Payola Pact Helps Independent Music...Yeah Right

When consolidated radio groups like Clear Channel Communications Inc., CBS Radio Inc., Entercom Communications Corp. and Citadel Broadcasting agree to pay $12.5 million in fines and give a collective 8,400 half-hour radio segments to independent music during the next three years in order to stop a payola investigation, does that not indicate that they are guilty?

While I do not believe that payola will ever end because there will always be that one disc jockey or programming director that will play a song a few hundred times for a free weekend in Las Vegas, I think this pact has two possible outcomes:

The first outcome is the glass half full. Independent and local music’s presence on radio has historically been restricted to Sunday nights between 9pm and 11pm. The radio groups have agreed to play independent music in half-hour segments between 6am and midnight. This could not only give independent artists and labels the commercial exposure they have been denied for decades, it could also give radio the youthful and on-demand audience it has lacked in the last five years. It also gives the people who still subject themselves to commercial radio and those who would love to return to the medium they used to use to discover new music the opportunity to listen to something other than Justin Timberlake five times an hour.

The second outcome, and the most likely, is half empty. Yes, commercial radio will include a half-hour segment of independent music during the daylight hours and that is more than we can say about independent music on the radio in the past. However, one half-hour is not going to bring radio’s listenership back in droves or clean up the wasteland that commercial radio has become. Independent music’s place is in the “now” and the “future,” which involves new media like the Internet and social networks. One half-hour segment on radio will not bring as much exposure to independent music as a feature on MySpace. Especially if these segments are only guaranteed for the next three years.

Like radio historian Christopher H. Sterling stated in this Los Angeles Times article, payola is almost “as hard to stamp out as prostitution.” This agreement is a start but the corrupt nature of the radio and record business really leaves very little hope that payola will stop and that the two businesses will come back to the reason they are in existence: the music.