I was getting a haircut one day around when Santana’s
album “Supernatural” came out. The album’s hit
single, “Smooth,” came on the radio, and the barber
jumped and nearly Van Gogh’d my ear.
I asked what was wrong, and he said that it was the 16th time
that day he had heard the song … on the same station. I wondered
why people would rabidly request one song and not buy the album and
be done with it.
My suspicions are now founded with New York Attorney General
Eliot Spitzer’s discovery that Sony BMG Music Entertainment
had been bribing radio stations and DJs to play its artists, among
them Jennifer Lopez and Good Charlotte.
The company paid stations to get songs played, gave prizes to
DJs, and even hired people to bombard the stations with requests.
The practice, nicknamed “payola,” is a federal crime
punishable by a fine of up to $11,000 or a year of jail time.
Is anyone truly shocked? Companies constantly push their
products in ridiculous ways, such as a few years back when
now-defunct video game company Acclaim wanted to advertise on
tombstones.
The big story isn’t that payola happened, but rather that
Sony BMG was dumb enough to get caught.
This revelation does do one thing: It makes judging and
understanding music that much more difficult.
Music is the most difficult medium in which to judge excellence.
Not only is it extraordinarily diverse, it also has the most
publications with differing opinions.
How many magazines are there specifically about film and
television? Not nearly as many as music. Rolling Stone, Spin,
Alternative Press, Blender, Kerrang ““ the list goes on.
Plus, music lacks a definitive award to judge excellence like
the Academy Awards or the Emmys. Those awards aren’t
infallible, but more often than not they do a decent job.
Conversely, the Grammys seem to be correlated with sales. If you
look at sales for any year, it’s likely that the top-selling
albums were at least nominated for Grammys. Is it any surprise that
of the top 10 albums in 2004, half of them won Grammys, including
artists like Norah Jones, Usher and Maroon 5? The fishy part is
this seems to happen every year.
If applied to movies, the nominees for best picture this year
would include “Fantastic Four” and “The Longest
Yard.” While it’s possible that people may just know
what all the best music is, it’s unlikely.
More importantly, after this scandal we don’t even know
what’s popular anymore. If record companies are requesting
songs, how do we know if people really like them? Some would point
to sales.
Album sales are reported by the Nielsen SoundScan system, where
every time a barcode is scanned, the sale gets stored in a
computer. So what stops labels from getting retailers to scan
unsold copies and reporting them as sales? The Los Angeles Times
reported on this general practice of SoundScan fraud in 2001.
Even file sharing may make it difficult to figure out how
popular an album is. A new release by an artist may not go gold,
but many people may have downloaded the album or parts of it and
decided, for whatever reason, not to buy. This is different from
when you had to buy a CD to find out whether it was crappy.
On the flip side, people may be so satisfied downloading that
they may stop buying CDs altogether, regardless of quality.
Now if it’s difficult to judge excellence and, as
we’ve learned from Sony BMG, to know what’s popular,
there is only one conclusion ““ the whole industry is a
sham.
What if the careers of some musicians are built completely on
payola scams and doctored sales figures? Does that mean the
Grammys, which appear to be based on sales, are also nonsense?
This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to ball up in the
fetal position.
So if radio, awards shows and sales figures are false, and the
music publications have differing opinions about quality,
there’s only one solution: Go download every single piece of
music you can.
After all, if you have no way of definitively knowing what is
good ““ or even popular ““ you may as well just grab it
all and listen.
Then again, what if the record companies planned everything
I’ve discussed to confuse people so that the vast majority
who don’t download everything would instead buy everything
they could? How utterly devious.
Though, as far-fetched as all these fraud theories may seem, in
the end they do explain one of music’s lingering mysteries
““ why Creed was ever popular.
E-mail Humphrey at mhumphrey@media.ucla.edu.