String Theory Media

Following the Payola Settlement Money

NY AG Eliot "Ness" Spitzer has landed another fish. Having reached settlements with the four major music companies, he's pressing charges against radio groups for soliciting and accepting payola. This week Entercom Communications agreed to adopt strict new compliance policies and pay $4.25 million to "put the investigation behind it." The company admitted no wrong doing, but do they ever?

There's a lot to debate about these cases, about Spitzer, about the public airwaves. But I'm interested in how the damages, if that's what they are, are divided. In this case, according to the AP, $750K goes to the state of NY to cover the cost of the investigation and prosecution. The rest, $3.5 million, goes to a music education and appreciation fund. What's that? Who runs it? What does it do? In theory I'm in favor of public spending on the arts, especially music education. But is New York State benefitting from Spitzer's raids?

As it happens...

Radio, Radio and more Radio

As promised at this month's FCC hearing, the Future of Music Coalition has released its second report on the state of radio in the post Telecom Act era. It's a big document, but here are its own quickie conclusions.

Data in the report shows that station ownership consolidation at the national and local levels has led to fewer choices in radio programming and harmed the listening public and those working in the music and media industries, including DJs, programmers and musicians.

Key points included in report:

The top four radio station owners have almost half of the listeners and the top ten owners have almost two-thirds of listeners.

The "localness" of radio ownership – ownership by individuals living in the community -- has declined between 1975 and 2005 by almost one-third.

Just fifteen formats make up three-quarters of all commercial programming. Moreover, radio formats with different names can overlap up to 80% in terms of the songs played on them.

Niche musical formats like Classical, Jazz, Americana, Bluegrass, New Rock, and Folk, where they exist, are provided almost exclusively by smaller station groups.

Across 155 markets, radio listenership has declined over the past fourteen years, a 22% drop since its peak in 1989. The consolidation allowed by the Telecom Act has failed to reverse this trend.

At Long Last, It Plays

Sometimes you get a good idea for a story at exactly the wrong time. Last spring I was enjoying the hell out of myself at a Long Players show, thinking how the cocktail of classic music (they were channeling The Cars that night), the vibe of the Mercy Lounge and the appreciative, musically savvy crowd said something really special about Nashville. Perfect radio piece I said to myself. Then the various members of the Long Players got busy with a long year of touring for other projects. But I waited and got Bill Lloyd to give me an early heads up when the band decided to do "Meet The Beatles" in October. That show formed the basis for a story that ran yesterday on NPR's All Things Considered. Find it HERE. There is a ton of additional Long Players info at BILL LLOYD's WEBSITE.

Now Hear This, FCC

Monday’s FCC hearing in Nashville was the best airing out of policy issues affecting Music City since last spring’s Technology Summit. With the focus squarely on radio and four of the five FCC commissioners there listening attentively, Nashville’s artists, writers, pickers, publishers and plain old music fans had plenty to say about the effects of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the way radio has done business ever since. Very little of it was complimentary. Nearly everybody who testified from the creative community urged the FCC to oppose any further liberalizing of caps on ownership of media properties. Some even urged returning to pre 1996 ownership caps, which would bust up Clear Channel and other radio groups like the trust-busting of the early 1900s. Rick Carnes of the Songwriters Guild of America may have summed up the mood in the room most succinctly with his opening, “Big radio is bad radio.”
What follows is my summary of the day’s first big panel, followed by some thoughts on the public testimony, which was by turns moving, stirring, peculiar and funny.

Tower Story is Online

My WPLN story about Tower Records aired this morning. You can stream it by listening HERE. Got a nice note from musician/producer Frosty Horton about it with memories of his own. "It’s hard to explain to so many why (Tower's) demise is so personally painful," he writes. Check out the rest after the jump...

Music Illustration of the Day

This looks way too small here, but click on this fabulous illustration by Julia Hasting in today's New York Times Magazine. It accompanies an item in the Year in Ideas issue. Noah Vawter, a grad student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, has invented a device that receives ambient sound from the environment, amplifies it, and organizes it into pattern-based music that gets played back through headphones in real time. It makes a kind of music out of the sound that surrounds every day. I'd try it. I know I listen to the world more intensely when I'm listening through a radio recording rig and a stereo microphone. Everyone should try it. I think I'll see if my niece and nephew are into it at Christmas.

Bad Journalism Dept.

A story on today's McClatchy wire about retiring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist accuses him of local pork-barrel politics by pointing to the $3 million tax measure he helped get through Congress to remedy an inequity in the tax code that affected songwriters. Doesn't seem a fair example to me at all. Songwriters who sold their song catalog were taxed twice, once as ordinary income and again under self-employment tax, about 40% instead of the capital gain rate of 15% that a publisher would pay if they sold the same catalog as a business asset. The Nashville Songwriters Association International regarded the passage as its biggest victory this year, and the measure of course helps songwriters nationally and not just in Tennessee. I think Bill Frist is a putz who deserves the scorn of Republicans and Democrats alike for his poor performance in the Senate. But it's hard to argue that fixing bad tax policy for songwriters everywhere should be flagged as pork barrel spending.

Radio Face Time

Our pal David Hooper invited yers truly to be his guest on his weekly show "Music Business Radio," a regular Sunday-evening feature on Nashville's own Lightning 100 FM. We talked about new and old media, and I tried not to sound like a boob. Grab the podcast version HERE. Browse past shows from cool folks like Tracy Gershon, Traci Thomas, Craig Shelburne and others are available HERE. Thanks to David for the opportunity to opine and chat up String Theory Media and the upcoming WSM book.

The Power of Tower

Tower Records is closing at last. The end comes in about two weeks. Bargain hunters and music freaks are poring over ever-dwindling shelves of stock, back stock and understock -- the warehouses disgorged. CDs, DVDs and even some of those things called records are flying off the shelves, making a lot of people very happy and very sad at the same time.

What started as a 10% liquidation sale is now a 50%-off free-for-all. That’s not to say that it’s like Filene’s Basement or one of those other ladies-only hair-pulling death matches over undergarments or like Wal-Mart in Wilmette on the day after Thanksgiving. It’s more like a wake with a really good buffet. A nice cross-section of Nashville is browsing the shelves on West End Avenue, just as they have since 1988. The difference this time – there are bargains.

More About Strads and Their Strands

Well now there's a little explosion of coverage of the struggle to understand the genius of Stradivari. Live Science reports that researchers have discovered that tonewoods in the violins made by he and Guarneri were probably bathed in chemicals to kill worms and fungus. Little word on the recipe.

This is just after visiting my folks at home in North Carolina, where my mother had Stradivari's Genius by Toby Faber in the back seat of her car. I was just getting into the incredible Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, so I didn't start it. But I've added it to my Amazon Wish List, should anyone care.

Violins and my folks will always be wrapped up together. They launched me into music via the violin at age seven. I've always been grateful. Sure it got me ridiculed and labeled a weenie, but I genuinely enjoyed playing after the monumental struggle to get a decent tone out of the squirrely wooden box. Mostly, the folks showed me what it meant to truly love and live with music. They are fervent frequenters of concerts of all kinds, as long as they're classical. Oh, but I kid. They've been known to seek out jazz and they made a point once of seeing Del McCoury. They say that's my influence, and I'm glad for that. They took me to see great violin soloists when I was really young. Some were dull. Some were electrifying like rock stars. I never outright lusted to play the violin but I knew a few people who did. The Folks certainly opened me up to the whole idea of caring about music and loving it more for the understanding of it. And as we enjoyed each other's company near the hometown of Durham, NC last weekend, that was one of the many things I had to be thankful for.