I miss music: Do you? Will Clear Channel's changes democratize the medium?w/poll

Good Sunday morning, this weekend, I had to good fortune to watch on VH-1
Classic, the making of Aja, the classic Steely Dan album, and it made me realize how much I miss music.

A little musical history, I was born in 1958, a very typical baby boomer growing up on a farm in Texas, but one of my earliest memories was seeing the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
In my household we had one small record player, but most of our allowances ( a dime a week) from doing farm chores went to buy the newest hit record.

I was the youngest of four, in the Sixties my siblings went from the Monkees to Jimi Hendrix in about five years and I did, too. I listened to a small AM
radio each night as I did farm chores. My brothers put an eight-track on a tractor.

They went off to college in the seventies and came back and introduced me to FM radio (where all the DJs talked low and mellow versus the AM radio where everyone was peppy).

By the eighties I had graduated college and had gone to work and bought albums and watched something really cool --MTV!

In the nineties, I started moving around the country with my job, and buying CDs. And then something happened.

It became harder and harder to find music I could listen to and relate to.

I think it had something to do with the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed unlimited ownership of radio stations. Clear Channel, a publicly traded company, headed by right-wing Republicans, the Mays family from San Antonio, TX gobbled up dozens and dozens of radio station borrowing heavily until they owned more than 1,300 stations in 300 cities and had the dominant market share in 100 of the top 113 stations.

They limited playlists and force-fed us the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura. They bought out and consolidated concert promoters and became the behometh SFX concert promoter and created limited choices in that arena, too.

Then, something happened, Napster, and a myriad of music choices became available to consumers.

Satellite Radio came on the scene in 2003 (however, Clear Channels owns 12 stations there). MP3s and Ipods and ITunes made CDs somewhat obsolete.

At the height of its power, Clear Channel began banning artists from their playlists for the political views--most famously, the Dixie Chicks.

But technology changed our culture and decentralized and fragmented how we get music, and "terrestrial" radio has seen margins shrink for the past four years.

In 2006 leveraged to the gills, and hearing footsteps on Wall Street, Clear Channel began the process of taking themselves private. They sold
more than 400 stations in non-Top 100 markets.

And you know what, no big corporate radio giants wanted them. So small limited partnership radio stations groups are forming around different cities around the country, and already there's less lock-step programming.

So, maybe there's hope.

But I miss music being something that forms a common link among us all.
It's so fragmented.

I love Satellite Radio, but yesterday I watched the VH-1 Top 20 countdown, and recognized two of the artists.

Why did MTV stop playing videos?

Why won't MTV and VH-1 have their own satellite radio stations?

In the internet age, what can we do about this?

How can we create our own, music-only UTube?

Also, why can't any artist over 30 seem to gain any traction any more?