Report: SONY Paid Radio Station Employees To Feature AUDIOSLAVE

July 25, 2005

According to the Associated Press, Sony BMG Music Entertainment agreed Monday (July 25) to pay $10 million and to stop paying radio station employees to feature its artists to settle an investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

The agreement resulted from Spitzer's investigation of suspected "pay for play" practices in the music industry.

Spitzer said Sony BMG employees sought to conceal some payments by using fictitious contest winners to document the transactions.

In one case, an employee of Sony's Epic label was trying to promote the group AUDIOSLAVE to a station and asked: "WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET AUDIOSLAVE ON WKSS THIS WEEK?!!? Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen."

The $10 million will be distributed to not-for-profit entities and earmarked for music education programs, Spitzer said.

Record companies can't offer financial incentives under a 1960 federal law that made it a crime punishable by a $10,000 fine and up to a year in prison to offer money or other inducements to give records airplay. The practice was called "payola," a contraction of "pay" and "Victrola" record players.

The law was passed in response to the payola scandals of the 1950s and early 1960s that implicated some then-famous disc jockeys.

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