....Even if a band is found by an A&R guy hanging out in a club, as with emerging alt-rockers stellastarr*, new technologies let labels and artists end-run traditional promotion channels, such as commercial radio.

New York-based stellastarr*was signed to a five-album deal in May 2003 by RCA Records. But five months earlier, deejay Billy Zero broke the band on satellite radio after he got hold of stellastarr*'s sole CD, recorded on the cheap in New York.

Zero works at XM Satellite Radio in Northeast Washington. For about $10 per month, the pay-radio service beams more than 100 channels of music, news, sports and talk to special receivers in cars and homes. Zero runs XM's "Unsigned Bands" channel, which exclusively plays bands that do not have record contracts. He left Washington's WHFS (99.1 FM) for XM in February 2000, after growing frustrated that the Infinity Radio station would not play enough unsigned bands to suit his tastes.

....Sanders and others in the industry have come to realize that XM and Sirius, both of which have teetered near bankruptcy, now combine to reach a national audience of more than 2 million listeners.

"It took us a minute to say, 'Wow. Okay. There really is something here," Sanders said. "None of us knew what [satellite radio] was other than a couple of dishes floating around in the universe. Now, it's 'Wow — they have an impact on sales.' "

....In the past, record labels would spend thousands of dollars to get a new song on big radio stations, paying independent promoters, or "indies," who gave much of that money to a radio station's promotion budget in exchange for, they hoped, putting the label's new song in the station's airplay rotation. Critics call the system legalized payola.

"The big radio promotion budgets of yesteryear are gone," said Bill Burrs, vice president of rock music for RCA, the man in charge of getting the label's artists, such as stellastarr*, on radio. "Before, you could just load the gun and shoot. But no one's spending $200,000 or $300,000 to blow out a single anymore."

Some such promotion still goes on, but record companies no longer have as much money to throw around, and radio stations are more reluctant to play songs from artists who are not proven hit-makers, because their research shows that listeners mainly want to hear artists they know. Unfamiliar artists cause most listeners to switch stations, and each lost rating point at a radio station translates into lost advertising revenue. [Washington Post] Now that the ice has been broken I think you will see new media have a great impact on the entertainment business.