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Friday, July 29, 2005
F.N.Y.T.
Since everyone who is paying attention should be reading Paul Krugman without my help I am not going to link to his article in today's NYT. (Tho if you read it you will find out that Happy Katherine, the Strib's K-beast and Minnesota's Worst Writer managed to miss the fact that her favorite football team sized family is obviously French!) But as it happens the very same page contains the following from a local boy made good:
Payola gets a song on the radio. If it becomes a hit, radio works it to death. In this day of consolidated radio ownership and programming, my friend suggests, eliminating payola could mean that commercial stations would become even more monotonous, if that can be imagined.
To my mind, however, the difficulty of picturing a world beyond payola is reason enough to cheer Eliot Spitzer along. Payola restricts access to the public airways; only artists whose labels are willing and able to pay get played. Listeners who might enjoy something else won't hear it from stations on the take. And when fans go to the record store, they'll find that payola has driven up the price of CD's.
By the end of our three-album run with MCA, Semisonic had sold close to two million records, but we were a long way from recouping the costs of radio promotion.
