love… love… love…

Bye! Bye!

I’m JUJU.

juju_love_avril@hotmail.com

Clearly, there is no defense for bad exigetical work, not even the international transport of a defenseless kitten who can barely remain upright without my personal intervention. None. I have learned my lesson. Let’s treat this post as a rusting old fish boat sitting on the ocean floor, the scourge of the marine world now a host to some of its most brilliant denizens. Also, when I get home, I intend to get out the article and do thorough exigesis and determine whether I am guilty on all charges or just some of them. But this is just the poor loser speaking. Now, back to the defense of kittens and playing in the traffic! Grant

It’s there as of this writing, I don’t know how long New Yorker content stays online – never quite managed to sort that out!

More to the point, there really isn’t any righteous indignation about payola in the piece, since I argue that the practice has historically fostered musical diversity, and actually helped outsiders get inside, rather than the other way around, and that it potentially helps stations filter hits from bombs. As Gabriel said, I’m indignant about the spot buys, because they’re a way of gaming a flawed system, and they yield no benefits to consumers. You’re right that there is a pretty easy fix for the abuse — Billboard should distinguish between spins that are paid for and spins that are chosen. But until they do, I thought it was worth making clear why it’s wrong not to — and, in the process, get people to see traditional payola in a new light.

thanks for getting ‘granular’ with the details here. (and for chiding grant re feminizing your name). i worked in rock radio in the 80s and recal quite clearly the “independent reps and promoters” (obviously the payola posse) who would visit the music director, and were quite distinct from the local record company reps who would give us free concert tickets and tshirts and field our requests for artist interviews. what exactly was this man from afar they called “heavy lenny” doing in the music director’s office i said to myself. pay to play was pretty much taken for granted then. and then the cork was pulled, as chronicled in frederic dannen’s “the hit men” (1991). around the same time, as you point out, soundscan came into being and no longer could albums “ship gold” only to “return platinum”. with all the changes that have since taken place in the music industry (downloading, alternate access points for music, indie/underground chic, clear channel’s consolidation moves) i naively assumed that payola-like practices had seen their day…although i thought i read/heard something about “placed” singles (i.e. ones that have bought the airplay time) had to be tagged on air as “being brought to you by xxxxxx” (insert label name here).

Album sales are an important piece of information, but even if you decide to start playing an artist, they don’t tell you which of the ten tracks on the album to play (although the label usually has a suggested single). Likewise, since albums are durable whereas airplay is ephemeral, album sales are really the first derivative of album ownership, which complicates the relationship with airplay. The other funny thing about that is that until the Soundscan revolution in 1991, record labels manipulated the hell out of album sales charts, just as badly as they still do with airplay charts (see Anand and Peterson. 2000. “When Market Information Constitutes Fields” Organization Science 11: 270-284).

Radio stations do an enormous amount of research, much of it arguably much more informative than either payola or album sales. The main two kinds of original research they do are auditorium testing and callout. In the former they have a few dozen people sit in a room and fiddle with the knob of a “stantonmeter” to indicate whether they like the songs being tested. This is mostly to decide which songs to start playing. In callout research a panel of listeners listen to 5 second clips over the phone and use the pushbuttons to register their opinion of it. This is mostly to decide what songs to stop playing. When it goes national in a couple years, the PPM will probably make callout research obsolete.

Also, I’m not offended, but FYI I’m an Anglophone man not a Francophone woman so there’s no “le” at the end of my name.

Hope you and your kitten have a good trip and return safely from dodging traffic to post again.

Gabriel

You’re not really doing justice to the Surowiecki piece. He acknowledges all the justifications for payola, but argues that spot buys are qualitatively different. The Lavigne adds weren’t in primetime, they were in the middle of the night. The reason is that the IRP wasn’t trying to influence consumers who happened to be listening in this damn cold night, but to influence the charts. One source of information radio stations use is record company signalling (ie payola) but another is peer behavior (ie charts). The problem with the Lavigne case is that the label’s agent is not sending an honest signal but distorting the field’s information exchange.
However, radio stations are conscious of this sort of bias and many stations discount the charts accordingly. (See Ahlkvist and Fisher. 2002. “Will This Record Work For Us?: Managing Music Formats in Commercial Radio” Qualitative Sociology 25: 189-215.)
I expect that in the long-run the system may be self correcting since charts are not a public good but a club good. To the extent that this bias devalues the charts, Radio and Records magazine will sell fewer subscriptions. Thus they have an incentive to clean the charts. For instance, they could base the charts only on 6am-midnight broadcasts (which would make spot buys prohibitively expensive) or they could use statistics to isolate or downweight outliers. Given the detail of the raw data on which charts are based both of these are technically feasible. And don’t get me started on how things will change once the Portable People Meter goes national.

Gabriel