Payola Shocker: J-Lo Hits, Others Were 'Bought' By Sony
by Roger Friedman(.......)
The internal memos from Sony Music, revealed today in the New York state attorney general's investigation of payola at the company, will be mind blowing to those who are not so jaded to think records are played on the radio because they're good. We've all known for a long time that contemporary pop music stinks. We hear "hits" on the radio and wonder, "How can this be?"
Now we know. And memos from both Sony's Columbia and Epic Records senior vice presidents of promotions circa 2002-2003 — whose names are redacted in the reports but are well known in the industry — spell out who to pay and what to pay them in order to get the company's records on the air.
From Epic, home of J-Lo, a memo from Nov. 12, 2002, a "rate" card that shows radio stations in the Top 23 markets will receive $1000, Markets 23-100 get $800, lower markets $500. "If a record receives less than 75 spins at any given radio station, we will not pay the full rate," the memo to DJs states. "We look forward to breaking many records together in the future."
So this is how it worked. The record companies couldn't directly pay the radio stations to play their music (cause that's payola) so they hired independent promoters to directly pay the radio stations - or provide 'goodies' or dope or women. It was a completely transparent legal fiction, but it worked. So the whole deal with being an artist having a record contract was to have enough clout with the record company to get a budget for independent promotion. Cause if you didn't have that budget, your record wasn't gonna get added to playlists; no playlists - no sales. No sales - no more record contract.
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