Sony busted for Payola

No, before you run off and grab yourself a knife, fork and bib, payola is not to be confused with paella…a lovely dish with a bunch of stuff in it that I couldn’t care to remember because it has nothing to do with this article.

No.. payola is defined by history-of-rock.com as the follows:

“Payola” is a contraction of the words “pay” and”Victrola” (LP record player), and entered the English language via the record business. The first court case involving payola was in 1960. On May 9, Alan Freed was indicted for accepting $2,500 which he claimed was a token of gratitude and did not affect airplay. He paid a small fine and was released. His career faltered and in 1965 he drank himself to death.

Basically then, its the underhanded and illegal practice of paying radio stations, or rather better, bribing radio stations to give songs more airtime than they would usually deserve.

So say for example, oh I dunno…Sony Music wanted to give a song a few extra weeks of airtime and it was a real minger of a song, they would slip the guy at the door a few quid and presto, 6 months extra of ‘The Ketchup Song”.

‘Yeah right’ you’re thinking, ‘funny one. Like people still do that today’

Well you’d think they wouldn’t right?

Attorney General Eliot Spitzer today announced an agreement to halt pervasive “pay-for-play” in the music industry.

Under the agreement, SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT, one of the world’s leading record companies and owner of a number of major record labels, has agreed to stop making payments and providing expensive gifts to radio stations and their employees in return for “airplay” for the company’s songs.

Such payoffs violate state and federal law.

“Our investigation shows that, contrary to listener expectations that songs are selected for airplay based on artistic merit and popularity, air time is often determined by undisclosed payoffs to radio stations and their employees,” Spitzer said. “This agreement is a model for breaking the pervasive influence of bribes in the industry.”

After receiving tips from industry insiders, Spitzer’s office conducted a year-long investigation and determined that SONY BMG and its record labels had offered a series of inducements to radio stations and their employees to obtain airplay for the recordings by the company’s artists

Oh my hat… Come on Sony! How you think your bands and artists are gonna feel when they realise that you’ve payed radio stations to play their music? You’ve basically tied a pork chop around your artists’ necks just so the dog would play with them!

Sony was busy doing the following as forms of payola:

• Outright bribes to radio programmers, including expensive vacation packages, electronics and other valuable items
• Contest giveaways for stations’ listening audiences
• Payments to radio stations to cover operational expenses
• Retention of middlemen, known as independent promoters, as conduits for illegal payments to radio stations
• Payments for “spin programs,” airplay under the guise of advertising

Thats horrible. So all this time I’ve been listening to Ashley Simpson scream how she “la la’s” and thinking, ‘do people actually like this song?’, the whole time they’ve been paying to keep such nonsense on the air?

Well that explains a lot!!!

Sony agreed to pay $10 million to a charity to make up for their sins.

Woopty-doo.. Thats like 1 CEO’s paycheck…

Tsk tsk Sony…