There are two reasons Numme has become, in some circles, radio's answer to Dennis Rodman. First is the widespread belief that Numme picked a song that's so bad, his only incentive could have been cash ("You Gotta Have Faith," page 23). Second, Numme openly breached the unwritten rule that radio stations should play what listeners want to hear, not something that a record company was desperate enough to pay for. Many local programmers say they're perfectly happy to let KUFO act as pay-for-play's guinea pig, if only because it could benefit their stations in the future. One man who's vehemently against pay-for-play is Mark Hamilton, the British-born, 35-year-old program director for rival alternative rock station KNRK 94.7 FM. He says financial pressures will make pay-for-play radio's quickie solution to any budgetary blips. "That's why it's so scary," Hamilton says. "The short-term benefit is great. The long-term damage is that you have another influence in programming your station, and you're playing stuff you normally wouldn't." The flipside is that for every company-sponsored song that gets airplay, an unpaid-for song gets stuck on the shelf. Of the many mediums used to break bands, from MTV to music magazines to Web sites, radio is the most potent force. If pay-for-play catches on, however, this could change abruptly. Sean Nelson (left), a tall, bespectacled Seattle musician who looks more like a philosophy student than a rock star, has a cautionary tale. Nelson and his band Harvey Danger have played clubs in their hometown and in Portland regularly in the past four years, attracting scant crowds because few had ever heard of them. Harvey Danger released its debut CD on a tiny New York independent label, the Arena Rock Recording Company, in early 1997, garnering positive reviews in the regional rock press. Nelson handed copies of the album to a few DJs at Seattle's KNDD, which like KNRK is owned by the Philadelphia-based Entercom, and they began to spin a variety of tracks from the CD. One song in particular, "Flagpole Sitta," caught on with listeners, who began phoning in requests for it with such regularity that the program director added it to the rotation. When major labels--including Interscope--began hearing of this fluke success story, they pulled out their checkbooks and dangled impressive offers to Nelson and his bandmates, some as lofty as seven figures. By the time Harvey Danger signed a contract with the Polygram-distributed London/Slash Records, "Flagpole Sitta" had been added to dozens of playlists at rock radio stations, including both KNRK and KUFO, where it's now in heavy rotation. This is the kind of thing that used to happen all the time, but today Harvey Danger is a rarity of epic proportions. Radio was a blessing to Nelson, but the specter of pay-for-play cools his warm feelings for the medium. "I am offended that it happened," he says of KUFO's deal with Interscope. "It's a strike against radio. If the playlists are available for purchase by major labels, then it'll make it harder for small labels to get on. And it's hard enough already." Numme may be pay-for-play's poster boy, but he's certainly not the first figure to rankle the industry. Though radio insiders are loath to discuss it--WW's calls to Interscope and other major labels met with silence--many consider radio the communication industry's problem child. The first dark episode came in 1960 in a scandal involving disc jockey Alan Freed, the man who coined the term "rock 'n' roll." A musician born in Pennsylvania in 1921, Freed became one of the most respected men of the early rock era. He was a DJ at New York's WINS in 1954, where he first earned notoriety for refusing to play white musicians' versions of black musicians' songs, a common practice at the time. Through the late '50s, he was radio's best-known personality, appearing in rock-oriented films and hosting popular rock concerts. But in 1960, Freed became the industry's symbol of corruption when he was charged with 26 counts of bribery. The feds found that many DJs accepted bribes, and their investigation exposed the fact that getting a song on the radio was hardly a democratic process. Freed was convicted on a lesser charge and given a suspended sentence and a fine, but it nertheless ruined his career. Freed died, broke and broken-hearted, in 1965, maintaining that though he may have taken the money, he'd never played a record he didn't like. Numme sings a similar refrain, but few are calling him Freed's kindred spirit. Nevertheless, Numme's willingness to accept money over the table in exchange for playing records is creating a similar type of stir. Terry Currier, a frizzy-haired blues and rock aficionado who owns Music Millennium, says of pay-for-play, "It's above-the-ground payola. Somebody needs to step in and stop it now." "Traditionally in radio, programming has been exclusive of sales," says Jim Kerr, an editor at the Los Angeles-based trade journal Radio & Records. "The critical element is crossing the line, and no one's crossed the line in such a critical manner." Numme argues that his critics are missing two points. First, he says, what he is doing is simply a new version of a longstanding practice. For years record companies have bartered with everything short of cash for a spot on the playlist. Labels have been known to provide a radio station with an on-air performance by a major band, promotional items such as T-shirts or baseball caps, flights for programmers to concerts or music festivals in far-off cities and bands to play station-sponsored concerts. "We don't want the T-shirts," says Numme. "We would much rather share in the risk and the opportunity of exposing these bands." Numme views the pre-song disclaimer as an honest way of acknowledging that the station and the record labels are in cahoots, as opposed to the current method of accepting undisclosed perks. "None of this is ever talked about," says Currier. "It's the shh-shh thing in the industry." The other distinction Numme makes between payola and pay-for-play is that one is illegal and the other is not. "Payola is defined as getting compensation in the back room for putting a record on and not telling your boss," Numme explains. "It's about the record guy pulling up to the back of the station and unloading a bunch of cash or a hooker and some blow and giving it to a DJ at night and having them play the record. It's about trying to influence, in a surreptitious way, the process of getting records on the air. Pay-for-play is really about taking promotional dollars and routing them directly to the radio station instead of spending it in other ways." According to the Federal Communications Commission, by telling listeners that the broadcast of "Counterfeit" was sponsored, KUFO did follow the rules. The backdrop for Numme's decision to consider pay-for-play is the massive consolidation that has overtaken the radio industry. In the past three years, Numme's had three different bosses. In 1996 Henry Broadcasting sold KUFO to American Radio Systems. In 1997, CBS Radio purchased ARS, and with it KUFO. Thanks to the 1996 Federal Telecommunications Act, which deregulated the radio industry, 4,400 stations in the United States have changed hands in the last two years, with prices spiraling. The total worth of the deals was $33 billion; in previous years, it would've been around $4 billion.In Portland, three corporations--CBS Radio, Entercom and Jacor--took control of the entire commercial radio dial, save KXL. What this means for executives like Numme is a stricter reliance on the bottom line. Wall Street investors with stock in the publicly held companies that own the stations couldn't care less whether a program director adds Limp Bizkit or a yodeler to the playlist, as long as listeners keep tuning in, ratings remain high and advertisers keep advertising. The result of the corporate buying binge is that the price of radio stations is skyrocketing faster than in Portland's similarly overblown housing market. Dennis Constantine, program director of the adult-contemporary station KINK 102 FM--which, like KUFO, was recently purchased by CBS Radio--says it's an apt analogy. He compares the consolidation scenario to a person who buys a more expensive house even though his salary hasn't increased. "If suddenly you moved from a home that had a $500-a-month mortgage to one with a $1,000 mortgage, it'd be more difficult for you to buy groceries," he says. So you'd have to take on another job to afford the necessities. For a radio station, one solution would be to up the amount of advertising. The FCC has no rules dictating how much time a station must devote to unpaid programming. Unfortunately for radio executives, there are still only 60 minutes in a given hour, and throwing off the balance between programming and commercials--which Constantine says is a 50 minute/10 minute split at KINK--risks alienating listeners. Numme and his peers therefore must create new forms of revenue without taking away the lifeblood of a radio station--its music--in order to satisfy the investors who are anxiously watching the bottom line. "The thing about consolidation," says Thom Moon of the Cincinnati-based trade journal Duncan's American Radio, "is that managers are under one dictate, and that's to pump up cash flow." Numme says pay-for-play will continue at KUFO--though he refuses to share what other deals he has in the works. Other local radio executives say they are considering following suit. "We've started talking about it," says Cary Rolfe, program director of the country station KUPL 98.7 FM. "I think every station in America is talking about it. We're being pressured to make money." In some respects, pay-for-play is the logical extension of a culture in which the Rolling Stones have sold their songs to companies such as Microsoft and the Verve has turned its hit "Bitter Sweet Symphony" into a Nike ad. The fear, says Music Millennium's Currier, is that "you're going to have a company like Sony buying 40 percent of a station's airtime and shoving things down people's throats." "I can see what's going to happen," says KNRK's Hamilton. "The [radio executives] will have a meeting, see that they're a little short of cash, and call Capitol Records and say, 'What will you pay us $5,000 to play?'" --Patty Wentz contributed to this report. |
