Corporate Synergy 1, Common Sense 0

Okay, so the score is probably much, much worse than that. Regardless, yesterday, I heard an ad on Disney-owned WZZN (The Zone) here in Chicago for a Faith Hill special airing during the week on the Disney-owned ABC Family Channel. The problem is, there's no way in hell Faith Hill will ever be played on The Zone. There's no chance that anyone listening to The Zone gives a rat's ass about Nashville pop music at all. Period. I have a hard time imagining that, next to their From Zero and Sum 41 CDs, these predominantly teenage kids in Chicagoland have the likes of Hill and Shania Twain on their shelves. Or on their iPods.

So why would the cable network do something so ill-advised? For a clue, look at the "Disney-owned" part of both media outlets. With the FCC set to relax cross-ownership laws in the next month, and the advertising market still struggling, we will probably see more of this kind of thing, where advertisers pick their spots because they're cheap, easy and in the family. Executives in conference rooms see a young demographic in the radio audience, and they see a chance to expand the largely older audience for Hill, without taking into consideration that it might be a horribly bad idea. They've got products, and they've got markets, and they've got ledgers and balance sheets.

This has been endemic in the entertainment business for some time now, with huge conglomerates reducing the music industry to an exercise in the marketing of identical alternatives. Already, the Tribune corporation saturates it's various arms with blatant plugs for the others, so this is only the latest in a long list of affronts to consumers' intelligence. With an FCC chairman sympathetic to, or more likely in the pocket of, these behemoths and their CEOs, it's unlikely that the tide will turn any time soon. Some people are smart enough to separate the signal from the noise, but a lot of people aren't, and the increasingly depressing outcome is that these companies will continue to market less and less options to more and more people as they extend their reach into our media consciousness.

I don't have any real answers to this, other than to search out commercial-free (such as TiVo and it's commercial-skipping abilities, or even digital music channels from cable TV) or more independent (online radio, where it still exists, and local music scenes) wherever possible. In this current climate, turning to the government that's allowing this to happen doesn't seem like a very practical option. On the other hand, this is something very concrete that the typically aimless protesters of things like World Trade Organization meetings might be able to rally around. Whether they can earn coverage from the very media they would be railing against remains to be seen.