Taxpayer foots another market failure

What was it Steve Maharey told us in March, when figures showed New Zealand music accounted for a record 20.8% of music played on commercial radio in 2005 - up from 18.6% in 2004?

"This is a fantastic result for the music industry, and it demonstrates what we've known all along - that New Zealanders want to tune into more of their own music," Steve Maharey said.

But the result was boosted by Kiwi FM which played 100 percent NZ music that hardly anyone was listening to!

Kiwi FM was launched on Waitangi Day last year and attracted just 0.7 per cent of the Auckland audience with a national listenership of about 43,000.

This week, with CanWest about to shut the station, the Government granted the company three FM frequencies to keep it going ...

So Maharey is basing his claim on the number of hours played - not the number of ears listening. Anybody operating in the real market would know the danger of that fallacy - basing your decisions on what you produce and not what was purchased. You go bust.

But even worse than the taxpayer being forced to subsidise the station, is Maharey's use of a "rigged" result to bully other stations into upping their own quotas because that's what we - you and I - want.