Do you ever wonder why radio stations played Celine Dion's unfortunate cover of Cyndi Lauper's "I Drove All Night"? For some stations, one reason may have been a free Vegas vacation offered to key radio station employees by her label in exchange for subjecting their listeners to it. That radio listeners were not told about the arrangement was at least one of the allegations contained in the $10 million settlement announced this week between music giant Sony BMG and the New York Attorney General's office.
The Celine Dion affair was hardly the most scandalous accusation in the case, though it was one of the funnier ones. In exchange for adding the song to play-lists, station employees were offered a travel package (known as a "flyaway") to see her A New Day (with a top price of $225 a ticket) in Las Vegas, as well as a chance to play blackjack with the singer. But in an e-mail included as part of the settlement agreement, a frustrated Epic executive e-shouts about how some of the stations violated the spirit of the bribe by relegating "I Drove All Night" to play only late, late at night:
"OK, HERE IT IS IN BLACK AND WHITE AND IT'S SERIOUS: IF A RADIO STATION GOT A FLYAWAY TO A CELINE SHOW IN LAS VEGAS FOR THE ADD, AND THEY'RE PLAYING THE SONG ALL IN OVERNIGHTS, THEY ARE NOT GETTING THE FLYAWAY. PLEASE FIX THE OVERNIGHT ROTATIONS IMMEDIATELY."
Good stuff. Other allegations included Sony BMG giving a plasma television to a California radio programmer in exchange for playing a song from J-Lo, and the always reliable tactic of paying interns to continually call radio stations so as to manipulate the rankings of top-requested song results.
This sort of behavior in the music industry is known as payola, and it has been going on for so long that the name reaches back to combine "pay" with the obsolete record player, the Victrola. Back in 1960, a disc jockey named Alan Freed—accused of accepting $2,500 that he claimed was a gift and not a bribe—was at the center of the first big pay-to-play scandal. After Freed's downfall, Congress passed legislation designed to stop payola, charging the Federal Communications Commission with oversight. But the FCC (the crew who spent much of the past few years worrying about everything from Janet Jackson's breast to Howard Stern's mouth) more or less decided to ignore the problem; the FCC has levied only one fine for payola in the past decade—and it was for a mere $8,000.
Actually, had the FCC been at all interested in its responsibilities, it would not have taken much to learn of the intricacies of the illicit relationships between labels and radio stations. A Google search would have turned up an excellent series of articles from 2001 in Salon by Eric Boehlert, which exposed how widespread all of the practices in the Sony BMG settlement are in the music industry. Instead, the FCC ignored these practices until New York State (where the major labels are based) chose to look into it. Of course, the FCC is now shocked—shocked!—to find that bribing is going on in radio. FCC Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein lamely offered in an interview with the Los Angeles Times: "If it turns out there is massive and widespread violation of the rules, I don't see how we can't take extreme actions against the guilty licensees." Welcome to the party, dude. What took you so long?
Of course, while all of this may be too little, it also is coming too late. Radio stations no longer have a monopoly on exposing the public to new songs. There is satellite radio, podcasts, iTunes and just dropping a track into an episode of The OC. In the end, " I Drove All Night" received far more exposure from being used in a Chrysler commercial than it did on radio.
Richard Abowitz has sworn in open court that he doesn't own a single Celine Dion album. E-mail him at
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