Radio Industry

More than 100 years ago, Congress gave composers the right to demand royalties from those who played or sang their musical works in public. That 1897 law would later help songwriters (along with their publishers) collect a percentage of the revenue from radio stations that broadcast their tunes over the air. But when the radio industry was developing early in the 20th century, there was no copyright protection for the sound-recording business that was emerging around the same time.

There was punk aplenty at Saturday's opening show of KROQ-FM's two-night Almost Acoustic Christmas bill at Gibson Amphitheatre. The lineup was dominated by the 200 mph music, from headliner the Offspring down through Chicago's Rise Against and Southern California's own AFI and Slightly Stoopid.

RADIO'S Golden Age was laid to rest in the spring of 1949. Influential glossies like Life wondered if the medium had doomed itself; newspapers issued regular reports of plummeting ad sales and dismal industry morale. By April, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Wayne Coy acknowledged, to a Chicago convention of broadcasters, "Television is here and here to stay.... It is a new force unloosed in the land. I believe it is an irresistible force."

"Get up. It's already 10 o'clock," urges the voice on the radio. "If you haven't had your breakfast yet, do have a steaming hot cup of tea or coffee while I play this number for you." A song from a Bollywood hit movie follows and then more music after that, hour after hour, blaring from radios in cars, homes, mobile phones, offices and markets here in the Indian capital. Like so many other parts of the economy, the radio industry is booming in this country of 1.1 billion people.

In the wake of declining radio revenue, CBS Corp. said Monday that it was replacing Joel Hollander, chief executive of CBS Radio, with a former president of the group, Dan Mason. The nation's second-largest radio group announced this year that revenue declined 7% in the year ended Dec. 31 after shock jock Howard Stern was lured from CBS to Sirius Satellite Radio Inc.

Adam Nathanson is making the most of his media-rich bloodline. His grandfather was an advertising man who published Radio Showmanship Magazine in 1940 and bought a radio station in 1952. His uncle Greg ran the Fox TV station group in the late '90s for Rupert Murdoch before retiring. After his father, Marc, sold the family's Los Angeles-based Falcon Cable TV company in 1999 to billionaire Paul Allen for $3.6 billion, Adam asked him to back his own entrepreneurial hunch.

The board of Clear Channel Communications Inc. accepted a sweetened offer Friday from private equity firms trying to buy the radio and billboard company. The offer of $39.20 a share is similar to one the board rejected two weeks ago. Last week, the board postponed its scheduled vote on the earlier $39-a-share offer at the urging of some shareholders. The new offer by the equity group led by Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Capital Partners is valued at about $19.

A group backed by the record industry that collects Internet music royalties said Tuesday that it would defer new copyright payment rates for small webcasters who claim the higher payments would bankrupt them. SoundExchange, which collects and distributes royalties from webcasters and satellite radio, said the offer was for webcasters with revenues of $1.25 million or less.

A court ruling last week easing restrictions on the inadvertent broadcast of obscenities is touching off a new war of the words. A federal appeals court's pointed criticism of attempts to regulate broadcast content could reverberate through the government's entire regime for keeping indecent language and images off the airwaves.

A coalition of recording artists, music companies and industry groups said Thursday that it would push for compensation of performers whose music is played on the radio. The MusicFirst Coalition, which counts recording artists Don Henley, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera and Wyclef Jean among its members, intends to lobby Congress for new laws requiring the payments by broadcasters. The group said U.S.