Unfortunately, I'm starting to think the problem is they ARE giving the customers what they want. Not all of us, mind you, but a profitable majority.

The same with Nashville.

I can rail about it (and do), and extol the virtues of the Thrift Store Cowboys or Randy Rogers or the Dead End Angels or the Asylum Street Spankers.

But many more people seem to prefer Shania Twain and Kenny Chesney, and want to hear them on the radio.

Then there's a flip side, where "community" sentiment sometimes turns a station like KPFT from great music back to Lunatic Left Radio. What can ya do? :)

Kuff, I suggest checking out DIY Media, he does a good job of keeping up with FCC news. Really into the pirate radio side of things, and, well, there's nothing wrong with pirates.

there's this thing called the market. you might want to look into it. it tends to result in products, services and price points for which there is a profitable demand.

There's also this thing called "oligopoly", which is when there's insufficient competition in a market, which results in inefficiencies.

and what potentate gets to decide what level of competition is "insufficient?" and when the results of market competition are "inefficient?" government action against "oligopolies" is merely the fascist expression of the idea "i can't win in the market place, so i believe i will obtain the result i want at gunpoint." i propose a very broad definition of fascism, including all persuasions that hold that the state is more important than the individual, and include herein communism, nazism, the fascism of mussolini, clintonism and the fascism of franco. fascism, regrettably, is not confined to either the right or left wings, and seems to be ineluctably bound up with the human failing that makes the leap from "i believe it would be good if i did X" to "i believe i will force all my neighbors to do X."

dude, if you don't like clear channel, don't listen to it, and urge everyone you know not to listen to it.

Abelard's inability to grasp simple non-crony economics is stunning. CC is part of an old-fashioned oligopoly. There is a very limited amount of airspace - that happens to belong to the American people - not Lowry Mays or Rupert Murdoch.

Trust me, I have a degree from the Phil Gramm School of Economics at College Station -with an excellent GPR I might add! I sometimes miss the days when I got to run circles around knuckleheaded conservatives like Abelard!

Oh, and BTW, Clinton signed the horrible communications bill that has allowed Mays and his ilk to run their oligarchy - so get your 'istas right Abelard!

smirking simply reinforces the point i made--statists like him define as any market place result they disapprove of, and them seem in many cases to be unable to resist using the state's power of armed coercion to suppress these market place results, substituting some market place result they do approve of.

i don't dispute that Clear Channel could be fairly described as an oligopoly, but i say, so what? you, sir, seem to be unable to grasp the circularity of your argument: oligopolies are bad, CC is an oligopoly, therefore CC is bad, and i suppose you mean the badness of CC to stand for proof that oligopolies are bad.

this is the only circle you seem to have argued around me.

in my previous post, i wrote the phrase "very bad word" preceded by a less-than sign and followed by a greater than sign, after "...statists like him define as". for some reason, this phrase was not included in my post.

in my previous post, i wrote the phrase "very bad word" preceded by a less-than sign and followed by a greater than sign, after "...statists like him define as". for some reason, this phrase was not included in my post.

The answer to that is that since my comments render HTML tags, anything that looks like a tag, which is to say anything within angle brackets, gets rendered. If what's there is invalid HTML, it disappears. Try square brackets or curly braces next time.

what is the İnsufficient competition?