Jesse Walker writes:"For decades, record companies have been begging radio stations to play their music. Sometimes they do more than beg: Few sorts of scandal reappear as reliably in the music business as a payola scandal, in which agents of the labels are caught bribing broadcasters to air their wares. In the Internet age, the AM and FM dials aren't as important to promoting music as they used to be, but they continue to play the preeminent role in the process. As Clive Davis, a dominant figure in the record industry since the '60s, told USA Today just this month, "Radio is still the leading force of determining what songs and artists break through." Now the Recording Industry Association of America and a coalition of other industry groups are backing a bill, the Performance Rights Act, that would require those same stations to pay a new fee for the right to air those records. An industry that is infamously willing to pay for airplay apparently wants to charge for airplay too."
Leave it to the libertarian publication (click to read the entire article) to place radio and the music business's Congressional battles in a very well-reasoned context.
