"this one's for you Alan Freed
wherever you go, whatever you do
cuz the things they're doing today
would make a saint out of you"

Payola Blues, Neil Young (and the Shocking Pinks), 1984

I'm not among those who think Clear Channel is the great satan, but what they're doing to popular music comes close to satanic.

link
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,176348,00.html

text below

Warner Music Payola Scandal

Warner Music Group has agreed to pay a $5 million fine after an investigation by New York State Attorney General Elliott Spitzer's office found that the company has been involved in complicated payola schemes.

This comes after Spitzer's office levied a $10 million fine on Sony BMG music earlier this summer.

As in the Sony BMG scandal, Spitzer's office has released a detailed account of how Warner Music execs got their records played on the radio by paying off deejays in various ways.

The announcement by Spitzer's office details: "Direct bribes to radio programmers, including airfare, electronics, tickets to premier sporting events and concerts; Payments to radio stations to cover operational expenses; Radio contest giveaways for stations' listening audiences, including flyaways, concert tickets, iPods, gift certificates and gift cards; Hiring independent promoters to act as conduits for illegal payments to radio stations; Purchasing 'spin programs' to artificially increase the airplay of particular recordings."

In settling the investigation, Warner's has signed an Assurance of Discontinuance in which they agree not to continue these practices.

There's lots of good stuff in the Warner's agreement, particularly citing former Buffalo KSE program director Dave Universal as a willing participant in payola.

"According to Warner Music Employees, Mr. Universal always required something to add a song. An Atlantic promotion manager added, "We all did business with Dave. We all had to do business with Dave if we were going to get our records on. And it was a game that you either played or you didn't have a shot at getting your records on the air."

Several stations owned by Clear Channel were cited as being very open to payola. And Warner execs talk in the settlement about how important it is to buy "spins" of their records on Clear Channel syndicated shows hosted by Carson Daly, Ryan Seacrest and Rick Dees.

Warner's biggest acts -- from Madonna and Green Day to Linkin Park and Josh Groban -- are affected by this settlement. It didn't seem to matter whether the various gifts and giveaways involved new acts you've never heard of or established ones like REM.

What comes out of this settlement even more clearly than from the Sony BMG one, though, is the complicity of the radio stations. It's not even complicity, it's solicitation. The radio stations are clearly blackmailing the record companies, and the record companies are caving in without question.

It will be more interesting I think to see how Spitzer's office deals with a conglomerate like Clear Channel, whose stations seem to require payoffs to get records on their air.

More on this tomorrow.