Payola

Based on Wikipedia: Payola

In 1960, a disc jockey named Alan Freed—the man who popularized the term "rock and roll" and helped bring Black music to white American teenagers—lost everything. His career was destroyed, his reputation shattered. His crime? Taking money to play records on the radio.

Here's the thing, though: everybody was doing it.

The World's Oldest Musical Bribe

Payola is the practice of paying radio stations to play songs without telling anyone about the payment. The word itself is a delightful bit of linguistic archaeology. Entertainment magazine Variety coined it in 1938 by mashing together "pay" with the "-ola" suffix that was everywhere in early twentieth-century product names. Think Victrola, Crayola, Motorola. The suffix originally came from "pianola," the brand name for a player piano. So payola literally sounds like something you'd buy at a department store—which, in a way, it was.

The practice predates the word by decades. Before the 1930s, nobody really scrutinized why certain songs became popular. The advertising agencies that sponsored NBC's "Your Hit Parade" refused to reveal how they determined their rankings. They offered only vague platitudes about "readings of radio requests, sheet music sales, dance hall favorites and jukebox tabulations." Translation: we'll never tell you.

Early attempts to stop payola were met with silence from music publishers. Why would they complain? The system worked beautifully for anyone who could afford to play.

Rock and Roll on Trial

The payola scandal of the 1950s wasn't really about bribery. It was about rock and roll.

By the mid-1940s, three-quarters of all records produced in the United States went straight into jukeboxes. The emergence of hit radio was threatening the livelihoods of song pluggers—professional persuaders who worked for music publishers, visiting radio stations to convince them to play their songs. These were people with real jobs, mortgages, families. And suddenly teenagers were dropping nickels into machines to hear this new, dangerous music that didn't need any plugging at all.

The traditional music establishment fought back by trying to link all payola to rock and roll. It was a clever strategy. If you couldn't stop the music on artistic grounds, maybe you could stop it on legal ones. Independent record companies and small publishers, the ones who actually produced rock and roll, couldn't afford the massive promotional budgets of the major labels. Payola was their equalizer.

Phil Lind, a disc jockey at Chicago's WAIT, admitted in Congressional hearings that he had taken twenty-two thousand dollars to play a record. That's roughly two hundred thirty thousand dollars in today's money—for playing songs.

The Destruction of Alan Freed

The first United States Congressional Payola Investigations began in 1959. The House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight hauled disc jockeys before it, demanding answers about their relationships with record companies.

Two men sat in the hot seat: Alan Freed and Dick Clark.

Freed was uncooperative. He refused to sign an affidavit stating he had never received payola. He was fired from his radio job as a result. His career never recovered. He died five years later, broken and largely forgotten, at age forty-three.

Dick Clark, on the other hand, understood the game. He had extensive ownership interests in music-industry holdings—publishing companies, record labels, talent management firms. Before testifying, he divested himself of all of them. He appeared before the committee clean, apologetic, cooperative. He avoided any repercussions and went on to host "American Bandstand" for another three decades, becoming a beloved television institution.

Same crime. Opposite outcomes.

The Cure That Made Things Worse

Following the investigations, Congress made payola a misdemeanor offense. More significantly, radio disc jockeys were stripped of the authority to make their own programming decisions. From now on, what songs got played would be decided by station program directors.

This was supposed to solve the problem. Instead, it simplified it.

Think about it: before, if you wanted your song on the air, you had to bribe dozens of individual disc jockeys at every station across the country. That was expensive and inefficient. Now you only had to reach one person per station—the program director. The corruption didn't disappear. It just became more organized.

Record labels quickly found another workaround: independent promoters. These were third parties, nominally separate from the labels, who would offer "promotion payments" to station directors. Since the label itself wasn't paying the station directly, everyone could pretend the Federal Communications Commission's regulations didn't apply. Stations didn't report these arrangements. Labels maintained plausible deniability. Everyone was happy—except the musicians who couldn't afford to play the game.

This cozy arrangement lasted until 1986, when NBC News aired an investigation called "The New Payola" and triggered another round of Congressional hearings.

The Corporate Era

In 2002, Eliot Spitzer—then the District Attorney of New York, later the Governor, and still later a cautionary tale about personal scandal—opened an investigation into payola at the major record labels. What his office uncovered was systematic corruption at the highest levels of the music industry.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment settled out of court in July 2005, agreeing to pay ten million dollars. Warner Music Group followed in November 2005 with five million. Universal Music Group settled in May 2006 for twelve million. EMI rounded out the group later that year with a three-point-seven-five million dollar payment.

That's over thirty million dollars in fines from just four companies. The money went to New York State nonprofit organizations funding music education—a lovely irony, using corrupt music industry money to teach children about music.

In 2007, the Federal Communications Commission finally closed the "independent promoter" loophole, ruling that it had always been a violation of the law—stations had just been getting away with it for decades. Four major radio companies (CBS Radio, Citadel, Clear Channel, and Entercom) settled for twelve-point-five million in fines and agreed to stricter oversight for three years. None admitted wrongdoing, of course. They never do.

Meet the New Payola, Same as the Old Payola

Clear Channel Radio—the massive conglomerate that became iHeartMedia—responded to the increased legal scrutiny by refusing to deal with independent promoters entirely. They also launched a program called "On the Verge" that, depending on your perspective, was either a legitimate artist development initiative or payola with better public relations.

Here's how it worked: brand managers at Clear Channel headquarters would listen to hundreds of songs, filter them down to five or six favorites across various formats, and send those selections to program directors at stations nationwide. The program directors would vote on which ones they thought listeners would enjoy most. The winners would then receive mandatory airplay—at least one hundred fifty plays—on every station in the network.

Artists who benefited from this exposure included Iggy Azalea with "Fancy," Tinashe with "2 On," and Jhené Aiko with "The Worst." Company executives insisted that selections were based solely on musical quality, not label pressure.

Perhaps. But consider what "On the Verge" actually accomplished: it gave a single corporate entity the power to decide which new artists would receive massive national exposure and which would languish in obscurity. That's an extraordinary amount of influence concentrated in very few hands, regardless of how earnestly those hands claim to be acting in the public interest.

Streaming and the Playlist Problem

The rise of music-sharing websites in the late 1990s initially seemed like it might break the payola system entirely. If listeners could discover and share music directly with each other, who needed radio stations? The power of independent promoters declined, and record labels went back to dealing with stations directly.

But then streaming services arrived, and with them came a new form of influence peddling.

On Spotify, record labels can pay for tracks to appear in user playlists as "Sponsored Songs." This is technically disclosed—there's a small label identifying the content as promoted—and users can opt out in their account settings. But how many listeners actually notice? How many know to look for it? How many understand that the songs appearing in their "Discover Weekly" or "Daily Mix" might be there because someone paid for placement rather than because an algorithm genuinely thought they'd enjoy it?

The fundamental dynamic hasn't changed since the 1950s. Those with money can buy exposure. Those without cannot. The platforms have changed—from disc jockeys to program directors to playlist algorithms—but the game remains the same.

The Dark Side: Money Laundering Through Music

In Mexico, South America, and some regions along the United States southern border, payola has been weaponized for an entirely different purpose: money laundering.

The scheme works like this: unknown "new artists" suddenly appear across multiple radio formats, aggressively promoted by producers of dubious origin. Money flows through the legitimate-looking music promotion channels. The songs get played. The payments get processed. And then, just as suddenly, the artists disappear from the scene—or reappear under different stage names, ready to wash another batch of cartel cash through the music industry's plumbing.

It's elegant, in a terrifying way. Music promotion is inherently subjective. There's no objective measure of why one song deserves airplay over another. That subjectivity creates perfect cover for moving money that can't bear scrutiny.

What Payola Actually Costs

In 2007, the United States Congress held a hearing with a memorably long title: "From Imus to Industry: The Business of Stereotypes and Degrading Images." The hearing explored hip hop music and its relationship with the radio and music industries.

Lisa Fager Bediako, co-founder of the media watchdog group Industry Ears, offered testimony that reframed payola in moral rather than purely legal terms. Misogynistic and racist stereotypes pervade hip hop, she argued, because record labels, radio stations, and music video channels profit from allowing such material while censoring other content. In her words:

Payola is no longer the local DJ receiving a couple dollars for airplay; it is now an organized corporate crime that supports the lack of balanced content and demeaning imagery with no consequences.

Whether or not you agree with her characterization, Bediako identified something important: payola isn't just about individual corruption. It's a system that determines which voices get amplified and which get silenced. When airtime goes to the highest bidder, the music that reaches audiences reflects the priorities of those who can pay, not necessarily the interests of those who listen.

The Independent Artist's Impossible Choice

Consider the predicament of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. Before "Thrift Shop" became an inescapable hit, they were independent artists facing the same barrier that has blocked independent musicians since the payola era began: how do you get your music on the radio when you can't afford to play the promotion game?

Their solution was to hire the Alternative Distribution Alliance, an independent arm of Warner Music Group that helps unsigned and independent artists get radio exposure. Their manager, Zach Quillen, explained that they paid the alliance a flat monthly fee to help promote their album.

This is perfectly legal. It's disclosed. It doesn't violate Federal Communications Commission regulations. But notice what it means: even artists trying to work outside the major label system end up paying for access. The specific mechanisms may change, but the fundamental equation remains constant. Exposure costs money. Period.

A Brief Legal Interlude

The actual law around payola is simultaneously strict and toothless. The Federal Communications Commission and the Communications Act of 1934 require that anyone who receives payment for airing material must disclose this fact. Employees of broadcast stations, program producers, program suppliers—everyone involved must reveal if they've been paid to promote content.

The stated purpose is reasonable: broadcasters need to let audiences know if material was sponsored, and by whom. Transparency allows listeners to evaluate what they're hearing with appropriate skepticism.

In practice, disclosure requirements have created a strange loophole. If you're paid to play a song and you announce that fact, it's not payola—it's just advertising. This led to a bizarre moment in 1999 when disc jockeys at a Washington, D.C. radio station, debuting Lou Bega's "Mambo Number 5," announced they had accepted a large amount of payola to play it. The joke was legally precise: if they actually had been paid, the announcement would have made it perfectly legal.

More seriously, the loopholes have enabled what might be called "white market payola." The streaming service Jango, for instance, openly accepts promotion fees from artists. For as little as thirty dollars, a band can buy one thousand plays, slotted between established artists. The artists choose whose fans they want to reach. It's pay-for-play, disclosed and documented.

Is this better or worse than the under-the-table deals of the 1950s? It's certainly more honest. But it still means that musicians with marketing budgets reach audiences while musicians without them don't.

Payola in Popular Culture

The scandal has echoed through music and film for decades.

In 1960, the comedian Stan Freberg released "Old Payola Roll Blues," a two-sided parody single about a promoter trying to bribe a jazz disc jockey into playing a terrible rock song called "High School OO OO." The disc jockey refuses every phony deal. The record ends with an anti-rock anthem welcoming jazz and swing back and saying goodbye to "amateur nights, including rock and roll." It's a fascinating artifact—comedy that sided with the establishment against the new music.

Neil Young took the opposite approach in his 1983 song "Payola Blues," which opens with a dedication to Alan Freed and then argues that corruption had grown far worse since the 1950s: "The things they're doing today would make a saint out of you." Where Freberg saw payola as rock and roll's disease, Young saw it as the industry's disease—and rock and roll as the victim.

The Dead Kennedys, performing at a music industry awards ceremony, sang "Pull My Strings"—a vicious parody of "My Sharona" that rewrote the chorus as "My Payola." The band had been asked to perform their hit "California Über Alles" but instead used the moment to attack the assembled executives directly. Punk rock, it turned out, had opinions about industry corruption.

They Might Be Giants contributed "Hey, Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had a Deal," narrated from the perspective of a naive musician who pays a disc jockey for promised airplay and then never hears from him again. It's funny and sad in the way that exploitation of eager artists always is.

Billy Joel included payola in his catalogue of twentieth-century events, "We Didn't Start the Fire," tucking it into the 1960 verse alongside other crises and scandals. The 1972 film "The Harder They Come," starring Jimmy Cliff, depicted payola in the Jamaican music industry—a reminder that the corruption was never purely American.

Perhaps most pointedly, the musical "Dreamgirls" and its 2006 film adaptation made payola a central plot element, showing how the practice shaped (and distorted) careers in the soul music industry of the 1960s and 70s.

Why It Still Matters

Here's what payola really is: a tax on being unknown.

If you're already famous, people will seek out your music. Radio stations will play it because audiences request it. Streaming algorithms will recommend it because listeners engage with it. Success compounds success.

But if you're new, if you're independent, if you're outside the system, you face an obstacle that has nothing to do with your talent: you have to pay for the chance to be heard. Whether it's thirty dollars to Jango for a thousand streams, or a monthly fee to a distribution alliance, or the old-fashioned envelope of cash to a disc jockey, the fundamental transaction remains the same. Access costs money.

The Alan Freed scandal taught the music industry an important lesson—just not the one Congress intended. The lesson wasn't that payola was wrong and should stop. The lesson was that payola needed better legal protection and more sophisticated methods. The practice didn't end; it evolved.

Every reform has created new loopholes. Every crackdown has prompted new workarounds. The people with power and money have consistently found ways to translate those advantages into exposure, while those without have consistently been shut out.

Maybe that's just how industries work. Maybe gatekeepers will always exist, and the cost of getting past them will always fall hardest on those least able to pay. But it's worth knowing the history, worth understanding that what sounds like organic popularity—the song that seems to be everywhere, the artist who comes from nowhere—might be neither organic nor accidental.

The next time a song gets stuck in your head, it might be worth asking: who paid for it to get there?