The radio: A device capable of transmitting any type of sound to anyone, anywhere. It has the ability to inform, persuade, and entertain; it has the gift to be completely unbiased in what it emits; and it has the capacity to be the ultimate form of free speech.
However, very few of these qualities are taken advantage of.
Thanks to major music label industries and greedy communication companies, the radio waves are not what they could, or should, be. In reality, we hear a miniscule amount of the music and other forms of public communication that is in the world. Independent record-based bands are scarcely heard and even big time acts receive a diminutive amount of the royalties. And yet, this blasphemy as has been occurring for years.
The first and foremost issue is the record companies' involvement with the radio. Record companies are a business. They need new products and have little time to search for new talents if they want to make a profit. Therefore, their solution is to cookie-cut certain singers or bands into what they think will get them to highest possible profit and buy them to most time until they can cookie cut another act.
Even worse, they pay radio companies to play these acts.
This act known as "Pay-for-Play" or "payola," is illegal but is often done through third parties so that the transaction is legally impossible to trace back to the record company.
Senator Russ Feingold is one of the politicians who are currently trying to battle these under the table deals. "It's an outrageous thing and it's a sad thing...It really does affect the quality of what you hear on the radio. It's very disturbing for me, and not just for entertainment but even for democracy," Feingold has been reported as saying.
The effect of this illegal "payola" is that many musical acts are withheld from being heard on the radio. This leads to the listeners only hearing a few genres of music and within those genres, only a few artists. If the playing field would level, listeners would be able to then hear a much larger variety of music instead of hearing the same songs list everyday. It would also cut down on the intervals of ten-minute advertisements that are used to fill in the empty time slots so that the same song isn't played twice in one set.
Although independent bands are beginning to be played on the air, they are still highly marginalized. Their success usually comes from creating their own label or by signing with an already independent company. However, it is nearly impossible to make the amount of money that most mainstream bands do because they don't have the resources to be played on the radio, or be given as many time slots.
Essentially, they don't have the money to pay the communication companies. dd
To learn more about this issue, go to :downhillbattle.org.
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