Payola never goes away, it just mutates. And we wonder why the major labels still dominate the radio waves?

During a single week in May, Canadian pop rocker Avril Lavigne's new song "Don't Tell Me" aired no fewer than 109 times on Nashville radio station WQZQ-FM.

The heaviest rotation came between midnight and 6 a.m., an on-air no man's land visited largely by insomniacs, truckers and graveyard shift workers. One Sunday morning, the 3-minute, 24-second song aired 18 times, sometimes as little as 11 minutes apart.

Those plays, or "spins," helped "Don't Tell Me" vault into the elite top 10 on Billboard magazine's national pop radio chart, which radio program directors across the country use to spot hot new tunes.

But what many chart watchers may not know is that the predawn saturation in Nashville - and elsewhere - occurred largely because Arista Records paid the station to play the song as an advertisement. In all, sources said, WQZQ aired "Don't Tell Me" as an ad at least 40 times the week ending May 23, accounting for more than one-third of the song's airplay on the station.

The "Don't Tell Me" campaign is part of the latest craze in record promotion, a high-pressure part of the music business in which the labels try to influence which songs reach the air.

In the late 1950s, rock's earliest days, the industry was hit by a series of payola scandals in which cash bribes were paid to disc jockeys who agreed to play certain songs. That practice was subsequently outlawed, prompting record companies to find more subtle means of currying favor with radio programmers, be it sending them on junkets or handing them concert tickets.

In the latest twist, it's the radio stations themselves that have been reaching out to the labels, offering to play songs in the form of ads, often in the early morning hours when there tends to be an excess inventory of airtime. The practice is legal as long as the station makes an on-air disclosure of the label's sponsorship - typically with an introduction such as "And now, Avril Lavigne's 'Don't Tell Me,' presented by Arista Records." [LA Times]

All five major record corporations have at least dabbled in the sales programs, industry sources said, with some reportedly paying as much as $60,000 in advertising fees to promote a single song.
page 1 | 2