Payola, value judgments, and other jibber-jabber

There’s no form of art, popular or not, tied up with notions of “authenticity” as much as popular music. We don’t get it from the music itself—aside from certain sectors of hip-hop, some particularly virulent strains of punk, and certain elements of folk, the music itself doesn’t necessarily concern itself with “realness” as a thematic element. No, music listeners apply labels to each other—our tastes are, more or less, considered authentic or not based upon myriad factors, but which can and will be broadly generalized here. From my experience, musical meaning is formed through musical alliances---in an age of ubiquitous media messages hitting us from all sides, musical meaning is derived not as much from the content itself as the context in which it's consumed.

Take, for example, the current bluster regarding PR companies feeding music to blogs in exchange for free artist publicity. Now, I’m never one to keep my mouth shut about what huge corporations do to gain a foothold in a certain market, but that’s not what I'm referring to here. As a blogger who’s been contacted with relative regularity over the past 8 or 9 months by all manner of label and “entertainment group” (fancy phrasing for the intermediaries between labels and public), I’m more concerned here with what is done with the music on the receiver’s end rather than the methods of the distributors. Because the general consensus to gain popular acceptance is that blogs are somehow “corrupted” through their acceptance of CDs and other things from labels in exchange for promotion, and I happen to wholeheartedly disagree with it. Here’s a somewhat longwinded explanation why.

Over the past few decades, the popular media has commonly been viewed as a tool for content producers to infiltrate the minds of consumers, who are taken as passive vessels that absorb every message sent toward them exactly as it is intended to be absorbed. This is what the PMRC and Joe Lieberman, along with hundreds of “concerned” or “watchdog” groups have wanted people to believe. And people, of course did. It’s known as the “hypodermic” method, and it infers that kids who play violent video games develop a higher propensity toward violence, along with kids who listen to Judas Priest and 2Pac. And of course, it’s a load of shit. Study after academic study has disproven these claim as junk science—propagated to serve larger cultural interests while ignoring a wealth of extenuating cultural factors—but somehow, they carry on. Consumers are still viewed as hollow chambers to be filled with whatever media producers want to fill them with. And while a good number of content producers probably still believe that (to an extent, they have to), I have more faith in my fellow humans than to believe they fall for it. At least most of the time.

Which brings me back to the blogging point. Bloggers are viewed as consumers by labels, indie or not, and definitely by the PR companies. But a type of consumer with perceived influence over others, befitting blogs as an asynchronous mode of communication. So they’re offered tons of free stuff with the hope that a small percentage will end up getting some publicity and assist in the label (or, heaven help us, the artist) turning a profit. That’s the model. It’s not viral marketing as such, but it’s marketing nonetheless. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. Because, while there are plenty of bloggers ready and willing to plug anything sent their way in the name of free and easy content, I'm going to take a logic leap and assume that most of them don't. For the majority of the bloggers I keep in contact with, free stuff from PR companies and labels is taken in and assigned personal meaning in the same manner as music they come across through any other channel—word of mouth, advertising, Soulseek, Pitchfork, etc. If it’s great, then, ideally, they’ll think of some unique way to express their admiration for it, and post accordingly. I personally hold no shame for the fact that I’ve posted tracks from CDs received in the mail and/or been emailed, and I also hold no shame for the fact that I’ve occasionally had my interest piqued by advertising to purchase something. It's the way things happen. What's important to consider is that it doesn’t happen automatically. A post on a blog is a decided action, just like deciding where to eat lunch, what type of car to buy, or which movie to rent. And while advertisers like to keep their products at the front of our minds, we'd all like to consider that we have a bit of control over our actions. At least I hope.

The vastly misapplied term “payola” has lately been cast at bloggers by those without a real understanding for its loaded meaning. For radio DJs, there used to be an institutional code that deemed it necessary to clearly tag music that was acquired for money as such. If that didn't happen, then a law was violated, there's Congressional grandstanding, Dick Clark sells his soul/Alan Freed kills himself, etc. Of course, this all occurred when there was still an inkling of personality in programming popular music (meaning intended for the public) on publicly-owned radio airwaves. Now that access to the airwaves and music distribution is all corporately controlled, the payola’s just taken on a different form. The DJ is largely gone, replaced by test-marketing groups and A&R guys. The term "payola" itself still holds a significant stigma, though, and is now being attached to the next musical distribution channel deemed "pure" or "untainted". But it can’t be applied to blogging—it doesn’t make sense. Payola can't exist within blogging when there are absolutely no institutional standards for bloggers to follow. And, of course, there shouldn't be standards for bloggers to follow. Ideally, blogs should exist as a remediated version of freeform radio, or zines, or something else—essentially, public venues for zealous fans to turn others on to what they love. We can all be John Peel. While I’ve given some thought to calls for journalistic standards (source-citing) within blogs, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re totally unnecessary, normalizing, and detrimental to the spirit of the exchange of information that blogging idealizes, which brings me back to the notion of authenticity.

This recent trend of attempting to “out” bloggers for taking freebies smacks of the worst brand of cultural elitism—the kind that assumes that one person can speak for another, as if one can have some sort of inroad into the psyche of another. It’s dangerous to affix one solid meaning to something—to essentialize it—in order to understand it. That’s what happens when bloggers are accused (and I can’t get over how dumb this sounds) of taking payola. They’re tagged as “false” or “inauthentic”, when their individual rationales for posting music on their blog will most often signal otherwise. Personal taste, which is what blogs broadcast, is a very nebulous thing, and it’s always publicly represented in myriad ways by different people, based on who they are and what they deem important. That's why some blogs take a corporate model, complete with ads, and talk of "serving their readers", and others take an opposite approach, curating a highly personal collection of music for an idiosyncratic following. And thousands of others do thousands of other things. But to assume that music acquired by bloggers from PR companies or labels is somehow "tainted", or the blogger is inauthentic, just eliminates the role of human agency and reverts to the medieval hypodermic model all over again. It’s hard for some to believe, but not everyone internalizes the same popular messages in the same way, and those who would apply a blanket term to a group of wildly dissimilar people speaks volumes toward who’s doing the applying than the applicant.