O.C. Register Article: Clay and the Payola Scandal

Don't bet on payola ever going away
By Ben Wener, The Orange County Register
August 2, 2005

My mother was the first to tell me about the payola scandal --the one involving Sony BMG, New York's crusading attorney general and a $10 million pittance settlement.

You remember my mother the Claymaniac, don't you? That darling fanatic whose nickname at Clayversity, a message board for other Clay Aiken fans, is OCRegMom?

Right. Her.

So if she's bringing this up, I know it's because she's worried about how it has affected Clay. My mother hasn't mentioned an entertainment story in two years that hasn't led to its bearing on Clay's career. You'd think she was reaping dividends on his album sales.

"Why do you care?" I asked. "You don't listen to the radio."

Besides, I told her, payola is an ugly industry given. It may be sidelined for a while, but it will never be fully stopped.

It's a pay-per-play practice in which record labels ply radio station bigwigs with cash and goodies to get tunes more spins, and it has been around since the dawn of AM. Though made illegal in 1960, after the Alan Freed-centered scandals of the `50s, anyone with half a brain should have suspected such hit-brokering and bribery continues to this day.

When Jennifer Lopez, Kelly Clarkson and Lindsay Lohan appeared at this year's Wango Tango bonanza in Anaheim, Calif. -- presented by KIIS-FM, a crown jewel in media giant Clear Channel's empire --do you think they did it just because they love their fans? Well, maybe they did, but their contract-keepers offered those performances so their singles would get increased airplay on the station. How could they not, right? You play the show, you get promoted.

Change the names to Audioslave and Foo Fighters and KROQ, or Snoop Dogg and Power 106, and you get the same equation. It is as pervasive as New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer contends.

But do the many revelations in subpoenaed e-mail really surprise anyone? Given such blatant "playola" at radio festivals and contest giveaways, is it such a leap to imagine program directors accepting laptops and plasma televisions and trips to Las Vegas in exchange for spins during peak hours? Or that record labels have teams of interns posing as callers trying to jack up the number of requests for a song-- which, frankly, seems useless under the circumstances?

Is it really so eye-opening to read statements like this, from a Sony exec: "Please be advised that in this week's Jennifer Lopez Top 40 Spin Increase of 236 we bought 63 spins at a cost of $3,600."

Seems pretty cheap to me.

Look, I long for more altruistic radio, wherein DJs play whatever comes to mind or gets requested. And if I didn't have enough CDs to create something similar via my PC, I'd gladly subscribe to a satellite provider.

But I don't see those outlets as mainstream, for they don't take the pulse of average pop listeners; they cater to niches.
Other stations, however, are cruder about hawking hot new things. For that's what radio is best at: pitching products.
Sometimes it's air purifiers and breakfast burritos. Sometimes it's lawyers and doctors you don't need. And sometimes it's music so lousy you wouldn't listen to it if you were paid to.

Welcome to the terminally corrupted entertainment biz, where award nominations can be had by sending out spiffy DVD sets and gift packages, where collusion among a small number of immensely powerful media conglomerates is gross yet unavoidable, where even a cynical schmo like me gets sent a pecan pie from ZZ Top just because I wrote a fond profile. (I let our copy desk scarf it. We have policies about such things.)

It's a you-scratch-mine-I'll-scratch-yours industry, and like it or not --and I don't--payola will survive this setback and persist indefinitely. As it is, labels can still legally barter with tickets and meals and other nominal bribes.

So all I can do is laugh when Spitzer says stations "are the ones most fundamentally violating the public trust."

What trust?! That we trust the radio will continue to play dreck? That we trust stations to operate fairly? Who is he kidding?

It should be obvious by now that this is a con game built on backroom deals later given face-lifts for public display. All Spitzer did was force Sony BMG to offer up the biggest payola ever ($10 mil to essentially go about its business) and score front-page publicity, in a sham where negativity is almost as golden as praise.

But back to my mother: She sees the violation of trust. "Radio didn't matter to me before at all," she told me. "But radio play equates to placement on the charts, which equals hype and sales. When one is invested in someone's career, that becomes, at the very least, interesting information."

She wants her boy (not me, Clay) to succeed. And I can see how frustrating it would be for fans who have been incessantly requesting songs to realize their effort may have been for naught.

Yet, all that irritation says to me is that superiority is being wielded here: It's annoying for Claymaniacs, for example, to see him merely rest in the Top 10 while others (Kelly, Avril, Jessica, whoever) get greater payola push and score a No. 1 smash. They want their boy to be every bit as huge.

To which I say: Mom, platinum sales and scores of spins are not the measure of a man.