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Spitzer Takes On Record Industry Payola
flackrum writes "NY Attorney General Spitzer has served subpoenas to four major record labels (UMG, BMG, EMI, WMG) in a continued house-cleaning of corporations employing dirty-tricks. In this particular group of cases, investigations are focusing on the circumvention of the Federal Payola Law, which forbids bribing radio broadcasters in return for airing specific songs. Mmm sweet karma."
Radio stations would have to play what people wanted to hear.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
This is good news.. these laws have long been ignored and in the age of consolidated mega media, "pay for play" is just part of the SOP.
They should enforce the law or remove it from the books. But if big media can't get the radio play they want, it really makes it hard for them to produce mega hits "on demand."
http://www.hawknest.com/
If bush wins the election, you will see this case quietly vanish into the ether..
if kerry wins the election... oh wait...
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
Just what the hell is wrong with that? That is his freakin job. You think people should not be paid for work?
But government's meddling in what businesses can pay to each other seems wrong to me.
In this case I don't think it's wrong, since the richer companies could use their money to effectively monopolise radio for their artists.
Hrmm...
"But government's meddling in what businesses can pay to each other seems wrong to me."
(I'm not American, nor in America, thank goodness) A previous poster stated that the law prevents the station from recieving inducement and _not disclosing it_ to the listeners. The law doesn't preclude the inducement, just the concealment of "sponsored" playlists.
i.e. it prevents corruption.
This is, in general, a good thing. In the UK, this is why extended "infomercials" have to bear a banner telling you that they are an "advertisement feature"; to prevent the credulous masses from thinking they are getting unbiased information, when in fact they are getting neither (not unbiased, probably not information either)
By extension you would be OK with businesses paying news companies to supress news stories. Payola is bribary, just because it's over something as trivial as popular music doesn't make it OK.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Music is not a manufactured commodity. It doesn't have feature sets, like computer software. Taste in music is subjective.
Aren't you in the least bit frustrated to tune through the FM dial and find the same artists on 3/4 of the stations?
Do you really believe that the reason independent artists are never played on the radio is that none of them are as good as commercial artists? The reason they get no airplay is because they can't afford to stuff the pockets of radio programmers. This system keeps the big labels happy, because they essentially own the FM radio band, and they use it as one big commercial for all their latest crappy music.
I don't know if attorney general is an elected position, but that doesn't matter. We need to send the message to people in our government that the more they do stuff like this the more likely they are to get our vote. The two presidential candidates have not even said a word about taking out evil corporations. And the third party candidates might say something about it, but have no track record of actually doing so. I want the people who represent me to know that if they do things that hurt record companies, the MPAA, media companies, etc. That I will proudly vote for them regardless of political affiliation.
Did you hear that?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
You tell me that some of these news stories aren't bought and paid for? And these news stories are driving our politics and our society in general, so that is much more important than what songs are playing.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
... of a business model becoming extinct. People can make their own radio stations now from online jukeboxes. If they really like it, they can pay for it and take it with them, so the distribution method is also going the way of the dinosaur.
How about we re-regulate radio? I'm tired of 10 song play lists being recycled 24 hours a day. God damn clear channel.
Whoa, nice spin.
Here's the deal: This is a system perpetuated by both the music industry AND the radio stations, but the music industry is in charge, make no mistakes. If they really didn't like the system, they could have and would have phased it out years ago.
But I think they know they have too much to loose.
They essentially have a monopoly over FM playlists, which means they can push out whatever teeny bopper crap they come up with and know, just KNOW, that it will sell well. Why? Good question. The answer is, because we are sheep. Peer pressure is a powerful force, for every age group, but especially the ones they are targetting.
Now, the radio stations are just as addicted to this problem as the labels, but they are NOT in control. If the labels decided tomorrow that they weren't going to pay out anymore, the stations would fail fast.
The music industry is right where it wants to be: It can dictate play lists to the music stations.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
If this rule were applied to Internet or Cable radio stations, I'd agree with you. But this isn't a free market, there's only a certain amount of spectrum available, and if someone wants to use it, they need to be reasonable.
Besides which, the payola rule is nothing more than a full disclosure law. If a radio station informs its listeners that they were paid to play a particular song, what they're doing isn't covered by the payola laws. This isn't about one company paying another for services, it's just regular regulation of advertising.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
What you are saying, is legal. The Payola allows actually allows for Pay for Play IF and ONLY IF they say something like, "Mega corp has paid us to play this song for you..."
The issue is, esp., when DJ's used to pick the songs they played, that the public would believe it was picked because they liked it... not because of payola.
http://www.hawknest.com/
I second that. I appriciate a good toilet joke but those people were really being abused (financially). If you've ever been in contact with one of them they are incredibly nice and it very uncomfotable to think they were being treated so badly. Kudos to Spitzer for taking on the big cases as well as the small. Spitzer may have political aspirations but he seems to be fighting the good fight in the meantime.
meep
Drug advertising contributes to the cost of the medication, on the order of 10%. Ironically, the 'bribery' has gone down as the TV advertising has gone up. This is OT, I know, but I think the drug advertising on TV is ridiculous. Really, they should be allowed to talk about a disease rather than the drug that treats the disease. After all, if they say, for example, 'Talk to your doc about cholesterol' they will still sell more cholesterol lowering drugs.
If the market was truely libertarian, then demand would cause new ventures to popup to undercut the markup thus putting the overpriced ones out of business.
It's a myth that an unregulated market is good for the small guy trying to break in. The reason this is not the case is the concept of scale effects. When you sell 100 items of a product your fixed costs per product are a lot higher than when you sell 100.000 items, and your variable costs tend to be higher as well (due to the inefficiencies of low volume production). Because your cost per product as a small guy is higher, it is hard to compete against the bigger businesses, who can maintain lower prices and still be profitable. Over time, this effect causes the market to merge in a number of big behemoths (the larger you are the more profit you make per product), and once you reach that point usually they will form cartels, where they use various kinds of underhanded tactics, like predatory pricing, coupled sales, government bribing and so on to keep out new market entrants and maintain higher prices than market forces would dictate. Examples of this are the music industry (the big five), microsoft's windows and office empire, the telecom industry on the local level, and on and on.
Cartels or monopolies have been demonstrated to tend towards having low market efficiency, due to the profit maximalization imperative and their ability to maintain non-market-optimal pricing models at greater profit to the business.
The only way to avoid this is to limit the ability of market players to form cartels or monopolies, and then abuse their power. Retroactively, that means antitrust law. So antitrust is a necessary part of maintaining a healthy free market. Proactively it means making sure that new market players can enter without high entrance costs (like allowing small telecom companies to use existing networks for a fair price, so they don't have to build up their own network at extreme cost), so raising prices by the big players would cause new players to enter at lower price points.
So, in conclusion, to have a truly free market (meaning with near non-existant barrier to entry), you must regulate it so no market player can become too powerful. A correctly regulated market is a healthy market, an unregulated market is a diseased or soon-to-be-diseased market.
Ofcourse, big business has been very successful at spreading the meme that market regulation is bad for the market. The reality is that it's good for the market (if done correctly), but it's bad for the behemoth.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... people put WAY too much weight on the power of the presidency. In candidate ads, news articles, /. posts, and conversations, I hear/read of all these magical powers that just don't exist. Bush should do something about X, Kerry will make the paralized walk. The president has power but there are other people in our government.
Worried about the draft, pork spending, over/under litigation? Want more/less spending on aids, stem cells, drugs then? Talk to congress. They write and pass bills. The prez can veto but congress can battle that. If the current music business model is not working, then your congress-person should be pestered. If they thought stem cells are the cure and private funding isn't getting it done then there would be 100% backing in congress to ram a bill into Bush's lap.
Republican or Democrat, the president is not a Mystykyl Majical being that can cure every problem in the country.
Now, if you subscribe to this mentality, the law falls into place nicely. Since the radio stations are there for the public benefit, it is up to the public (by way of representatives and laws) to determine how they should conduct business. Also, since there's supposed to be a division between content and advertising, and I think we can all agree that that division is in the public's best interest, codifying that division can only support the public's best interest.
Again... this all makes sense if you agree with the original mindset in which the law was written. To sum it up, here's the basic logic (since that last paragraph was poorly written and hard to follow):
- Radio stations are allowed to broadcast by the government (acting as representatives of the people) for the public benefit.
- Radio stations have "content" (music, talk shows, etc
... ) and "advertising" (pre-recorded ads, endorsements, contests, etc ... ). Keeping these separate allows to strengthen the public discourse while providing the radio station enough money to operate profitably.
- By allowing companies and industry groups (like RIAA) to "pay for play" in the content section, the "public discourse" is taken away from the public and given wholly to the industry. As representatives of the public, the government should try to stop this.
- Furthermore, by having a "pay for play" policy, recording companies with less money are unable to get their songs heard and can never compete with the larger labels. This creates a oligopoly (like monopoly, but instead the market is cornered by a "group" of companies), which is against the competition model of our society's capitalist system.
Agree or not, hopefully that will make the intention of the law clearer. I thoroughly understand your viewpoint, though, and I agree that dictating what a company can or can not do is a little risky, but only if you're a laissez-faire Republican (one who believes government should be reduced in size, and take a less-active role in day-to-day life... i.e. a classical conservative). The fact of the matter is that industry is subject to regulation all the time, usually in a way that supports the public good (i.e. environmental laws, zoning laws, bribery laws, accounting laws, etc-=-=-=-=-=
I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
Personally, I find bathroom attendants to be remarkably creepy. Taking a crap should be a personal experience and they are an intrusion. Nevermind tipping them, I don't even want to see them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Ted made his own fortune. He was in no way dependent on "media conglomerates". All he's lobbying for is the ability for other guys like him to create their own new media empires.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I understand what you're saying about subjectivity. But you're acting like it's an absolute; that all bands are equally good since objective measurement is difficult or irrational. But that's not true. Subjective quality is not uniformly.
You might have a real point if airplay correlated with album sales. But there are glaring exceptions. Look at Radiohead. Look at Steely Dan. Look at the Grateful Dead or Phish. There are lots of bands who aren't on the radio, yet have huge album sales. The issue is not radio reflecting the taste of phillistines; it's radio reflecting its own corporate ambitions, and intentionally shaping the preferences of the casual listener.
As a person's devotion to music increases -- i.e., more time is paid to the hobby -- the overwhelming majority turns away from what's on the radio. They may turn to obscure country, or blues, or indie rock, or jazz -- whatever. But very few people who spend a lot of time listening to and reading about music find their love of Britney Spears' artistry deepening.
Is this just en-masse elitism? I'm sure to some extent it is. But I find it hard to believe that solo artists locked into multi-album deals -- the kind of artists that are most profitable to the record companies -- are the "naturally best" solution to serving casual listeners (at least from the listeners' perspective).
You're right that the subjectivity of art means we can argue forever about what ought to be on the radio, but one thing should be clear: whatever it is, it isn't what's on the radio now.