Seth Godin On Payola & Music Marketing
Marketer Seth Godin published this interesting insight today on his blog:
"For 20 years, the Billboard charts were easy to manipulate. By paying radio stations and some retailers, record labels could push an act to the top 40, which would increase sales. People liked buying what they heard on the radio, and the radio played what they thought people were buying.
Billboard changed their methods about twenty years ago, and overnight the acts on the list changed. Suddenly, it became clear that what we were listening to wasn't what we thought it was, and as a result, the marketing of music changed forever." Read The Rest.
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Seth is the best. “Permission Marketing” & “Tribes” should be required reading for everyone in the biz.
Seth, you are an idiot.
The internet is full of payola.
Match the ads with coverage and you will find out who uses payola on the web.
Are you crazy!!! Thats exactly what still happening, a Major label pay’s “consulting fees” or finds a way to pay for airplay to have their artist played constantly in the radio, and thats how they get to the top of the charts. That was the case 20 years ago, as it is the case now. But now people want artists and labels to pay for payola to online radio, blogs to feature their music or to talk about them (popular blogs at least). So don’t give me that crap that payola is dead in radio or that Billboard changed the way they did business it essentially works THE SAME if not worse.
Payola ia Alive and Well! I own my own Independent Record label and it has cost me roughly $30,000.00Usd to produce 500+ BDS/Media Base National Spins. Funny that I outsourced 2 Major Label Urban Radio Promoters and an Employee Of The Biggest Trade Magazine in the BIZ! The Industry is still full of Unethical Practices and Will continue Until It Crumbles.
i think seth’s last line from today was his best:
“…there’s a significant market opportunity for someone who can, as Billboard did, clean up the charts and make the payola worthless or at least more transparent…”
i think we’ve been attacking that precise opportunity @ http://gorankem.com
who knows each artist better than their own fans? we’re crowdsouring the music discovery process by allowing the fans to rank their favorites & then aggregating the totals for each artist.
love to have you build on the resource that gets better with each passing day. more than happy to take any questions at adam[at]gorankem.com
-adam w.
Pull over to the side of the road Adam. Third-parties, i.e. GoRankEm, that sit between bands and music fans are the problem. It’s entities exactly like this that are susceptible to influence and lobbying.
Not just the internet, but the industry in general is ALL about payola in a whole bunch of ways.
Back then: Taxi, the “compilation” scams like Rodell records or some other “pay me to give you access to A&R people” were in the back to every entertainment weekly in the country, and the “showcase” for “industry people” were avenues of payola as well.
Today: the endless supply of sites that will offer you everything from online press kits, access to “contacts” (Pollstar and music business directory), contests (international songwriters competition) and “knowledge” is more than Chicago Reader, BAM and Music Connection ads for those “Services” ever were.
1000’s of people and companies, some qualified and some of the same scummy descendents from the past that are tryin to define their own version of payola in a newish media.
The good news is that the record companies are dead.
The bad news is that everyone has to do everything that the labels actually did at one time build careers and artists with integrity.
Nothing has changed except for the gatekeepers. The ones with integrity will always be the ones remembered. The others are just in it for the payola in some form or another.
love to hear you elaborate. every fan is entitled to their own opinion, and we merely allow them to express their personal favorites from any artist. how does influence & lobbying play a role?
Ray, I think you’ve demonstrated Seth’s point pretty well. I have a hard time trying to think of a way anyone can “clean up the charts” because the advertising industry isn’t getting smaller.
What would an open-source type chart system look like? The crowd-sourcing idea (gorankem) I find interesting but again, it takes time / money to run any site like that. I don’t see any way to make all radio stations (+ MTV etc.) to listen to anyone telling them “Listen up boys and girls, let’s play fair now, OK?”. But that’s just me.