Money talks, top 40 listens
Amid its antic tales of malfeasance and egomania in the record business, Fredric Dannen's new book "Hit Men" (Times Books/Random House) details a sobering statistic: from the late 1970's through much of the 1980's, record companies laid out as much as $50 million to $80 million each year on independent promotion. An informal alliance of promotion men calling itself the Network controlled what was played - and what wasn't - on Top 40 radio stations across the United States. (One member of the Network, Joseph Isgro, has just gone on trial in Los Angeles for racketeering and payola.) What does it mean that for the last decade, cash has ruled the Top 40 as much as listeners' choice?
It's no great surprise that the record and radio businesses are not always beacons of probity; they hardly have a monopoly on corruption in American industry and politics. Nor does independent promotion's hold on radio stations mean, as rock-haters often contend, that the only reason people enjoy current pop is because it has been rammed down their throats through constant repetition. Listeners can always change the station, and even if they don't, they will resist an over-hyped song.
But neither is the story told in "Hit Men" simply a matter of a few greased palms. Until it became prohibitively expensive, the Network was doing a job that seemed to satisfy a capitalist oligopoly, the six major corporations that control about 90 percent of the recorded-music market. In effect, the Network was squelching the small fry, the independent labels that couldn't afford to ante up. The major labels already had their own national distribution systems, which could put recordings on shelves from coast to coast simultaneously, compared to the smaller labels' less effective local outlets. Not only were the smaller labels' releases difficult to find in stores, but independent promotion helped assure they would also be scarcer on the air.
For as much as $100,000 to $300,000 a song, independent promotion men allegedly paid off radio-station program directors with money or drugs, or intimidated them. The goal was to guarantee radio exposure and, nearly as important, the reports made to trade papers that a song was being played, all of which moves a hit up the pop charts. Not employing the Network, Mr. Dannen suggests, could keep even a sure thing off the air.
After a 1986 NBC News report called independent promotion "the New Payola", major labels dropped the practice. But established performers and managers began employing the Network directly (at somewhat reduced prices) to retain a competitive edge.
Both the magnitude and the effects of modern independent promotion make it different from the small-time payola of the 1950's (there was no specific law against payola until 1960). What one promotion man in "Hit Men" calls the "$50 handshake" helped, in the 1950's, to get independent-label efforts - specifically, early rock-and-roll - on the air, providing an alternative to major-label pablum. If that alternative hadn't found an eager audience, the disk jockeys who helped turn so-called race records into rock-and-roll would soon have had to find other employment; payola provided the music that people wanted to hear. By contrast, the corporation-financed independent promotion of recent years had nearly as much to do with limiting access by competitors as with buying airtime.
Money has always spoken loudly in the recording business in legitimate ways. Bigger budgets buy more recording time, more experienced technicians and better equipment. None of that guarantees a better recorded performance; rock has been known to defy and then redefine good recording technique. But except for some noncommercial college radio stations, most broadcasters demand a minimum standard of sound quality, and most expect high-gloss productions.
Money also buys albums to send free to radio stations as well as special promotional pressings, like the one-song 12-inch disks or CD's provided to radio stations to show which song the record company intends to push.
It pays for packaging and advertising in a field where impulse buying makes a huge difference. Even within record stores, display space is often sold to record companies. And of course, money buys video clips. Through the 1980's, while television (especially MTV) became vastly more important as an outlet for pop, the cost of marketing a hit far outstripped the cost of recording it in the first place, giving major labels an increasing advantage.
But popular music is one peculiar commodity; it can't be completely professionalized. To survive, to maintain the public's interest, it has to evolve, and its innovations and mutations rarely come from the top. Pop stays contemporary as the mainstream absorbs the fringe; it depends on a challenge from outside (and, historically, from the lower-class communities that first supported jazz, tango, rhythm-and-blues, country-and-western, samba or rap). New styles tend to arise beneath the radar of major labels, to be detected and marketed by the streetwise entrepreneurs who were pressing rap records in the late 1970's or speed-metal albums in the mid-1980's - the despised small labels, which were priced out of the Top 40 by independent promotion.
While the major labels were pumping tens of millions of dollars into independent promotion, their profits were shrinking. From 1979 to 1983, the heyday of independent promotion, the music business went into its first downturn, which ended only through the advent of MTV (a strong new marketing method, apparently outside Network control) and the compact disk, with its larger profit margin and the chance to sell old recordings anew. As the majors locked up the Top 40, they turned their back on the radical challenges of punk-rock and rap, and most of the resulting music was boring.
Listeners turned elsewhere. Like disenchanted network television viewers switching to cable TV or VCR's, some set out to create the alternative circuits that nurtured collegiate rock, rap, speed-metal, world-beat and house music, the 1980's styles that people were willing to go out of their way to hear, and the styles that the major labels are now catching up with. Top 40 stations lost some of their make-or-break power; a band like Metallica could sell a million copies of an album with virtually no radio exposure, and fortunes were made on dance singles played in clubs. But the commercial explosion of rap was delayed until after 1985, when independent promotion became affordable for smaller labels.
Ideally, the Top 40 ought to be a kind of participatory democracy - the music of the moment, as voted on through sales and requests, competing in a free market of noise. Realistically, it's never that fair; a song without significant record-company support stands about as much chance as a Congressional candidate without campaign funds. But in pop, squelching the competition backfires sooner or later; the music stagnates, innovators give up, the audience yawns. The price of the new payola should be measured not just in millions of dollars, but in lost musical revelations.
Mariah Carey has a "monster" with "good legs" and no "burn factor". The monster is the singer-songwriter's ballad "Vision of Love", which recently spent its fourth week atop Billboard magazine's pop singles chart. The song owes its lengthy stay at No. 1 (its legs) to strong sales (500,000 copies) and the fact that radio listeners haven't wearied of it (the dreaded burn factor). At No. 87, Chicago's "Hearts in Trouble" is in trouble, fading fast after only five weeks of sporadic radio airplay and weak sales. Meanwhile, 98 other songs on the chart are locked in brutal competition. Of the thousands of singles released last year, only 32 made it to No. 1. The road to a hit is long and often precarious. Here are the basic steps along the way.
1. Three to four weeks before releasing an album, a record company launches a single believed to have hit potential. Sales are secondary; instead, singles are used to generate airplay and create demand for albums, which are five times as expensive. A video is usually sent to MTV to bolster interest.
2. Record-company promoters personally deliver the single to radio-station program directors across the country and try to convince them to play the song. (Incentives can range from the song's apparent commercial potential to, some claim, payola.)
3. Stations are cautious, often adding a song only after playing it on a trial basis and interviewing listeners by telephone. Stations in urban areas also keep tabs on dance clubs. WPLJ, a Top 40 station in New York, recently added a remake of "Strawberry Fields Forever" on the strength of its popularity in clubs. If a record is favorably received, the station adds the single to its playlist of 30 to 35 songs.
4. The single's ranking - recalculated weekly through audience research - is reported to Billboard, which polls about 250 stations each week and checks sales figures from record stores. The magazine converts this information into points, and the songs with the most points earn slots on its national singles chart. The more points, the higher the chart position.
5. A single moves up Billboard's chart by improving its popularity ranking at the reporting radio stations, by increasing the number of stations playing it and by selling well at record stores. Sales play a bigger factor in determining a song's position in the Top 40 section of the chart. There, songs with airplay but meager sales falter. Others drop back despite strong sales because their rank declines at reporting stations.
6. Singles backed by relentless promotion and/or true merit make it to the Top Five. The strongest, like Ms. Carey's "Vision of Love", remain in the coveted No. 1 spot for a month or more. A Top 10 song usually logs 15 or more weeks on the Billboard singles chart. (The New York Times)
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