The messy suicide of commercial radio series; (part 8) payola isn’t dead. It always smelled like that

At the turn of the 20th century, phonograph records were not the only game in town. As America became more affluent, every well-heeled home had to have a piano, and generally someone in the house could play and read music. It became a sign of refinement, a major status symbol in parlors and living rooms, not unlike a good stereo system toward the tail end of the century.

So while the record business took its first baby steps, sheet music, established back in the day of Gutenberg, also turned into a major commodity. In 1892, for example, Stephen Foster’s “After the Ball” sold one million copies of sheet music – just in the course of the year.

Nothing sells that well in a vacuum. The selling of songs fell to a new form of music businessman, the “song plugger.”

The precursor of the record company promotion department, a song plugger earned his keep by enticing people to buy sheet music. He accomplished this in several ways. The most basic way involved going from large sheet music retailer to large sheet music retailer around a prescribed territory, sitting down at a piano, and playing both the music that potential customers handed him (so they could hear it before they bought it) and his company’s songs. This required the publishing companies to have regional offices all across the country. A more profitable way to entice buyers involved getting performers to sing the publisher’s songs on stage. By the late 19th century, various areas of the country had show circuits that presented minstrel shows, early vaudeville, and even burlesque.

In places where there was segregation, there were segregated vaudeville circuits. The late boogie-woogie piano legend Sammy Price recalled his early years as a performer on one of these black-only circuits:

The TOBA was a theatrical circuit that was organised in the ‘20s and they had about 26 cities where black artists could travel, like the Plantation Circuit and other circuits. It started in St. Louis, from St. Louis to Kansas City, Kansas City to Dallas, Dallas to Houston, Houston to Shreveport, Louisiana, Jacksonville, Florida, all around to Baltimore, which is where they would discontinue that show.

The travelling shows enjoyed across-the-board popularity wherever a theatre could support them. A song performed by a vaudeville headliner nearly guaranteed a publisher a hit. So paying the headliner to perform a song was not uncommon. The roots of this practice were deep, and even respected to an extent. Gilbert and Sullivan did it. The performance of “subsidised” songs helped many a vaudevillian make ends meet.

Of course, other factors than subsidisation influenced a vaudevillian’s decision to perform or not to perform a song, just as other factors influence a radio programmer’s decision to spin or not to spin. A radio programmer wants to avoid losing listeners and a job. The vaudevillian wanted to avoid getting pelted with overripe vegetable and other projectiles.

As time went on, people continued to pay for play. They tell some great stories about artists who beat the system this way. Dave Cousins got his British progressive rock band the Strawbs on the radio in England by finding out which stores reported to the BBC. He gave the price of the single to all of his friends and families and their friends and family and sent them to those shops. Noting the rise in sales, the BBC started playing the song, and suddenly it began to sell without Cousins having to underwrite it.

The story is great because it is so rare. Throughout the rock era, getting a record on radio has been a major, often dirty, chore.

As former Columbia head Walter Yetnikoff put it, “The music business – and especially the cutthroat business of generating hits – has always had its shady side. What else is new?”

For the better part of a century, the equation in the record business has read “S = R + P,” where “S” represents sales, “R” stands for radio and “P” means promotion – or the other “P” word. While once in a blue moon record companies do manage to sell records and don’t get radio play – the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Thou? Or bands like Anthrax, Hawthorne Heights, and Mannheim Steamroller sell considerable numbers without benefit of a hit – generally the path of least resistance to getting a hit involves getting a song on the radio (if you can call that least resistance).

The symbiosis between radio and the music business began very nearly with the introduction of radio to a popular audience. In 1924, the New York Times trumpeted:

Questionnaire reveals radio beneficial to music industry. Broadcasting has in many instances created a desire on the part of listeners to buy records. This is clearly shown in the case of Wendell Hall, an instrumentalist and singer, who visited many of the large broadcasting stations. When singing from WEAF, he rendered some songs that were more than three years old and for which there had been no recent demand in record form. Several music stores in Brooklyn reported a sudden demand for records of these songs, and upon questioning, it was found that the renewed popularity was caused by the broadcasting of the selections.

This led to a rapid change in the role of the song pluggers. Suddenly they didn’t need to bring their music directly to the people. They could reach the people with much more ease by just getting a song on the radio.

“I was a song plugger 50 years ago,” said Juggy Gayles, one of the people who invented and developed the idea of promoting music to the radio as a means of selling records back in the days when it involved getting the big bands to play it on their regular broadcasts. “In those days we looked to get our songs played on radio. Today, we look to get our records played on the radio.”

By 1955, Billboard was reporting that 2 700 radio stations nationwide accounted for 300 000 songs played per day:

The cry that radio “killed” music – shortened the life of songs – was already being heard in the late 1930s. Network radio, the system of “remote” broadcasts by bands coupled with the virtual death of vaudeville (once the chief source of song promotion) had already worked a major change in the business… . In this remarkable statistic lies the answer to what has happened to the music-record business, the answer why it has grown rougher and more competitive than ever before on all levels.

Several developments point up the fact that the deejay’s role has increased in stature over the past few years. First of these is the fact that station management tend more than ever to give the jockey complete freedom of selection of records.