JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum Legitimizing Pay-for-Play

Brian/Color Theory,

You stated that you paid for radio promotion and got nothing out of it. Yet that didn't teach you that paying for airplay directly isn't an even worse idea? Heck, you've even shown that actually having real airplay was not beneficial to you, so why pay or it?

You are a poster child for why it's stupid to pay for airplay. Pay for play will not result in airplay royalties. That would break the law. So you're not going to help that with pay for play either. And you actually have talent (the real reason for the success you've had) and even with that going for you, airplay and radio promotion didn't help you. Most of the folks who might be suckered into pay for play don't have talent to start with. They are especially desperate because legitimate radio, even in France, will NEVER play them. So it's critical that we dispel this notion that getting airplay by paying for it and not earning it through actual talent is a massive scam. They may do it anyway if they need an ego stroke and no one is doing that for them legitimately based on their talent, but at least we've done what we can to warn those smart enough to avoid it. But for you to do it is really troubling. That means that people with talent and generally good sense are still willing to throw money away.

Let's look at the basic economics of it. If buying airplay made good business sense, the cost of buying it would go up and up until you, as an individual couldn't afford it anymore. It's only affordable because it DOESN'T make business sense or is so unlikely to provide more than anecdotal benefit (i.e. you can't repeat it and thus can't be directly attribute it to the actual success). Scam artists use anecdotal evidence all the time to "prove" the success of what they are selling. (Watch late night TV for all sorts of nefarious companies using anecdotal evidence to sell their wares, always having to run a disclaimer in small print because those claims mean nothing to whether it works or not). But someone may come out and say "hey.. I got a record deal because I paid for airplay... blah blah blah.. " but it won't mean ANYTHING even if it were true. Because for it to really work, it would have to be repeatable.

Now, this is far different from a SERVICE. If someone offers a service, like radio promotion (something I am also against, though it's not always a scam) as long as they do the specific things they agree to do (contact X number of stations, send out X number of press releases to X number of media outlets etc.) and they make no promises of any results of that effort, that's above board. If they claim that because Billy Joe Bob got a record deal because they were heard on a station that they promote to, and so you are likely to as well if you hire them, that is dishonest. If that were true, everyone ever played on that station would have a record deal. It's all a coincidence.

People like our anonymous friend above are much like conspiracy theorists (and scam artists). They use tiny elements of truth to make a point while ignoring 99% of the facts that disprove their theory. Just because something occasionally may help someone, it doesn't remotely mean it will be of any use to you. And you can NEVER guarantee success. No one controls that completely.

Buying radio play fills the ego of the person getting played and the pockets of those scamming him.

Brian