Back to School

Reminiscing about my school days, I now realize that I really did learn something useful in High School.

I remember being forced to take a ‘music appreciation’ class. The teacher was this red-faced, overweight man who always looked to be on the verge of having a massive heart attack. I forget his surname – everyone just called him Dwight.

Now, I know of only 3 people named Dwight. There was the 34th President of the United States, my High School music teacher, and that guy from The Office. But his unique first name was not the reason why he was so memorable. It turned out that he was actually a pretty good teacher.

Back then, Beethoven, Jazz and Gregorian chants weren’t on my musical radar. For me, the only ‘historical’ music I was interested in was that Live Cream Volume II 8-Track that my older brother gave me. Even though I wasn’t very keen on taking the class, Dwight soon won me over with his insights on different musical genres and musical history. He was particularly interested in the Payola scandal, and spent a great deal of time covering this subject in class.

Now, Payola was before my time. If you never heard of it, Payola was a practice in the record industry to pay radio stations to play their records over others. The theory was that, the more times a record was played, the greater it’s perceived popularity, and this would result in higher record sales.

In practice, the Payola system worked very well-perhaps too well. Lesser known record companies who lacked the deep pockets of the major labels were finding their records more and more difficult to get on the air. They raised such an uproar about the Payola system that Congress got into the act, amending the FCC Act to exclude Payola practices. The resulting backlash hurt the careers of many DJ’s, including Alan Freed and Dick Clark (I saw him last New Year’s Eve –as if the man didn’t have enough problems).

All of this hullabaloo over the sales of 49 cent plastic discs.

Fast foreard to 2010.

Personally, I don’t see a lot of difference between the Payola scandals of the 1950’s and the gifts and payments that pharmaceutical companies use to entice doctors to write prescriptions for their particular drugs. In fact, I think that the practices of the pharmaceutical companies are much, much worse.

With Payola, it was radio stations and disc jockeys that were being paid to play music. The music itself – as broadcast by the radio station – was free. You were not paying the radio station to listen to their broadcast. You were not paying the disc jockeys for their musical opinion. Plus, if you didn’t like the music they were playing, it was very simple to change to another station.

With the pharmaceutical industry, they are influencing physicians to push their products – and these products cost a lot of money – on average, close to $1,000.00 per year for every American. In addition, they are influencing people who we are paying for their supposedly unbiased professional opinion. If we are unhappy with their opinion, it takes a whole lot more effort to change physicians than it does to change a radio stations. Plus, as important as music is to many of us, it can in no way be deemed nearly as important to anyone as their life and well being.

So, why is no one making a bug fuss over this practice? Have we changed, as a nation, so much in the last 50 years so that what was scandalous back then is merely mundane today?

I think I know what part of the problem, and I want to start fixing it right now.

The radio station scandals would probably be a forgotten footnote in history except they had a catchy, memorable name – Payola. Perhaps the pharmaceutical company practices need an equally catchy name in order to be given the proper attention and respect by the American public.

So, I’ve come up with a good one: Pill-ola.





Remember, folks – you heard it here first.

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