The musicFirst Coalition and the Future of Music Coalition are pressing the FCC not to do away with the current FM ownership caps.
Those rules limit the number of FM stations that one entity can own in each geographic market. The commission is reviewing its ownership rules, as it must every four years, and the deadline for reply comments has just passed. Licensees represented by the National Association of Broadcasters hope the FCC will remove the limits. Read our story on NAB’s reply comment filing here.
The two coalitions are longtime opponents of further radio ownership degulation and they frequently work together on the opposite site of issues from the NAB, most notably on whether broadcasters should pay performance royalties.
FMC and musicFirst argue that the public interest requires the FCC to keep its FM subcap “in order to protect and promote viewpoint diversity, localism and competition between local AM/FM radio broadcasters.”
They say NAB’s argument that the current rules harm broadcasters and the public is false.
“Over 1,800 individual AM/FM radio listeners and a plethora of organizations across a wide array of the political spectrum have stated in comments in this proceeding that broadcast ownership rules remain necessary in the public interest in competition, localism and viewpoint diversity,” they wrote.
“This is because the commission’s broadcast ownership rules protect audiences, independent broadcasters and all kinds of AM radio broadcasters (both independent broadcasters and big companies that have invested in AM holdings).”
To advance their argument, they cited specific or general comments about broadcast deregulation from organizations as disparate as iHeartMedia, Newsmax, SAG-AFTRA, the American Conservative Union Foundation’s Center for Regulatory Freedom, Free Press and the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters.
The coalitions believe further deregulation would hurt “all smaller broadcasters who want to continue to compete for audiences and advertising dollars within the local markets they serve” and that it would be harmful to the entire AM radio industry.
The only possible beneficiaries of economies of scale, they told the commission, would be “those few radio owners that had already maxed out their commercial FM ownership within the local communities in which they broadcast. …
“Such owners of (already large) local clusters would, in the process of buying more local FM stations than previously allowed, gain further local market share specifically at the expense of every other remaining owner of local FM stations who must then try to compete with their now comparatively gigantic local competitor for advertising dollars.”
FMC and musicFirst said the NAB wants the FCC to believe that there is a direct cause and effect relationship between AM/FM ownership consolidation and increased program variety.
But they cited evidence to cast doubt on claims that larger station groups will offer the public more variety.
The groups were dismissive of a radio programming study from BIA Advisory Services that commissioned by NAB last year.
They say the NAB arguments are “obscuring the fact that the diversity of music, viewpoints (through music and spoken word), and local voices has decreased since 1996 radio ownership deregulation. We challenge the NAB to show whether the number of unique artists and unique songs on the radio increased in the wake of mergers following 1996. Additionally, by all means, show what percentage of artists, before and after 1996, were local to their regions, and what percentage of topics discussed were specific to local concerns.”
Also, when large radio broadcast entities complain about their profit levels, they asked the FCC to remember that several of them “are spending much of their available cash servicing debt that they acquired in the wake of the last time that the ownership caps were loosened.”
In the wake of the elimination of the Main Studio Rule in 2017, the continued, “many stations that used to be staffed by local personnel are now, at least part-time, programmed and/or voiced remotely in order to cut costs further, thereby further diminishing the local connection that AM/FM listeners appreciate.”
They gave as an example the overnight broadcasts on Audacy station KNX-FM in Los Angeles that consists of programming from KCBS-FM in San Francisco.
They also told the FCC that noncommercial Educational Media Foundation, “which now owns over 1,000 broadcast signals across all 50 states, has nearly monopolized, and homogenized on a nationwide basis, the Christian music radio airwaves, including making it so that listeners of Christian music in any given city are likely listening to exactly the same playlists and shows as Christian music listeners in another city with completely different local needs.”
[You can read the full filing in PDF form here.]
