I’m still sub­scribed to the internal email list at WCBN despite no longer being an Ann Arborite. The CBN dj’s have a lot to say to each other about music and such. (I also still listen to the sta­tion regularly–there’s a lot of killer com­mu­nity radio out there, espe­cially in Canada, but WCBN really is one of the greats.)

A news story was posted to the list regarding enor­mous cut­backs at the Clear Channel cor­po­rate media empire. That article posits that com­mer­cial radio may get even more homoge­nous, as local con­tent gets fur­ther replaced by cen­trally man­u­fac­tured generic noise. Clear Channel pio­neered the remote dj, and if they need to, they could prob­ably supply every town in America with some­thing like music using an .mp3 playlist tied to the Billboard Top 20, and a text-​​to-​​speech pro­gram plugged into an ID3 tag parser and a feed of the weather ser­vice. More homog­e­niza­tion? Shudder.

But Jesse Walker, Reason Magazine editor and cur­rent WCBN dj sug­gested this alter­nate gloss on the news:

“There’s another way to look at this: Corporate radio empires are tot­tering as their con­sol­i­da­tion binge proves less sus­tain­able than expected. In addi­tion to these cut­backs, Clear Channel has been trying to offload hun­dreds of sta­tions for the last few years, as have sev­eral other chains.

It’s a bad time for exper­i­men­ta­tion right now — ask the former fans of Indie 103 FM (RIP) in LA — but that could change if those com­pa­nies get more des­perate to sell off their excess out­lets and sta­tion prices start coming way down. By that time, granted, most of the cre­ative people who in past years might have wanted to buy the licenses may have given up on radio and migrated to the Web.”

I sure hope so. Anyone want to buy a com­mer­cial radio sta­tion with me? The time is ripe.