Welcome back to Country Music 4 Ever! Today I am going to be talking about the dirty way the radio decides what songs get airplay.

 

A long time ago record labels used to pay radio stations to play artists signed to their label. This was outlawed in 1960, after a number of disc jockeys were charged with taking bribes from record companies to play their songs. Back in those days it was easy for radio stations to decide what songs to play by how much they got paid for doing so. But even today this is still going on. I’m sure you’re wondering how it is still going on since it was outlawed. But people get creative when it comes to money. Instead of the record label paying the radio stations directly, they pay independent promoters (the middlemen) and then the independent promoters pay the radio stations. Since the record label is not paying the radio stations directly this is completely legal.

 

This is why if you want to get played on the radio you need a record deal. If you don’t have a record deal, and you send radio stations your music for them to play, they probably are not going to play it, because they don’t get anything out of it. I’m not saying every radio station is like this because I know there are some that support new artists. But even those ones still operate the same as all the others because they have to.

 

This is why when you listen to the radio, you hear the same songs all the time. The songs you hear are the ones that are being paid to be play now, and once you stop hearing them that means the record label stopped paying for them. Like I said in the beginning, it is a dirty way of getting songs played on the radio.

 

Thanks for reading. I hope you liked it and I’ll be back soon!