We were contacted by a very prominent radio promoter today. He and i spoke for about an hour. He said that the band is making a name for itself and with the right push he could push us into mainstream radio. He thinks his best shot is the song Girls, Minnie Driver, or I’m not the only one if we edit them down a bit and take out the bad words.

What a conversation it was. Asked me if i thought our label had what it took to make it happen if he should start to get successful... I asked him what exactly he meant. What was he talking about? Tell me straight up and I’ll tell you if i think we can do it. Well its as bad as we had always heard. We had a heart to heart and he told it to me straight up how it works if you want to get real airplay or actually chart on commercial stations.

He can get interest if the song is good... but in order to get spins we need to give them lots of free cds, merch, and various other things like hundreds of dollars worth of gift certificates to Best Buy and other stores. We would be paying for spins and “adds” at certain key stations called indicator stations. This would cost tens of thousands... but its how it works. Its what gets the interest at the bigger stations.
 
Then once they start picking the song up we hit the bigger stations that are P1 (population more than 1 million) reporting stations; now these are all owned quite publicly, but discretely, by certain promoters already. Promoters who have worked these stations for years and decades even. In other words KUPD in phoenix only “adds” songs to its playlists from ONE indie promoter in essence---he pretty much owns that station and what they play—an old boys club—so if another promoter wants to promote a song and we’re talking any song here by any act, big or small--- then that promoter has to get paid first usually a few thousand bucks if he isn't working that song, and then the station itself would also want to get paid with free CDs to use as giveaways, free merch, gift certificates, rental properties, etc....

I asked him, it sounds a lot like payola. Like we used to read about years ago. But i thought that was all over. “Well that is all over now. But this is just the way its done. You get what I’m saying?” All kind of discouraging for an indie band, just because we don't have access to that kind of cash.... we would need a hundred thousand dollars at least to really push a song up the charts on commercial mainstream radio. It was helpful to learn how it works. A lot people i know complain about this. But i found it fascinating. I don’t think its as bad as people try to make it out. I mean, radio is a business like any other. People are always so shocked when they find out... “What? You have to pay to get played on the radio?!” as if that’s strange. But the truth is that radio is a business like any other. I mean you have to pay to get a show on television don’t you. Or in a magazine or shop at a store... it does help explain why the radio is so filled with music that you may not like and the music that you do like is never played. Because its not so much about the music being good or valid or appropriate for radio as much as its just about the company behind the music having enough cash to get it serious airplay. And again, i don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Especially since now we have tens of thousands of internet radio stations to choose from out there that don’t follow this method... so its all good. Just a real eye opener. I swear to god i thought this guy was going to be like ‘hey give us five grand and we’ll get you a hit.’ And instead it was like ‘give us a hundred grand and we’ll try to get you some airplay...’ Crazy.

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side." - Hunter S. Thompson


Last screening: the magnificent Ambersons. This was the new version made recently with Madelynne Stowe who was just as enchanting as always. I so love films like this, anything like it. it takes me back to my youth, reminds me of my family before things got all crazy, when things seemed so much more civil and respectable. I know I sound like an old man, but as the years pass I have come to understand that sounding like an old man is the natural order of things for those of us lucky enough to survive for any significant amount of time here. It is our right. I still find myself incessantly vacillating between having one foot in the ivory tower and one foot in the gutter as I have all my life. I was always too liberal, too rebellious, and too much the lower class commoner to satisfy the aristocratic side of my family, which was a shame because it was in my blood, something that came very natural to me and at times, no matter how intermittent, I longed to feel truly a part of. There was that time towards the end, when as a young adult we were listening to my grandfather ramble on and on as he always did about the “lower classes” and the impending apocalypse that would inevitably befall America and mankind because of the “godless liberal media who were destroying the morals and values of the hearts and minds of us all.” I, being a very wise twenty year old godless liberal myself, made some comment that if he spent half the time he did preaching about the lower classes actually helping them that he could make a real difference in the world. That perhaps it wasn't our duty or right to just sit and pass judgment on the lower classes but instead to crouch down along side them and see if we could lend a hand. Something like this anyway. the table went silent. And of course he stood up and started shouting that it was only the peasant blood in me because my mother was an idiot and married my father, who at best came from a working class family, at worst, and more truthfully, a family with a long lineage of salesmen, farmers, and even carnies from what we are told, that made me speak this way; that if I was to continue to speak this way to him or anyone else in his house now that I was of age that I should not be allowed in their house anymore. I was very used to not hearing a word that he or anyone else said when their voice raised above a certain level. I grabbed my coat and quickly made my exit. In my car I popped two pills, lit a cigarette, and checked my reflection in the rearview to make sure that I still looked the part of the downtrodden twenty year old bleeding heart existentialist. I drove away as fast as I could down the freeway I swore to myself that I would never return to their home. And more than that, that one day I would make a great difference in the world to commoners and aristocrats alike, to liberals and conservatives both. One day I would avenge that moment and all the other moments that came before it.