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Sony Agrees to Stop Payola
dsginter writes "Sony BMG Music just reached agreement with New York Attorney General. Sony spokesman John McKay admitted that the practice was 'wrong and improper' but the company engaged in the activity anyway. They were fined $10 million and have agreed to obstain from the practice in the future. Is this the first step toward getting our airwaves back or is this just a slap on the wrist?"
The Recording Industry Association of America will never stop something as profitable as payola without the threat of jail. Period.
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
It's "abstain".
They were fined $10 million and have agreed to obstain from the practice in the future. Is this the first step toward getting our airwaves back or is this just a slap on the wrist?"
With music industry profits of billions each year, I'm sure they made much more than $10m from doing so. They'll carry on with the payola until it stops being profitable for them to do it.
Don't forget it's not just direct profits that payola causes. Payola is a large factor in preventing independent musicians from getting adequate airplay, so it actually supresses the competition and reinforces the RIAA cartel's position. That alone has to be worth way more than $10m.
A Salon feature from earlier this year offers some more information on the practice, and a tentative answer to the question posed in this summary:
"...radio playlists are unlikely to improve anytime soon. While [promoters] are often seen as dubious, they did have a knack for getting new acts their break on FM radio...station programmers may soon become even less adventurous in choosing which songs get tapped for rotation on FM stations' heavily guarded playlists.
The indie promotion fallout could be especially tough on smaller, independently owned record labels...The short-term effect is not good for independent music."
Spitzer said Sony BMG's efforts to win more airplay took many forms, including outright bribes of cash and electronics to radio stations and paying for contest giveaways for listeners. In other cases, he said, Sony BMG used middlemen known as independent promoters to funnel cash to radio stations.
So if a regular Joe spreads the word about a new song and induces many thousands of random people listen to it for free it's theft, but if a radio DJ does the exact same thing he gets paid? Riiight.
Maybe Sony should just have those "independent promoters" run eDonkey clients instead. It'd be much cheaper.
Money for nothing, pix for free
It's a good gesture to try to stop the corrupt radio business, but it will have very little effect. The corruption runs rampant, from low level DJ's to nationally syndicated shows, however unfortunately most is unknown.
The bottom line is that having steady radio play is the key to selling albums, and when the the vast fortune of the music industry is at stake, dishonesty is inevitable. A VERY high percentage of Americans discover new music by hearing it on the radio, and a small fine (10 million? Ensuring that their arists get radio play has got to be worth at least 10x that) will do little to discourage the big labels.
Makes me wonder how much they paid the Attorney General to keep the fine that low.
Beep beep.
Payola, while unpleasant, is nothing to people who are carefully creating radio to only be sports, 80s hits and right wing shock jocks.
But, fortunately, there is satelite with some variety but above all else the internet.
Australian radio, in contrast to US radio, is vibrant, brilliant and is a good industrial subsidy for the Australian music industry (ever wonder where INXS, Midnight Oil and many others got their start?).
If you want to check it out over the net check out JJJ, RRR, 3PBS and enjoy some streaming quality alternative interesting radio for a change.
..some music is so poor, yet so successful. Take, just off the top of my head, a Madonna track that was released for the Bond movie "Die Another Day". It was A list on the radio and got played at least once every 3 hours, and it was utterly appalling. Like, so bad I couldn't understand why anyone would listen to it, never mind buy it.
I mean, music criticism is difficult because someone somewhere is going to see something in a track you might detest, but I'm pretty confident that 99% of the people who heard that track would think it was rubbish. But still it got on air, a lot.
DJ's these days are totally shackled by the system, I think they have very little freedom on large stations to play music they actually like. It used to be that an "Indie" DJ played music they liked, and if they were actually a good DJ with discerning taste and access to a lot of new stuff, it was like a filtering process to find stuff old and new you would like. But listen to any commercial station and the music is essentially interchangeable, at least here in the UK.
Anyway, talking of music that's overhyped and overpromoted, just read "most of modern R'n'B". The genre, with too few exceptions, requires little to no talent compared to too much arrogance and attitude. Recipe for success: a few hooks, some mediocre rapping and an effects/whore-heavy video. If it wasn't pushed so much, it wouldn't be popular.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Individual likes music. Buys music. Distributes it to friends and family. Gets caught by the RIAA and gets slapped with a criminal record.
Record company hates music, loves advertisments. Gets given music. Gives it away for free over an unencrypted medium to anyone who cares to listen. Gets given a huge 'bribe' by record company to keep doing this and the record company is a criminal.
I know this is an over simplification, but this really is nuts.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Why exactly should this be illegal?
If a DJ accepts a direct payment when his employment contract forbids it, that's breach of contract.
If a radio station advertises that they don't accept payola, but they do, that's fraud.
But if a radio station wants to make a strait-up pay-for-play deal with a record producer, why should the government care? If it really bothers listeners, a competitor can lure those listeners away by promising not to.
There is the really lame argument that the airwaves are a public trust, but that just means the government was dumb enough not to auction them to the highest bidder.
There is the only slightly less lame argument that music should compete on quality alone. But if the listeners don't care, and somebody has to be the popular band, why not the one that pays the most money?
Should a person break the law, they may well face a jail term.
For a company, a jail sentence make sense. Who should be incarcerated? The executives?
Perhaps we need to take a different approach - one which with credible and appropriate consequences.
I suggest removing all copyrights on songs/artists that benefited from the payola crime.
The starving artists themselves can claim damages against the company directly.
--- blackironprison, where ignorance is bliss....
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act... If the recording industry and the radio industry knowingly collude to perpetuate payola, how is it not covered by this act which has some real teeth?
Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
I don't understand this. I thought that the record companies were supposed to be the shining beacons of morality! What with all their protecting the rights of the innocent and defenseless artists, they'd HAVE to be completely upright businessmen.
:)
I guess the moral is that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Meanwhile, I'm going to start downloading music again.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I would argue that there really is no such thing as independant music being played on most stations. 'Indie promotion' is just another buzzword that makes it sound like it's creative and underground, which is far from the truth. Indie promotion is another word for payola. That's all it is. If there are a few indie promoters that can get some unknown band on the radio, they are very few and far between.
And as far as station programmers choosing playlists, well I don't know enough about it to make a conclusion, but given the fact that where I live Clear channel owns both 'classic rock' stations and they both play pretty much the same playlist, I doubt the station managers have any control on what Clear Channel wants played. At any specific time I can turn on a Clear Channel station and be guaranteed to hear one of 3 AC/DC songs (who knew they only put out three songs?) or some old Aerosmith song.
The music industry is stagnating right now. MTV has been useless for several years now, choosing to focus on reality television rather than music videos or innovative sound. Mom and pop radio stations have been bought out by the one or two monopolies left in broadcasting.
And anyone that can tell me Lil' Jon is a musician with a straight face deserves a frickin Oscar. It's almost as if two music executives sat in a room together and made a bet that they could make millions off of a bum with no talent just from pure marketing hype alone.
I think if there's anything that can make a big difference, it's a media-centered site like Apple's iTunes that has things like music videos, sampling, playlists, online radio stations. I can listen to more new bands in a week through iTunes than I ever heard introduced as a new band on a radio, in all the years I've been alive.
> I was trying to figure out why payola bothers Americans.
It bothers people who would like to listen to the radio, because they're frustrated with the level of (ostensible) quality of the music played on most of the available stations. Those of us who gave up on radio decades ago don't care so much.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
How's the e-mail thing working out for you, old chap?
I wonder if this is why the NY hard rock station, 92.3 WXRK, changed formats and has ditched nearly all music produced since '95 from the playlist.
Currently, NY is completely without a modern rock station, leaving only pop Z-100 to play anything new.
Some of the memo's are pretty revealing. FSN has a story on some of it. "We ordered a laptop for Donnie Michaels at WFLY in Albany. He has since moved to WHYI in Miami. We need to change the shipping address." One Sony memo from 2002: "Can you work with Donnie to see what kind of digital camera he wants us to order?" Looks like Rush was right: "glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity, yeah!"
As an aside, the next time you sneer in disgust at a greedy tort lawyer (the sneer is very deserved in some cases) and think about calling for sweeping reform of our "broken" tort system, remember that manufacturers do the same thing with product safety. Probability that it will hurt somebody times what it will cost us when it does. If that's less than the savings from making an unsafe product, they make the unsafe product. The reason they don't like lawyers (and especially juries) is because they're an uncontrolled element to the damages variable. Huge jury awards hurt them (and can actually drive changes in unsafe behavior) because they can't accurately budget for them. They have such a love affair with capped awards and forced arbitration because it makes it easier for them to lock down that variable and accurately measure the benefit of hurting people.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
It's funny that the music industry will actually pay out money sneakily to get airplay via the radio and tv, to boost sales, but for some reason airplay via p2p services can only damage their sales.
Of course p2p could result in the listeners having a permanent copy, but so can radio and tv.
- And then there are all the streamripping and peercasting options to grey-out the difference even more.
"Imagine if they said, "this next Madonna song was sponsored by EMI."
That would make the music show a defacto advertisement. People would tune out in droves. By hiding the money, they can make an ad seem like a music show.
Listeners don't like being lied to, and given that the airwaves belong to them, they have a right to honesty.
Honest artists and producers don't like it because it's anticompetetive. Implicit in the deal that "you will play *our* music more" is the undeniable fact that "you will play *their* music less".
What amazes me, is that they've been getting away with the "new payola" for so long now. I think it's fair to say that the reason "popular" music sucks so bad is that most of it doesn't become popular on its own merit. Its popularity is engineered in boardrooms.
"Against a clear backdrop of what is right and what is wrong - what is legal and what is illegal - it is as important now as ever to encourage our fans do the right thing" - Cary Sherman, President of the RIAA Perhaps a good way would be to lead by example....
Payola is nothing new. Anyone who is surprised that this is going on was just unaware that the practice has been around as long as radio.
... when is New York state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer running for a bigger office? He seems to have a knack for getting headlines with high profile cases that get everyone all fired up.
w ire/sns-ap-clinton-2006,0,1068438.story?coll=sns-a p-nation-headlines
My big question is this
From http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/
the poll showed state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer continuing to hold a double-digit lead over the three-term governor in a possible matchup for the 2006 gubernatorial campaign.
Minnesota Public Radio has recently started one of the best alternative radio stations I've heard, 89.3. It's completely listener (and NPR, to some extent) supported, so there aren't any ads and the DJs seem to be able to play whatever they want, judging by the fact that I've never heard the same song twice. Ever.
I believe that public radio is the only way to get good songs on the air, because they're listener-supported and not just corporate shills.
Government funding for public television and radio is under attack by Republicans pretending to 'restore balance' when in reality the American public doesn't think there's any bias; the real goal is to take away government funding, which will kill much of the programming. Fucking shame.
steampunk web design
The same thing has been said about music since at least the days of Elvis, and I'm guessing there have been discussions like this since there were room for musicians and critics.
Erm. . . I had a revelation halfway through the post. You're referring to the industry not music itself.
I agree, mostly. The monolithic companies that control most of the music industry are pretty much what you'd expect from a monolith - controlled by inertia, and slow to react.
The key difference is found where music is really progressing - not in the Clear Channel approved acts but the other stuff that gets no radio play. Look to Ani DiFranco for an example of an artist who is 100% independent. Look to Eighteenth Street Lounge recordings for a small label with huge distribution, and tons of radio play worldwide. (not so much in the US, due to payola and the like).
So I guess we agree. Traditional model - bad and failing. New models - good.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Eliot Spitzer is idealistic and ruthless in his pursuit of corruption.
The idea that he would accept bribes is ludicrous, not to mention stupid. In his high profile position, he would surely be found out.
If I ran a radio station, I'd make people pay me to play their music. They sell songs to people who like them because they heard them on the radio. Why should I pay them to play the songs on the radio, to help them make money? I'd pick music that fit the format, of course, to keep listeners happy, but then only those who paid would get airplay. Then there would be no need to waste listener's time playing commercials. Why should it be illegal for me to do this? What happened to freedom in this country?
Vote for Pedro
"In both cases, it's up to the people to truly solve the problem, the government can't do it for them."
But the whole reason for governments to exist (democratic governments, at least) is to solve the problems of the society they govern. That's why they exist. In order to do what they do, they levy taxes. That's why you pay taxes.
Yes, most governments may be very inefficient, and often corrupt, but what they are in a democracy is the expression of the way a society that society, rightly or wrongly, thinks it should be governed.
Put it this way - if the people of a country got together to choose a small group of people to represent their wishes and run the country the way they wish it to be run, what else would they have formed but a government?
Anyone who's ever tried to get a song on the radio knows that payola is alive and well.
I play in a local rock band. There's a small radio station in the next county north of where I live (they've got about a 20 mile broadcast radius). When we put out our first album we tried to get on their show that showcases "local" bands. Talking to the program director didn't get us anywhere. After being turned down a couple of times the guitar player and I ran into the DJ that hosts the local band show on the radio at a bar we were playing. He really liked our stuff so we gave him a free CD. When we asked if it would be possible to get it on his show he laughed and told us that we had to buy the $2,500 "advertising" package at the station before the program director would even listen to a song off of the CD.
I'm not suprised that Sony is involved in Payola. What I am suprised at is that they were caught doing it directly. There are "promotion" companies out there that exist only to act as middle-men between the labels and the stations. After talking to the DJ we poked around and found a promoter that works in Chicago (our general area). Let's just say they're not hard to find. For $10,000 he would guarantee us airplay at a major radio station in the Chicago market.
Oh, and Zardo, not to disparage your friend at all but he knew it was illegal. Even when I was doing college radio we were all made well aware of it and the possible consequences. In reality it's more of a "wink, wink" in the industry because everybody does it. Sony definately got a slap on the wrist. These stories come out every few years so the industry can say that they're cracking down.