How Deregulation from the Telecommunications Act Stripped Black Music of Power

Thirty years ago, ownership caps vanished. Black stations vanished with them, replaced by playlists built for shareholders, not communities.

In 1995, the United States had roughly 5,100 commercial radio station owners. By 2001, that number had cratered to approximately 3,800. More than a thousand proprietors vanished from the dial in five years. The instrument responsible for that disappearance was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by President Clinton on February 8, 1996, which overhauled broadcast ownership rules and, in the process, stripped Black communities of one of their last reliable vehicles for economic self-determination and cultural clout.

Before the Act, federal regulations capped any single entity at forty stations nationwide (twenty AM, twenty FM) with strict local ceilings preventing one company from dominating a single market. The Act demolished the national cap entirely and loosened local restrictions through a graduated scale tied to market size. In large markets with forty-five or more stations, one owner could now hold up to eight. The rationale sold to Congress leaned on free-market logic. Deregulation would attract investment, diversify programming, improve service. What followed instead was a five-year acquisition binge that concentrated broadcast power in fewer hands than at any point since the medium’s invention.

Station sales nearly doubled between 1995 and 1996 as companies raced to exploit the new rules. Clear Channel Communications, which operated fewer than sixty-five outlets before the Act’s passage, gorged itself on acquisitions until it controlled approximately 1,200 by 2002. According to the FCC’s own Radio Industry Review, Clear Channel and Viacom together commanded outsized shares of national advertising revenue by the turn of the millennium, their dominance built on debt-financed purchasing sprees that smaller proprietors could not match and did not survive. The average number of distinct owners per Arbitron metro market slid from 13.5 to 10.3 during this window. That arithmetic tells you who got squeezed out. Independent operators, the category that included most Black license-holders, lacked the capital reserves or credit access to compete against publicly traded conglomerates leveraging Wall Street financing to bundle hundreds of licenses under a single corporate umbrella.

The toll on minority licensure registered on the congressional record itself. At a 2003 Senate Commerce Committee hearing chaired by Senator John McCain, testimony documented a fourteen-percent decline in African American radio proprietors since deregulation took effect. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration had been tracking the pattern for years through its Minority Telecommunications Development Program, and the data told a consistent story of structural disadvantage compounding under merger pressure. Between 1991 and 2000, minority ownership of commercial broadcast outlets hovered between 2.7 and 3.8 percent of the total, a sliver that the acquisition wave threatened to reduce further. NTIA reports from the period noted that sixty-one percent of minority-held stations operated as standalone enterprises rather than parts of larger groups, which meant they bore the full weight of rising operating costs, signal competition, and advertising-market erosion without the economies of scale that insulated chain operators. The agency’s own assessment concluded plainly that concentration still threatened the survival of most minority owners.

Capital access had always been the bottleneck for Black broadcasters, and the post-1996 terrain squeezed it tighter. When station prices inflated because chains were willing to pay acquisition premiums, knowing they could offset the cost through bundled ad sales across their portfolios, independent buyers faced a seller’s market they could not afford. A Georgetown Law Journal study from the period synthesized the evidence linking proprietor demographics to broadcast content, finding documented connections between who held licenses and what those licenses delivered. The research established that outlets owned by people of color were measurably more likely to air diverse news, public affairs coverage, and locally relevant material than their chain counterparts. License concentration redistributed editorial authority along with the licenses themselves.

Understanding what that redistribution destroyed requires remembering what Black radio accomplished before the sell-off. In the decades leading up to 1996, a Black-owned or Black-programmed outlet in a city like Memphis, Atlanta, Detroit, or Houston functioned as something far more granular than an entertainment pipeline. DJs built their reputations on breaking records that national promotion departments had not yet prioritized, picking up a regional single from a pressing plant and spinning it into a hit before any label marketing budget caught wind. Mix shows on Friday and Saturday nights operated as live A&R laboratories, testing songs against real audiences in real time, gauging which tracks moved a particular city’s dance floors and which ones died on arrival. Church advertisements, community announcements, and neighborhood business spots filled commercial breaks. The station was an economic circulatory system for Black neighborhoods, routing attention and dollars through community channels that absentee corporate control had no incentive to maintain once the license changed hands.

That circulatory system depended on program directors with community authority, people who lived in the market, knew its tastes, understood its politics, and exercised discretion over playlists based on neighborhood knowledge rather than corporate research. The Future of Music Coalition’s quantitative study of post-deregulation programming patterns measured what happened when that authority evaporated. As independent owners sold to national chains, song selection migrated from resident program directors and DJs to centralized playlist managers operating out of distant offices. Format overlap between supposedly distinct radio signals climbed as high as seventy-six to eighty percent in some markets, a figure that demolishes any pretense of diversity under consolidated control. Peter DiCola’s research for the Coalition traced the mechanism to its root. Fewer decision-makers meant fewer people making playlist decisions, which meant narrower rotations, which meant less room for records that did not already carry national promotional muscle behind them. The Government Accountability Office, in its 2010 report on media ownership and diversity, acknowledged that multiple studies had linked concentration to homogenized radio playlists, even as the agency noted ongoing debate about the exact degree of impact.

Homogenization did particular damage to Black music because it collapsed what had been a range of formats into one commercial corridor. A market that once supported an Urban AC signal, a hip-hop signal, a gospel signal, and a quiet storm signal under separate proprietors—each with its own program director, its own advertiser relationships, its own sense of obligation to a specific listening community—could, after the merger wave, house all those formats under one entity running them with shared research departments, shared playlists, and shared commercial imperatives. The call letters survived and the frequencies remained active, but the editorial independence that had allowed those outlets to serve different facets of Black life had been absorbed into a uniform corporate metabolism. A record that did not fit the parent company’s research profile for maximum cross-demographic appeal had nowhere to go.

The advertising dimension compounded the damage in ways that rarely surfaced in policy debates. Kofi Ofori’s research, published under the title “When Being No. 1 Is Not Enough,” documented a practice among advertisers and agencies known internally as “no Urban/Spanish dictates”—explicit instructions refusing ad placement on Black-formatted and Latino-formatted frequencies regardless of their ratings or consumption metrics. A station could deliver the largest audience in its market, and major advertisers would still route their budgets elsewhere. An independent Black operator could fight that practice through direct advertiser relationships, community pressure, and sheer persistence. Once a chain acquired that same outlet, the parent company had less incentive to wage the battle when its portfolio included formats that attracted ad dollars without the friction. The economic strangulation was quiet but measurable. Shrinking revenue constrained content budgets, starved investment in regional talent, flattened the programming until nothing distinguished the outlet from its competitors, and left it more exposed to the next round of cost-cutting.

A common deflection holds that terrestrial radio’s influence was already waning by the time the acquisition cascade’s effects matured, that streaming, satellite, and internet platforms would have dissolved broadcast gatekeeping leverage regardless of who held the licenses. That argument confuses a technology shift with a policy choice. The Telecommunications Act did not predict the internet’s disruption of broadcast media. It facilitated ownership concentration years before streaming offered an alternative distribution channel, and the roll-up it enabled locked in structural damage during the precise period when radio still held primary control over which songs reached mass audiences.

The Congressional Research Service’s analysis of the Act’s consequences confirmed that Congress itself had not anticipated the speed or scale of concentration that followed deregulation, which suggests the policy was less an organic market correction than an unexamined giveaway. As Napster, then iTunes, then Spotify arrived to offer musicians and listeners alternative paths around broadcast gatekeepers, the community infrastructure that had once given Black neighborhoods autonomous cultural transmission power had already been sold, absorbed, and operationally gutted.

The thirty-year anniversary of the Telecommunications Act arrives in a media environment where Black artists have more distribution options than at any previous moment and less institutional broadcast infrastructure under Black control or community editorial discretion than at any point since the medium became commercially viable. Streaming platforms have decentralized access to music but concentrated recommendation power in algorithmic systems maintained by companies with no roots in any neighborhood.

The gap the Act tore open between Black music’s creative output and Black communities’ structural grip on how that music circulates has never closed. It widened into a permanent condition, one where the culture generates enormous commercial value and the communities that originate it retain almost none of the broadcast apparatus that once converted cultural production into economic and political leverage. No algorithm recommends a church fundraiser between songs. No centralized playlist manager knows which local MC deserves a first spin. The frequency was always the asset. The robbery was letting someone else price it.

---

Works Cited

Congressional Research Service, “The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and Its Impact” and “Broadcast Station Totals,” reports R43936 and RL31925. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R43936.html / https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL31925.html

Federal Communications Commission, “Radio Industry Review 2002: Trends in Ownership, Format, and Finance,” FCC Working Paper, 2002. https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/working-papers/radio-industry-review-2002-trends-ownership-format-and-finance

Telecommunications Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-104, 110 Stat. 56, signed February 8, 1996. https://www.congress.gov/104/plaws/publ104/PLAW-104publ104.pdf

U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, hearing on “Media Ownership: Radio Industry,” 108th Congress, 2003. https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2003/1/media-ownership-radio-industry / https://govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-108shrg88772/html/CHRG-108shrg88772.htm

National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Minority Telecommunications Development Program Annual Reports, 1997–2001. https://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/opadhome/mtdpweb/01minrept/mtdpexecsum.htm / https://www.ntia.gov/files/ntia/publications/mtdpreportv2.pdf / https://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/reports/97minority/index.html

Peter DiCola, “False Premises, False Promises: A Quantitative History of Ownership Consolidation in the Radio Industry,” Future of Music Coalition, 2006. https://arthurmag.com/2006/12/16/false-premises-false-promises-a-quantitative-history-of-ownership-consolidation-in-the-radio-industry-by-peter-dicola-for-the-future-of-music-coaltion/

Government Accountability Office, “Media Ownership: Economic Factors Influence the Number of Media Outlets in Local Markets, While Ownership by Minorities and Women Appears Limited and Is Difficult to Assess,” GAO-10-369, 2010. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-10-369 / https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-10-369.pdf

Bill Ivey, “Radio Deregulation and Consolidation: Background Report,” Curb Center, Vanderbilt University. https://cdn.givingcompass.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/26100741/A-History-Of-Ownership-Consolidation-In-The-Radio-Industry.pdf

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications, studies on the nexus between broadcast ownership demographics and programming diversity. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1455&context=fclj

Kofi Asiedu Ofori, “When Being No. 1 Is Not Enough: The Impact of Advertising Practices on Minority-Owned & Minority-Formatted Broadcast Stations,” Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy.