Payola

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The term payola is made up of the words pay ( Engl. : Pay) and Victrola together and represents the process of "pay for play" (Engl .: "pay to play" ). Here a recording company impresses disc jockeys and program editors from radio and television stations , so that a certain song is played more often. In this way, the popularity of a song can be boosted and thus the volume of phonogram sales increased. In countries where the chartscannot be determined solely by sales figures, but rather that airplay flows into the charts of radio or television stations, there is also a positive correlation with a self-reinforcing effect. However, this can lead to the fact that listeners of an artist who is played too often get tired of his and the radio station, which is not in the interests of those involved.

history

The term was first clearly mentioned in October 1938 in the American star magazine Variety . Herein has been cut in uncovered, whereby people were registered as author of a musical work as a composer, which no creative portion of its formation had. This group of people consisted of music producers , owners of smaller record labels or artists. Due to the royalties actually due to the real authors alone , this group of people also received fees that they were not entitled to due to a lack of creative performance. Similar processes had already been described by Variety in 1916 . The cut in was the origin of other forms of bribery that would be revealed twenty years later.

In early 1959, the so-called Payola scandal kept the American public in suspense. The reason for the affair was the assessment of the big record companies that the market had bypassed them. In fact, the small independent record companies, licensed by the collecting societies ASCAP and BMI , dominated the market. The competition from ASCAP claimed that the dominance of the BMI was only due to Payola . With this assertion, they continued the competition that had begun in 1953, in which the ASCAP repeatedly tried to maintain its monopoly position . This time the Federal Communications Commission examined a total of 25 DJs and editors for corruption. In addition, the commission demanded detailed information from 5,300 radio and TV stations about their broadcast behavior and the associated services under oath. A wave of hysteria broke out. Denunciations occurred, DJs were threatened anonymously, radio and TV stations monitored their employees or subjected them to a lie detector test . In public, the media promoted the impression that Payola only existed in connection with rock 'n' roll , or that it came about in the first place. The attitude of the overwhelming part of the population that rock 'n' roll spoils and endangers the youth was encouraged by the association with criminal machinations. As a result, rock 'n' roll music was played less and less on radio and TV, on the one hand to give in to public pressure, and on the other hand to avoid the unwillingness of influential interest groups, who in rock 'n' roll have a kind of " National Security Threat ”. The two most famous DJs spotted during the Payola scandal were Dick Clark and Alan Freed . With the indictments against six of the monitored DJs and their conviction in 1962, Payola disappeared from the public eye again.

In the 1970s, Casablanca Records , among others, had a massive influence on the position of its albums and singles in the charts. Larry Harris, then Senior Vice President and Managing Director of the label, described in the book about the history of the company how he himself insulted Bill Wardlow , the employee responsible for the US charts at Billboard Magazine, on July 21, 1978 , for that the soundtrack album for the film Thank God it's Friday did not reach the top position in the charts as promised by Wardlow, but instead Saturday Night Fever from the label RSO Records took the top spot, although Casablanca had paid Wardlow.

Since both companies had the same distributor, Harris had access to the competitor's sales figures and knew that Saturday Night Fever had actually earned the top spot. He was concerned with the prestige for Casablanca: “For the past two years I had been in control of the Billboard charts and was able to significantly influence the positions of our records to create the impression that ours Company (...) and our artists (...) were the hottest in the music industry. "

The influence of Billboard Magazine, which at the time was still struggling with seven competitors ( Cashbox , Record World, Radio & Records, FMQB, The Gavin Report, The Bob Hamilton Radio Report and Booby Poe's Pop Music Survey ), was enormous: Great Retail chains such as KMart or Walmart only bought products that were listed on the Billboard charts. If a record was not represented there, the label and artist could be sure that their products would not be found on the shelves of these chains, which could mean the loss of five to six-digit numbers for the first orders.

Therefore Casablanca took cash payments and "invitations" (z. B. the Studio 54 ) to the persons responsible as Bill Wardlow impact on the listing of the plates, which led, among other things, that in 1977 four albums the group Kiss ( Alive! , Destroyer , Rock and Roll Over and Love Gun ) were in the Top 100 at the same time - of which "at most two actually deserved to be nearly as high in the hit lists."

Bill Wardlow was fired in 1983 when his methods of handwriting the charts in the sense of the word became popular.

In 2005, cases of bribery became known again. The record company Sony BMG is said to have bribed New York DJs with vacation trips, electronics, support for listener competitions and participation in operating costs. As part of a settlement, Sony paid BMG $ 10 million in July 2005 to avert a Payola lawsuit . The record label Warner Music Group paid five million US dollars less than half a year later and also averted legal proceedings with this punitive damages payment. The investigation was led by the then attorney general and later governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer .

The Office of the New York State Attorney General directed the by these and other comparisons materialize-down sum of 19 million US dollars in the tenure of Governor Eliot Spitzer (January 1, 2007 - March 17, 2008) a fund at the non-profit Organization Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors , which disbursed the money in individual steps to a total of 218 non-profit organizations in New York state to promote the appreciation of contemporary music.

Otherwise, there should have been a kind of Payola again and again in relation to top 40 radio stations. So-called "Independent Promoters" have received large amounts from the record companies to introduce certain singles to these hit radios and to bring them into the program there. There was always reason to assume that money had flowed and flowed here too.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bill Brewster / Frank Broughton, Last Night A DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey , 1999, p. 37
  2. ^ And Party Every Day - The Inside Story of Casablanca Records, page 2
  3. ^ And Party Every Day - The Inside Story of Casablanca Records, page 207
  4. ^ Larry Harris in: And Party Every Day - The Inside Story of Casablanca Records, 210, Hal Leonard Corporation, 2009, ISBN 978-0879309824
  5. ^ Warner Music no longer wants to bribe radio stations , Heise News, published on November 23, 2005, accessed on February 14, 2007
  6. ↑ Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors: $ 19 Million in Music Grants Awarded by Fund Created by “Payola” Settlement ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , December 19, 2006 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / rockpa.org

swell

  • Larry Harris: And Party Every Day - The Inside Story of Casablanca Records; Hal Leonard Corporation, 2009, ISBN 978-0879309824

literature

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