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Labels Find New Method of Payola
rhadamanthus writes "The Houston Chronicle is reporting on the newest 'legal' payola tactic put forth by the record industry: playing the song as an advertisement. It seems that while it is illegal to pay a radio station to play a song, it is not illegal to play a song as an ad. Quoth the article, 'The practice is legal as long as the station makes an on-air disclosure of the label's sponsorship -- typically with an introduction such as "And now, Avril Lavigne's Don't Tell Me, presented by Arista Records."' Incidentally, that song was played 109 times in one week by Nashville station WQZQ-FM."
I see a lot of this on TV. Shows with audiences and amazing products that will change your life. Its one big paid advertisement.
How is this any different? Except they have to pay for a lot of time (2-3 minutes) of ad time.
"You think I care about the pea-brained yokels of this town. I can't stand those sniveling maggots! They make me want to puke. But there is one good thing about broadcasting to a town full of mindless sheep: I always know I've got them exactly where I want them."
- R.J. Fletcher, "UHF"
that if someone has to pay a radio station to play a song, then chances are that the song is not that good?
usually a song sells itself to people and any good song shouldn't have to pay to be played.. if the listeners want to hear it, they will play it but they would be playing it for the wrong reasons if paid.
They want us to listen to this music. However, we still have to make up our own minds about whether we like it enough to buy the entire album or not. Wouldn't the record labels perhaps save their advertising dollars by promoting a special download of Avril's song somewhere? Instead we get to have this song shoved to our, already bleeding, ears.
Hmmm.
Agreed. Music radio sucks. If I want music, I'll listen to what I want when I want it with my own music collection. As a news outlet, radio stations such as NPR are still great sources for news, especially on the move... At least NPR hasn't been fawning over Reagan 24/7 for the last few days.
Not more than you need, just more than you want
I don't mean this as flamebait... I guess I just don't understand why paying for airtime is disallowed to begin with. I think the RIAA has a lot of underhanded tactics, and skirting laws is yet another one, but I don't know why there's a law to begin with. Seems like we all love to champion open competition and free markets as long as people stay within the rules, why is paying a radio station to play music any different? Perhaps I just need a lesson in radio economics. :/
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
What I don't understand is why Billboard would count a paid advertisement as a spin for the purposes of producing their charts.
It's one thing to pay for advertising so that people will hear a new song, it's another thing altogether if those "ads" can influence the numbers in the Billboard charts.
I hear it at work(I'm a student working at a fast food place for my summer job, at least for now).
The restaurant has a policy of having it only on an available "pop" station. When I work an 8 hour day shift I'll hear the same "song" 3 times sometimes. To be naive: this is a radio station that apparently doesn't even have enough music to fill up an 8 hour spot, so they have to repeat songs. I've got enough casettes just in my car to fill up a four day spot, and I'm not a radio station. And I'd guarantee I'd actually play something that, at least, resembled music.
Yes, some people still do. I run a show out of the local university here, and we've plenty of listeners, because we a) make our own playlists and our own decisions, b) actually consider playing what people want to hear, and c) generally play nothing but good music--no corporate bullshit.
I do agree with your sentiments to some extent that before I discovered indie/nonprofit radio stations such as my own and a few under the Pacifica banner, I hated all radio and preferred the noise of my car engine to anything they were playing over the airwaves.
But once you've started listening to public radio, my friends, you'll never look back.
Fair enough... but do you understand how cheap radio ads are during off-peak hours? We're talking like $5-10 per minute or less.
Heck... you can even get ads played on major cable networks-- CNN, Spike, etc. during off hours for prices in the $5 range...
Here's an article about it.
jrjBlog
I'll do you one better. The label promo dept decides they're having a hard time working the album at radio. So the band goes out on tour, and the label promo guy, in collusion with the band's manager, setup a team of kids around the country to go into record stores to buy the album. The retail stores report sales to radio and then the radio station either adds or bumps up the airplay because they think this is a "HIT". The kicker... the expense that is used to buy the artists albums is then billed back to the artist. The artist is paying to "buy" their own albums. This tactic has been going on since Elvis Presley was selling records. Lucious Jackson's career was built on this.
I'm not sharing a music file... I'm sharing a commercial !
Okay, Googled it, can't find the law, but I did find several interesting sites with commercials !
Anyone know the relevant laws ??? (Yeah, IANAFL).
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."--Benjamin Franklin
Why is it that the RIAA will pay a radio station $60,000 to play their songs, and then turn around and sue a 12 year old girl for effectively "rebroadcasting" their advertisement?
So, fans get sued by the RIAA for downloading the same music the RIAA paid a radio station to broadcast. How can one be piracy, but not the other? After all, why would I buy the CD if the radio plays it all the time? Doesn't it occur to the RIAA that music fans have no need to buy the CD if the radio station is always playing a particular artist's music?
I'm kind of curious as if there are any slashdotters brave enough to distribute mp3's of these "commercials" (in their entirety, of course...) and then send the RIAA and invoice for every file downloaded...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Why don't the labels simply buy (or create) radio stations for themselves? Then they could skip the ad-placement phase and cut right to the playing of stuff they want to push.
Come to think of it, why not buy (or create) record stores too?
How about venues for concerts?
Are there some sort of laws against record labels owning radio stations/record stores/performance venues?
I mean, c'mon, if you're going to tell people what to like and then charge them to get it, do it right.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
This is fine, good and noble, but it leaves out the point of the article, advertising and distribution.
If lables control the airwaves, how do you get the word out that you have a great band? Many(most?)people who love music only rarely get out to hear it live. Their primary source of info about new sounds is the radio. If the major lables are paying to have the airwaves play their artists tunes, how do the little guys with no money get heard?
In theory, radio airplay is about the songs that people want to hear. According to this article, and a well-known history of corupt payola, its really about what the record lables want you to hear. If you could fix that, you'd be a lot closer to me buying into the argument that the little band has a choice about signing with a lable.
TW