Radio Killed
the Radio Star

The clunky, big-dial radio in Radio K programming director Andy Marlow's office is a reflection of a bygone era. Unfortunately, Marlow says, his view of how radio should operate is becoming equally antiquated.

Several factors -- some generated by the Federal Communications Commission's de-regulation of the airwaves -- have turned metropolitan areas into hotbeds for big-money radio conglomerates. The Twin Cities are no exception; indeed, some say the area is one of the country's most glaring examples of the increasing trend toward corporate control of the airwaves.

Money is the bottom line for most large corporations, leaving radio purists in the area screaming above the megawatts of commercial radio.

"We're going to do some advertising," says Alan Freed, the mind behind 1280 AM's Beat Radio. "But we're not going to bend over, grab our ankles and say, 'Go ahead, advertisers.' Balance is the key, and things are out of balance."

The March 1997 buyout of Rev 105 spawned a wave of protest from fans of the station's underground alternative format. ABC/Capital Cities, which bought the station, shuffled frequencies and ultimately added a hard rock station to the dial, is now caught up in a competition with AC/DC maven Rock 100.3, owned by rival Chancellor Broadcasting.

Those watching the corporate gridlock from the outside fear a future for radio with even fewer creative efforts, personalities, and opportunities for new bands and musical innovations. Some, like the gray-bearded Marlow, are beyond the point of being frustrated by radio's direction. Then again, his station -- because of its location on the more experimental AM dial and target college audience -- is one of the few in the Twin Cities that has retained a diverse format.

Nonetheless, he does see a need for an overhaul, a reversal of 1997, if you will.

"Philosophically, I think this increasing concentration of ownership is bad for everybody," Marlow says. "It might be good for the owners, but that's about it. The range of options is really small and it puts fewer and fewer creative heads into the process of designing radio. They all have their little stable of consultants. A lot of stations just get a new hard drive and they've changed formats -- and it comes from Atlanta or New York or California."

That's the consensus among musicheads: the art, soul, and personality of radio are gone. The mission for many outside the corporate mainstream is to bring them back.

Any success in bringing a stronger, independent sound back to the Twin Cities airwaves will depend on a variety of factors, including upcoming rulings by the FCC, the continued rise or leveling off of current FM station prices and technological advances that could yield a stronger AM signal and therefore more high-quality frequencies to choose from.

Views on which method or combination of methods will be the most effective are varied. But those who are working to make change agree on at least one point: the community aspect of radio is dying, and the industry's cancer is accelerating every day.

A boisterous lounge singer marks the entrance to Nye's Polonaise room with a Jimmy Buffet classic. It's 15 minutes shy of midnight and the nine members of Americans for Radio Diversity (ARD) in the back room seem more content with bottled water than margaritas, but there's no doubt that the song, and the wide spectrum of others to follow, is appropriate for the clan.

The group was at the forefront of the backlash against ABC/Capital Cities' buyout of Rev 105 in March 1997. Among other things, ARDers circulated petitions and lobbied the FCC in an attempt to prevent the purchase and subsequent format shake-up.

Their mission statement is decidedly anti-establishmentarian; if there is a leader in the fight against corporate radio, it is them. And more than a year after Revolution Radio went off the air, their concern about local and national radio is greater than ever.

Group members finish a discussion of their recently released compilation CD and then lean back for an impromptu round-table discussion on musicians, discs, and all broadcasters big and small.

At first the dialogue is limited. Those gathered have heard these questions before; what they haven't heard after scores of meetings, petitions, and lobbying is substantial and audible progress -- yet.

Their pained looks are a constant reminder of what radio means to them and many others in the community. It's hard to watch something dying. It's even harder when those controlling fate seem muted to your idea of a cure.

Nonetheless, the passion within the group becomes apparent as the night grows older. Glenn Austin, speaking in a controlled, matter-of-fact tone, voices what he sees as the basic problem and solution within the local airwaves.

"When you have so few corporations controlling so much, it's not a good thing," Austin says. "It's going to take the public being vocal to make a change."

Hence, the weekly meetings and constant FCC petitions are on their World Wide Web site. Before these people were activists, they were radio fans. Perhaps that's why their words seem to carry a more thwarted tone than Marlow's. They see the impact on broadcasters, but first they see an impact on listeners .

Of large-market cities, Minneapolis has the second-fewest stations per listener (Atlanta has the fewest). That, combined with a perceived lack of freshness on commercial radio, is why ARD members don't buy the corporate pitch of more competition and more variety from Chancellor (seven stations in the area) or ABC (three, including monolith KQRS).

Radio K's programming director, Andy Marlow, poses in his favorite hat. View larger image by Pat Casey.

"A lot of people say, `You shouldn't be whining. You still have Radio K," ARD member Jeremy Wilker says. "But why shouldn't we expect more? Why shouldn't we expect commercial broadcasters to be musically responsible?"

Everyone in the room, however, knows the answer. While many can argue that de-regulation of the airwaves has hurt listeners, no one disputes that it has helped corporations turn a profit.

"We're seeing a big homogenization of the airwaves," Freed says. "Formulas that work and that are for the singular purpose of making money -- delivering an audience for advertisers to reach with their product. It doesn't have anything to do with the programming anymore, that's secondary . The listener is tertiary, not even secondary ."

Chancellor and ABC are duking it out for control of the hard rock audience in an area that had no hard rock stations two years ago. The competition might reintroduce some people to a hazy past, but it isn't going to put local or national up-and-comers on the air.

The only place to find new sounds and bands is on noncommercial radio. Radio K (770 AM) and KFAI (90.3 FM in Minneapolis, 106.7 FM in St. Paul) are two sources, but their resources and wattage often limit their audience.

Those committed to radio diversity contend, however, that the relatively low listenership at such stations is not a product of a lack of interest.

"We felt a sense of responsibility to perpetuate ourselves after Rev went off the air so (fans) wouldn't have to go through that again," Marlow says. "There was a lot of real mourning. The whole process -- denial -- that listeners went through. Obviously, the hunger for the kind of stuff Rev did and the stuff we do is out there."

Members of ARD speak of the 1996 FCC ruling -- one that made it possible for corporations to own more than one station in a market -- as the bane of their existence .

Andy Bloom does not. Bloom, the operations manager at Rock 100.3, says things are looking up at his station. Howard Stern is carving his way into the drive-time audience, and listenership is increasing.

That, he says, is an indication that the people have spoken.

"I don't understand what that means, `People are concerned about a local voice.' What I read into that is, `Gee whiz, they're not playing music I like. It's not adventurous enough for me,'" Bloom says. "There's a fringe element of music junkies who are never going to feel like the radio is being programmed for them. The reality is that we have to serve a mass audience. That's how we serve the public need."

Some facts back him up. His station's cumulative weekly listenership is 252,400. Radio K's, in contrast, is around 20,000.

Zone 105 DJ Steve Nelson also reaffirms some of Bloom's sentiments. Nelson, who worked for Radio K and Rev 105 before coming to the Zone, says the corporate-owned stations shouldn't necessarily be expected to provide the same type of programming found at noncommercial stations.

"The corporations are going to play what they think the most people are going to want to hear," Nelson says. "They're not going to go out of their way to super-serve a smaller group of people."

Still, the problems others see are prevalent in the pro-industry party line.

"It's reality that one company can now own more than one station in a market," Bloom says. "That's good because it enables companies to provide a range of programming choices and make radio stations more efficient ."

Bloom's use of the word "efficient" and subsequent description of different formats as "brands" represents a fundamental difference in the way the airwaves operate these days and the way radio purists would like to see them run.

In the musicheads' perfect world, there would also be room on the spectrum for a wide range of ideas and sounds. Instead, mega-watt stations control -- and, in Bloom's biased view of rival ABC, waste -- frequencies.

Bloom calls ABC-controlled Zone 105 a "garbage dump" for leftover music and asserts that the hard rock format on 93X was created to mirror Rock 100.3 and protect KQRS (92.5 FM).

"93X has been placed to literally duplicate this radio station. Everything we put on the air, they will duplicate within 10 hours of when we do it," Bloom says.

Without taking sides in the Chancellor/ABC war, Bloom's final statement about radio duplication rings true: "To use a signal and literally waste it -- that's not serving the public interest."

Corporate radio is the captain of the football team. Freed is the younger brother -- hard-working and somewhat coordinated, but decidedly weaker and clumsier. He desperately wants to be Junior. For now, he's coping with being Alan.

He'd kill to have the power, in terms of industry watts and industry weight, that his corporate counterparts have. But the cost of a full-power FM station in the Twin Cities is around $25 million, almost double what it was 10 years ago.

So Freed has improvised. He broadcasted illegally for 103 days on a vacant FM frequency before being shut down by the FCC. Now, Beat Radio is legally on the AM dial.

"We're just talking about access to the airwaves and reaching people. It's frustrating for anyone who isn't Chancellor or ABC or CapStar or CBS," Freed said. "We'd love to have a full-power station. Microbroadcasting is something we've settled on because there's no other way to do it. But we're still very much in favor of it."

Marlow rustles around in his chair at the onset of a discussion on microbroadcasting. To him, the return of small-watt stations to the spectrum is a good way to give audiences a greater variety and sense of community .

Until the mid-1980s, the FCC allowed 10-watt community frequencies, called Class DClass D stations, to coexist alongside mega-watt stations. For the past decade, however, large frequencies have had the right to bump Class D stations from their spots on the dial.

Although a few such stations still exist in the area, most have been booted out of the spectrum -- something that Marlow disagrees with and something that the Zone's Nelson referred to as "ridiculous."

"I think those 10-watt stations served a purpose," Marlow says, adding he would like to see their reinstatement if they offered a unique format.

FCC chief William Kennard's ear appears bent to this subject. In a December New York Times article, he said he is open to ideas for creating new openings on the airwaves and is concerned that there aren't enough "outlets for expression."

Besides that possibility, small broadcasters have a couple of other potential resources with which to fight their battle.

One, Internet broadcasting, is already here. Although it is also accessible to large broadcasters (93X is on the web), it is likely to have a greater impact on stations that aren't in the mainstream.

Marlow says a Radio K listener from Ireland sent the station an e-mail recently, a confirmation that the format helps the station get more visibility than it normally would. Also, it allows Radio K, a daytime-only station over the airwaves, to broadcast until midnight.

Another option involves an increase in the quality of AM radio transmissions. In Band On Channel (IBOC) broadcasts would leave FM stations with compact disc-quality sound, and AM would be current FM quality or better.

A clearer signal on the AM dial could get people to switch over and check out the more innovative side of the spectrum.

"It upsets the whole apple cart," Marlow says. "It would certainly be a hell of an improvement."

Others, however, are not convinced that smaller or newer is better. ARD's Austin says the Internet isn't the answer -- "You can't take it to the park with you."

Ultimately, ARD members say, music-conscious people have to swim into the mainstream again. Otherwise, the area is going to continue to lose respect among local and nationwide music lovers.

"People in the industry realize how bad the radio here is," says Kim Randall, an ARD member and a No Alternative Records whirling dervish. "I've had people from all across the country tell me, `I've been to a lot of places and Rev 105 was the best station in the country. What the hell is going on with radio?'"

But the immediate forecast, at least among mega-watt commercial stations, is cloudy. The ownership and format changes have all shaken down now, and will likely lead to an era of low-cost, high-profit radio driven by advertising instead of music.

Marlow speculates that there might be even more counter-programming between Chancellor and ABC -- something that seems unfathomable given the already copycattish nature of the supposedly variety-fed airwaves in the Twin Cities.

That could create an even larger gap between broadcasters, advertisers and listeners .

"It's not an even triangle right now. It's some weird thing," Freed says. "I was never good at math, but you can imagine what the triangle's looking like right now. It ain't pretty."

The question is, will listeners notice the disparity if it gets larger, and if so, will they demand more from area radio? ARD members are banking on people refusing to be duped by what is passing for fresh.

At the end of the discussion with the ARD group, voices come from everywhere. Among a sea of syllables, this stands out: "Zone 105 says they're the largest supporter of local music. That means they play the Honeydogs once an hour."

That proves to be the final word. Then a reporter steps into his car and flips to Zone 105 for a short drive home. He hears the promo that the ARD member spoke of. The band that follows is Soul Asylum, not the Honeydogs, but the point still sticks.

Bands like that will ride in big tour buses from now on. But they had to hitchhike to get where they are.

It would be a shame if no one heard of the next big act until they were found dead on the side of the road next to a dented radio, their thumbs long ago turned down.