Station Ownership and Its Effects on Playlists in U.S. Radio Markets

Abstract

This paper examines the extent to which radio station content is influenced by common ownership of stations and additional competition, and whether these effects differ when comparing large corporately-owned stations to other stations. We confirm previous results in the literature indicating that co-ownership of a pair of station leads to increased content differentiation. We find this effect is muted when the stations are co-owned by a large parent company, a finding that can be explained by these stations being less sensitive to local preferences. Competition would seem to induce stations to be more sensitive to local preferences, as all stations regardless of the characteristics of their parent tend to increase variety as the number of within-format competitors increase. Furthermore, stations with large parents deviate more from nationally representative playlists in the face of additional competitors. They deviate less from national playlists, however, when their parent has a strong presence in other formats in the market, a finding that indicates that the ownership structure of stations outside of a given format may be relevant considerations from the perspective of market definition.