If my understanding of the radio industry is correct, the days of record company execs plying DJ’s with money and blow to play their artists’ songs are long gone.
So how do songs get pushed to radio stations legally? Do radio DJ’s even have any discretion as to what songs the play? How does someone like Carly Rae Jepsen or Meghan Trainor come seemingly out of nowhere to get a #1 hit, when tens of thousands of other songs are recorded on a daily basis and never get airplay?
Radio plays what is selling, but the artist coming by and touching base with the station or network can do good things for the sales and can get it played more.
Nowadays, DJs have no discretion. They are given a list of songs to play; their job is to introduce the songs and commercials.
I believe that the record companies push their CDs to the home office of the company that runs the radio stations. Thus, you meet with someone at Clear Channel to push your latest hits. The program director (or whatever his title is nowadays) will determine if the song gets on the playlist.
Payola has been illegal since the 50s. When I was in college radio in the 70s, we were awash with promotional copies of albums. A part of the job is determining who might be worthy of being added to the playlist.
It’s way more screwed up than even that. Payola seems to still exist, but buffered by independent promoters. This whole article is interesting, but this part seems to be the meat of it…
I mostly listen to local independent alternative rock radio, where DJs have song meetings and an actual program director makes a lot of decisions. However, I understand the majority of stations are now Clear Channel or similar and DJs often don’t even exist and the playlist is set at corporate. It’s funny to listen to the local Clear Channel “alternative” station, when they are “breaking” songs that were out last year and have pre-recorded DJs who appear to intentionally target some douchebag demographic.
Cash makes anything and everything legal.
Why? There is no way to trace cash (unless you do something real stupid - like video yourself and then upload it to YouTube).
But I’m surprised that radio stations are still in business. I wouldn’t listen to any AM or FM stations except the ones I pay for on Satellite radio. I can’t stand to listen to commercials and it is well worth every penny to avoid them.
I’m very surprised that AM and FM radio stations are still in business. I haven’t listened to any of them (except by accident) ever since Satellite radio came out. It’s well worth the money. IMHO, it would be worth paying twice the price.
When it comes to commercial radio stations, Reality Chuck and Pork Rind have pretty much nailed it, although it does depend on the station. Some DJs still get a few slots during their shift where they can play what they want from the catalog. Being able to play something that’s not already in the station’s catalog is unusual on a commercial station.
But, when it comes to community radio and non-profit stations (there really are quite a few, and they’re where the real musical action is, anyway), the DJ can pretty much play anything that’s not going to get the FCC on your neck. Lots of them are mostly playing their own collections. In that case, if you can meet the DJ and hand them the record yourself, it can go a long way. In the cases where you can’t, you send out records to stations and DJs and hope they listen to them. That method works ok. Aside from local play, I found out that my band’s record has been played pretty regularly on WFMU* in Jersey City since about mid-summer. I am not certain how that record got there, but I imagine one of my band mates, or someone from the label knew they played the style, so they sent them one.
*This might be the best radio station in the country, irrespective of them playing my record. I’ve been listening to them pretty heavily since finding them by doing a vanity search for the record. As I finish this up, they’re playing a John Cage composition - my record is instrumental surf that gets played on a garage rock show. That’s variety.
I seem to remember the main reason Evanescence broke in the UK was due to Jo Whiley pushing them on her Radio 1 show. However, she is quite rare, in the sense that Jo has a bit of clout in the music industry so she may have had more leeway in terms of being allowed to play a few songs off the playlist.
There are definitely exceptions to the rule, but in the most part, radio DJ’s have to play whatever is pre-selected for them based on exec decisions.
I’ve noticed that even when they do the call-in request hour, listeners are only allowed to request songs that are on their list.
I’ve heard people call in to request a certain song, and the DJ says they don’t have it. Yet they play other tracks from that same album daily. Hm.
I believe that’s due to a policy imposed around 1980 where radio stations are only supposed to play album cuts that have either been released as singles or specifically designated as playable by the record company. Radio stations (especially FM album-oriented rock stations) often played *all *the cuts on an album and listeners taped the songs off the radio using radio-cassette players. Since this allowed people to get an album for the price of a blank cassette tape, the record companies cracked down on radio stations playing “deep” cuts by imposing this rule.
Incidentally solosam, did this rejection of a request by a DJ happen recently? I would think in a time when anyone can access nearly any song on the internet, the “no deep cuts” rule would be obsolete and pointless (as, come to think of it, calling radio stations to request songs).
There was a 1990 book “Hit Men” by Fredric Damen that talks about the legal ways indie promoters get records played
I don't own a copy so I am going on two decades old memory. But it talks about how one person at the record company in Los Angeles wanted to see if he could get a single played on the radio without promotion. He had to find the right group and thought he did when Pink Floyd's album "The Wall" had a popular song, the one with kids singing "we don't need no education" ("elitist art school rubbish" as Bob Geldof called it when they offered him the movie). The executive figured PF is in England, they keep a low profile, they are an album group so he tried it. No radio play in LA. But Roger Waters heard about it, had a hissy fit and demanded they get on the radio in Los Angeles.
Payola was a more democratic way of doing things. If you’ve got a decent sound record and an amount of money(or coke) then you were in. Very straight forward and democratic. Now that the payola is at the corporate level, you have to already have a gigantic machine behind you buying advertizing time, using clear channel promotions for tours and advertizing or at least conglomerate sponsership Coke(the company) is the new coke(the drug).
Gone are the days when a DJ had to have an ear for a hit and he could “make” a hit just by opening the mail, listening, then playing a song and getting the audience to like it too. Greedy entities like the former Clear channel CEO wanted in on the act, but on a corporate level.
Cite? I started in radio in 1980, and worked on-and-off in the biz for nearly ten years. Admittedly, it was mostly part-time and at smaller Midwestern stations, but I never once heard of such a policy.
I am very aware of the record companies’ freaking out over home taping (a review of Billboard and other industry publications from the 80s provides tons of illumination on that), but I never heard of a formal policy “prohibiting” stations from playing any cut from any album they wanted. Maybe that happened in bigger markets, but I figure I would have heard about it, at least.
We DJs would mainly tell callers we “didn’t have” a certain record because we simply didn’t want to play that particular song on our show. Or, it was easier than explaining how our format worked and that “Fight For Your Right To Party” wasn’t a part of that.
I wish I could provide a link to the article but I read it back in 1980 shortly after Bruce Springsteen’s The River album was released. The record company was trying to dissuade radio stations from playing other cuts off the album than “Hungry Heart” and “I Don’t Want to Fade Away” to prevent people from simply taping all the cuts off the radio rather than buying an album. (This, by the way, was during the recession that hit the recording industry between 1979 and 1982.) Before then, when a highly-anticipated album was released, it was common for radio stations (especially FM album-oriented rock stations) to set aside time to play all the cuts on a album. For example, in my radio market (Spokane), I remember in 1979 hearing at least a couple radio stations that played all of Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door and Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk shortly after both were released. By 1981, I hardly ever heard a radio station do that for a newly-released album. The only time you heard a radio station play an entire album, it would be an older album that had long since fallen off the charts.
Moby had a somewhat unique idea, no one was playing his music, so he released them royalty free at first. That way people would use them as background and for intros and at least get him in the door. His “Bodyrock” was used at the opening theme for “Veronica’s Closet” for the last year.