One of the upshots of the homogenization of radio over the past few years is that I've more or less stopped listening to music on the radio. I'm going to club shows more. It costs more, but I can usually stand the music -- and it gets away from the programming decisions of the corporate monoliths.

Or so I'd like to think. But Jeff Sharlet has an article in this month's Harper's (which I don't see on line -- they kinda want you to buy it) on Clear Channel, which describes, among other things, their attempt to bring the same benefits to the live music arena that they have to broadcast music on the airwaves:

Musicians say touring has become a cross-country hopscotch from one Clear Channel venue to another, each more sterile than the last; their agents and managers say that if artists don't play when and where Clear Channel says, they will suffer less airplay or none. ...

Sharlet shows how the strategy works by exploring the life of a guy named Bryan Dilworth, who works booking live gigs for Clear Channel in Atrios's stomping grounds in Philly -- and some independent clubs on the side -- but the company doesn't own him. Or at least so he wants to think:

At various times, Dilworth told me he worked for Clear Channel, or didn't work for Clear Channel, or Clear Channel simply didn't matter. Sometimes he called Clear Channel "the evil empire"...

But in the end, it may not matter what the guy thinks he's doing:

Dilworth develops "baby bands" in [tiny, independent] clubs like the Khyber on his own time and filters the most marketable of them to the more lucrative venues he books as his alter ego, a Clear Channel talent buyer. Such a double role appears to be part of the Clear Channel business plan, in which the independents who should be an alternative to Clear Channel instead become the company's farm team. As a result, live music is following the route taken by radio. Songs that sound the same are performed in venues that look the same and even have the same name: identically branded venues, all controlled by Clear Channel...

It's hard for me to know what to think of this. The clubs I wind up going to most often -- the Middle East, T.T. the Bear's, and so forth, at least claim to have independent ownership. Then again, we have a radio station around here, WFNX, which is very proudly independent, and years and years ago programmed itself like an overgrown college station -- but the last time I tried to listen to it, admittedly quite some time ago, their programming was in the grip of a consultant whose brilliant idea was to shovel the exact same, well, stuff onto the airwaves as the corporate giants. So even independent ownership is no guarantee. And the band I saw in TT's last night, who played good solid rock that sounds, well... about as good as anything you can hear on the radio, proudly posts on their web site that they are "cocked and loaded in Lava/Atlantic president Jason Flom's star-making cannon"...

By the way, unlike a lot of lefty bloggers, Sharlet does not perceive the company as following any particular political agenda. In his article, he points out that many evangelics are appalled at the antics of Clear Channel shock jocks, and that Clear Channel's post-September-11 list of songs for its programmers to avoid included not only anti-war songs, but also "Some Heads are Gonna Roll" by Judas Priest. In private email, he adds a list of Clear Channel folks who are doing progressively slanted broadcasts of various kinds on the local level.

Then again, the best he can do with progressive talk show host Randi Rhodes's allegations that the company is keeping her out of national syndication to keep Rush Limbaugh happy, is that it if it's true, then the company is following Limbaugh's agenda -- for purely commercial reasons -- and not its own...