Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of Roadsidepictures

October 30th, 2008 – I’m sure you’ve been listening to the radio (people still listen to the radio these days right?), and heard the same track by the same artist, played twice or more within the same hour. If you’re like me, even if you like the song, you will be slightly irritated at such laziness in programming. Have you ever wondered why a radio station would play the same songs over and over?

There are several reasons that this could happen, but the biggest is something called “pay for play”, or “payola”. As you know, record companies are in the business of selling records. What you may not know is that they also get paid every time a song they own gets radio play (of course with a portion supposed to be going to the artist as well). You would think that they would love to get their music played as much as possible, since it means money for each play. However, record companies did a strange thing starting several decades ago: they actually paid for their songs to be played. The money they paid was well above of what they would have received in return for royalties on the playing of that song. So why do it?

Their experience showed that the more a song was played, the more people liked it. The more people like it, the more likely they are to purchase the album, even if it’s only for one song on it. Think about the last time you heard a song by an artist and dismissed it, but as you heard it more and more, you started to like it. I don’t know about you, but it happens to me a lot. Of course, the flip-side of that is if it’s played too much, you may start to then despise the song. The thing is, during the stage where you liked it, you might have already bought the album so whether or not you no longer like the song anymore, doesn’t matter to the record companies.

This practice was actually made illegal in the US in 1960 but record companies still find ways to circumvent the laws. At their best, the record companies may give a radio station exclusives for their artist (interviews with the artist, swag, etc), if the station agrees to play the song a certain amount of times. At their worst, they might pay a third party to drum up album support and that company may do the bribing. However they go about it, only record labels with big advertising dollars can afford to pull such shenanigans. This is why bigger name artists will dominate a radio station’s play lists.

Another reason for song repetition is that the masses (not sophisticated listeners like you and me) don’t necessarily want to hear the unfamiliar; they only want to hear from big name artists that everyone else is listening too. Music is largely a social activity and people subconsciously want to play nice with everyone else. Radio stations know this and, anticipating what songs will bring in a bigger audience and convince them to stay, will choose songs from artists with a history of churning out hits. This turns out to be a Catch-22 situation though, as to become a big enough artist to actually have had previous hits, artists need to be able to get onto the radio in the first place, which is difficult with all the Britney Spears’, Rihannas, and T.I.’s of the world. This, incidentally, is why it’s harder for independent artists to break into the Top 40; you need a lot of money to promote/bribe radio stations for airplay.

Sometimes an artist gets played a lot because the laws of a country mandate it. In countries like Canada and France, media must have a certain percentage of home-grown content. You might think that this would be a good thing for local artists, but this is not always the case. At least in Canada, this means that radio stations play the same songs by the same Canadian artists all the time. This means that I hear Avril Lavigne and Nickelback every 20 minutes.

It may seem like we don’t have a choice as to what gets played, but sometimes I think that we have too much choice of what to listen to. Compare our compartmentalized satellite radio versus BBC radio in the UK. Sometimes not being able to choose what we listen to allows us to experience more. A lot of music I hear coming out of the UK recently is evolved, regardless of genre, compared to our devolved music here in North America (case and point: Souljah Boy). But that’s for another post.