This law allowed companies to buy more AM and FM radio stations than ever before. Critics argue it was a green light for large companies to dilute programming with similar cookie-cutter formats, replace local DJs and radio personalities with remote voice-tracking technology, and cut staffs by automating many formerly-manned air-shifts.
Large companies like Clear Channel Radio - who at one point owned more than 1200 radio stations - defended these practices.
Significance: In retrospect, deregulation and consolidation probably made the AM and FM radio industry less competitive, less creative, and more vulnerable to upcoming technologies which were poised to take advantage of a changing paradigm for audio distribution.
Deregulation of the Radio industry and consolidation of operations and staff served to homogenize programming and weaken the value of AM and FM radio stations, allowing for other technologies to come along like Internet Radio and Satellite Radio able to chip away at that portion of the available audience that was becoming disenchanted or disenfranchised.
Commercial AM and FM radio began to make itself less compelling at a time when new technologies were about to redefine the concept of "Radio" - and compete head on against it.
In my opinion, the period commencing with the introduction of Real Audio in 1995 through the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 should be viewed as the delineation between what I refer to as the end of the "Era of Commercial AM and FM" and the beginning of what is now the "Modern Radio Era".
