CONVENTION HIGHTLIGHTS
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Giuliani Leads The Way At R&R Convention 2003 (continued)

Moschitta didn’t disappoint, reading off all the nominees and announcing the winners with his signature rapid-fire delivery. In fact, he finished the show in record time, at just about an hour and a half.

Among the other winners at the sixth annual Industry Achievement Awards presented by R&R: Infinity’s KROQ/Los Angeles won three national awards as top Radio Station (markets 1-25), Market Manager/GM (Trip Reeb, who’s GM for KCBS-FM & KROQ) and Marketing/Promotion Director (Amy Stevens); WJHM/Orlando and WPLR/New Haven, CT were named national Radio Station of the Year in markets 26-100 and 101+, respectively; and Howard Stern was tapped as Syndicated Air Personality of the Year.

On the label side, Interscope/Geffen/A&M and DreamWorks won Label of the Year in the Platinum and Gold categories, respectively, and Interscope/Geffen/A&M’s Brenda Romano was named Sr. Promo Exec of the Year. A tribute to all the winners will be featured in next week’s R&R, and a full list of winners is posted on R&R’s website (www.radioandrecords.com).

Group Heads Assess FCC Rules

“I don’t think the new rules were very well thought out,” Cumulus CEO Lew Dickey said June 20 of the FCC’s new media-ownership rules as he sat on the “Radio: State of the Industry” panel that also included Hogan, Emmis’ Jeff Smulyan, Entercom’s David Field and NextMedia’s Skip Weller.

Dickey believes the provision in the new radio rules that forces cluster owners to either sell clusters intact to minority buyers or parcel out the stations individually will ultimately harm smaller stations, which he believes won’t be able to compete. “Those little stations will be orphans,” he said, explaining that since cluster owners will likely spin off their weakest stations in order to comply with the new rules, the buyers of those stations will have a hard time competing with the station combinations that are left.

He added that in some of Cumulus’ clusters the performance of the company’s larger, more profitable stations allows Cumulus to carry the unprofitable small stations and keep them on the air. “As a broadcaster, I am disappointed,” he said. “This hurts the little guy, and it hurts diversity.” On the flip side, fellow panelist and Clear Channel CEO John Hogan said the new rules will be “inconsequential to us as a company and as an industry.”

Hogan called the media-ownership debate “like a gang tackle”: “Everybody wants to get in on it, but very few actually understand our business. This is a highly politicized topic.”

And Field added that while the debate is raging now, it won’t likely lead to any significant legislation. “I think there’s a very good chance that as this works its way through the process on Capitol Hill,” he said, “you’ll end up with essentially a resolution that will be a minor nuisance, but not a disruptive event for the industry.”

Panel: Labels Need To Refocus

Switching topics, Weller told the crowd that labels are missing the boat when they focus attention on marginal stations in large markets instead of on dominant stations in smaller markets. “We have a station in Erie, PA that has 100,000 listeners, and it’s not a reporting station so [the labels] really don’t care about the radio station,” he said. “But they may have a station in a top 100 market that has 50,000 listeners and they’ll support that station. I think the [record] industry needs to look at the millions and millions of people that they’re just not even covering. They used to cover them, and their business used to be better, so maybe they should look at that.”

Meanwhile, Smulyan believes that educating the public on the issue of content ownership is a major hurdle facing the record industry. “The music industry is in grave straits today because we have raised a generation of kids who believe that they have a constitutional right to get recorded works for free.” Smulyan used the example of owning a grocery store to what’s happened to the record industry: “If you go to a grocery store, fill up your basket, and when you get to the checkout you just wave to the grocer, this is not a compelling business proposition for the grocer. Pretty soon he’s not going to be a grocer. And yet that’s what we’ve done to the music industry.”

Field presented a challenge to the industry: to debunk the myths that have been propagated in the mainstream press. “There is so much false information out there, it makes your blood boil,” Hogan added, “You couldn’t have paid the New York Times five years ago to write about radio,” although he acknowledged that the radio industry has been slow in responding to the fervent criticism, a lot of which is focused specifically at Clear Channel.

® 2004 Radio & Records, Inc.