The music industry is engineering artist popularity

>The music industry is engineering artist popularity – listeners are right to be angry

Say it isn't so ;)

How bad do you think it could get if radio gains popularity nationwide?

Liszt was a prodigy who became a virtuoso unrivaled in Europe. His popularity didn't need to be engineered nor was it. The popularity of Lizst and Mozart also clearly have nothing to do with what the article is referring to.

Sure. With the same intensity? Same all-encompassing reach? Same mechanisms available to them?

In fact, it was quite less so back in the day, as Zappa said:

"Remember the 60’s, you know, that era that people have glorious memories of? They really weren’t that great. One thing that did happen in the 60’s was that some music of an unusual or experimental nature did get recorded and did get released.

Now look at the who the executives were in those companies at those times. Not hip young guys. These were cigar-chomping old guys who looked at the product and said “I don’t know… who knows what it is? Record it, stick it out, if it sells… alright”. We were better off with those guys than we are now with the supposedly hip young executives, who are making the decisions on what people should see and hear in the marketplace.

The young guys are more conservative, and more dangerous to the art form than the old guys with the cigars ever were. And you know how these young guys got in there? The old guy with the cigar one day goes “well i took a chance, it went out and we sold a few million unit. Alright, I don’t know what it is. But we gotta do more of it. I need some advice. Let’s get a hippy in here”. So they hire a hippy. they bring in a guy with long hair. They’re not going to trust him to do anything but carry coffee and bring the mail in and out. He starts in there, he carries the coffee. “well, we can trust him, he brought the coffee four times on time. Let’s give him a real job”. He becomes an A&R man. From there, moving up and up, next thing you know, he’s got his feet on the desk. and he’s saying “well, we can’t take a chance on this, it’s not what the kids really want, and I know”. They’ve got that attitude.

(Speaking in the US)

This seems like the return of radio "payola" to me.

Payola was deemed a form of commercial sponsorship and so not informing listeners that a station (or DJ) was being paid to play a song violated FCC rules about disclosing sponsorships.

The FCC doesn't regulate online streaming, but the FTC has analogous rules that they enforce with bloggers and various "influencers". I imagine that they might be interested in this as well.

I guess it's legal because Spotify is a private subscription service and does not use public airwaves like radio so Payola rules do not apply.

It's worse than that.

The big record labels effectively have a lock on popular music. If you want to play any of it you have to deal with them. But now what are your incentives, right? You pay them whatever it is, high fees, to play one of their songs, so you want to avoid playing their songs. Play an indie artist who will give you a better deal because you're buying direct and cutting out the middle man. Play one of the labels' expensive songs if the customer specifically requests it, but not otherwise.

The record labels don't like that. Competition? They want to set up a scheme where their music is what's getting played and indies are screwed, so new artists have to sign with them to be heard. So if you want the back catalog for anything less than a bankruptcy-inducing fee, you have to take the payola and let the labels choose what you play, and they're not interested in letting people discover independent artists.

And then which of their own songs do they demand get played? The artists that signed a one-sided contract giving the label most of the money are going on loop.

This industry has needed a serious antitrust investigation for decades.