What is payola?
"The illegal practice of payment or other inducement by record companies for the broadcast of recordings on music radio, in which the song is presented as being part of the normal day's broadcast." - Wiki
At first glance, payola seems immoral and wrong but if you think about it, what's wrong with it? Music is not only art, but it is also a product. The airwaves and TV channels are just mediums in which you promote your product. The internet works in such a way. Paying for adverts in digital space, paying for placement in certain sites, etc. I personally find nothing wrong with Payola. Although if it is publically funded then there is a problem, but let's just work with privatly owned firms and corporations. This is just simply how things the private sector should work. Paying money for prime advertising time/space is the same as paying money for a prime location of a business. And yes I realize the implications of this if it becomes a legal process). It will mean musicians need a large financial backer to be able to acquire prime advertising options. But this is how the private sector works. You need to invest money and hopefully come up with a profit. This is the pure business logistics of the issue and I see no point in making it illegal in the private sector. The public sector is a different issue because that is paid by the public and should not be influenced by some company to shove music down thier throats. But the private sector should be what it is.
I was reading an article in The Economist about payola issues in the K-pop industry and relating it to the legal troubles of the America industry in the 50's and 60's. This is not surprising to see that payola is an issue in an industry that is over saturated with plastic manufactuered crap. It's not much of music industry, rather it's more of an idol/celebrity industry. Regardless, I'm not surprised. What I'm surprised by is how much the author is surprised by such a revelation that payola is still an issue in South Korea. No one should be so stupid as to think that payola doesn't occur in North America/UK. There's no way this practice doesn't happen. I care not what Spitzer does in New York. In happens and you can't stop it. You pay so low paid jokey 10,000 bucks and get a possible return of 1,000,000 record sales. It's pretty simple math. Even if you get caught, the fine can't be anywhere close to the money you would make from a million sales + all the other publicity that comes with it. The industry today is the same as the industry of the 50's and 60's in that regard. Nothing has changed. It's just done more in the shadows now instead of out in the open.
Now, why is payola not really an issue that everyone should be concerned with. Ultimately, the product needs to be good. No matter how much someone forces me to listen to a song, it will not change my opinion of how good or how bad it is. Yes, yes extra publicity will = more people hearing your song. But if no one likes your song, no matter how much money you throw at it, it makes no differenece. Good is good. Now I'm not naive enough to think that people listen to music for the artistic element but rather they just listen to it because it's entertaining or background noise or *gasp popular. And to that I say, should we really care. Should, we as musicians really care, what drones such as them really listen to. Yes, yes it is a market of music buyers but it is also a market that we have no place in. We can make a quick buck in that market, but in the long run, there is no place. Should we really care about what drones listen to. Should we really care that they are being spoonfed a setlist that was paid by a corporation. They are not taking any of our marketshare, people looking for real music will not listen to the radio or the TV, they will listen to their heart. They will listen to the pulse of the song and find the true spirit of the artist who wrote it. Those are the people that you must reach out to. Those are the people that we really care about. If the radio station chooses to take payola offers, those people will leave and never listen again to that station. They will move on and find the music that can be felt by the heart. Real music will reach the masses soon enough, it may not be immediate, but the underground will hear and they will listen. So is payola that important? No, because it really does not affect us in any way.
**unless in the extreme case, all music that comes out is actually real music. Then those without a big cheque book are screwed. But seriously, that's not gonna happen. There's only one Bob Dylan. So I don't expect 1000 Bob Dylans one day to show up and flood the charts.
