Back home after an exhausting trip to Goldsboro NC. On the ride home, I listened to some NPR, one of my cheapo audiobooks - the abridged version of Ralph Emery's A View from Nashville, and some of the Subgenius radio ministries Hours of Slack. Kind of an odd mixture, but that's what I'm about. I really enjoyed the Emery audiobook, which was all anecdotes about various country music folks, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Loretta Lynn, Brenda Lee, etc. I've been getting reacquainted with my country and western roots lately. As a kid in Nebraska and Kansas I heard a lot more Buck Owens and Eddie Rabbit than Black Sabbath.

I heard something inexplicable while listening to NPR. In a story about Michael Powell calling for FCC changes to the rules for radio station ownership, some dude made the statement that further consolidation would be great for commercial radio. "Many of these smaller organizations don't have the resources to create the content, so this will help them out." Folks, he's talking about spinning records. I've done it, and I can tell you that it ain't that hard. Yes, its true that someone must decide what you do and don't play. In a small station, that can be as little as an hour or two a week. It was that way in KQNK when I was a DJ in the mid 80s, a small daylight hours AM station. That's an incorrect statement, and exactly the wrong direction. There is already a growing body evidence that the slump in record sales is rooted in the ever narrowing playlists caused by media conglomeration. When one guy in Chicago or New York is picking what hundred or thousands of stations play, when local variation is snuffed out, when it is grossly expensive to crack into that game, you see what we have today. Because every roll of the dice on a new artist is so expensive, record companies devote more resources to fewer acts, and acts less and less risky. It makes sense, they have an investment to recoup so why take chances?

I found the story about the proposed FCC rule changes:

The Federal Communications Commission considers new rules that would increase the number of TV stations a single company can own. But both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Commerce Committee charge the deregulation, which would increase media consolidation, runs counter to public interest. NPR's Rick Karr reports.

I've written about WBZB before. They are the stark opposition to the nationally controlled playlists. They don't play any music that doesn't originate in North Carolina. I listen to their streaming MP3 feed sometimes, and because of the way I drive to Goldsboro I can actually hear their air signal for about an hour, from a little north of Fayetteville on I-95 until I get too far west on US 70. Fun stuff. I listened to them both ways, and I like the station. God bless them for trying something different.