In just a few short years, Clear Channel became a media behemoth, a poster boy for the evils of media consolidation … and then a Wall Street basket case. It’s a great story, one taken up by reporter Alec Foege, who has a new book out on the company. It’s called “Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Fall of Commercial Radio.” As the subtitle implies, it’s about more than Clear Channel as well.

The company began as a fairly grubby small-time radio operation, grimly running features on local companies to get them to advertise on its stations. As the dreams of its founders grew, however, it was poised to take full advantage once a credulous FCC relaxed media-ownership rules, and in a burst of activity in the late 1990s ended up owning some 1200 stations. Around the same time, its grabbed SFX, which had correspondingly bought up almost the entire rock-concert production industry. (That part of the business has been spun off, and now operates as LiveNation.)

That powerful aggregation, complete with a team of execs that weren’t afraid to use that power, created the Clear Channel we came to know and love. I have been an amateur Clear Channel-ologist since working with reporter Eric Boehlert on what I think is fair to call his groundbreaking investigations of the company in 2001 and 2002 for Salon. When I heard Foege had a book coming out, I emailed him and he graciously agreed to carry on a email discussion about his work. The books is in stores this week and available through Amazon as well.

We’ll be posting the conversation throughout the week.

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Dear Alec:

Thanks for taking the time to chat with me, and congrats on an engrossing book. I thought I would start with one quote you took the time to include in “Right of the Dial,” which underlies its clear-eyed strengths and, coincidentally, brings up an interesting way of looking at how companies like Clear Channel thrive. You’re talking about the future of how folks will consume media online, and you note:

“It more often involves listeners exchanging their musical preferences in real time online. If those preferences happen to be as bland as the offerings of Top 40 radio, so be it.”

It’s not a huge thing, but I does point out the uneasy disconnect between a company like the bottom-line focused Clear Channel and the listeners who, essentially make it easy for them. So before we go into the Clear Channel bashing, can I ask: Do folks get the media they deserve?

ALEC FOEGE: Excellent first question. It is a bit provocative, but it is also one that I spent some hard time thinking about when I first planned out my book. I decided early on that it’s nearly impossible (and somewhat snobbish) to argue what constitutes bad radio purely on aesthetic criteria. So I built my argument against the quality of today’s music radio based on short playlists and repetitive content. But clearly umpteen millions must disagree with me.

As a relatively current example, an Arbitron study from October 2007 determined that the most popular channels on satellite radio mirror the most popular formats on free radio. One could certainly debate the accuracy of Arbitron’s ratings methods, but it still is pretty jarring notion that people may be paying real money for what they already get for nothing (although the cable TV business was built on a similar premise). Then again, this might simply mean that the only people listening to radio of any sort these days are those who actually enjoy it. The answer is probably somewhere in between. A lot of people still listen to the radio because it’s there, typically preinstalled in their car. Likewise, a lot of people listen to satellite radio because their new cars come equipped with satellite radio units and 1-year complimentary subscriptions. Tellingly, the churn rate, the number of subscribers who don’t renew their subscriptions, continues to rise. In other words, the number of listeners willing to pay for radio programming of any kind is likely relatively small and finite. This is why the two satellite radio companies, XM and Sirus, are such trouble financially and why they want to merge.

People do get the media they deserve, but it depends on what the options are. In 1999/2000, when Clear Channel was at the height of its powers, the Internet had not yet caught on as source of music for the masses. Now it has, and that is one of among many reasons why Clear Channel has had trouble. It is also the main reason a broadcast radio company will never again be able to consolidate power, as Clear Channel did. Now radio is beginning to exhibit the Long Tail phenomenon, where listeners with broadband access can hear any radio station they want from their computers. I predict that, within five years, many new cars will have wireless Internet access, allowing drivers to access whatever Internet radio streamcast they desire. This development will kill off satellite radio with a few swift blows.

So how will today’s commercial radio behemoths fare in the online atmosphere? For now they will do fine, thanks to starkly anticompetitive royalty rules devised by the Copyright Royalty Board last year, which impose high fees on Internet-only stations. Internet-based extensions of existing terrestrial stations pay the same fees, but their parent corporations can usually afford them, whereas mom and pop Internet-only stations can’t. But I will suspect these rules will be changed as wireless Internet access becomes more prevalent.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that bland radio will always exist—because a lot of people like it. But fresh, vibrant programming is entering a renaissance and, with greater access, may take away a substantial amount of crummy commercial radio’s listenership over time.