Saturday, March 29, 2008

FCC No. 9 It has not been the best of times for FCC Chairman Kevin "Pincher" Martin Congress dons rubber glove, prepares probe of FCC chairman. First there was Rep. Dingell's (D. MI) little request; for virtually all paper-work the FCC has produced in the last 10 years. The FCC's own data on consumer complaints system is so chaotic as to cast all doubt on any attempt to ensure net neutrality FCC living in the dark ages; a threat to net neutrality aims. Then there was a strange story that some staffers were going to wear black to work one day as part of a silent protest of his chairmanship FCC insider: This place is hell; silent protest planned. Now with a brief press release illustration that even Fox doesn't care what they think:  Fox to FCC: your analysts' sexual fantasies not our problem. Not that the FCC really wanted to be moral content cops to begin with. Others wanted that for them. Its nice to be feared, but if you growl and they don't flinch what then? There has been some good news, the auction to sell off the VHF spectrum space being vacated by television was successfully completed. Raised more money than they figured it was going to. Additionally since analog channels were spaced out fairly widely there is considerable "WhiteSpace" spectrum to be allocated and put to first use as well. These were the gaps between allocated analog channels of vhf broadcast. Google seems to have an idea of a national wide broadband cell phone service in this space White space (telecommunications) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Soon though the FCC may find itself between a rock and a hard place on the matter of the Sirus - XM merger. The Department of Justice has decided that the absolute monopoly in satellite radio this would create is; however, not anti-competitive, leaving  intact another display for the museum of free market antiquaries. The general line of reasoning, the same used for local market media merger, is to count all possible allied human activities as being substitutively competitive, or to count every possible way of delivering a glob of entertainment to your door step as competing. Content diffusion or medium diffusion as competition. Of the three major dailies Justice Dept. Approves XM-Sirius Radio Merger - washingtonpost.com I saw covering this Justice Dept. Approves XM Merger With Sirius - New York Times only the WSJ seems to have actually bought this arguement.  XM, Sirius Move Closer To Improbable Merger - WSJ.com : "The combined company will face stiff competition from traditional broadcasters, iPods, mobile phones and other emerging ways for consumers to access music and other programming. Still, the Justice Department's approval marks a big step forward..."  It is as though in the 1890's railroad barons told the government: "what are there no mules, no horses, no donkey dog or cat carts? We can envision vast fleets of rats from New York City yoked together and pulling (something like) a ten-car train down to Philadelphia, and back, every day. The chill thought of that kind of competition will keep us honest, trust us." Seriously though the idea of routinely regarding any activity in an given economic sector as having conceivably occurred against another is aggravated nonsense. It is a softening of the edges of a concept that collapse the category. Major League Baseball may decide it competes against cinema, hiking footwear, or kayaks; things to do on a week-end after all. But that is not a rational to allow it to form a corporate cartel with the NFL, NBA, PGA etc. to fight this. Anti-Trust: the government isn't even trying anymore. Another matter that seems to have dropped off the map, although it is not likely it has, is the final arrangements of royalty schedule that SoundExchange was trying to levy on behalf of the RIAA. That after some initial public and congressional attention things became murky, is not really mysterious. Public policy is increasingly becoming a war of attrition against the public. In-transparency or opacity disguises intent and eliminates judgement. The issues surround this were actually treated in a Washington Post feature last Sunday Name That Tune-In: Who Will Emerge as The Future of Radio? - washingtonpost.com. Mostly it dealt with what it termed "next radio" all the internet and digital solutions precipitated on the death of terrestrial radio and the urgency of keeping people paying somehow for recorded music. Mostly the article pointed up the least common denominator banality of music services like Pandora. These services attempt to discover what you and people with exactly your tastes like and then give you just that, What you get sounds what like you've got. Marc Fischer, the author, in a deft moment allows a twenty-something proponent to state that the days of mass culture and pop groups like the Beatles are over. Before noting the decided top-forty tendencies of some of these services. None of these so far is "next radio" and to reiterate my biases I believe the strategy is to keep any of these start-ups from becoming too successful until existing industry players can figure it out and occupy that space themselves. Latter in the week Diane Rehm (NPR) built a show around that article with a handful of guests including Fischer WAMU 88.5 FM American University Radio - The Diane Rehm Show for Thursday March 27, 2008 . The concept of iPod fatigue is interesting; the notion that a digitized and ubiquitous music collection even of very large proportions will eventually become overly familiar and drive people back to something like radio. Of course I also believe that if it appears music culture needs a next radio it is because radio was rarely done well over the last 30 years. I like the idea of a service that would allow me for a nominal fee to listen to (as opposed to buy and store such as iTunes) or share a given song or playlist, but these would be songs I knew of already. I've long since thrown in with free form radio. Radio where the flow of music is not predictable nor often familiar, but is intentional and an implicit argument emerges from the segues. A minor irony, as part of initiatives designed to boost small local radio, WFMU, my favored radio station, which I listen on the internet when I do, is being allowed to build a repeater in Manhattan across the Hudson river from their original base. Without increasing their transmitting wattage at all they could double their terrestrial reach. Moves like that which cost the FCC nothing can often be the difference whether a community radio station with bills to pay can remain viable or not. LPFM has its uses to the FCC; making up-market consolidation more palatable. It's an acceptable bargain to the low numbers side. 11:49:01 PM    comment [];trackback [];

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2008 P Bushmiller. Last update: 4/3/08; 9:45:08 AM.