payola
There's a rash of new payola scandals in the news, with record companies paying out millions of dollars in penalties for having bribed people to play their music on the air.
I'm having a hard time understanding why payola is illegal in the first place. These are private radio stations, it's not like any public money is being wasted or corrupted here. If you consider the songs to be an advertisement for the CDs, then why wouldn't people be allowed to pay a station to run their commercials?
Also, if we're making laws against this, maybe a lawmaker could explain to me the difference between this and lobbyists? Seems to me that making campaign contributions to get your way is about a million times worse than someone getting a trip to Jamaica in order to play Beyonce more often on the radio.
posted by Tobin @ 11:11:00 AM
5 comments
5 Comments:
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Private radio stations are allowed to use the public's broadcast spectrum, and as such there are some restrictions that they must follow. One of them is that if someone pays for airplay, it must be disclosed. Payola is illegal when the radio station does not disclose that someone paid for the song to be played.
Not a lawmaker, but I think disclosure here is the main point. It is OK to buy radio stations (or lawmakers) as long as you tell everyone you are doing it....
(updated a spelling error from previous post)
Yeah what Luke said. Basically allows the larger labels to gain an unfair market advantage over the smaller labels.
Lobbying is sketchy too.
I don't see how it gives them any greater advantage than the fact that they can also pay for more magazine/tv marketing as well. Big labels are going to have a market advantage, because they can pay to advertise, no matter how they do it.
Radio stations are allowed to use the public's broadcast spectrum because they pay to do so, not out of any sort of generosity.
Sure they pay for it, but much like public service announcments, "community standards", and emergency broadcasts there are requirements and restritions. The whole realm of broadcast standards is full of both arcane and strange historical rules.
The whole un-fairness of payola is not paying for airplay, but the fact that the airplay is not disclosed as paid for. So, a listener hears the "top 40 most requested" countdown (or some crap like that) has an expectation that the "countdown" is actually based on listener requests (or the most played songs the station or dj choose) rather then the big labels paying for their songs to get played.
Of course this asks the question, who actually listens to radio and/or countdowns any more, let alone places any value in them?
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