Re: Lowry Mays speaks

[Aaron Read <aread@speakeasy.net>]

At 01:05 PM 2/24/2003 -0500, Donna Halper wrote:
> From today's edition of Newsblues (www.newsblues.com) , a quote from 
> Lowry Mays, in an interview with Fortune magazine:
>
>"If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone from 
>our company," says Lowry Mays, CEO of Clear Channel. "We're not in the 
>business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of 
>providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling 
>our customers' products."
>
>Entire interview is 
>at:  http://www.fortune.com/fortune/ceo/articles/0,15114,423802,00.html


"...They don't really see the point in government oversight. Randall argues 
that the broadcast ownership rules dating back to the 1930s were never 
necessary, and that consolidation occurred so quickly in radio because "it 
was artificially depressed for so long." This is how the Mayses like to see 
themselves: not as a destructive imperial army, but as a limber commando 
unit liberating the airwaves. Adds Mark emphatically: "Let the free markets 
reign."

One thing that's always amused me about the "free market" folks in radio is 
that they don't want any gov't oversight when it comes to ownership, but 
they demand FCC oversight when it comes to busting pirates.   To my way of 
thinking, you can't have it both ways.  In the real world, if you have a 
weak gov't oversight, you have weak gov't oversight period...you'll never 
manage to tweak that agency's budget finely enough to have strong technical 
oversight and weak ownership oversight.   Esp. since in a lot of cases 
(more AM than FM) there is some overlap between the two.

Plus if you insist on free market so much, you shouldn't be surprised when 
someone (pirates) takes that train of thought to its logical extreme.

Okay, putting aside the blatant left-wing politics that ramble through my 
head...the article does highlight (somewhat unintentionally) how often it 
takes someone who has no idea how to work "within the industry" to find a 
way that really "works".   Whether you like what CC has done to the 
industry or not...you can't deny that from a purely business standpoint 
they've succeeded fabulously.   They did that by not thinking in the 
traditional radio way at all, and by boiling it down to its core 
essence.   I'd argue that a good hunk of the success stories in business 
have come about that way (Google comes to mind).   Hmmm...I wonder if 
there's any non-commercial stations that have "succeeded" because of that 
way of thinking...


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aaron "Bishop" Read             aread@speakeasy.net
FriedBagels Consulting          AOL-IM: readaaron
http://www.friedbagels.com      Boston, MA