The argument for loosening broadcast ownership rules is well-documented in FCC filings and NAB talking points. Attorney David Oxenford frames it differently: through the eyes of a local advertiser trying to reach every Country music listener in a single market.
Speaking on the Borrell Associates Local Marketing Trends podcast, the Wilkinson Barker Knauer partner laid out what he considers the clearest illustration of radio’s structural disadvantage in today’s advertising marketplace.
“An advertiser wanting to reach 100 percent of the over-the-air Country radio market is going to have to go to three different operators who each operate competing country stations,” Oxenford said. “They have to adopt three different sales practices on those three different companies. And it just makes it that much harder for the local advertiser to reach the audience that they’re trying to reach.” The alternative, he noted, requires no negotiation at all.
“When they go to Facebook or Spotify or any of the digital competition, they can really click a button and reach everybody within a market that meets their demographic targets.”
Oxenford, whose firm represents broadcast clients before the FCC, traced the mismatch to ownership caps written for a media environment that no longer exists. “In 1996, audio was radio,” he said. “These days, audio is radio, audio is podcasts, audio is Spotify, audio is Apple Music. There was basically no limit. Audio is really YouTube in many ways.”
This matches the latest argument from Connoisseur Media CEO Jeff Warshaw, who filed comments in the FCC’s 2022 Quadrennial Review proceeding arguing that Spotify’s AI-driven Prompted Playlist feature, which blends music and podcasts into a single product, proves digital audio platforms compete directly with broadcast radio and that local ownership caps should be repealed as a result.
He described FCC movement on the radio side as more straightforward than the TV debate. “There’s not really a whole lot of opposition to relaxing those ownership rules given the change in the audio marketplace,” Oxenford said, adding that a commission decision could come as early as this summer.
The core argument, in his framing, is survival. Without the scale to consolidate sales operations and build a broader revenue base, local broadcasters lose the advertising support that funds the local programming that distinguishes them from digital competitors in the first place. “You don’t want broadcasting to go the way of the newspaper,” Oxenford said. “If you want broadcasters to continue to be able to be sources of local news and information, they’ve got to be able to scale up to provide a better local service.”
