And indeed. After a dozen more hours in the car marvelling at the poverty and the uniformity of country radio programming – and the near-absence of anything else – I rolled into Music City the day of the FCC public hearing on media consolidation and got to hear the whole story painted out in a thousand little fragments through the testimony of hundreds of people affected in very different ways by the whole business.
Country music stars testified that it has become impossible for new talent or new sounds to get play on the radio, that even the classic greats of country music don’t get play time: only those who are specifically groomed and prepared to reproduce radio country’s sound – and politics – have a chance. And those that are heard are heard incessantly: playlists repeat the same 15 hits over and over, whereas only a few years ago the standard range was 45 core songs.
Musicians and songwriters talked about the split economy of country music; the breach between the quality and diversity of what is being played and produced in little venues and on little labels on the one hand and what is being played on the radio on the other. And somehow, they say, a steady trickle of listeners manage to find them, bypassing the radio altogether in favor of internet, word of mouth, etc. But of course that requires money and time, limiting the possible audience and insulting the general public.
Small local radio operators talked about the impossibility of getting access to frequencies in the city, about how their frequencies were continually being colonized by larger stations with greater power, and that the law protects the large stations under the assumption that, being larger, they can afford a broader and more elaborated content. Thus most of the little and independent local stations – including some small-town ones which have constituted the principle public space in their remote rural areas for 50 years – are being shut down.
Listeners talked about the lack of local news or local information, the bombastic uniformity of political opinions expressed, the loss of public discussion, the tendency simply to turn the radio off and forget about what was once an important public space. They talk about the failure of big-radio to reflect local politics and tastes but also about the transmission of basic information, like tornado warnings and school events, that are essential to the very survival of the community.
Almost all reflect a ferocious sense of the public, the common. In a land of cars and highways the airwaves are the public space, more often than not the only public space. Its a weird kind of virtual common, but it works. It is gratifying to see so many people who know that, and who recognize the tremendous loss which the colonization of those spaces by monopolies represents.
After the testimonies of the music stars and the public there was a panel of media professionals: journalists, managers, editors. Some few – those working within big media corporations – pled for a loosening of what little anti-consolidation law remains, but most demonstrated, by appeals to the notion of the public, and to political plurality, and to the quality of art and journalism in a competitive environment, and to the great American tradition of meritocracy, that the consolidation of media has a greivous effect on the functioning both of art and of democracy.
And because Nashville is the home of the country music industry in all of its facets, and because country music is perhaps the genre most intensely affected by the artistic degradation and political censorship which monopoly medias have permitted, the spirit here is intense. A guy I was talking to in one of the breaks between sessions said that when the Dixie Chicks came to town last week there were throngs and throngs and throngs of people there to cheer them on as the icon of the other country, the real country, the supressed but surviving outlaw-rebel-laugh-in-their-faces kind of country.
