I find that Doug is articulating very clearly a lot of ideas that have also been rattling around my ahead for the last decade or so, but he’s made the effort to research them and flesh them out in print both in his book and in a growing series of columns and essays. What I like about his analytical approach is his willingness to attempt to get outside our contemporary assumptions about daily life and try to figure out when and how something, like the corporation, was brought into existence. I also appreciate that he’s willing to continue prodding at a question even when the answers are murky, showing a willingness to accept there are some apparent conflicts in the messy reality of daily life.

He recently wrote a piece for Publisher’s Weekly arguing that the publishing business is very ill-suited to corporate consolidation. He notes that book publishing is a sustainable business, but not a source of tremendous year-over-year growth of the sort a large corporation needs. But he remains sanguine about the future of publishing because the expert editors, publishers and writers haven’t gone away and are ready to rebuild the industry, perhaps with new independent houses.

I see some parallel with the radio business, although radio has been far more decimated than publishing. The root problem is the same: the large consolidating companies treated radio as a commodities business, seeking unreasonable profit growth that the business could not sustain. Radio differs from publishing in the fact that stations must be licensed and are therefore inherently limited in number, whereas publishing houses can be more easily started with less capital and require no licensing of any sort.

If new independents could start radio stations without having to try and pry licenses away from the likes of Clear Channel and Cumulus, I think we’d already be seeing some innovative rebooting of the industry. Unfortunately, radio is more like a neighborhood where the landowners have all let their properties get run down but refuse to sell them because scarcity still keeps the going rate artificially high.

In some sporadic cases we see innovation happening in public and community radio, where license holders can keep their stations sustainable but don’t have to rake in enormous profits. I just keep hoping that Clear Channel will finally bite the bullet and need to start shedding stations left and right, giving an opportunity for smaller, local and independent owners to get back into the game. Admittedly, it’s a more distant hope than the reinvigoration of the publishing industry, since another smaller consolidator, like CBS Radio, might choose to pack its stables, outbidding smaller players.

That’s the problem with licensing, and, to an extent, why the founding fathers organized against the Stamp Act of 1765. As it was designed, radio pretty much needs to be licensed because it was premised on scarcity partially imposed by the technological limits of 1927. But it’s not necessarily an inherent fact about radio. Perhaps the future of wireless communications will render this period of licensing a short historical anomaly. It’s an open question and no better than a 50/50 proposition right now.

Doug has his own relatively new radio show, The Media Squat, on the great noncommercial station, WFMU. In the interview we talked about his program and our shared challenged of trying to do an original weekly program on a completely volunteer, non-profit basis. That part of the interview will air on the next edition of mediageek. You can listen to it live on Thursday, Sept. 10, at 9 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago and online at http://www.wnur.org. Of course, the program will be archived online next week.

No related posts.

Happy downloading and listening!

No related posts.

As someone who has tried to pick through numerous music sharing sites I have certainly been frustrated by trying to find artists and tracks that suit me. In our interview Ken points out that these open access sites tend to be dominated by people making electronic music or jam bands, which seem to be two groups inclined to be more inclined to use the internet or to share music than, say, modern classical composers and performers.

Over the last ten years WFMU has really solidified its reputation as a cutting-edge freeform music station driven by taste and artistic value. And it’s achieved that by carefully selecting the DJs it puts on air and giving those DJs full control over their programs. On top of that the station has been on the forefront of using the internet and webcasting to both better serve it’s local audience and to reach a broader, global audience.

As one might guess, much of WFMU’s aesthetic appeals to me, and so I am very much looking forward to the debut of the full Free Music Archive. Like a favorite record label, publishing house or rock club, I have come to trust that ‘FMU is likely to steer me towards interesting, challenging and appealing music that I might not otherwise encounter. Simply, I expect them to sort through the chaff and present to me the wheat, even if it’s not everyone’s cup of tea (to mix my metaphors).

I don’t think that the Free Music Archive is intended to be or will be a challenge, substitute or replacement for open submission archives. The internet continues to be a big place and there’s plenty of room for both approaches.

One delicious irony of the Free Music Archive is that it was seeded by a grant from the state of New York that comes from the money received in the big payola settlement of a few years ago. I love that an archive of Creative Commons music is being funded by the entertainment cartel RIAA-members.

The Archive is not yet online, though Ken says they’re currently planning for a launch date of November. However, they’ve been posting selected tracks on a project blog.

You can listen to my interview with Ken Freedman about the Free Music Archive at the radioshow page. To learn more about WFMU and the station’s unique approach to internet broadcasting listen to my first interview with Ken on the Nov. 11, 2005 edition of the radioshow.

No related posts.