The messy suicide of commercial radio series; (part 13) We don’t do payola, We let the independent promotion companies handle it (II)

And musically, what did the end of the Network era augur? Well consider the #1 records in 1985, the year before the Network hit the fan. That year Phil Collins topped the charts three times and Wham! twice, and John Parr and A-ha had their only real hits. By buying music onto the air, the Network ushered in sonic homogeneity, a musical malaise that still afflicts popular music. As most of the music the Network worked tended toward the middle of the road, radio started to regard rock as a niche format, and the height of R&B was Whitney Houston and the Commordores. The Network disappeared, but it branded popular music, and the scars remain.

While the Network was finished, independent promotion didn’t go away. It did, however, mutate. At the height of the influence of the Network, and just before it came crashing down, a young promoter in Chicago, who had worked independent promotion in New York and toiled in various Midwestern cities as an employee of CBS, came up with his own idea. “In 1983 or ’84, I went to an FCC attorney and laid out his promotional assistance/revenue sharing opportunity,” said Jeff McClusky.

The idea was to take a portion of our income and go to one of the two or three Top-40 stations in various medium and small markets and supply those stations with promotional assistance, if they would work with us and not other independents. That’s where it started, and it’s the standard [as I speak]. By the time other companies caught up on this way of doing business, we’d become the dominant company in our area.

The basic model for promotion that McClusky invented worked like this:

1. He signed up a station as a McClusky station.

2. The station agreed not to work with any other independent promoters.

3. He provided the station with a promotional budget, which it used for things like the station van, because the more the station could increase its profile, the more value it would hold for McClusky and his clients. And if the budget offered a few more dollars than the van cost, no one was the wiser.

4. Every week, McClusky sent the records he wanted “his” stations to add. Usually there’d be around 10. Of the records the station added that week, a certain percentage had to be McClusky’s.

5. McClusky charged the record companies a relatively small weekly fee, and bonus fees for:

• Getting the record on the chart

• Getting into the Top 20

• Getting into the Top 10

• Getting into the Top 5

• Topping the chart

• Reaching gold status

• Reaching platimun status

• And, of course, each level of multiplatinum

Ironically, this method proved, in its own twisted sort of way, to be more democratic than the Network. It aided the first commercial wave of rap music, as the independent companies that put out rap could afford dealing with McClusky, while the members of the Network were far pricier. If McClusky didn’t bring home the bacon, the record company had to pay only the relatively small retainer, and if he did, the company was likely making enough money that it was happy to give McClusky his share. While the Network built from the top down, McClusky’s method could build from the middle up. As the Network began to crumble, McClusky’s power began to accrue, and many other companies started to use his method.

For one thing, McClusky didn’t have to count on stations reporting one thing and playing another. He offered enough music that most McClusky stations could find sufficient McClusky records to add every week that fit their formats. This proved useful a few years down the line when, as we’ve seen, the chart methodology became more sophisticated and publications such as Billboard and Radio and Records stopped relying on station reports.

“There is a greater reliance on verifiable information,” noted independent promoter, radio consultant, and talent advisor Jerry Lembo. “Today’s benchmarks are monitored airplay (Mediabase and BDS), Soundscan, and call-out research.”

As all this was building, Joe Isgro ran into trouble again – outside of the record business. On March 30, 2000, a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of loan sharking. They must have caught him red-handed, as he pleaded guilty to two counts and was sentenced to 50 months in prison. No longer the dapper, tan, successful music businessman of his Network days, Joe Isgro faced the judge in shackles. He wore a prison windbreaker and blue chinos. His hairpiece was gone, and what was left of his natural hair was a sparse gray.

In the meantime, Isgro’s successor as the 800-pound gorilla of national promotion, Jeff McClusky and Associates, grew more and more powerful. In 2001, Billboard celebrated McClusky’s more-or-less-20th anniversary with an advertising supplement that ran nearly 40 pages, most of them ads paid for by the major record companies and many of the larger indies, film companies, local press, service providers McClusky did business with – like travel agencies, florists, and limousine services – lawyers, managers, other radio-specific trades and tip sheets, and even some artists themselves.