Slashdot Mirror
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."
Broadcasters are prohibited from taking cash or anything of value in exchange for playing a specific song, unless they disclose the transaction to listeners. But in a practice that is common in the industry, independent promoters pay radio stations annual fees - often exceeding $100,000 - not, they say, to play specific songs, but to obtain advance copies of the stations' playlists. The promoters then bill record labels for each new song that is played; the total tab costs the record industry tens of millions of dollars each year.
Why wasn't this loophole simply closed up when it began?
http://www.busyweather.com/
Anyone...
Anyone at all...
Buhler? Buhler?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
Mark my words, very soon this guy will either be the successor to Pataki as governor, or Bloomberg as mayor. From there he WILL go national.
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 have to agree with that. I didn't actually know there was a law against this (and for all I know there isn't where I live in Canada) but I noticed this happening about 2 or 3 years ago in Canada.
;-).
Radio stations I used to like to listen to were playing top 40 hits non-stop during the day, and often two stations would be playing exactly the same song at the same time. I said to myself, that isn't music it's advertising space.
In Canada there was a backlash against it by a number of top DJ's who got sick of playing this crap and the left to join a group of radio stations that were formed across the country (by a big corporation mind you) that lets them play whatever the hell they want. It ain't always in my taste but I guaruntee no one paid to get Whitesnake or Genisis played
Hopefully this means the Rock/Classic Rock stations I was listening to can stop playing top 40 music.
"Take that Lisa's beliefs!" - Homer Simpson
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!
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.
Problem is, it's very hard to fight it. The record companies use middle men, independent record promoters, to do the dirty-work (as indicated in the article).
When I was far younger, I used to work in the radio broadcasting industry and the stories of what the indie-promoters do is shameful.
The program director, a few of his lackies, some of the higher-profile talent and an independent promoter all went out to dinner in Windsor. Not only did the promoter spring for dinner, but then he hands everyone in the group three crisp $100 bills and tells them to have fun in the Windsor Casino.
Or perhaps the station is out of money for promotions and can't buy bumper stickers or on-air give-aways. The indie will line up all sorts of cool goods to give away like video games, cell phones and lots and lots of record product and concert tickets. Funny thing is, the listeners get the record product and the concert tickets, but the video games and cell phones are traded to vendors to print bumper stickers. Or, they simply go into the pocket of the general manager and program director.
Another disturbing thing that happens now is ClearChannel has a concert promotion business too. So when their show comes into town, the playlist is modified so heavily on all their radio stations that you can't get away from the featured act. Imagine a weekend of nearly nothing but Journey!
Radio is pretty much a license to print money. It is not a surprise that it's rampant with abuse and corruption.
You are wrong. Ted Turner (founder of CNN) who should know what he is talking about, is against the current situation where a few dominating media giants dominate the market. Yes, he is/was a media mogul himself, but he sees the problem nevertheless.
He writes:
"At this late stage, media companies have grown so large and powerful, and their dominance has become so detrimental to the survival of small, emerging companies, that there remains only one alternative: bust up the big conglomerates."
The whole article is
here
Arguably he discusses television, not radio but many of the companies involved are the same, the "product" sold to advertisers (John Q. Public) is the same, and a part of what is aired (music, news) is the same too.
Maybe you could start your own radio station, but who will listen to it and why would anyone advertise with you, with your tiny marketshare? The other companies are just too big, so they will very easily undercut you while you are trying to build your business.
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.
The question is though, do they listen to it because it's played? Or is it played because they listen to it?
That, or what you think, they ought to want to hear?
Exactly. Excellent point. Whenever the subject of music comes up, you always get the freaky clove-smoking oddballs who claim that radio doesn't play OBSCURE BAND X. The implication, of course, is that OBSCURE BAND X on OBSCURE LABEL Y is objectively (no questions asked) "better" music than NOT-OBSCURE BAND A.
And what usually happens, once the freaky clove-smoking oddball launches into the first attack, several additional attacks follow -- all of which list more OBSCURE BANDS from OBSCURE LABELS. Subtext here -- always -- is: gee, if only folks would listen to this music, we'd all be "better off".
Most of the music -- from where I sit, at least -- listed is wretched. This is my opinion, of course, but for whatever reason, the clove-smoking oddballs don't seem to understand the idea of "subjectivity" in art. I don't either, but I pretend I do -- and by pretending, I'm at least making an effort at being charitable and understanding that usually the reason that obscure bands are on obscure labels is that the music isn't appealing to a large audience. It may appeal to a small audience, but the commercial potential probably isn't there. So, okay: fair enough.
But I suspect -- and have no proof, of course -- that the only reason the clove-cig smoking oddballs list the obscure bands is to say, hey, look at me, I have distinct musical tastes and now this little band out of Idaho called the Blue Fonzies that plays *real* punk music, blah blah blah. I also suspect that the clove-crowd is pretty narcissistic and isn't able to think that, well, some folks *do* like Britney and Usher and Justin and that's okay. Personally, I don't -- I abhor the hip-hop stuff, yet (paradoxically) I have a hard time latching onto the Blue Fonzie-like bands from Idaho for (mostly) ideological reasons. They piss me off -- not tha band, but what band stands for -- and the sort of clove-cig smoking idiots that use art as ideology in order to drive home an uncharitable, narcissistic point that says nothing about the music industry, music in general, the band, or even the state of contemporary culture.
It says: hey, look at me, I like the Blue Fonzies. Ergo, I'm hippy-dippy cool.
Ooo.. lookie.. the cumulative number of people listening to radio increases over the years.
Ooo.. lookie.. the cumulative number of people born increases over the years.
Congratulations, you've just managed to find a (very poor) measure of population growth.
Every stat except the cumulative shows a downward trend. This includes the TSL (which I assume stands for Total Seconds Listened). More people, listening less. That certainly says something about the quality of radio, doesn't it?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze