Tag: Music

Here’s an infographic explaining how a record gets leaked from a Spin article titled Days of the Leak:

Click the image to see it at full size.

According to the infographic, there are a number of opportunities for an album to make it into the public’s hands between its completion and release:

• At the studio: 4 months before release — As soon as a record is finished, anyone from the producer to the engineer to the band members can spoil the fun.
• At the label: 3 1/2 months before release — Labels send albums to companies like Sonic Arts to add a digital encryption code that can identify evildoers…but not necessarily stop them.
• By the press: 3 months before release — Considered to be the most common source of album leakage, watermarks or not. Oops!
• At the plant: 1 month before release — While in the process of being manufactured, a CD is ostensibly secured under lock and key, but sometimes copies fall off the back of trucks.
• At the warehouse: 2 weeks before release — Once CDs await shipping to retailers, it’s virtually guaranteed that a copy will find its way online.
• At retail: And of course, once an album is for sale online and in stores, all bets are off.

A Brief History of Payola

See the gentleman on the left? That’s Alan Freed, the “Father of Rock and Roll”. As a radio DJ and music television show host in the 50’s, he popularized the term “Rock and Roll”, turning it from an obscure euphemism for sex into a household phrase for a music genre. He helped break the color barrier in music, introducing America to acts like Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

His career and reputation were destroyed in the (painfully-named) Payola scandal, in which he accepted bribes from record companies to give their records more airplay. Dick Clark’s career was almost destroyed as well, but by cooperating with the authorities and selling off his share of a record company, he was able to have the charges against him reduced to a slap on the wrist.

(Freed, unable to find much work in the wake of the scandal, turned to alcohol and died of cirrhosis in 1965.)

Payola still exists today, thanks to a legal loophole. Rather than going directly to radio stations, record companies hire “indies” (independent promoters, not independent labels) to promote their albums — and by promote, I mean “provide payment as inducement to play their albums”. For more on the relationships between record companies, indies and radio stations, see this How Stuff Works article.

Radio: Bad for the Recording Industry?

Here’s a report from Techdirt earlier today:

Remember a few months back when the RIAA started asking the government to get radio stations to pay up for promoting their music? This seemed pretty ludicrous (especially when you add in the fact that record labels for years have paid radio stations via payola to get them to play their music in the first place). Well, the group organized by the RIAA to push this plan has found a professor to publish a study saying that radio actually makes people buy less music. This way, they can claim that radio actually is not a promotional medium for music.

Techdirt asks the question and I repeat it: If radio is bad for music as the RIAA says, why have record companies been bribing radio stations all these years?