i support pnoy's radio airplay quota

this article's been popping up on my facebook feed repeatedly the past few days, to pretty much unanimous discontent. at the heart of the matter is executive order 255, which states:

"all radio stations shall broadcast a minimum of four original [F]ilipino musical compositions in every clockhour of a program with a musical format."

or to put it another way, stations have to allot about a quarter of every hour of airplay to local music. which, if you think about it, is pretty reasonable. TV ads get more airtime than that.

so why all the negative comments?

1.) anything pnoy does is wrong.

i'm not qualified to talk about that.

2.) i'll listen to what i want!
no one's forcing anyone to listen to anything. they're forcing the station to play OPM one quarter of the time, thereby giving local artists more exposure (and/or royalties?), which hopefully leads to more income. is that so bad? the rest of us remain free to change the station, or pop in our earbuds, or play music on our pc, whenever "pusong bato" comes on. just like always.

3.) its forced patriotism! borderline communism!
look, this is about money, pure and simple. this is about giving a degree of economic protection to local music artists. EO 255 is, in effect, an airplay quota. the EU, australia, canada, new zealand, and venezuela, to name a few, also have radio airplay quotas; it's not really such a strange and unnatural thing. EO 255 will not turn us into north korea.

in fact, i'd be happy if they expanded the EO to cover movies as well, add a screen quota in there.

let's try to get past our kneejerk reaction against being told by the government what to do, and try to think about how EO 255 will benefit local artists (and by extension, pop culture) and how little its actual effect is going to be on our personal freedoms.

4.) but what about jazz and classical music stations? 

now that's a legit problem. i'm not familiar with the local jazz scene, but we do have local jazz artists, don't we? as for classical, i know our one classical station, 98.7 DWFE, also plays christian stuff, so maybe they could play christian OPM?

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