This is a radio. It's a technology I use primarily
when I've already sat down and don't want to get my phone out of my pocket.
Last year I would always turn the radio to pop. But here's the thing. It was always the
same song. “Now Charlie Puth…” “Puth is getting his light switch.” “Now, here's the Puthster.”
Oh, my gosh. Again. How many times are you going to play this song?
“You turn me on like a light switch.” And every commercial radio station and every
single city seems like it's the same. Why?
This is an American story about commercial radio that I want to tell in three main sections. So
let's get started and talk about Etheric Bedlam. Imagine you're a 1900s radio guy.
“This is as advanced as technology will ever be. Also, there will never be wars and no pandemics.
Okay. Back to work.” You're
probably sending mainly Morse code. But the problem is that your signal
is competing against lots of other radio signals.
The frequencies are unregulated. Anybody can be on, say, 1130 AM.. Lots of people
hate that. The Navy, for example, is worried that distress calls from ships will get lost
in what they call a etheric bedlam. I promise it is actually kind of necessary
to go this far back to answer the question of why every radio station sounds the same today.
Congress passed an act saying radio stations have to be licensed. Goodbye,
bedlam. This later got followed up by a new law creating a Federal Radio commission,
which then turned into the FCC with the Communications Act of 1934. Radio stations
that were commercial started to rise against educational or religious stations. Crucially,
ownership was also limited by the FCC. Rules lessened over time,
but it's fair to imagine a cap of 2 AM and FM radio stations in one market and 40 nationwide.
As far as what one company could own. I just want to hit home that they felt they need to
regulate this because it depended on actual radio waves. This was an FCC monitoring
station in Grand Island, Nebraska, where they were just listening for radio waves
that might be breaking rules. And this 1934 map really gives you a sense of things.
It stacks AM radio stations by the power of their transmissions, A being a super-charged or broad
station, H probably being a hyper local one. And down here, you see a reminder that this was a
medium based on distance from these transmission areas with rough yardsticks as estimates.
For the next 60 years. I'd argue that this is pretty much how things work.
I mean, there were blips of change. FM radio showed up,
though it took a surprisingly long time to become dominant. In 1968,
it was still only 15% of listeners. Public radio was established in the sixties and
started in the seventies, and syndication became a popular format. Here's an NBC News
pamphlet trying to convince stations to switch to all news radio and buy their shows to do it.
But even though these were big changes, the status quo of ownership mostly stuck,
and that affected the music. Imagine you're a 1960s radio DJ. You work for a pretty local
and relatively small company, so you are in tune with local consumers. Record companies
have to individually solicit attention to their songs and you can also just put
in whatever you want if you feel like it, even if you wanted to copy the mainstream.
It was a lot harder. This is a 1973 issue of Radio and Records Industry magazine.
They had a whole section called “Parallels” in which you could browse charts for ideas,
but also find radio stations parallel to your own. So you could be like, "Oh, okay,
I guess WBHQ is playing Kris Kristofferson's 'Why Me?' So maybe I'll give that a try."
Through the nineties, you could find a DJ saying, "Okay, Tuscaloosa. I've completely outsourced my
mind to the pop charts. So here's the same song you heard yesterday,” but one station over,
you might find a DJ who would say, “I've completely outsourced my mind
to hallucinogenic plants. So here's a song you'll never want to hear again.'"
FCC ownership rules had this result that, to me,
was unpredictable. It meant that commercial radio could actually be unique. That is until 1996.
"Downloading images of global climate change again?"
Here's VP Al Gore. Here's President Bill Clinton.
"You're not stiff. You're just a techno nerd."
So this is part of a very long skit that the vice president president did with Lily Tomlin to,
I don't know, amuse people before they signed their huge telecommunications bill.
"I thank Lily Tomlin for reminding us that the Internet can be fun."
They were there to sign the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
"Whatever the reason, though, the Communications Act of 1934 was born without much fanfare.
It will not pass on the same way."
Now, this act did a ton of stuff that is outside the scope of our narrow focus on why every radio
station sounds the same. They sort of cast it as an information superhighway bill,
which is why they used the same pen that Dwight Eisenhower used to create the highway system.
"That's the time when people in Washington were real leaders and pens were real pens."
So now I'm going to explain every intricate aspect of this law.
“No, you tell me why the signs are the same,
why I'm stuck in Lightswitch limbo. That's what I need to know.”
Okay. Okay. So there had been tweaks to FCC rules before around spectrum auctions,
which kind of favored parties that had more money. But the Telecommunications
Act smashed all that regulation. The national ownership cap was unlimited,
and local markets could own as many as eight or more stations,
depending on the market. The effects were - and I'm not exaggerating here - they were immediate.
Broadcasting cable reported on “Mega weeks” in which huge consolidation occurred.
"Let the deals begin." This changed everything.
Radio owners cut really, really big. Clear Channel today, you might know it as iHeart,
became the biggest station owner, going from 173 stations to 1207 stations in just seven years.
But consolidation was bigger than one company. So how did this affect music? I like the description
in this paper by a guy who actually worked in promotions at music companies before writing
this paper. “Instead of cultivating relationships with individual radio stations, music companies
were now pressured to develop relationships with radio station groups.” Now you needed to
convince one person, the person at the big radio company, instead of a thousand different DJs, and
you could get the same airplay. “A station group could conceivably save on music format research.”
Remember Parallels? Now, you didn't need Parallels because you owned all the parallel
stations. They knew what songs worked and they could just repeat that formula,
plop the songs across the country. “And a group can downsize its on air staff with
the advent of voice track automation.” Suddenly there was no reason to remain
local because you could pipe in outside DJs from wherever you wanted.
This New York Times article shares an anecdote that became universal - streaming
in disc jockeys from outside local markets “Clear Channel…wants to replace
live jockeys with prepackaged shows that use voice tracking.” Stations could also
save money on jingles and sweepers through consolidation. You know, this kind of thing:
"You're listening to The Fuzz Top 40 Hits. We’'re going to blow your
mind. We're coming straight to you from ——— (fake female voice) beautiful Tuscaloosa."
As quickly as 1999, Adult Contemporary was majority controlled by just four groups.
Let's say A and B are big radio owners. A record company might promise them both
performances and tickets if they play this song. So they plop the song in the markets they own,
station to station. The songs are the same. The same songs are getting piped down to the stations.
Then the Internet exacerbated those trends.
“What if there was a song that started off like, ‘Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.’”
That Charlie Puth song that I kept hearing on the radio. It was actually part of a TikTok campaign.
It was really trying to make it go viral. "This is actually kind of dope. I'm
freaking out right now.” This is so obviously fake.
“It's literally my record label. Come on, Charlie, You're almost done with the song."
It totally worked. He went up to the top of the charts. TikTok drives charts, YouTube drives
charts, and radio is in decline. Radio played "Light Switch" because it was a hit on TikTok,
and their only hope in a declining market is to catch you really quickly.
Now, a few caveats. Now, my whole video is premised on radio being this kind of like
totally outdated curio, and I think maybe I'm in a bit of a bubble. If you look at statistics,
revenue for the industry still tops 10 billion a year…somehow. And let's throw
aside listener-supported radio. There is good commercial radio out there.
When I was starting to research this, I tuned into a DJ set by DJ Triple XL.
The station he plays on, it's actually owned by iHeart, aka a Clear Channel.
I'm a dork, but I was I was enjoying it. I was, I was groovin' to it. But unfortunately,
sets like that are kind of a rarity, at least for now.
Modern program directors will tell you that they are basically playing the same 10 to
20 songs because they have to capture people on their commute. All those reasons are the
reason that every radio station sounds the same, and radio knows it too. They just hope that we
can't get our phones out of our pockets. "It turns me on like a light switch."
(Sighs) (Switches off)
All right. That is it for this one. Thanks for watching. If you haven't been here before,
this is a personal channel where I post personal videos, history videos, stuff like that.
This really came from my own interest in why radio stations sound so similar. Did
a lot of research for it. Links to papers and sources are down in the description.
I also have a video over on Patreon where I kind of react and tell you the things that
I left out. I'm a committed radio listener. I mean that radio that I use in the video,
that's my radio. It sits in my dining room and I enjoy listening to radio. So
I do have hope for the medium, but I'd be interested to know what you
think that I left out or, you know, if I wasn't being fair in certain places.
In any case, thank you for watching. I will see you in the next one. And
I guess let's have "Light Switch" play me out. Why not? Yeah, yeah. OK.