Payola

It's the same way, like for now we... let's come closer to, uh, home.

PayolaYeah

I was abo- nilikuwa najiuliza niingie au kama nisingie huko?

[laughs]

But there's no promotion people out there helping to persuade or move along or doing anything to incentivize these stations at all.

Yes, we know Payola doesn't work that way.

In country, it still does.

It might not be totally there, but we've already heard about that country.

Bobby Fuller was smart enough to know that Larry Nunes was relying on a tried and true but illegal trick to guarantee airplay, payola, the act of paying DJs under the table to play music.

A few years earlier, legendary rock 'n' roll DJ Alan Freed had been federally indicted and publicly disgraced for his payola schemes, as were a number of other DJs throughout the United States.

Payola may have helped Let Her Dance climb the charts on the West Coast, but it wasn't gonna move records nationally.

For that, Larry Nunes needed an East Coast partner, and that partner was the devil that Bobby Fuller was about to make a deal with.

[upbeat music] Morris Levy, the owner of Roulette Records, sat at a table at the back of an empty Manhattan club and listened to Bobby Fuller express his disappointment with the other man sitting at the table, Bob Keane, president of Delphi Records.

[laughs] So we're gonna start with payola in the '50s, and this is from performingsongwriter.com.

Okay.

Payola became a household word in the 1950s.

The decade's music scene was the convergence of a number of systematic factors: the rise of rock and roll and R&B, which coincide with the rise of small labels, the introduction of the inexpensive 45 RPM single, radio shift to Top 40 music, post-war prosperity, and the emergence of the teenager as an economic force.

Records began to replace live performances as the main way to hear and sell music, and labels recognized that popular disc jockeys could influence sales.

It's speculated that Freed bore the brunt of the committee's ill will because unlike the squeaky clean Dick Clark, Freed was a heavy smoker, a jive talker, a rock and roll lifer who freely associated with Black musicians and refused to betray his own principles by signing an affidavit swearing he'd never accept payola.

He was charged with 26 counts of commercial bribery and handed a bundle of fines and a suspended jail sentence.

He lost his television show, his radio show, and found himself blackballed, rendered virtually unemployable by the fallout from Payola scandal.