Reducing commercials on the radio can't be all bad, you say...

...but you'd be wrong. Sure, it sounds great to reduce the annoying number of ads you hear day in and day out on any given commercial FM radio station; every 15 minutes the station reminds you of what station you're listening to and what cool things you should buy to be like all the aweseome DJs and musicians you can't wait to get back to listening to.

Why is this so bad, you ask? Well, for one thing, its not. Its a great idea, and I'm glad someone is finally doing it. The problem isn't the move toward more music, the problem is in the agency doing the moving. Clear Channel Communications is almost solely responsible for the disposable FM radio you hear all over the United States. Thanks to their corporate ownership of over 85% of the rock radio market in the US, Milwaukee sounds exactly like Long Beach, at least on the FM dial. (Thank George W. Bush for Clear Channel's monopoly on the radio waves.) With this much of the market controlled, Clear Channel keeps getting bigger and richer (like America) and competitors get smaller and poorer.

Most FM radio station's income is generated by advertising dollars. The more listeners a station has, the more money advertisers are willing to spend on airtime. Since Clear Channel owns a large portion of the radio market, they receive even larger portions of both the listeners and the advertisers, making their revenues increase. Plus, they often own several different formats in a given market (i.e. both classic rock and modern rock stations in one town) and can air the same commercial on all their market stations. Paired with the aforementioned homogenization of their national market, this makes Clear Channel a formidable corporate foe that small, poor FM stations can barely compete with.

Following the decrease in hourly commercials, expect to see an increase in the cost of advertising on Clear Channel stations nationwide. Not only that, but this move will attract more listeners, making advertising on Clear Channel stations a privledge only afforded Fortune 500 companies. Smaller stations can't afford to cut their profit margins any closer than they already are, and the advertisers won't want to advertise on stations that can't control much of the market anyway.

Your mother was right, you can have too much of a good thing.