This is why it's ok to steal music
From the NYT:
"This is not a pretty picture; what we see is that payola is pervasive," Mr. Spitzer said, using a term from the radio scandals of the 1950's in describing e-mail messages and corporate documents that his office obtained during a yearlong investigation. "It is omnipresent. It is driving the industry and it is wrong."
It should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that radio these days sucks nuts. (Not your show, Rochester, obvs.) Although it doesn't help the situation, I'm sure that this neo-payola isn't the root cause. It doesn't matter how much you pay someone to play shitty music, it still gets on the air. What bothers me is that the industry has been bitching for years about how "piracy" and file-sharing have cut into it's profits, and now we find out that literally millions of dollars have gone to radio stations to promote shitty (or mediocre at best, in the case of Franz Ferdinand) music.
While many of the promotions detailed by Mr. Spitzer appear to come cheap - for example, $939 to fly a Buffalo programmer and a guest to New York City in connection with the addition of a Jennifer Lopez track to the playlist - they add up to millions of dollars a year. More than that, the settlement documents provide an unusual window on a sector of the music business where the public airwaves are discussed as a commodity, and where little is allowed to stand in the way of bolstering a song's chart position.