Investigating Rock Radio with Rick Beato

I went on Rick's YouTube Channel and we talked a lot about things that we're not supposed to mention.

My friend Rick Beato invited me over to make a video with him during the holiday, and the results are now live.

There’s a couple of things I’ve learned from hanging out with Rick over the last couple of years. Making videos is really hard. He’s had a lot of practice at this point, but there’s still a huge amount of planning and thinking that takes place before the cameras roll.

Also, we got into a subject that’s second nature for both of us, so we had to concentrate on making sure we explained exactly what we were talking about for people who don’t know the inner workings of the label business. Rick fortunately went back and added some extra explanations during his edit, so I think most people can follow the story we’re telling here.

Rick has both encouraged and inspired me as I’ve made the transition back into music as my full-time occupation. I futzed around in a corporate job for a few years before both Rick and our mutual friend Ward Carroll (also a YouTube celebrity) contributed a lot to getting me back where I belong. Thanks, guys.

Dusty Groove Records in Chicago is one of the most calming places to visit after terrifying tales of the label industry. Deep breaths. (photo by me, April 2023)

Hi

I imagine that a few of you who are reading this are encountering me for the first time, so here’s the shortest possible bio: I’ve worked in college radio (music director, WHRB), independent college radio promotion, independent label world (Big Time Records), management (drivin’ n’ cryin’, Adam Schmitt),, A&R (Geffen/DGC Records), production (Ryan Adams). I’ve been a music publisher and consultant to record companies, artists, and entertainment attorneys. I know a few things.

There isn’t a paywall on this newsletter (yet), so feel free to dig into my earlier posts. Some of them are pretty good.

Also, subscribing is a huge help. Paid subscriptions are even better.

Let’s Go to the Videotape

Consider what follows here an annotation of our video conversation, which got filmed after many, many hours of discussion over the past couple of years. Rick and I have followed different paths in music, but we’ve arrived at many of the same conclusions about how things work and why they don’t sometimes.

Everything below, however, is all me. That’s not to say that Rick won’t agree with most of it, but anyone who’s really pissed off by any of the points I make here should blame me and leave him out of it.

I’m going to talk about some things below that are just straight-up references to what we discussed in the video. If you want to read this before watching it, I’m not going to promise that all of this will make sense out of context.

When It Rained $$$

It’s hard to imagine now just how much money the label industry made from reissuing its back catalog on $18.98 list price compact discs. There were zero recording and minimal promotion costs, and people bought millions of copies of albums that they’d previously purchased on LP, 8-track, or cassette.

We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars in essentially free money. All the outrageous spending we talked about in the video was fueled by the unprecedented profits those catalog sales kept generating for over a decade.

Is Payola Actually Bad?

Rick and I discussed the history of payola, i.e. the practice of slipping some cash, drugs or home appliances to radio station program directors or DJs to get them to play a record on the air. I’m not sure we had a chance to dig deep enough into why it’s illegal.

Every time you go to the grocery store and see a product highlighted on those perpendicular shelves at the end of an aisle (a/k/a endcaps), someone paid for that placement. The same is true for whatever’s at eye level in the rest of the store. Those signs advertising specific phones when you walk into an AT&T or Verizon store? Also paid for.

The same was true at Sam Goody, Musicland, Tower, or any other chain music store. Record companies paid for placement in those endcaps. The new releases featured in a weekly Target or Walmart ad are there because someone paid the retailer so that you, the buyer, might see them.

(Note: James Daunt, who’s now running Barnes & Noble, decided that the chain would no longer trade placement for money in their stores. Managers decide what their customers might want and those are now the first books you now see. It’s almost an aside in this NYT story (gift link). If you’ve been in a B&N lately and thought it sucked less that it used to, this decision is probably why.)

I’d go so far as to say that paid placement is the backbone of the American economy, a theory that might inspire questions about why paid placement on the radio is such a scandal.

Here’s the important thing. The United States decided early on that the airwaves were a public asset that needed to be managed by the government in the interest of promoting fairness and to prevent chaos. Every radio station in the USA is supposed to be licensed by the FCC, whose primary jobs are to make sure signals don’t overlap and make sure that station owners operate for the public good.

That public good means that everything you hear on a radio station is supposed to be there because someone thought it was worthy enough for you to hear it. If that airplay resulted from a payment, that payment is supposed to be disclosed. Back in the days before radio stations played records on the air, Bing Crosby could star on the Kraft Music Hall radio program and perform songs that were influenced by Kraft’s executives because everyone knew that Kraft was sponsoring/paying for the show.

Payola wasn’t actually illegal until 1960, and the new laws did nothing to acknowledge the reality that every single jukebox operator in the country was getting paid to put records into the machines at a time when jukebox play was second only to radio play as a promotion tool for record companies. Based on the business entities that ran the jukebox business, let’s just say those payments weren’t optional. There were definitely racketeering issues that never got addressed by law enforcement.

The American Federation of Musicians union hated that radio stations began playing records on air in the years before and during World War II, insisting that stations were taking jobs away from the musicians that had previously been paid to perform live on air. That led to a disastrous strike during the WWII era and, because no one could book a recording session with AFM members, we ended up with some really terrible Frank Sinatra records that featured oohing backing singers instead of instruments.

The strike ended in failure for the AFM, much like the one a decade earlier when they tried to make movie theaters continue to employ the musicians who had accompanied silent films while the movie business was transitioning to sound. Bob Stanley from Saint Etienne has always been a great music writer and I happened to be reading Let’s Do It: The Birth of Pop Music while writing this. Bob cites these numbers: There were 22,000 musicians with jobs accompanying silent movies in 1926. In 1934, there were 4,100. I imagine most of those were organists or piano players in small towns where theater owners hadn’t yet upgraded their sound system.

All of that is a windup to my conspiracy theory, one that’s entirely my own and definitely influenced by the AFM’s contempt for the rock musicians I managed in the ‘80s and ‘90s. During that era, no one in the local wanted any long-haired hippie freaks to get any of the (alleged) AFM benefits, but they sure threatened anyone who wasn’t paying dues after every live show. Pay us or our friends the Teamsters will drop your amps down the stairs when you’re an opening act in a union venue.

Okay, here goes: I’m certain that the AFM did whatever it could to convince Congress to investigate what was going on with payments to radio stations in the late 1950s because they were still pissed off about losing their jobs after WWII. It’s hard to imagine now, but rock and roll music was the major cultural force less than a decade after V-J Day. However, the union was still full of old guys who hated the new music more than we could possibly imagine.

Payola laws didn’t bring pay-for-play to an end. Labels just got more creative about it, and the independent radio promoters that Rick and I discussed existed to give everyone a level of deniability about the practice.

I was going to say that I was outraged by payola at the very beginning of my career, but that’s not true. As music director at my college radio station WHRB, I once reported The Bangles All Over the Place LP as an add to the CMJ Report in exchange for a box of cleans (i.e. uncut LPs with no promo stamps). I traded them to In Your Ear Records in exchange for a stack of Australian punk singles that we played to death and that I imagine are still in the station’s music library.

I get the idea that the airwaves are under federal control, and that the government deemed the practice out of line with the ideal of what public media should be.

Small labels always complained that they didn’t have the budget to play the same independent promotion games that were funded by the majors, but I thought of it this way: If I had a treasured family recipe for pasta sauce and wanted to start a company to make and sell it, Kroger or Ralph’s is not going to put my product on the shelves just because it’s so good. I’m going to have to raise the money that will allow me to pay them to put my sauce in their stores.

Could there be a deeper discussion about the nature and corruption of late-stage capitalism? Absolutely. There are plenty of moral and ideological questions raised by this story, but today we’re just talking about how things are and not how they should be. I’m not going to go down that path here.

Bill Clinton Burns It All Down

I think Rick and I did a good job in the video of explaining how local ownership rules created more diversity in programming and viewpoints. To me, that hands-on management was the best thing about how the radio and television business operated up until 1996.

Bill Clinton’s Telecommunications Act of 1996 did far more to limit access to radio airplay than any payola ever did. Once we arrived at the moment when dozens of radio stations were programmed by the same person, any hopes of getting your record started by an adventurous DJ completely vaporized. If you skipped the video before you got here in this post, you’re probably confused right about now. Go watch the video.

Have we established how much I blame Bill Clinton for all of this?

Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game

Some viewers and probably quite a few of my readers will be able to identify the radio consultants that Rick and I don’t mention by name in the video.

Why didn't we name names? There was a long discussion before we turned on the cameras, and both of us thought that the individuals involved were products of the system and not evil, mustache-twirling villains. Almost anyone we know would have taken on the opportunity to program dozens of radio stations while getting paid handsomely by the new corporate overlords while also continuing to collect the independent promotion fees paid by the record labels.

While I was enjoying the waning days of the old major label system, Seagrams sent some consultants from Booz Allen Hamilton to interview the executives at Geffen Records so they could understand the way a label worked before they made suggestions about how to fix the problems. Because they’re going to have to find some problems to justify their fees.

I had an actual problem for them, a real head-scratcher. This was 1998, and Guns ‘N’ Roses was late in delivering the Chinese Democracy album. The suits (yep, they were wearing suits) were puzzled as I tried to explain that we couldn’t just order Axl to finish the LP (he wasn’t an employee) and that promises of financial bonuses upon delivery were having zero impact on the creative process.

They obviously thought I was insane. Why would anyone work with a performer who was so unreliable? Shouldn’t I focus my efforts on musicians who could keep to a schedule and make the Geffen corporate budgets more manageable and predictable?

Because he’s Axl Fucking Rose, you idiots. If you don’t want to enjoy the carnival, go work somewhere else.

Radio had been its own carnival for decades before corporations bought up all the stations and tried to impose order on what had been an elegant chaos that was always a blast and often produced hit records out of nowhere.

Reducing the number of opinions about what got played on the radio may have eliminated duplication and kept the wheels turning, but it was a disaster for the art form that depended on radio stations to reach an audience.

Sure, maybe it was worse because at least one individual involved in programming those stations had such abysmal taste in rock, but it would have also sucked even if someone like me or Rick was in charge. Everyone has their blind spots, and it was the multitude of voices that competed for attention during the peak rock years that helped the best bands rise to the top.

I loved the radio promotion part of the business, all the scheming and hustling and crackpot ideas that made the label industry so much fun. Did everyone bend the rules? Sure, but a lot of those shenanigans were only dubious because of the particular rules that governed radio licensees in the 20th century.

Next time you pick out a box of cereal from the eye-level display at the grocery store, pour out a bowl in memory of the old ways.

About that Gear Rental

Rick decided to add some more commentary to the video about producers requiring a label to rent their outboard gear or amps for a recording project. I just want to make sure that I add that the practice started because some producers really did bring their own rack of gear that they actually used to brew their own special studio sauce.

Studios generally went out and bought whatever they saw in a producer’s rack so they wouldn’t lose business because they didn’t have the exact piece of gear they wanted. Eventually, that should have eliminated the need for producers to bring their own stuff.

Have I ever worked on a project where rental of the producer’s road case of outboard gear was being charged to the recording budget and that same road case was never opened? Of course. And let’s not forget the outrageous shipping costs required to get that road case to the studio and back to the producer’s storage space after the project was over. All expenses charged to the artist’s budget and royalty account, so label execs weren’t especially motivated to crack down on the practice.

Where were the managers in all of this? The ones who were smart enough to question the practices were warned that they could lose access to a producer manager’s client roster.

Locked to the Grid

I have spent a long time learning to focus on the positive things about music and label industry, but there’s one thing I really fucking hate: Beat Detective.

The idea that rock music can be locked to a perfect rhythmic grid means that it’s no longer rock music. Without push and pull from the bass and drums, you lose all the chemistry that is the defining element in all great rock and roll bands.

Look, I love plenty of hip hop, electronic music, and contemporary pop records built on gridded beats. The late-20th century notion that rock needed to sound and feel more like rap was a knife to the heart of rock music.

Some of us really thought the NYC scene in the early 2000s was going to claw back rock’s cultural status. Lizzy Goodman’s amazing oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom chronicles that moment when the Strokes, Interpol, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs seemed like they were going to bring back rock as we knew it.

Regarding Our Thing

Rick used the term “Mafia” in the title of the video, but that’s just a metaphor. The label industry really did have a long and checkered history with real organized crime, an era that I was too young to experience. For anyone who wants to know about music and the mob, you should check out William Knoedelseder’s 1993 book Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business and the Mafia and Tommy James’ incredible Me, the Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride with Tommy James & the Shondells. Tommy’s history with Roulette Records and its mobbed-up owner Morris Levy is a far wilder story than any we could tell.

Public Service Announcement

Starsiren (or is it Star Siren? They spell it one way on Spotify and a different way on Bandcamp) are a trio duo from ATL who are free sampling like it’s 1988, with zero regard for or fear of all the licensing lawsuits that have stifled artists’ creativity over the past three decades. I really like both songs they’ve released so far.

But I’m embedding the “Promise” video here because I’m related to the director (who’s also the editor), and I think she’s showing some real promise herself. If anyone likes the video as much as I do and is looking for someone who knows how to deliver on a limited budget, I can put you in touch with her.

Pertaining to the Label Industry

If you’re wondering why this Substack is called Stars After Stars After Stars, I named it after the great James Hunter’s open letter to the label industry circa 1985. Mr. Hunter may not have become the live concert titan he aspired to be, but listening to his tape always reminds me that hope is the core of our business. That, and the shows that make people sway.

8-Track of the Day