Simon Willison’s Weblog

Oh ffs...

25th June 2002

Slashdot: Shocked, Shocked at Payola. This is just tragic. American record companies are all upset about the huge amounts of money they have to spend bribing commercial radio stations to play their music... but at the same time the RIAA are killing off internet radio and p2p file sharing, activities that give bands exposure for free! OK, file sharing allows people to keep the copies they download which is something the RIAA have justification to be cautious about, but killing internet radio and then complaining about the costs of promotion on commercial radio is just farcical.

Incidentally, this article on Salon explains the sorry state of American commercial radio in detail, and in doing so helped me understand why internet radio is such a big deal in the States.