Another report from the It Couldn’t Happen to a Nicer Group of People Desk:

Four years ago, Clear Channel opened up a new ad strategy, “Less Is More.” With stations clogged with ads and listenership decreasing, the company decided to try to stress shorter ads, and run fewer of them per hour. According to the Wall Street Journal ($), the company is now abandoning the strategy.

The story runs the numbers in various ways. Whether the strategy worked at all is open to dispute; the company’s radio division (like the industry as a whole) has been stagnant for years, but it’s possible that without the plan sales would have dropped farther. Still, for Clear Channel haters (like Hitsville), this is good news. The company contributed mightily to the ruination of radio in the late 1990s by buying up stations, running up the number of commercials per hours, ramping up the use of voice-tracking*, and de-localizing the industry generally. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the company’s execs acted like thugs and flouted federal ownership rules, as my colleague Eric Boehlert detailed with a great deal of brio in Salon in the early 2000s.

The rise of the iPod, internet radio and satellite has been a challenge for the terrestrial radio industry over the past half decade, but Clear Channel was losing listeners at the rate of several percent a year dating back to the mid-1990s. Anyway, the company’s stock price is off by a third since the “Less Is More” strategy started. Now it’s forced back into its traditional “screw the listener, let’s load up the joint with crappy ads” gambit. And that, you gotta think, will, in the long run, inevitably lead to even fewer listeners, poorer Arbitrons, less revenue, and a bigger stock decline.

*  Voicetracking is where a supposedly local radio station has its crappy DJ patter taped in bulk and in advance by someone in a different city, and then digitally stripped in between the songs.