My Own Pirate Radio

Eliot Spitzer’s investigation into payola continues.

In a two-pronged attack, New York Attorney General and gubernatorial hopeful Eliot Spitzer has hit a major radio group with a lawsuit and chided federal regulators to take action, based on mountains of payola evidence.
The complaint highlights e-mails from former WKSE-FM program director David Universal, sent from December 1999 to January 2005. “Do you need help on Jessica (Simpson) this week? 1250?” he wrote to a Columbia Records representative, the complaint reveals. “If you don’t need help, I certainly don’t need to play it.”

References:

• news article: “Spitzer’s payola probe targets Entercom with suit”
• my earlier post: “Payola is Alive and Well”

Regarding attention, A-lists, and oxygen for content: the Economist published “Sing a song of Spitzer” back on Jul 28th 2005. It’s a brief piece on bribery in the radio industry: Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging for me is a hobby. I’ve only been doing it a short while, and it’s not my day job or something I try to promote. I’m pretty sure most of my readers are friends and family who humor me by visiting on occasion. So this morning, on seeing my blog traffic running at 10x its normal level, my initial reaction was fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Read the rest of this entry »