Long ago, when I was a boy-PD, the whole idea of payola made me mad for all the expected reasons; It was dishonest. It was illegal. You had to be a whore to take it. As time went on, I got over my moral indignation and came to terms with it when I realized payola is as old a commerce itself. Eons ago, I’m sure some camel jockey just back from the Far East with his load of goodies, spices and silk gave a little spiff to one of the Pharaoh’s marketplace security detail so he could set up his little kiosk in the best high-traffic position. I’ve often told people about my Remington Nylon 66. The .22 rifle came out in 1959, the first really good hunting rifle with a synthetic stock, no wood, very light, very accurate. It is still with me, stored in the back of a closet. My father was a grocery store manager. A guy from a food wholesale company wanted Dad to put a big display of Hunt’s Tomato Sauce at the end of one of the store’s high-traffic aisles. He handed him the new, very modern rifle as a gift to get it done. That’s payola. It’s always been around. The word itself was coined a couple of decades before radio was even invented. It is prevalent to some extent in every form of commerce, in every business. We can tut-tut about it, we can even feel personally offended, but it ain’t going away.
Now, not all of us took payola cash or dope or dollies. As I matured in this business, there came a point when I realized it could help me. I was always one of the “reporters”, a program director at a station that’s playlists were used to compile the weekly airplay charts in Radio & Records, Billboard and The Gavin Report, the most important publications in our business. It was a much-coveted position to be in. The reporters got excellent record service, we got all the new releases immediately. Stations that weren’t reporters had to buy the records, as often as not. And it could be weeks after some songs first appeared on the charts before copies were even available locally for purchase.
As a reporter, I heard all the scuttle-butt about which songs “bein’ worked hard” but “weren’t happening.” Some of us knew what “paper adds” were; those songs reported as being played on a station when they weren’t. Paper Adds were the Catch-22 of the record biz. You can’t get the record on the national charts unless it is being played, but the radio guys don’t want to play anything that’s not already on the national charts. Before the internet, before computers could tell us exactly what a station was playing and when and how often, before all that a program director could tell Radio & Records’ chart people he was playing a new song 30 times a week when he might be playing it only five times and on the overnight show. That got the job done. The record guy “got the add.” The PD got the persistent record guy off the phone.
Knowing which other stations/program directors we involved in it, Paper Adds helped me to better handicap my new ‘horses’, those being the few new songs to be added to my station. Every week the playlists of the few hundred reporting stations were printed in Radio & Records. When I saw new songs making some nice chart jumps over a few weeks, indicating potential programming value, I would look at the list of stations where each song was being played. Some guys were respected as ‘having great ears’. That meant, if he heard ten new songs, the two he picked for airplay most often turned out to be the hits. When I liked a new record, if saw a half dozen guys I respected had added it, I added it to my playlist with more confidence.
Of particular interest would be the stations reporting some song to be ‘hot’ when my ears hadn’t warmed. When I saw a bunch of takers in the group, well, it was good to know. If I had just one slot open in my New Adds category and two records to consider and the early chart action on both of them was about equal, I’d go with the one that I figured had fewer paper adds greasing its way to national charts.
I’m linking the Rolling Stone article below but I haven’t yet read it all myself, just the first few paragraphs. All I saw so far was same ol’, same ol’ to me.
