The Marlowsphere (#13)
A couple of weeks ago, the Latin Jazz listserve provided a link to an article entitled “The Reason Why They Repeat the Same 20 Songs on the Radio & TV Nationwide.” I clicked, I read, and now I’m commenting.
The Impact of Media Consolidation
The article, by Ren the Vinyl Archeologist, makes the following observation:
“Ever wonder why you see and hear the same 20 artists on the rotation on radio & television? No, it’s not because people are calling the radio stations requesting the songs incessantly. The answer: media consolidation.” He continues: “90% of the media is controlled by only six companies: GE, Newscorp, Viacom, CBS, Disney and Time Warner. Compare that to 1983 when [90% of] media was owned by 50 companies. According to FreePress.net, ‘media consolidation means less diversity in programming and ownership, fewer voices and viewpoints, less coverage of local issues that matter to communities and less of the unbiased, independent and critical journalism we need to prevent abuses of power.’ Media consolidation has affected the balance and diversity of today’s music, which is especially evident when it comes to hip-hop.”
This is not a new issue. Numerous authors and observers of the media landscape have made loud and cogent statements about the implications of media consolidation over a period of several decades, including: Robert W. McChesney in The New Global Media: It’s a Small World of Big Conglomerates and Rich Media, Poor Democracy; Rifka Rosenwein in Why Media Mergers Matter; Gerald Caplan in Advancing Free Media; and especially Ben H. Bagdikian in his seminal The Media Monopoly, published in a sixth edition in 2000.
The impact of media consolidation on the music world is, of course, profound. With the distribution of media content now in the hands of a few, the bottom line is: the bottom line. The desire to minimize risk is high, the desire to maximize profits is even higher. If that means purveying content to the lowest common denominator and to a public motivated to spend, even if it can’t afford it, that’s what the media conglomerates will do. It also means feeding the public content in all media. A successful book can become a movie with as many merchandizing opportunities as possible. Conversely, a successful movie could become a Broadway show (it could also tour), and as many merchandizing opportunities as possible. It has become a multimedia merchandising market. Whatever the product, the output becomes maximized in all media platforms. If a media company has vertically integrated the process—from content creation to distribution in all markets, domestic and international—they have an opportunity to maximize profits.
It is not about art, or fair and balanced reporting, or the higher needs of the public at large. It is about minimizing market risk and maximizing profits.
Consolidation at the Grammys
There are other examples. In April 2011, the Board of Trustees of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences (NARAS), the folks who bring you the Grammys, unilaterally reduced the number of Grammy categories from 107 to 79, effectively eliminating many ethnic categories, such as Latin jazz, zydeco, blues, et al. The minutes of that decision have never been made available, nor the names of the committee members who made the decision, even though the Academy is a non-profit organization with a 20,000+ dues-paying membership. None of the chapter Governors were consulted. It was a fait accomplit. The decision, they said, was based on making a Grammy more valuable by reducing the number of categories.
Nonsense. The decision was made to reduce the expense of the Grammys while maximizing the influence of the media conglomerates purveying the product of their artists. It was also racist—not so much against African-Americans, but against Latinos (now a larger minority in the United States than African Americans) and other minorities, including Native Americans.
The Academy was sued (I was one of the four plaintiffs). We recently lost in New York State Supreme Court. The judge essentially ruled that the Academy’s Board of Trustees could do whatever it wanted, the membership’s needs and wants aside. The judge’s decision will be appealed.
The Academy’s decision tilts the Grammys in favor of the media conglomerates, effectively maximizing their investment in pop and hip-hop artists, and virtually eliminating any recognition for artists in several dozen ethnic and diverse categories. The Academy’s decision lines up with the needs of media conglomerates.
The Effects of Globalization
These issues aside for the moment, this question must be asked:
Is media consolidation an organic outcome of globalization fostered in the last sixty years by the spread of electronic media?
Look at what has happened in the years since the end of World War II when many of the electronic technologies we are familiar with today were introduced—such as the computer, satellites, and lasers.
There has been consolidation in various ways on an international scale. The United Nations was born. There are now more international business and professional organizations and associations than ever before. Economists now refer to the several countries surrounding the Pacific as the “Pacific Rim.” The Eurozone was created (Greece’s possible exit, notwithstanding). The Organization of American States was formed. OPEC was established. Financiers and economists refer to BRICs—Brazil,Russia, Indian,China—as a group. Militarily, NATO was organized. And closer to home, the Big Eight accounting firms are now the Big Four!
Has the global spread of electronic media—radio, television, cable, satellites, cell-phones, CDs and DVDs, the Internet, et al—fostered the demand for consolidation on a global basis? With respect to media companies, is this a situation of communications opportunity converging with economic opportunity?
It is also true that in the last 60 years more countries have been created, mostly along ethnic lines, and many of these countries practice “democracy.” It remains to be seen what happens in Egypt and Libya, but the thrust of world politics is edging towards democracy. Even in Russia, Putin is “talking” about reform. And in China the powers that be seem to recognize that its economic rate of growth of the last two decades is not sustainable and that political reform of some kind is inevitable. Unless I miss my guess, the leaderships of Russia and China fear their own people more than they fear an attack from the west.
Nothing lasts forever. Economic pressures ultimately lead to political change. Witness the American Revolution. It started with “no taxation [the economic pressure] without representation [the political change].” The American Civil War was also about economics/politics: the use of slave labor in the South. It led to political change that is still being played out today.
Media consolidation may well be the result of the convergence of technological and economic (i.e., profit) opportunities. At the same time, though, it has led to too few people making creative and journalistic product decisions for too many. This un-benign situation brings to mind the line from the movie “Star Trek II”: ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” The dictatorships in North Korea and Syria are about the needs of the one and the few, to the detriment of the many. In America, or at least in the west, journalistic and creative democracy, even political decision-making may be at risk because the media conglomerates cannot tolerate the risks of the market place. Are they now too big to fail as well?
I suspect not a backlash to media consolidation but a response on local and regional levels. With Hip-hop apparently in decline, I observe younger people rejecting the overly packaged creative output of the media conglomerates and becoming hungry for “content” with some substance. Lady Gaga may appeal to a younger set that doesn’t know any better, but a more mature, educated, discerning audience demands more. Is Adele’s straight on presentation more of what the future holds?
Will the decades long media attention to “celebrities”–rather than the more important issues of global access to food and water, the environment, and democracy–finally wither away? In the United States we forget that two-thirds of the world’s population does not have access to the Internet and one-seventh of the world’s population is illiterate. In Afghanistan the people there are concerned about daily survival, not the latest utterance of Kim Kardashian.
Will Facebook’s explosive growth lead to an awakening about the need for privacy? As one of my sons pointed out recently, Facebook is about a herd mentality. And calling it part of “social media” is a complete misnomer. Social media has been around since homo sapiens first walked the earth. People have always been “social,” first by body language, then speech, then writing, then printing, then electronic media of all kinds. Since when are Facebook and Twitter a new communications category–“social media”? What a marketing ploy!
When the global media conglomerates see their growth slowing (as has happened on a national scale in Japan and will happen in China) and there are fewer companies to buy, perhaps then the six media companies identified earlier will decide to make the changes that meet the needs of “the many.”
If you have any comments on this or any of my other blogs, please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com.
Eugene Marlow
June 4, 2012
© Eugene Marlow 2012