Fighting pay-for-play

The annual promotional payment secures the indie as the station's exclusive point man, the only one (or at least the first one) its programmers will talk to about playing a new single -- an "add," in industry parlance. The indie becomes a high-priced toll collector. Once that indie has claimed a station, he (it's almost always a he) sends out a notice to record companies, letting them know he will invoice them, on average $1,000, every time the station adds a new song to its playlist. If indies don't get paid, the songs don't get played.

Considering most current music-based stations add roughly 150 new songs each year to their playlist, that translates into at least $150,000 worth of adds for that station's indie.

A small indie, working out of his office with just one or two employees, might have a dozen claimed stations; that makes for an annual income of at least $1.5 million. For larger indies like Tri State and McClusky, multiply that $150,000 by several hundred stations to get a sense of the amount of money changing hands annually behind the scenes -- even as the radio stations themselves continue to boast to listeners they're hearing "the best new music."

For the record companies, the system costs big bucks. Launching a single at rock radio can cost between $100,000 and $250,000. If the song's a hit -- if it gets played at hundreds of stations across the country, with added charges for multiple plays a day -- the costs skyrocket. Appearing on a panel at the South by Southwest music conference earlier this month, Mercury Nashville president Luke Lewis told attendees his label spent more than $1.5 million on promotion for a Shania Twain single that crossed over to pop radio.

The exclusive station deals were pioneered during the '90s by indie Jeff McClusky, whose firm became the leader in the Top 40 promotion business. The practice, adopted by competitors like Tri State, has become common at R&B as well as rock radio, and even extends into niche formats, like the so-called Triple A (for "adult album alternative") stations. Now, after years of fighting the exclusive, pay-for-play approach, country radio may be the final format to succumb. That was the recent talk among industry attendees at the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville last month: that Clear Channel country stations will soon be using Tri State only.

With that sort of commodities approach applied to music, it's no surprise that songs come with a price tag -- and that it's not even a well-kept secret in the industry. TVT Records recently sent out a typical directive to indies informing them that playlist adds for Bosson's cheery dance-pop single "One in a Million" would be worth $2,000 in the country's top 50 radio markets, $1,000 in markets 51 to 125, and $500 in the remaining smaller markets. Meanwhile, when record labels submit their weekly lists of new singles to radio trade magazines, the correlating add prices are often included right next to the title.

"Radio's not about the music anymore," laments Glenn Gardner, operations manager at rock radio WJJO in Madison, Wis. "And it's becoming less special every day in many places."

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