payola |pāˈōlə|
noun
the practice of bribing someone to use their influence or position to promote a particular product or interest : if a record company spends enough money on payola, it can make any record a hit.

A tweet-link from the prolific, intelligent, and fine-looking independent music revolutionary Ariel Hyatt caught my attention today, linking to an article by Bobby Owsinski about Payola. In a nutshell, the fact that 60 million people have watched that godawful Rebecca Black “Friday” music video and yet radio stations aren’t running with that ball into the endzone pretty much proves how out of touch they are with what music consumers actually consume.

Owsinski also links to (and quotes) another article where a radio Program Director admits that a song doesn’t make it to radio unless a major record label “brings all of its resources to get it played.” Having interned at a well-known label, I heard all kinds of stories about non-payola payola. Even a decade ago the industry was rife with “this big-screen TV is totally just a gift and has nothing to do with the new single we just sent you (*wink wink*).”

Slimy? Of course. Illegal? Nope. Promotional expenses are as tricky to control as campaign financing; the line between legitimate contribution and vote-buying is purely subjective. Payola is still alive and well despite the laws against it.

And I’m all for it.

Competition Is Good

Payola might have been bad when no competition existed for music radio. Now we have terrestrial radio, satellite radio, podcasts, internet streams, and the vial of liquid awesome that is Pandora. Rumor has it iTunes and Amazon will be duking it out for market share in this field soon.

With all these venues gaining traction to compete with terrestrial radio, record labels could go broke bribing (or totally-not-a-bribing) all of them, if they even can. Pandora’s playlists are picked by algorithm, not by meat-based decision makers. It’s hard to bribe a robot, I’ve tried. At the end of the day it will be the consumers that drive the industry, not the program directors. The days of dictating taste from on high are over.

I say Payola should not only be legal, it should be encouraged. Let the stupid record labels funnel so much money into radio that they bankrupt themselves and flood the airwaves with mediocre over-compressed crap (*cough* Nickleback *cough*). People have options now- I can listen to Pandora through my refrigerator, for shit’s sake. I’ve already abandoned everything but NPR on the airwaves because half the artists I’ve fallen in love with lately (see my recommendations below) don’t get played.

The smart record labels (yes, they exist, somewhere) will focus on helping good artists develop their craft into music that stands on its own. Or they’ll spend money outside the music stream, promoting the artists where it makes more sense. Who knows, they may even come up with creative marketing ideas. If the airwaves are a known paid-for entity, the public at large will gravitate towards the organic sources of good ideas.

Payola on the Internet

Oh yeah, and it’s not like Payola isn’t thriving on the internet either. A new music site seems to pop up, function, and die about every month or so, nearly all of them taking bribes- sorry, Premium Artist Payments -for better playlist positioning. Nothing ever changes.

Anyone remember MP3.com? Anyone? Beuller? At the turn of the millennium they were big- so big, in fact, they couldn’t cover their bandwidth costs. So they opened up a pay-for-a-promoted-chart-position system that didn’t actually move your songs up in the charts, but placed your song just below the legitimate #1 spot. Payola? Maybe, but as you can imagine it guaranteed that the people with the most money got more plays.

A decade later we have the shitty music service Jango. If you’re a consumer, it’s totally free. If you’re a band, you have to pay for guaranteed plays on their service. Wait, let me get this straight… musicians that are most likely barely paying their bills are providing your website with thousands of hours of content and not only are you not paying them anything for it, you’re asking them to pay you? Count me out.

Robots (and humans) to the Rescue

With the explosion of new media, the signal-to-noise ratio of bad music versus shining stars has grown almost unbearable. Radio once functioned as the sole taste-maker, but everyone knew the system was corrupt. As the industry’s adolescence catches up with it, two new taste-makers will arise: Robots and humans.

Like I said, robots can’t be bribed. Services like Pandora force the listeners to decide what they like based on a complex algorithm. It also forces musicians to produce material that can survive on its own merit. On the human side, there are disc jockeys everywhere. Not the talking heads that sit in broadcast booths playing a pre-set playlist, I’m talking about your BFF on Facebook that puts up a link to a track. That podcaster whose show you like and whose taste you trust. That artist you’re already listening to that recommends another artist she’s fond of.

I believe that opening the floodgates of Payola will simply accelerate a process that’s already happening: Corporate douchebags will blow all their money promoting tepid product while smart consumers move on to greener pastures. The situation’s like a boil that needs to be lanced.

Let the money flow, let the system devour itself, and let the music live or die on more level playing fields.

Those of us that live for The New face a challenge that never changes: When is it the right time? I’m a fan of all things technological and it’s difficult- sometimes outright painful -to come to terms with a new development while the majority of the population still doesn’t “get it”. The trick is to equip your Robot Army with the Cutting Edge, then implement it when the rest of the world is ready.

Example 1: Virtual Reality

Remember Virtual Reality? If you weren’t around to witness the 90′s, just read the Wikipedia article. Otherwise, you’re well aware of the big hype that kinda went nowhere. VR hit pop culture like the Hula Hoop, from Nintendo’s migraine-seeding Virtual Boy to Stephen King’s The Lawnmower Man to the thank-God-it-was-never-widely-adopted Quicktime VR. All this at a time when the hottest Power Mac sported a whopping 110 MHz processor and could hold up to 264 MB of RAM.

Here we are in 2011. High-resolution LCD screens are so ubiquitous we’re turning iPods into digital watches with them, yet you can’t find VR goggles in the gaming peripherals at Best Buy. CPU’s, memory, and graphics technology have improved to the point where fully-rendered 3D games exist on your iPhone. Broadband internet now makes it possible for dizzyingly complex render files to travel across the world in milliseconds.

Shit, we actually invented Virtual Reality the way it was hyped up 20 years ago. For real. Virtual people, virtual objects, virtual sex, prims, and rock and roll. And the majority of the public couldn’t give a shit. Why? Because the hype happened 20 years too early. We saw the potential on the horizon and had our party before the birthday boy actually arrived. Now that he’s here, we’re all sick of cake and booze. Virtual Reality happened at the wrong time and now it’s merely a toy that lonely geeks and marketers play with.

And most of the marketers have already left.

Example 2: Podcasting

If only there was a way to listen to new music, talk shows, fiction, and all that cool radio stuff without having to schedule a time to sit in front of the magical talking antenna-box. Imagine it’s 2005 and Apple’s iPod has been out for 4 years. Everyone had one by 2003. Yes, everyone. Don’t argue with me, Steve is watching.

More importantly, blogs existed and circulated via something called RSS. By 2005 RSS had been around for six years and most people today still don’t even know what it is. Then someone (maybe Adam Curry) decided to test if an audio file could ride on that RSS feed. MP3′s started floating around college campuses five or ten years before iPods did. All three of these technologies had been invented, circulated, and field-tested for years. Unlike VR, they had no sex appeal. Stephen King didn’t write any short stories of crazed men killing people through blog feeds (at least, not that I know of anyway). Duke Nukem wasn’t reprogrammed and brought to video arcades as an XML stream.

I won’t say Apple started it (hi, Steve, I love you), but it certainly hit the public consciousness when iTunes added a little extra icon on the left side of the screen. Suddenly there’s a feeding frenzy: Podcasting companies open, rise, fall, and dissolve faster than sand castles. Companies throw marketing budgets at podcasting with a fervor rivaling a squid orgy. The RIAA sends out CDL’s to anyone who even thinks about the possibility of maybe considering the merits of planning to play big-label music on their own little show.

And because of that last part, guys like me suddenly have a career. Thank you.

Now it’s six years later and anyone with an iPod knows what a podcast is. NPR re-broadcasts all their content this way, formerly unknown authors are now well-known among the podcast-listening public. Some of us musicians are earning most of our living through podcasting. And we didn’t even need Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Fahey in rubber suits to pull it off.

Is It The Right Time?

I’ve ditched cable TV and watch all the same programming I used to via HD broadcast, iTunes, and web streams. I only torrent shows when their producers are too stupid to give me a legitimate means of buying them directly- but I still get the shows I want. Is it the right time for everyone to do this? Maybe, I’d give it another 2 years before everyone’s got a Mac Mini replacing their cable box.

I’ve stopped listening to commercial radio and find much better quality music with far fewer commercials via Pandora Radio and, of course, Podcasting. Is it the right time for everyone else to get their music digitally? Absolutely. The variety is much wider, the barrier to entry much lower. Services like Pandora and some podcasts ensure that musicians get paid every time their songs are played. Radio doesn’t do that, yet they run 1 minute of commercials for every 2 minutes of music.

I live on a spaceship somewhere just outside the Earth’s atmosphere and live on a diet of squid meat and quinoa. Is it time for everyone else to follow me? Hell no, will someone please send up a steak and some ice cream? It’s definitely the right time for that.

I had hoped to make this announcement weeks ago, but apparently Pandora Radio lists holiday albums under a different artist name and it took me until this morning to notice this. I don’t care, it’s in there and you can listen to it now. However, I don’t think they’re going to spin up the radio drama parts, so if you want to hear the whole adventure you’ll have to buy the album.

In the mean time, though, take a listen and create your own holiday station at www.pandora.com/music/artist/matthew+ebel+holiday

I’ve mentioned Pandora a few times as the future of internet radio, at least here in the states. If you’re still not clear as to why I’m in love with it, check this video out.