations.  According to the FCC: "The goal of this new law is to let anyone enter any communications business -- to let any communications business compete in any market against any other."  The effect, of course, was precisely the opposite, as ownership of commercial radio stations became concentrated in very few hands.   Meanwhile, just four corporations control over 70% of the entire world market in recorded music, and concentration is even greater in the U.S.

It's the nature of large organizations to be conservative, to stick with the old formulas, to avoid taking risks.  Look at K-Mart, Sears, Montgomery Ward, Burger King, DEC, the old IBM, the old and the new General Motors and Ford (so unaccountably eager to relive the 1970s), Woolworth's -- the list is endless.  The corporations that control radio stations and record labels seek to rationalize their business, to make their investors' return on investment predictable from quarter to quarter.  To do so, they try to maintain (or restore) the conditions that prevailed in the era of their greatest success.  

As they see that goal slipping away, the corporations do what incompetent corporations in trouble have always done: they turn to the legal system.  They describe their problem as one of "piracy", by which they mean things like that KUNM broadcast responsible for so many album sales.  Just take a look at the archived press releases of the Recording Industry Association of America:  "RIAA Praises Department of Justice, FBI and Nashville Police Department", "New York State Police Raid Local Warehouse", etc.   When the recording industry praises  cops rather than musicians, its problems go far beyond the capability of cops to solve.

This Christian Science Monitor article reports that in 2003 it cost record companies "upwards of $400,000 to $500,000" to get a song on commercial radio.  (And that's not payola?)  You can understand why the record companies are reluctant to take a chance on anything new.  And so listeners to commercial radio are assaulted by the repulsive paradox of rock music devoted to the status quo, while innovative acts, signed to independent labels, bypass radio altogether.  The Big Four record companies keep giving us Rock Hudson and Doris Day while the independent labels wrap up post-production work on Easy Rider and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Radio stations owned by Clear Channel play only music targeted to niches identified by marketing people, and so the music is limited by the imaginations of the sort of people who take jobs in the marketing departments of billboard companies.  Since the niches are defined by what has come before, the goal of the exercise becomes to avoid programming anything that sounds new.

When I was growing up, the same AM station would play Motown, Stax, bubblegum, Sinatra, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, acid rock, Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell within a single hour.  You were constantly hearing new things.  Now the commercial radio stations play only one song, 24 hours a day, until suddenly, without warning, they switch to a new song -- what I believe they call a "format change" in the biz. 

Creedence Clearwater Revival and the Allman Brothers would be country acts today, banned from rock stations.  Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding would be played only on stations specifically targeted for Black audiences.  If you were, say, a Beatles fan, you would never hear any of those acts on your Clear Channel radio station.  But you'd hear plenty of bands that sounded just like Badfinger, only slightly worse.  And you'd buy fewer albums every year.

In politics, repression works only if you're prepared to go all the way.   But the genocide option isn't available in business, no doubt to the RIAA's chagrin.  How can a business devoted to the most ethereal of arts  convince itself that its problems can be solved by lawyers and police officers?