The Convergence Review Committee Interim Report released this week wasn’t timid in recommending changes to bring media regulation into the 21st century. Although much of the focus was on changing the rules for Television and Newspapers while making some for the Internet, some of the implications for Radio are interesting, to say the least. One is the recommendation to eliminate broadcast licence fees. While not so much a windfall for Radio as it is for TV, the implication is that in the future broadcast spectrum will not have any more value than an online server, or some other platform yet to be invented. It is as if land prices will plummet because we will all have the ability to build houses in space.
The other interesting suggestion is, in the longer term, to drop Australian content quotas in terms of air-time, in favour of providing more funding to create local content. Presumably, the more foreign content you broadcast, the more money you’ll have to put towards Australian productions. What’s more, foreign producers will have to pay in to a local production fund if they want to do business here. The outcome should be that the more funding that’s available, the more high quality local content will be produced – content that media will want to broadcast, both here and overseas.
While this proposed model has been designed with movies and television in mind, could it be applied to radio and the music it plays?
Commercial Radio Australia certainly wouldn’t argue against dropping the quota. In fact, it is currently lobbying to do just that. On the other hand, paying more money to record companies is likely to be a sticking point. Perhaps, if they knew that the money was going to go directly to developing new artists rather that just more for performance and publishing rights, they’d be more amenable. Should they be? Why?
Peter Saxon