Congratulations! Your band has just signed a record deal. You have recorded a single and now you need the radio to take notice among the thousands of other that are sent to them every week. Your manager gives you a wink and says, “Leave it to me”.
Your manager will head to the radio station and have a chat with the host. He’ll shake hands with the DJ and recommend your new single. By the end of the DJ’s show, you hear your record. You’re ecstatic. Then you hear it again on the next show. Then again and again. You are on the way up. The single is rocketing up the charts. All because of a handshake.
What you didn’t know was that while shaking hands the manager gave the DJ a $50 bribe to help give your band that push. This was a common occurrence at the start of the ‘rock n roll’ era in the 1950s. Giving the top DJs such as Alan Freed and Dick Clark, all the power to play whoever paid them the most. This all came to a head at the end of the decade when it was all getting out of hand. It was even brought to the attention of then US President Dwight Eisenhower who permitted Congress to investigate the situation. This week The Beat Marches On to 11th July 1951 when Alan Freed’s Moondog House Rock and Roll Party first aired.
Alan Freed is perhaps one of the forgotten men of the Rock and Roll revolution. The man to have claimed to have coined the term ‘rock n roll’ ended up being the scapegoat for the Payola scandal in the 1950’s. Before the scandal broke, he was one of the top radio personalities of the era. One of the first DJs to have character on the radio he quickly gained popularity throughout the USA.
Payola is not anything new. It’s been around since the late 1800s. Possibly earlier than that. At the time it was just called pay to play but in 1938 Variety coined the term by combining the words of Pay and Victrola a popular record player of the time.
Although it wasn’t illegal at this point it was still frowned upon by the majority of the industry. It was a known thing that went on behind the scenes, but the major record labels didn’t take part in the action. This paved the way for the independent labels to take advantage of this system.
One of the main labels involved was Morris Levy’s Roulette Records. Levy who has been mentioned in this blog before made his name in the 1950s first with a jazz club in Harlem then went on to create a record label of his own frequently handing out the $50 handshakes. It wasn’t just his label doing this but his seemed to be the most successful of the time.
By the end of the 1950s payola was rampant in radio. It used to be hidden in a handshake but now the promoters and managers didn’t even hide the money that they were bribing the DJs with. This was when the US Congress decided to get involved. They used the same hearing committee that had found TV networks guilty of rigging their gameshows only three months earlier.
Congress was tipped off by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) of the payola situation due to it getting out of hand. The organisation that helped people in the arts get paid their royalties was in a bitter feud with rival Broadcasters Music, Inc (BMI)
ASCAP thought that Rock and Roll was a passing fad and did not accept many acts that performed the genre into their organisation. This turned out to be a colossal mistake as this helped the BMI gain more power within the industry.
Bemused by teenagers’ love of rock and roll ASCAP thought the only way it appeared on radio was because of the BMI using payola to get their music played on the radio. In a way they were right, they didn’t realise that it wasn’t just rock and roll.
Payola came to national attention in the US after the 1959 national disc jockey convention in Miami. A local newspaper reported on the event and the lavish world the top DJs were living in which was all being paid for by the record labels. At this point, it wasn’t just $50 handshakes, but holidays, stereo equipment and televisions were given to the men who ruled the airwaves.
A promoter from RCA Records, who Elvis Presley was singed to, estimated he spent $300,000 a year to keep the DJs happy. In an example of how bad it was a Time article in June 1959 mentions that a Neil Sedaka single also released by RCA, spent $50,000 for the full treatment and within four weeks the single was in the top ten of the billboard charts.
As soon as radio stations got wind of the announcement, they started destroying any evidence of any payola paper trail which included staff. Suddenly Disc Jockeys who had any affiliations with receiving money or gifts from a record label were out of a job. It didn’t matter how popular they were the radio stations needed to clean up their act. Those, if any, who were kept on had to sign a disclaimer restricting them from choosing what to play and the station making the decision for them.
As the hearings took place in New York 25 witnesses were called up to testify. The top performers of that time were Les Paul and Bobby Darin, record label executives like Morris Levy and many of the nation’s top DJs and musical hosts of the time, the most famous being Dick Clark and Alan Freed.
Clark who was known as the nation’s oldest teenager hosted one of Americas most popular television programs, American Bandstand. Every afternoon he would entertain the nations teenagers with popular music performed live on the show. It was discovered in the hearings that although he never admitted to taking a bribe to play music on his show or before when he was a DJ, he was taking a percentage of royalties from artists claiming to be one of the songwriters even though he had nothing to do with the songwriting and having publishing distribution rights for the song.
Before the hearings commenced Clark sold off any investments he had to give the impression that he was squeaky clean. This included all the songwriting credits and publishing rights he had profiteered from throughout the 1950s. The subcommittee was aware of his investments and questioned him and his involvement. He brought in a statistician to confuse them with numbers and percentages of songs played and how many times they are played etc. He confused the subcommittee with all the numbers and managed to weasel himself out of any wrongdoing.
Things differed on the other hand for Alan Freed. The man who launched ‘rock n roll’ into the music stratosphere was to become the fall guy for this whole scandal. Freed’s dealing wasn’t nearly half as bad as Clark’s, but he was a proud man.
Freed’s reputation was completely different to Clark’s. Whereas Clark looked like the man parents wanted their daughters to bring home Freed looked like a chain-smoking insomniac. Freed had a TV show that was cancelled after mixed-race dancing was shown and viewers complained (it was the fifties) He arranged multiple artist concert tours around the country, and they earned a reputation for being violent and police shutting them down. In reality the concert hall owners were getting anxious due to the audience getting out of their seats and dancing.
Freed stuck to his morals while testifying in the hearing. He thought he was not doing anything wrong. He had a code for accepting cash for a record. He wouldn’t play it if he didn’t like the song. He would only take cash after he had played it. For the most part, he stuck to it until the payments got too big to resist.
Being close friends with Morris Levy wasn’t helping his cause. The Roulette Records owner gave Freed money as much as $5000 as loans regularly and told him to pay it back whenever he could or play his records and he would take a little off.
Once the payola hearings were finished it was signed into law as illegal. The people involved could not be prosecuted unless proven it was after it was signed into law. Well, most of them thought so anyway.
For the DJs who worked in New York, they were not so lucky. Under state law, they could be charged with commercial bribery. The most famous of the scalps was Freed. He pled guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison in 1962.
After his release in 1964, Freed was blacklisted from all major national radio stations. He worked a couple of jobs for local stations in California where he was now living. He was drinking heavier and by 1965 he died due to diseases brought on by alcoholism. He was only 43.
Although the practice was deemed illegal payola was still happening behind the scenes. Radio station owners tried to control what was being played having the program director take playlists, but the record labels soon got to them. If anything, it made it easier and cheaper to do as they only had to visit one person rather than multiple DJ’s at the station.
There have been multiple exposures of stations getting caught in payola stings since it was made illegal. It’s something that in the risk/reward factor the reward outweighs the risk. American rapper Cardi B has accused some rivals of using payola to get the plays. Morris Levy and some mafia affiliates were caught in a major sting operation in the 1970s and 1980s.
At the beginning of February 2021, a DJ who appeared on London’s Capital Xtra and claims to be Stormzy’s tour DJ was fired for admitting that he accepted £200 multiple times to play an artist’s record after he was outed on Twitter. This ignited the payola debate once again.
Multiple rumour streaming platforms such as Spotify are now using the payola method. They can get away with this as the law in the US is only for radio not streaming. This is not a confirmed story anywhere, but people are asking questions. I hope this is not the case as someone who listens to Spotify frequently. The more questions are asked the more it will get the attention of investigators.
The promoters will do anything to get their songs played. The more plays they get; the more people will buy or stream the single and more money is earned for the parties involved. In an industry that takes a lot of luck just to have a bona fide hit people will always reach the limits and beyond.
The Beat Marches On is a music blog written by Jimmy Whitehead. Jimmy has been blogging for six years specialising in Sports (especially American Football). If you want to follow Jimmy on Twitter: @Jimmy_W1987
The Beat Marches On has a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/The-Beat-Goes-On-Blog-107727714415791 and a Twitter page: @TheBeatGoesOnB1
Websites used for research are:
Scandal – Payola – The Golden Age of Rock
DISK JOCKEYS: The Big Payola – TIME
There also is a podcast on the subject used for research by Wondery called American Scandal. They have six-episode series on the whole Payola scandal, before and after the Congress hearings.
If you want to request a story for The Beat Marches On blog, then you can contact jwhiteheadjournalism@gmail.com. We cannot guarantee that the story will be published but will be considered.