Zan wrote:I especially like what he says about singwriting and knowing what's a hit vs. what's a great song for him. What I find sad about the whole thing is that songs liek "Lady" and "Come Sail Away" depended greatly on other people delivering promises or going out of their way to help make them hits (ei: the DJ in Chicago playing Lady every night at 8pm, Tommy and Cahill bribing the program directors, etc.). I wish that good music was recognized as such without needing all that extra "crap" to be considered a hit - or ever HEARD for that matter. So many great, great songs are out there with no real means of being heard because they don't have the connections or resources/funding to get there. 
Boy do I understand what you mean about that . . . BUT, every song you've ever heard on the radio in your life has some trade-off story behind it. A sad reality of the business, as I'm sure you know. Even when people don't use outright payola (which is still not uncommon at all, by the way, regardless of what the labels claim), there's all this promotional jockeying that goes on, all this horse-trading, and the one with the best team winds up winning in almost every case. Radio is a self-promotion contest, not a talent show.
I have a good friend who used to have a record deal at Virgin Nashville about six years ago, when Virgin first opened a Nashville office (which failed). He was the first signing they made to the country division of Virgin, they hyped him as the next Alan Jackson, they spent more than a million bucks on this record called 'Love Trip', the whole nine yards. Sent him out on tour with George Strait, and his single was a song called "Love Trip". For radio promo they were offering that if a station added the single, they would sponsor a contest that Virgin would pay for, where some lucky listener and guest would get an all-expenses-paid Valentine's weekend "love trip" to Vegas to see my friend and George Strait in concert and then stay at this amazing hotel and all of that. Great idea, right? The song got to #38, and when you crack the Top 40, that's when you step it up a notch in promo and bring it home to the top 20, then the top 10. But Virgin Nashville was being mismanaged and was losing money hand over fist, and they needed a big seller right out of the gate, and this other artist on the label had a single that was doing marginally better, and that artist happened to be managed by the same team as a really, really big country superstar. That artist made a deal with Virgin that if they put all of their promo on him, his management would offer up all kinds of promo tie-ins to radio with their other, superstar client, who almost never does anything like that because he no longer has to. So that's what they did; that superstar client agreed to all these radio tie-in promos, Virgin pulled all of the promo budget from my friend's record and put it behind this other guy, and his single went top ten.
My friend's single dropped from #38 to #60-something in a week and then disappeared forever, and they dropped him from the label. He had a million dollar debt to the label, which makes it unattractive for another label to even look at signing you. He was practically bankrupt, and then his wife left and took their daughter because she couldn't take it anymore. He's working at a store now. So I can totally understand why people go out and play those games . . . if my friend had known then what he knows now about the hard realities of the business, I bet he would have played the game a lot harder while the opportunity was still in front of him. He'll never be in that position again. My point is, yes it's too bad it has to be that way, but I can't really fault any artist who goes out and promotes their work in whatever manner it becomes necessary to achieve success. For every song you hear on the radio today, there's another guy like my friend that didn't play the game as well, who is listening to that song play on the radio as they work at McDonald's or something like that.
Sterling
Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 2:28 am