It was my observation that songs were played during commercial breaks at :30 and :50 and that national commercials seemed to be provided for breaks at :20 and :40. And then there were songs for news breaks.
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FCC & Radio Ownership Limits
- Thread starter TheBigA
- Start date
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Where did this discussion move from the possibility of ownership caps being further loosened to where the satellite music networks took their breaks and what was used as filler?
Ownership caps led to a discussion of national radio networks as exist in other countries, which led to questions of how that would work in a country our size and how to insert local breaks and/or content into a national network feed. That, in turn, led back to how the satellite networks handled breaks back in the day.
It's all perfectly logical... <g>
But I'm going to address the question of whether lifting ownership limits could lead to national networks of stations that are commonly owned, and I think that the likely answer is that they wouldn't. Why not? Multiple reasons:
- Since the only ownership limits that currently exist are local limits, national networks could be assembled under the current rules. But they haven't been.
- Since ownership of radio stations on a national basis is still diffused between quite a few different owners, assembling the stations to create a national network would be hugely difficult.
- Our country is big -- and so much of it is lightly populated. The number of stations it would take to cover the country is mind-boggling. Even if broadcasters opted to leave the emptiest parts of the country unserved, I'd guess we'd be looking at assembling 300+ stations per national network.
- Cultural differences are still significant. Even if we took the idea that someone else proposed of regional networks by timezone, my guess is that listeners in rural Georgia might be different enough from those in, say, urban Boston that separate programming would still make more sense.
- That said, smaller regional networks are likely to ultimately happen -- a network serving, perhaps, the state of Texas or the mid-Atlantic East coast or other somewhat more cohesive regions could make sense. (And, yes, I know that there are huge differences between Dallas, Dumas, and Ft Stockton -- but still, it would be more viable than national or time zone based networks)
This has been done with sports networks in Iowa and other states:
KXNO’s Iowa Sports Network Debuts New Lineup
iHeartMedia's "Iowa Sports Network" based at 1460 KXNO Des Moines/106.3 KXNO-FM Ankeny IA, debuted a new weekday lineup today. Heather
radioinsight.com
Audacy To Launch 97.1 Detroit Sports Radio Network Across Michigan
Audacy has announced it will launch a statewide Sports network in Michigan on Monday, December 1.
radioinsight.com
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
There have also, at various times in the history of the medium, been statewide or regional news and agriculture networks. One of the more famous was the Intermountain Network, operated from flagship KALL/910 in Salt Lake City (later KWDZ, and silent since 2017) with 41 interconnected stations which were also Mutual Broadcasting System affiliates. It switched primary affiliations in 1959 after Mutual barely survived a financial crisis which almost led AT&T to disconnect the "long lines" service.
Then there was the Don Lee Network, consisting entirely of stations in the Pacific Time Zone, Major Armstrong's Yankee Network, Gordon McLendon's Liberty Network ...
One could also call the satellite-delivered music networks from Transtar/Unistar, Satellite Music Network, Jones and the like as national networks of a sort.
The issue is that the driving force here is sales, not programming. Not "regional differences" and not time zone difficulties. Ad agencies have, among reasons not to buy radio, the complicated market by market, station by station, owner by owner system we have in the U.S.
In nations where there are national stations, agencies make one buy and cover the whole country with a specific listener profile that covers age and psychographics. In the U.S. It takes hundreds of buys, lots of manpower even if automated buys are done. All the internet based services are broad and easy to buy.
In one case I am familiar with, Colombia, radio has nearly double the percentage of national ad expenditures that it does in the USA. This is mostly because the ownership groups make it easy to buy the kinds of audience, nationally, that the agency accounts want.
Again, keep in mind that agency buys represent transactions by intermediaries. They are looking to do what they are supposed to but with the highest profit margins for them. National radio stations (not "networks") are the answer to the profit goals of agencies.
Columbia is 1/10th the size of the US, and about 15% of the population. It's really not comparable.
In the US, local sales still exceed national sales for most groups. That's why they still do local radio.
It is just one example. Brazil, with much closee to the US population, and the same kind of national radio structure I have subscribed, is another example. Or Chile, which is as long as the U.S.A. is wide is another example.
In all cases, those countries, like the U.S.A., have national brands that advertise via national scope ad agencies. As for advertising and marketing, they are no different than the U.S.A.
I picked Colombia because it has three significant population segments, ranging from Black to Indigenous to Spanish ascendancy. It also has a variety of zones, just as the U.S. does, with different language usage, local cultures and senses of heritage.
In the major markets, the significant stations get most of their revenue from agencies. As a long-time general manager and owner of stations, I don't classify sales by "local" and "national" but by "agency" and "direct".
Even when you get out of the top 100 markets, you still have local and regional agency buys. And they work the same whether they come from that little "Bob Smith Agency" in Montgomery or from McCann in NYC.
The easier it is for an agency to buy a medium, the better it's chances of getting a sale.
* "Columbia" is a district on the polluted Potomac or a river in the Northwest. Not country.
Ease isn't the issue. It's desire. Radio companies are in both national and local businesses, both on air and online. They know that online is where the growth is. So making it easier to buy a less desirable medium won't really change things. They have to change the radio narrative.
I didn’t know about those ag or news networks.
There are still some ag networks around, like the Northern Ag Network, with affiliates in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming:
Home
Northern Ag Top Stories Trump Administration Delivers Second Stage of Crop Disaster Assistance for Farmers by Colton Young November 17, 2025 November 17, 2025 Three days after the government reopened and despite the radical left Democrat caused shutdown, President Donald J. Trump and U.S...
www.northernag.net
There’s also the Northern News Network, which has affiliates all across Montana:
Northern News Network - Northern Broadcasting System
News Headlines Farmers Voicing Opinions and Uncertainty on Tariffs/Trade War News Headlines Fentanyl Seizures Decrease Felony Arrests Drug Seizures Increase News Headlines Montana Influenza Death Count At Highest In Past 7 Flu Seasons News Headlines Montana Aeronautics Board Allocates $3.2...
northernbroadcasting.com
Guess how those ag networks got the money to get started….
In the case of ad agencies, whether they are down the street or across the nation, "ease" means staff size and labor costs.
But the industry still gets well over 80% of its revenue from OTA stations. For the moment, for February 2026 billing, that is where the money is.
You are assuming that traditional radio, if made easier and cheaper to buy, is "less desirable". Agencies look at getting results for clients while garnering fees from those clients and commissions from the media they buy. "Desirable" is mostly synonymous with "profit".
No, they have to make radio simpler to buy. When you have to buy over a hundred different markets, each with 12 to 25 viable stations, each of which has a rating of, at most, around 0.3 (that is "zero point three"), buying radio is complicated. And then that process has to be repeated and negotiated for each and every market.
As it is now, just the monthly invoices for a 120 market deep buy with a goal of perhaps 10 to 12 Grips per station at three to four stations per market will give you the equivalent of two or three reams of paper. .
Those are "networks" and not regional stations or national stations. The concept that works outside the U.S. has nothing to do with networks... it is about national stations.
A lot of those started at one station in a region that formed a group for sales. Again, the purpose of those networks was always to make it easier for agencies to buy groups of stations in one package.
Radio audiences are declining. You know by how much since 2000. That's what makes radio less desirable.
Agencies don't have to buy individual markets unless they want to. If they want to make an easy buy, go to iHeart and they get 95% of the country. 160 markets. 260 million listeners. iHeart's syndication company, Premier, does business with lots of stations not owned by iHeart, increasing their reach. One stop. What's easier?
Agencies look at metrics of each medium. In the case of radio, they buy based on Grips or Impressions. All that matters there is "how many / how much".
But they get a ragged assortment of schedules, rotations, formats, ratings and so on. And a whole bunch of individual bills and affidavits.
With targeting even more precise today than ever, advertisers want the lowest administrative cost and precise delivery of their clients' target demos and such.
They are adding cume. You can't add cume unless you go and get "unduplicated cume". And what is being bought today is very specific as to age, gender, ethnicity, income and other factors. The day of the "buy the top 5" is long gone.
But, again, an assortment of good and bad stations (just look at some of Premier's "affiliates" that are rimshot suburban underated signals) with not all formats duplicated or replicated in every market. That kind of buy is usually cheaper than buying stations direct, and does not guarantee times, dayparts, delivery. It is sort of like heaving turds at a wall and hoping some of the crap sticks.
Let me simplify this: Even if the FCC eliminates all ownership caps, there will never be a situation where one company owns all 16,000 radio stations. It's just not going to happen. One company won't even own 2000 radio stations. So no matter what, the situation won't improve. The only thing that I see happening is a cross-company online sales platform. But even then, you get that "ragged assortment of schedules, etc."
The foreign record labels are equally frustrated with this country. It's so much easier everywhere else.
It won't because, for starters, just under 5,000 AMs that really nobody would want.
Then there are a "whole bunch" of rimshot non-viable signals, little A's in bigger metros, and signals where the bigger nearby large market B's and C's cover adequately.
400 to 500 or so signals per format across the country. Three or four companies with 2 or 3 national "stations" each. The math works.
And in the meantime, NRG in France or Los 40 in Spain do very well...
And whether it is in Chile or Czechoslovakia, they only have to call on the national station PDs.
Oh ok. This ag network says it got started with seed capital.
The US isn't France or Spain. While I see lots of advantages, I don't expect it to happen in the same way as other countries.
I don't expect it to happen here, either. Nobody wants to spend the needed money to build such a structure, even if it is proven to make radio vastly more attractive to ad agencies.
The U.S. waited way too long to relax the 7/7/7 rules when most of the rest of the hemisphere and world were way beyond that. It all goes back to the early 1930's when politicians, afraid of regional newspapers, tried to prevent higher power radio stations and larger group owners.
As I've mentioned, in the later 60's I owned 9 stations in one market in Ecuador, and had licenses for over a dozen more in total. It made sales to agencies simpler, as on one visit I could sell over a dozen stations and 6 or 7 markets