Phoenix Media/Communications Group founder and CEO Stephen Mindich talks about battling corporate conformity.

By Jason Roeder
Berklee.edu Correspondent
June 10, 2005

	Stephen Mindich, with Berklee trustee emeritus Mike Dreese in the background.
	Photo by Phil Farnsworth

"I am to a media mogul as a bump is to a mountain," said Mindich, who recently visited Berklee's David Friend Recital Hall to deliver the 2005 James G. Zafris Lecture for Music Business/Management. But in the New England media industry, one in which competitors constantly emerge and fade away, this "bump" has loomed large. As founder, chair, and CEO of Phoenix Media/Communications Group, Mindich presides over the Pulitzer Prize–winning Boston Phoenix weekly newspaper, alternative radio station WFNX-FM, and other regional media outlets. On a national scale, however, and in an age in which smaller media companies are frequently appropriated by larger ones, Mindich's independent holdings seem stubbornly anachronistic. But someone has to take a stand. The big guys are hurting everyone—except their shareholders.

"These multimedia conglomerates grasp every form of media one can name," Mindich said, "and they're adding new ones every single week, further limiting entrepreneurial and competitive endeavors.... When it becomes—as I think it has—only about money and so-called shareholder equity, there really isn't room for experimentation, creative risk taking, or long-term investing, and when by some happenstance, there is a breakthrough idea, it quickly becomes copycat city."

Mindich talked in detail about the effect of concentrated ownership on the radio business in particular. With fewer and fewer entities running an ever-greater number of stations, the competitive incentive to break new talent or diversify to attract new audiences is lost.

As long as the bottom line holds, the product is an afterthought.

"They're focused on playing a very limited number of songs that for the most part are only the familiar hits played over and over again," Mindich said, "while cramming more and more advertising spots into their broadcast hour."

And after a while, listeners get used to the monotony. What's worse, they grow comfortable with it.

Mindich said that when more adventurous radio stations lose listeners, their ratings naturally suffer, which means they lose the leverage to charge advertisers at competitive rates. And when these stations fold, a corporate clone is always there to take its place.

But what really troubles Mindich isn't so much the hit that independent radio stations such as WFNX take to their bottom line—though he's not very happy about it, of course—it's what consolidation says about our changing culture.

"There's an overall dumbing down of the public that takes hold fast and furiously," Mindich said, "and people get used to those lower standards very, very quickly."

Mindich brought props to demonstrate rapid changes in the music business.
Photo by Phil Farnsworth

"One day people will get tired of the same-old, same-old," Mindich said, "and when that happens, and these companies ain't got nothing to send down that distribution channel, it's suddenly going to negatively financially impact them.... Hopefully, that pendulum will swing back, and quality content, including brilliant new music, will once again be valued by businesses who are once again dedicated to more than just the next financial report to Wall Street."

Of course, some speculate that Sirius and XM satellite radio stations will accelerate this process. But Mindich, in a postlecture discussion with Berklee trustee emeritus and Newbury Comics CEO Mike Dreese, said that terrestrial radio is here to stay. It's too embedded for one thing—Sirius and XM, according to Mindich, have about 4 million listeners combined, compared with approximately 285 million for terrestrial radio. It's true that satellite technology is just getting its footing in the market, but Mindich said that there's something unique about terrestrial broadcasts that's going to keep people from making the switch.

"It's local," Mindich said. "It's something you can touch, something you can identify with."

The technological and structural changes in the music industry will prove a mixed blessing to emerging artists, Mindich said. Making music is easier than it's ever been, but selling it is a completely different story.

"Yes, you can upload MP3s all over the place," said Mindich, "but that doesn't create a market.... Right now, there's a lot of people with great art to make, but not a lot of outlets for them to find commercial ways to sell it."

This isn't a call to surrender. But in times like these, Mindich said, you have to be a warrior.

"There's no easy answer," Mindich said. "Be fast, be smart, pound on doors. Persistence, persistence, persistence. I'll tell you something, starting something is difficult and sustaining something is far, far harder. It's combat duty."

Jason Roeder is Berklee's editor/writer in Berklee's Office of Communications.