Entertainment

Modern Day Payola Alleged

May 29, 2001 / 2:16 PM EDT / CBS/AP

Some independent music promoters have deals with radio stations that one critic says are nothing more than payola in modern dress, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

The promoters have arranged so-called "banks" for radio stations that play record labels' products, allowing stations able to make "withdrawals" in cash and promotional material, such as airplane tickets, for airing certain tunes, the newspaper reported.

According to internal documents obtained by the newspaper, the "banks" are detailed logs that list the date a station plays a song followed by a dollar amount collected from the artist's label.

"This document destroys the notion that the new payola is any different from the old payola," said Peter Hart, an analyst for the New York-based media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. "What you have here is a smoking gun. This document confirms suspicions that critics have long had about potential tit-for-tat arrangements between independent promoters and radio stations.

"An appropriate government investigation could blow this whole industry wide open," Hart said.

Federal law prohibits radio stations or programmers from taking cash or goods to play songs without telling listeners about the exchange. The practice was prohibited after the payola scandal of the late 1950s in which disc jockeys such as Alan Freed were found to have accepted money from record labels to play their songs.

According to one document, the newspaper said, Michele Clark Promotion, a Calabasas, Calif.-based company, took in about $50,000 last year from record companies for songs added to the playlist at Portland, Ore.'s KINK-FM, a division of Viacom-owned Infinity Broadcasting. The "bank" lists every time KINK aired a song followed by a specific dollar amount and the name of the label Clark billed for the play time.

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"We aren't doing anything wrong here," Clark told the newspaper. "The support I get from labels has no effect whatsoever on the musical decisions of the program directors at my stations."

Besides, she said, "It's standard operating procedure in the promotion business."

The documents cited by the newspaper show that each of the five major record companies — Vivendi Universal, Sony, Bertelsmann, AOL Time Warner and EMI Group — paid fees o Clark that were allegedly linked to what songs KINK added to its play list.

The station denied wrongdoing.

"We don't do anything illegal or unethical here," KINK Program Director Dennis Constantine said. "No matter what the companies pay Clark or what she writes in that bank, it has absolutely no bearing on how we program this station."

Officials at the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department declined to comment on their four-year probe of the radio business, the newspaper said.

Five executives from Latin music labels and radio stations have pleaded guilty to payola-related tax offenses, and Clear Channel Communications, the nation's largest radio conglomerate, was fined.