Image by mareadjrock
I love radio … it is important. Part of the way we do things. “Socially central” in many ways.
So, I like to think about what happens when we reconfigure the radio spectrum as a tradable commodity in a free market, rather than a social, cultural, economic and political asset that belongs to the people from the place it is in.
In New Zealand, where I come from, we have sold almost all of our radio stations and radio frequencies to companies from outside of New Zealand. We have no rules on ownership of our tradable spectrum (including cross-media and foreign ownership) and few on radio content beyond legal standards of taste, decency and privacy. We do have a couple of non-commercial publicly-funded radio networks, seriously under-funded community networks and a few other minor players that are not owned by one of two foreign companies. These broadcasters cannot really compete with the international capital that drives New Zealand’s radio system. They are now becoming fringe players in our radio ecology. Our politicians have generally stayed away from the debate around public and private ownership of radio since deregulation in 1990, preferring to let the market run its course. They may also be afraid of the overwhelming audience reach available to the owners of New Zealand commercial radio.
I think this situation is not good. Almost all of New Zealand radio is designed to encourage people to buy stuff. What you will experience when listening to the majority of New Zealand radio is strong advocacy for consumerism, with a few global pop hits in-between, or songs from New Zealand that emulate global pop. The discursive space in which we used to talk about radio as a public asset (and perhaps need) in New Zealand has been largely shut down by lobbying from the commercial industry. To me this is a bleak “radioscape”, a radio-place where you are, but that is hostile in that you cannot truly affect it.
I worry a bit about the expansion of this system. Canwest (one of the companies that operated in New Zealand until late 2007) sold up here to move into other markets (the UK and Turkey for example), using the lessons they have learnt in New Zealand to try to move other national radio ecologies towards the free market. The language of corporate communications is usually pretty subtle, but this slideshow from Canwest is all sorts of fun!
www.ctbc.ca/upload/infofile159.ppt
Tagged: Deregulation, ecologies, mollgaard, Ownership, radioscapes