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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 12-JUL-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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,"...

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