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HOW RADIO "PAID SPINS" HELPED REV UP SINGER'S COMEBACK Jeanne Anne Naujeck - The Tennessean When Reba McEntire's song "Somebody" hit No. 1 last summer, it was hailed as a comeback for a country legend who had dominated the charts in the 1990s but hadn't reached No. 1 in seven years.
The payoff for a No. 1 song can be big. It drives record sales for the performer and labels. And other parties have a stake, too, such as songwriters and publishers who make royalties each time a song is played on the radio.
But McEntire's success after years away from the music business ignited a furor on Nashville's Music Row because her record label bought radio time to play the song. That's because the key to hooking customers and selling large volumes of music is radio play. And lots of it.
The spotlight on radio play already has prompted some music labels, radio stations, chartmakers and artists to change their methods, pulling back on the use of independent promoters and altering how No. 1 hits are calculated. Looming in the background are New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who has rooted out fraud on Wall Street and in the insurance industry and is looking into the music business, and the Federal Communications Commission, which has taken a harder line on certain types of programming and disclosure rules.
Sudden success
"Room to Breathe," the first studio album in years for McEntire, who had turned to acting and stars in her own TV sitcom ("Reba," 9 p.m. Fridays on The WB/KTWB), had a soft opening in 2003 for a major music star. The first single released topped out at No. 14 on Billboard magazine's Hot Country Singles chart.
Then the second single, "Somebody," came out. It spent 30 weeks climbing the chart, then suddenly vaulted from No. 3 to No. 1 in early August.
At the time, the Billboard charts were determined by the number of times a song is played on U.S. radio stations in a given week. When an Aug. 7 Billboard article noted that "Somebody" had just gained 1,150 spins, an unusually large jump, Music Row noticed.
Speculation flew that McEntire's label, MCA Records, got to No. 1 through "paid spins" — buying advertising time on radio and then playing a song during it — to raise the total number of spins a song gets on radio. It's perfectly legal as long as the sponsorship is disclosed.
Scott Borchetta, head of promotions for MCA owner Universal Music Group, acknowledges that the label bought some spins but said it was just one element of a plan to accrue a large number of spins during crucial "push weeks" — such as the one that moved the song from No. 3 to No. 1.
"When promotion is brought up, people think there's some kind of black art to it," he said. "It's hard work."
The No. 1 success of "Somebody" jump-started sales of her album "Room to Breathe." The album, which sold 280,000 copies its first two months out, has since sold about 587,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
"It certainly had a positive effect ... on her whole profile," Borchetta said. "There was a concern that Reba wasn't as focused on music since she moved to L.A. Now she's announced a 40-date tour for this year. The whole momentum of 'Somebody' going to No. 1 is snowballing."
Memories of payola
The flap over paid spins — and Borchetta is hardly alone in using them — comes at a time of renewed focus on the music industry. Spitzer's investigation of promotional practices has revived memories of the payola scandals of the 1950s, when radio DJs and stations were bribed to put certain songs on the air. After the Spitzer investigation was announced, Infinity Broadcasting and Entercom said their stations would no longer use independent promoters. Infinity fired a program director in Rochester, N.Y., after it found he kept gift certificates from an independent promoter instead of using them for station giveaways.
The FCC also is interested in what's being played on the radio, specifically how difficult it is for a large variety of acts to be heard on the public airwaves. The federal agency also is charged with enforcing the laws on payola, a federal crime.
Record labels and radio stations say direct bribes aren't the issue as much as consolidation in the radio and the music business that has squeezed both the airtime allotted to play music and the money that can be devoted to developing new acts.
Labels in Nashville spend between $250,000 and $1 million to introduce a new act with a single, video and album release. Pop and rock labels spend even more — two to three times as much, by some estimates.
Nancy Tunick, managing partner of Nashville-based Grass Roots Promotion, compares promotion tactics to a poker ante that ends up costing every label more.
"It's bad for the business," she said. "They spend so much money on promotion that when they're finished they generally have to sell platinum (1 million albums) to recoup. It's a poor business plan for a label, and they recognize that." |
