This Explains A Lot About Modern Pop Music
Monday, July 25th, 2005Wonder why you never hear any good music on the radio? Here’s your answer:
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.
So, basically radio stations are not playing the music their listeners want to hear; they’re playing the music that the record company pays them to play. If nothing else, this explains Jessica Simpson and Jennifer Lopez.
So, to recap: Sony pays disc jockeys to play certain records, and is also stupid enough to document the process in writing. Further, they also give DJs trips and electronic toys on top of the cash. Finally, given all of this, the record executives have the gall to complain about their declining sales and file-share downloads. Did it ever occur to these dolts that the reason that everyone is downloading pirated music to their iPods is because they can’t hear anything they like on the radio?
The music business should be an easy business to make money in, especially if you are the record company. You put out recordings by various artists, see which ones sell well, and then let the artists whose music sells well make more recordings. You simply go where the music buying public takes you. You can’t do that if you’re skewing the results by paying radio DJs money to play recordings no one but the record company likes. Assaulting listeners with junk three or four times an hour isn’t going to make it sound any better and it certainly won’t make the public like it any better. What it does do, however, is make me turn off the radio, put in a CD, and listen to something that was recorded years and years ago but is musically light-years ahead of the crap you’re pedaling now.
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July 26th, 2005 at 7:32 am
Its all about the money these days. sad.
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