Pig-Squeal Radio

As a director of Muzak Corp., ex-Adman William Burnett Benton found that there was a market for canned music, free of advertising plugs, piped directly into clubs, hospitals, restaurants, factories. Bill Benton decided to apply the same system to radio. He lined up big-name sponsors for such a project, including his old partner, Chester Bowles, now OPA boss; the University of Chicago's Robert M. Hutchins; Businessman Beardsley Ruml. He laid his plan before the Federal Communications Commission (retiring FCC Chairman James L. Fly is expected to join the group). This week the group is incorporating as Subscription Radio Inc.

It asks the FCC to assign it three channels for frequency modulation (FM) broadcasting. On these, three types of programs would be broadcast: 1) uninterrupted classical music; 2) continuous popular music; 3) shopping news and educational programs. Subscribers would pay 5-c- a day ($18.25 per year) to listen. Nonsubscribers would be kept from listening by a "pig squeal" which would be broadcast along with the programs, "jamming" all sets but those of the Benton subscribers, whose radios would tune out this squeal by a special apparatus. Benton proposes to let other broadcasters use the attachment for a small royalty so he would not have a monopoly.

Chief argument for Benton's proposal which is the first determined attack on radio advertising in the U.S.: the amount of good music on the air, says he, has constantly decreased, giving way to soap operas and "talk" programs. The Benton plan would give paying listeners all the music they wanted, 24 hours a day, without any advertising spiel.

Last week, as FCC still mulled over the plan, the New York Times attacked it: "The pig whistle injects a poll tax on radio -- the payment of a fee in order that the public might enjoy what is already free and their property -- the air. This is hardly a liberal conception of the 'freedom to listen.' " This could open "the doors to a whole series of exclusive squeals, each representing a different fee to the listener.

[It] seems an undemocratic means to a generally desirable end." But these were only the opening guns of the argument sure to rage. Bentonites believe that the proposal is no more un democratic than newspapers which cost 5-c- a day. And if the subscription radio provided programs the public liked better, the commercial radio would have to com pete or lose its audience.

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