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se is easier to find and easier to control. This regulation of the creative process, which began as a tiny regulation governing a tiny part of the market for creative work, has become the single most important regulator of creativity there is. It is a massive expansion in the scope of the government's control over innovation and creativity; it would be totally unrecognizable to those who gave birth to copyright's control.
Still, in my view, all of these changes would not matter much if it weren't for one more change that we must also consider. This is a change that is in some sense the most familiar, though its significance and scope are not well understood. It is the one that creates precisely the reason to be concerned about all the other changes I have described.
This is the change in the concentration and integration of the media. In the past twenty years, the nature of media ownership has undergone a radical alteration, caused by changes in legal rules governing the media. Before this change happened, the different forms of media were owned by separate media companies. Now, the media is increasingly owned by only a few companies. Indeed, after the changes that the FCC announced in June 2003, most expect that within a few years, we will live in a world where just three companies control more than 85 percent of the media.
These changes are of two sorts: the scope of concentration, and its nature.
Changes in scope are the easier ones to describe. As Senator John McCain summarized the data produced in the FCC's review of media ownership, "five companies control 85 percent of our media sources." 25 The five recording labels of Universal Music Group, BMG, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group, and EMI control 84.8 percent of the U.S. music market.26 The "five largest cable companies pipe programming to 74 percent of the cable subscribers nationwide."27
The story with radio is even more dramatic. Before deregulation, the nation's largest rad
