Twelve Million Songs Await

Hooray for the \$12 million dollar settlement!

In a world-class example of “throwing everything you’ve got at the fire before it takes out the ammunition shed”, major radio stations agreed to the fine, as well as to designating over 8,000 hours of airtime to “independent media”, in response to having been caught utterly pantsless in a three-year investigation of “payola”.

“Payola” is nicey-nice for “taking serious kickbacks”, and it’s why every major radio station plays the same banal songs, and you never hear local or independent bands on the radio anymore. It’s an entrenched system of tacit ownership of major radio outlets by the RIAA that’s been in place forever, and getting increasingly more hermetically sealed as time goes on.

Think about how not-free-market that is. Recording industries cherry-pick their latest Brittany or boy-band, often also securing corporate sponsorship to help pay for massive marketing campaigns. Then they bribe the radio stations to play their dismal excuse for a song over and over and over again, until it’s so in everyone’s head that people, at least the more impressionable of them, assume they must like it. A carefully managed, invariably sex-focused image for the “musician” completes the trap. And people who like music learn to go anywhere but to major radio stations.

Well, maybe now they can consider coming back. Maybe. It’ll take a lot more than a twelve-million-dollar “voluntary” settlement and some token airtime, but my hope, like many others’ hopes, is that this will get people’s attention on the process, and how blisteringly unfair it is to artists and the public, in favor of lining the same stupid pockets over and over again. Perhaps people can either force more change and the elimination of big corporate bribes for radio time, or, if that change won’t come, can pressure the FCC to realize that payola is the result of allowing coroprations to own virtually unlimited amounts of radio stations, television stations and newspapers.

Diversity and monopoly just don’t get along. It’s sad that this needs to be proven by suffering damage like the music world has, when the theory is sound and obvious; but corporate interests are fantastic at taking the words people want to hear and co-opting them. Thus, not only radio stations but also cable and cell-phone and other big companies are still trying to convince people that letting them become bigger and more consolidated will somehow “lower prices” and increase the diversity of content and consumer choice, in spite of the fact that it’s happened 100% the opposite way, every single time.

You do have to hand it to whoever writes their material…