On this summer day, however, Scher sits in his company’s headquarters, a sprawling three-story Victorian in Montclair, N.J., and tries to adjust to the new facts of his business. Or, more precisely, to one new fact: the impending buyout of SFX Entertainment, the largest concert promoter and venue owner in the U.S., by Clear Channel Communications, the country’s largest radio station owner.

SFX and Clear Channel’s impending union represents a profound shift of power in the rock ‘n’ roll concert business. Clear Channel, which announced its purchase of SFX for $3.2 billion in stock in February, is expected to consummate the deal at an SFX shareholders meeting in New York this Thursday. In March, Clear Channel announced its intention to purchase a rival radio chain, AM/FM, for $17 billion, giving it control of more than 900 radio stations across the country. The Department of Justice cleared the deal last week, asking only that Clear Channel sell 99 of the stations to satisfy antitrust concerns (formal FCC approval is expected to be forthcoming).

After one profligate, $20 billion quarter, the company is poised to become the primary conduit through which Americans are exposed to popular music. Scher and other independent promoters like him will face a competitor with a near-lock on the venues, the tours and the radio play and promotion that provide the life-blood of live entertainment. The coming merger of these two enormous media properties will effectively reduce Scher to a vastly outgunned underdog in a business he helped to invent.

In a sense, it already has. In three short years, SFX has come to dominate the American concert industry, applying corporate marketing strategies to rock and other live entertainment on an unprecedented scale. In the process, it has been squeezing out a diversity of different players — booking agents, promoters and radio programmers — those who once were the hidden forces behind the concerts, responsible for marshaling the artists, the venues and the radio play.

Even by pre-Clear Channel standards, SFX is huge. The company owns 200 concert halls across the country and represents more than 40 tours this summer — many of which it owns outright — as well as a host of Broadway shows; it also serves as talent agent to sport stars such as Michael Jordan and Andre Agassi. The bands it represents are the biggest and most profitable in the business, from N’Sync to Tina Turner; in June, it purchased the entire Pearl Jam tour, which now plays almost exclusively SFX venues across the country.

While SFX may be huge, Clear Channel is voluminous: In addition to its radio holdings, the company owns 19 television stations, more than half a million billboards, and a new domain address, .cc, based in the Cocos-Keeling Islands, that it promotes with a blanket ad campaign on its own radio stations.

The new Clear Channel-SFX combine promises an unprecedented level of concentration in an industry that once thrived on the creative tension between radio programmers, concert promoters and artists. Clear Channel is taking over a company that has already destroyed the unspoken system of relationships and loyalties that long characterized the live music business. In the new world of one-stop concert production, booking agents have been castrated, already-successful bands are offered fantastic sums in return for centralized control and less well-known bands are left with fewer places to hone their sound.

Today, Scher looks at his former peers and competitors and sees just one corporate logo: SFX Entertainment, which purchased Delsener-Slater, Don Law, Bill Graham Productions and dozens of other smaller promoters over the past three years in a tidal wave of cash and stock buyouts. Scher’s colleagues, many of whom launched bands like the Velvet Underground, Bruce Springsteen, Talking Heads, Blondie and countless others through a legendary combination of favors, wiles and muscle, are now part of a company which played the Brady Bunch theme at a simulcast meeting in April to introduce the former independents now working under SFX’s corporate umbrella. That in-house broadcast featured the grinning faces of nine formerly independent promoters (from St. Louis, New York, San Francisco, Houston and elsewhere) in split-screen, nodding at each other as the Brady Bunch tune ran with lyrics tweaked for the occasion: “Here’s the story of a bunch of companies … That’s the way we became SFX.”

“Being independent now means something different every year,” says Scher, sitting in his office surrounded by rock memorabilia. “Three years ago, there was no SFX: We were all independent. Two years ago, SFX was of a certain size, and there were still a lot of us left. Now they’re in with Clear Channel, and independents are anybody who’s not with them …”

“Will this new entity come in and play nice with the neighbors?” Scher asks sardonically.

Since the day SFX went public in early 1998 — with CEO Robert Silberman ringing the bell of the New York Stock Exchange, flanked by loyal sidekick Rod Stewart, who Silberman guaranteed in excess of $350,000 a night — the company has radically transformed the concert industry. In going public, SFX sought to guarantee a season-to-season predictability in a notoriously volatile business dependent on the ebbs and flows of artists’ popularity and fans’ willingness to spend money on tickets to see them. The collapse earlier this month of Diana Ross and the ersatz Supremes “reunion” tour is a sign that the SFX formula — big names and high prices — doesn’t always work.

“You cannot assume that because everyone is flocking to Mvtley Cr|e one year they’re going to go in the same numbers to James Taylor the next year,” comments a skeptical Ben Liss, who left Don Law’s concert production company in Boston shortly after Law sold out to SFX in 1998. Liss went on to found the North American Independent Concert Promoters Association (NAICPA), which is attempting to defy SFX by coordinating national-scale tours with the remaining independents. (Scher’s Metropolitan and Jerry Michaelson’s Chicago JAM Productions are the largest remaining indie producers).

“SFX is the 800-pound guerilla,” says Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the concert industry trade journal Pollstar, “and nobody else is anywhere near 200 pounds.”

SFX’s modus operandi from the outset has been to squash competition from the independents by offering unprecedented guarantees to artists — a practice that has led to astronomical ticket prices and rise in ‘facility’ fees, adding as much as $4 to $5 to the price of a ticket at SFX venues (on top of the $5.50 or so usually charged by Ticketmaster, with which SFX has an exclusive relationship). This year alone, the company locked up at least 20 national touring acts with outright purchases — including N’Sync, Ozzy Osbourne, Tina Turner and Pearl Jam.

SFX has such a lock on concert venues that it is nearly impossible to launch any national tour without dealing with the company in one form or another. Its dominance of venues has been marked by an epidemic of renaming, as one arena after another is christened in honor of new corporate sponsors: Fleet Pavilion, Continental Arena, Staples Center. In April the company unveiled its latest addition to the legacy of rock ‘n’ roll: Pringles as the new “official salty snack of SFX venues,” featuring upturned potato chip canisters cum conga drums for concertgoers anxious to try their hand at percussion, courtesy of a multimillion-dollar promotional deal with Procter & Gamble.

Now, the accumulated might of SFX and Clear Channel threatens to occupy the terrain of live rock ‘n’ roll with an overpowering concoction of marketing muscle and promotional overkill.

Three years ago, Clear Channel was a provincial power in the San Antonio radio business. In 1996, the company took a leading role in lobbying Congress for the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, which expanded the number of stations that could be controlled by a single owner from four to eight in major national markets. Clear Channel went on a blitzkrieg of acquisitions after the act was passed. It took just 18 months for control in the radio industry to shift overwhelmingly to two companies: Clear Channel and Infinity/CBS, whose combined billings, according to the trade publication Duncan’s American Radio, are 10 times those of its closest competitor, ABC.

Ironically, listenership appears to have suffered as consolidation has intensified. According to Duncan’s, the radio audience has dropped an alarming 12 percent over the past decade. The antidote, Duncan’s suggested, would be “a commitment to localism — local operations, local research, local programming decisions, local promotion, local news and events.”

In fact, the opposite is occurring. In its rise to the top, Clear Channel followed the golden merger formula: amortize costs and pare down differences. In many cities where the company owns up to half a dozen stations, operations are overseen by a single general manager and ads are sold by a unified business staff. Guidelines for playlists are sent out from the company’s radio branch headquarters in Covington, Ky. Musical formats echo one another from coast to coast, with little regional variation. Drive from New York to Los Angeles with the radio blasting and the music doesn’t change much. Gone are the days when you might catch onto a new band on the radio in Philadelphia, Chicago or Detroit: The uniformity of playlists has become a fact of the airwaves. Now, with those SFX venues in its pocket, Clear Channel aims to bring that same spirit to the concert business.

J.P. Anderton, a vice president at Duncan’s, says that Clear Channel’s formatting is overwhelmingly “CHR, contemporary hit radio.” In other words, Top 40. Translated, that means big bands with big marketing muscle on a national scale. “Clear Channel,” says Anderton, who covers ratings and audience surveys for Duncan’s, “has the types of stations that play the music that fills the [concert] venues.”

SFX’s control of those venues is what enticed Clear Channel into the deal. “We see a lot of synergy between the two companies,” comments Randy Palmer, Clear Channel vice president for investor relations. “There are big cross-promotional activities. Who pushes a concert? Radio. And vice versa: The artist and the concerts can promote the local radio stations.”

That level of concentration is what makes independent promoters nervous. “It’s a two-sided sword,” says Gary Bongiovanni, “giving them [Clear Channel] the power to say: ‘Do your show with us, and we can give your record heavy airplay.’”

The ability to leverage radio play for concert appearances veers dangerously close to what was once known as payola, the infamous practice outlawed in the 1950s in which record companies paid disc jockeys to spin their latest tunes. “Instead of blow and sex and cash,” comments Dave Kirby, an independent promoter with the Agency Group in New York, “it’s payola in a different form.” The key difference, of course, being that the money ends up not in fewer pockets, but in one huge pocket. The new Clear Channel-SFX combine gets it both ways.

“If the government felt that Bill Gates and his company could be divided, they should be coming to the same conclusion with SFX and Clear Channel,” asserts Kirby. Kirby came face-to-face with SFX’s marketing muscle when he put together the heavy-metal Tattoo the Earth tour this summer and was forced to book exclusively in non-SFX venues (which are harder and harder to find) because SFX feared competition with its wholly owned tour of Ozzy Osbourne’s Ozzfest.

Clear Channel’s president of radio operations, Randy Michaels, provided a taste of how the new musical hydra could ratchet up that marketing muscle. In an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer shortly after the merger was announced, Michaels asserted that during an upcoming Britney Spears date in Ohio, the company had no intention of tying in the usual promotions and celebrity appearances with any non-Clear Channel station. “When Britney Spears comes here,” he told Enquirer columnist John Kiesewetter, “is [CBS/Infinity station WKR]Q going to get a piece of that? No, they’re not.”

Such practices are “certainly possible” elsewhere once the merger has gone through, says Clear Channel executive Randy Palmer. In other instances across the country, bands have been threatened with removal from Clear Channel station playlists if they refuse to appear in an SFX venue.

The SFX-Clear Channel combination puts artists in a difficult bind. Pearl Jam’s ill-fated effort to defy Ticketmaster in the mid-’90s — which led to the cancellation of the band’s tour, and a virtual collapse of resistance to corporate dominance of the ticket industry — hangs like a specter over artists who might consider resisting the new combine. Few musicians can afford to bite the hand of a company that they must rely on for concert dates and radio play.

About as vocal a protest of the merger as you’ll see from any nationally recognized musician is a comment on the Indigo Girls’ Web site. Even artists like Bonnie Raitt, who announced her opposition to the National Association of Broadcasters’ effort to repeal the FCC’s introduction of new low-power FM frequencies, did so several times at SFX venues — venues which will shortly be owned by Clear Channel, which played a major role in lobbying against the low-power initiative.

Jennifer Toomey, former lead singer of the indie rock band Tsunami, bemoans the impact on small bands just starting out, many of whom face a dwindling number of venues in which to play. Toomey is co-founder of the Future of Music Coalition in Washington, which aims to promote the culture of independent music. “You’re going to have more music that’s huge and on every station across the country,” she says, “or music that doesn’t get played at all.”

SFX has already shattered the intricate dynamic of relationships that once characterized the live music business. The tacit understandings that once sustained concert promoters as powerhouses in their own regions have been ruptured as SFX propels concert promotion onto a national scale. Now, all bets are off. Recently, Scher began promoting concerts — by Korn, the Backstreet Boys and Brian McKnight, among others — at independent venues in the heart of Don Law territory in Boston and Providence, R.I.

“The entertainment industry is different from any other business,” says Scher, who continues to hold out hope for independents like himself. “There is one essential ingredient you must have: living, breathing, dancing human beings. In that regard anyway, they won’t be able to control everything.”

Tonight’s episode of “Duets” then, in which the rules are largely, if not entirely explained, effectively works as a do-over. Each week, the performances are graded — anonymously — by the superstars, and it is their feedback that determines the amateurs’ chart standings. (There is a moment in tonight’s episode when the first performer of the night is told her place on the chart. Anti-climactically, it’s the top one, because she is the only person yet to have sung. “Duets” is still working out its showmanship kinks.) Starting next week, the two contestants at the bottom of the chart will have to face-off in an a cappella duel (no trapeze sadly), and the loser will be kicked off the show. In six weeks’ time, “Duets” will go live and the audience will begin to vote on the outcome of each episode. (As to how the victor of the duel will be determined or what the ultimate winner will win, see the “not entirely explained” clause above.)

When written out, these rules may sound boring enough to seem like the sort of yawn-inducing information a TV show could reasonably hope to spare its audience. But they matter. On all the other major singing competitions, after the winnowing down of the audition rounds — those dark weeks when it becomes clear that America lacks for neither competent singers capable of melisma or the disturbed and delusional — it’s the audience that decides who stays and who goes. On “Duets,” for the next six weeks four relatively articulate performing professionals will be the deciders. “Duets” is temporarily putting off the rowdy, democratic voting process, and its tendency to favor sleepy-eyed white boys, to practice the more aristocratic style of expert judgment found on Bravo’s competition shows. “Duets” may be ABC’s answer to “Idol” and “X Factor,” but in rare moments, it’s also the singing version of “Project Runway.”

Though the four judges are too nice (they start and finish each comment with something like, “I love you,” or “you’re great”) they are also informed. They give feedback — the singing is pitchy, too perfect, too scared, the mic is too close, the dancing is bad. “Duets” does not embrace the sort of serious crit sessions seen on “Runway,” “Top Chef” or “Work of Art,” and it would be much better if it did. The judges seem up to it — not only does Kelly Clarkson effortlessly remain more likeable than anyone who has ever appeared on reality TV, I suspect that there is a Nina Garcia lurking inside of John Legend, whose high standards and perfectionism are belied only by the goofy, childish, wide-eyed expression he gets whenever he is watching a performance he enjoys. Real criticism would also rescue the show from its current in-between state, in which it drags on like any bloated musical performance show, but without the energy or stakes of one since, thus far, “Duets” is pre-taped.

The judges’ participation adds a nice new wrinkle to the format. Though it may mean that we will never get to know the amateur contestants well (this show could be called “Singing with the Stars,” despite the reversal of expertise), it should fuel some future sharp exchanges. Kelly Clarkson may not want to lay in to a reality TV contestant, but she can feel no such compunction about digging in to the over-confident Robin Thicke.

That the judges are performers delivers the same message –albeit at a much softer, less-compelling volume — as those Bravo shows: Talent is great, but greatness is hard, hard work. Robin Thicke may seem most concerned with making himself appear sexy, and Jennifer Nettles may not be able to contain her inner cheeseball, but they, like Legend and Clarkson, are professionals in the most complimentary sense of the word: reliable, knowledgeable, focused, dedicated. What they demand of their duet partners is surely nothing compared to what they demand of themselves. Clarkson, especially, is the embodiment of this. Exactly a decade ago she won the first season of “American Idol,” and she is now back on reality TV mentoring the two least polished, most insecure contestants on “Duets.” She chose them, she says, because they both reminded her of herself. She may be right, but they have lots and lots of work to do before before I see it.

In this sense, the new music video for Kanye West and Jay-Z’s track “No Church in the Wild” is the best actual riot porn I’ve ever seen. The video, directed by Romain Gavras, is five minutes of a graphic, fiery and entirely staged riot. It opens with a young man lighting a Molotov cocktail and lobbing it at a line of riot cops as masked comrades behind him raise their arms in support. Filmed in Prague, but presented as a non-specific yet decidedly European urban battleground, riot cops on horses violently beat the masked crowd, who fight back with fire and fists while Greco-Roman statues look on. Were it not for the surprising appearance of a chained elephant amidst the fray in the video’s final frames, the footage looks (almost) like something straight out of Athen’s Syntagma Square. Jay-Z and Kanye don’t feature in the video at all, which makes artistic sense: I’d be more surprised to see Hove in a riot than a two-tonne elephant.

So what to make of riot porn brought to you by those hip-hop moguls and emblems of excess Jay-Z and Kanye? As I noted last year when purveyors of eau-de-date-rape Axe came out with a scent called “Anarchy”, the depiction of anarchism and riotousness in commercial ventures are at least “a nod to the popularity of dissent.” Gavras, who directed the “No Church in the Wild” video, has long riffed on the idea of social upheaval and fierce state repression in his work. His short film for rapper M.I.A’s “Born Free” told the story of U.S. military forces brutally rounding up and executing ginger-haired civilians. The message was lost on no one, and the video was banned from YouTube. Gavras offers a stylized, gritty and startling depiction of social rupture; that his brutal vision of a street riot is deemed popular and consumable enough to accompany some the most mainstream of music is worth consideration. It’s not just anarchists getting off on riot porn anymore.

This isn’t entirely new: There was the Levi’s jeans commercial last year that featured a young man in Levi’s squaring up to riot cops under the tagline, “Now is our time.” The ad was pulled from British television in light of the summer riots in London. The video for Kanye and Jay-Z’s anthem with Rihanna, “Run This Town,” also featured gangs in black bandanas — but it was a far cry in terms of realism and police-on-protester brutality from the riot scenes in “No Church in the Wild.”

My friends at the New Inquiry magazine, Malcolm Harris and Max Fox, have argued that riot imagery and revolutionary calls in products can serve as genuine threats to capitalism, even though they may be expensive ad campaigns or music videos. In a published dialogue between the two (which is well worth reading in its entirety) Fox and Harris agree that subway ads and select lyrics from pop songs are ample materials for would-be rioters. So, while some might see the depiction and glorification of rioters in a hip-hop video as exemplifying capitalist recuperation (even Molotov cocktails can help sell records now!), Harris and Fox suggest that these images can be reappropriated by anti-capitalists — after all, the accessibility of a music video featuring a riot suggests, at the very least, that this sort of dissent resonates. Indeed, Harris quipped on Twitter today, linking to the Jay-Z and Kanye video, “Oh hey, capital, are you sure that’s such a good idea?” and continued to joke about whether the hip-hop artists endorsed black bloc anarchism. We don’t need to make new anti-capitalist propaganda; Kanye and Jay-Z can have Romain Gavras do it while they accidentally offer up revolutionary slogans in their otherwise problematic lyrics. The bridge for “No Church in the Wild”, sung by Frank Ocean, is an insurrectionist two-liner: “I live by you, desire; I stand by you, walk through the fire.”

Of course, none of this is to say Kanye or Jay-Z should be praised as agents for revolutionary change. Jay-Z, aside from celebrating a life of unadulterated excess, is a key voice behind developer Bruce Ratner’s controversial Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, which has been widely criticized for pushing people out of their homes and failing to provide affordable housing and jobs. Meanwhile, Kanye is a famous jerk; he walked by Zuccotti Park once to check out Occupy Wall Street last year, but, again, he is mainly a jerk.

And, it’s worth noting, that the way in which the rioters are glorified in the music video is problematic. I question Gavras’s decision to only feature male rioters. It’s a common criticism of black bloc tactics that they alienate women and perpetuate a masculinist expression of anarchist street actions. Problems of patriarchy in radical scenes certainly abound — indeed it’s an issue too huge to really address here. Suffice to say, however, women across the world who have fought riot police in the streets might take issue with Gavras’s ubiquitously male scene.

But what strikes me the most, and what might make a lot of anarchists and other proponents of street confrontation feel pretty smug, is that Kanye and Jay-Z have the resources to produce pretty much any kind of spectacular music video imaginable. And they opted for riot porn.

Watch the “No Church in the Wild” video below:

What I remember is when my parents bought that brand-new album “Abbey Road” and played this LP on their brand-new faux-antique console hi-fi, right about when they were separating. That had some impact. I can remember feeling like “Golden Slumbers,” McCartney’s brief, melancholy lullaby from that Beatles album, was a lullaby for me in a time when I could have used one.

Well, now I am a dad myself, and I don’t want to make my daughter have to listen to stuff she doesn’t want to listen to (though, in fact, I have tried to sneak Sun Ra onto the stereo in her presence). I don’t want her to feel that music is an intergenerational chore. I would do almost anything to make sure that music, for her, is something to love.

And yet: Nothing makes me happier than when my daughter does take to a particular piece of music on her own. Recently, e.g., she became obsessed with a very excellent tune by the Pogues. It was “If I Should Fall From Grace With God,” which my daughter refers to as the loud-and-fast song. As in: Papa, play the loud-and-fast song. No delight is more delightful than dancing to the loud-and-fast song with a 3-year-old specialist in the pogo.

And yet, sometimes, it must be observed, the sadder songs are the more genuine songs, or: there are times when the sadder songs come into focus, or: perhaps affirmation in a song is a thing of which one should always be suspect. And so there was a day recently that I was spending the day with my daughter, just me and her, and after all the usual pastimes had been exhausted I said, at last, falling into the trap of so many dads, We still have a few hours here, how about we listen to some music?

I put on “Let It Be.” By the Beatles. In fact, I put on the song “Let It Be.” And I’m talking about the version from “Let It Be,” the Phil Spector production, not the George Martin-produced single that you can find easily, not the “Let It Be … Naked” version, which I actually love, too, because I like hearing how guitarist George Harrison thought about what he did on the various recordings. I played my daughter the “Let It Be” I knew best, and which had bludgeoned me much as “Golden Slumbers” had, back in the day, when things at home were coming unglued.

I played the song for her while I was making her a sandwich. It’s really unusual for a 3-year-old to stop moving, unless she’s asleep, and my daughter was not asleep. But she was pretty still. She was transported by the song. Look, you have heard this song 10,000 times, I have heard this song 10,000 times, we are somewhat impervious to the charms of this song, even though it’s a very beautiful song, but when you play it for someone else, in this case someone else who has never heard the song at all, you get back something lost, the original emotional freight of the thing. And with “Let It Be,” which is apparently about a dream Paul had about his dead mother, and, self-evidently, also about the Beatles breaking up, it is hard not to feel that the title, the refrain, is sung with real insight, a real understanding about what it feels like to need the sentiment expressed therein. There really is a lot of misunderstanding and disagreement and dispute in the world, all of it essentially pointless, our time here is so brief, and it would be better if we could all just …

Now, when you’re 3, a sentiment of this kind has maximum impact when repeated, but it’s repeated a lot here, in the song, over and over, and my daughter picked it up quick, the theme, but not so quick that she didn’t want to hear the song again, and so I played the song again, and finished making the sandwich, and then she wanted to hear it again, and I played it again, and then again, and on the third or fourth repetition, that plaintive, moving quality had begun to empty out again, and I was just hearing the song I had heard 10,000 times, and then my daughter asked for it a few more times. We played it six times. That first day. And we have played it more times since. Papa, play that “Let It Be” song.

What’s it like to have resounding success in the dad-playing-music-for-the-kid sweepstakes? I am not sure I want my daughter feeling like she has to like something just because I played it for her. I would like to provide an opportunity, make the music available, then step out of the process, so that she’s absolutely liberated, so that she has self-determination in the matter of her musical interests. That way she can die for Uncle Rock or Dan Zanes if that is what she wants. But I can’t deny, and especially not here, the sense of pride that I feel when she likes something that I too liked, once upon a time in the suburbs. I hope she can do the same when she’s a parent. Maybe one day she’ll share with me things she likes with the same enthusiasm. And maybe one day I can sell her on Sun Ra.