A look at the blurry line between marketing and payola
Steven Sandor / steven@vueweekly.com
A decade ago, Insterscope Records paid Portland, OR radio station KUFO FM to ensure guaranteed airplay for the then-new Limp Bizkit single, "Counterfeit."
That story was huge in the music industry a decade ago, as it brought the question of what exactly is sponsorship and what constitutes payola to the forefront. What Interscope did was legal, but it showed just how far labels were willing to go to make sure radio kept playing what their A&R people thought were going to be the hits. Today, radio is not nearly the tastemaker it used to be, because more and more of us are discovering new music through the Internet. But does that mean the concept of pay-for-play is dead? Not at all. In fact, it might make legal payola—or "promotion" and "online marketing"—more important than ever. Sure, an artist can submit a track to the likes of CBC Radio 3 and hope for the best. Maybe it will get discovered, maybe it won't. But, as someone who uses TuneCore, the service that, for a fee, allows independent artists the chance to upload their albums and get them into a variety of e-commerce stores from iTunes to Amazon, Napster to eMusic, I received a notice about Jango. I was intrigued by the sales pitch, an Internet radio service that guarantees your song gets exposure. According to the bumpf, "Your music will be played to Jango listeners who like music similar to yours. You choose the fans to target by selecting artists you want to be played alongside. For example, if you buy 1200 airplays ... and pick U2 and Coldplay—Jango will play your songs to 1200 people who like U2 and Coldplay." That's right. Buy. Airplays. It's not all that expensive. US$30 for 1200 airplays or US$200 for 12 000. According to Jango estimates, 1200 plays usually result in 60 – 100 fans with whom the artist can interact. It needs to be noted that those are special fees that are offered to artists who are TuneCore users. What the artist or label or manager is doing is buying a placement, putting your songs alongside similar artists. Marketing people do exactly that when they make their ad buys. There's a reason so much beer is pitched during Sunday football and minivans are hocked to white suburban families during hockey games. Because the Internet is such a wide, wide place where it's easy for any artist to get lost in a world of click-thrus, Jango is simply taking advantage of a simple concept: in a sea of confusion, give the user a compass. Give them artists directed to their tastes. And, give the artists a chance to market their music to people who might like them. VSteven Sandor is a former editor-in-chief of Vue Weekly, now an editor and author living in Toronto.
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