Salon.com News | Payola is dead! Now what will we listen to?

Salon.com News | Payola is dead! Now what will we listen to?: "
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News


Payola is dead! Now what will we listen to?
The bizarre, sleazy system of independent radio promotion may finally have bitten the dust. But believe it or not, pop radio may get even worse.

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By Eric Boehlert

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Jan. 5, 2005 | The new year brings some good news for artists, record companies and music fans. Independent promotion, the entrenched system by which record companies pay middlemen to get songs played on FM stations, has finally been reined in. It's the practice that's sucked hundreds of millions of dollars from the pockets of labels and artists, been tagged by critics as nothing more than legalized bribery, while helping dumb down radio playlists.

'Ding-dong the witch is dead,' crows one record company executive, who, like most people contacted for this article, agreed to talk only on the condition of anonymity. (The indie system may be going down but the topic remains sensitive inside record companies, where neither executives nor artists want to jeopardize potential radio airplay because of public statements.)

Under pressure from New York's nosy attorney general, who has already posted an "