PAYING TO PLAY.(The Talk of the Town)('the new payola,' or 'spot buys,' of air time for new songs, on radio)

James Surowiecki talks about the economics of choice

Pop music thrives on repetition. You know a song's a hit when you've heard it so often that you'll be happy never to hear it again. Even by Top 40 standards, though, the playlist adopted a few weeks ago by the Nashville radio station WQZQ was extreme. On May 23rd, Billboard reported, the station played "Don't Tell Me," the new single by Avril Lavigne, three times an hour, every hour, between midnight and 6 a.m. This didn't have much to do with the tastes of WQZQ's d.j.s or listeners. Instead, an independent promoter working for Lavigne's record label had effectively paid the station to play the song. "Don't Tell Me" had been hovering just outside Billboard's list of the country's ten most frequently played songs, which radio programmers use to decide what singles get airtime. The extra spins the promoter bought--sometimes called "spot buys," because what's really being bought are blocks of ad time, as with an infomercial--were meant to bump "Don't Tell Me" up the list. By early June, Lavigne had a Top 10 hit.

She also had a lot of angry music fans to contend with. Spot buys may be legal, but to most people they're the "new payola," a modern-day equivalent of Alan Freed's taking money under the table to play rock-and-roll records. (Freed called the payments "consulting fees.") It's an obvious comparison, but a misplaced one. Spot buys aren't the same as old-fashioned payola. They're worse.

"Payola" became a household word in the fifties, when a host of d.j.s were found to be playing songs in exchange for favors and money, but the practice is as old as pop music itself. A century ago, songwriters routinely paid vaudeville singers to perform their tunes, hoping to goose demand for sheet music. In the thirties, music publishers paid off radio bandleaders. And although some forms of payola were outlawed after the mid-century scandals, various loopholes allowed other incarnations to thrive, under the guise of independent promotion. With money from the record companies, promoters used oblique tactics--subsidies, gifts, "research funds"--to encourage radio stations to add new singles to their playlists. By 2000, tens of millions of dollars a year were being spent on what you might call legal payola, and although bad publicity has severely curtailed the promotion business, paying to play is still integral to the way radio works.

Despite its sleazy reputation, payola has a certain rationale. In a typical year, upward of seven or eight hundred CDs are issued each week. Not even the most dedicated program director can hope to sift through all the new songs. So stations need a way to filter the possible hits from the certain bombs. Pay-for-play schemes provide one rough-and-ready way to do this, because they involve what economists call signalling. By putting money behind a record, a label signals its belief that the record has a chance to be a hit; no company will spend a lot of money trying to sell something it doesn't have high hopes ...