The First Shots Fired In The Coming War

Most people don’t realize that when they turn on their favorite radio station the sound they hear isn’t music, it’s the sound of money changing hands. People imagine that the music on the top 40 is there because it’s the best the world has to offer, or because it’s the most popular among music fans. But they are sorely mistaken.

The music played on commercial radios stations is there largely because big corporate record labels pay off the stations to play their artist. The labels spend hundreds of thousands of dollars paying off the stations to play a single song. In the business it is considered that the going price for a top 40 hot is about 200,000 dollars.

This payola system creates a complete lock-out that makes it impossible for unsigned artists to get commercial radio airplay. Radio airplay creates hundreds of millions of dollars in CD sales each year, so there is a lot at stake in this game. The big corporations want to maintain complete control of this cash-cow system and they sure don’t want people like me getting access to it and taking a slice of the pie.

Now that The Imperial Orgy has released our first CD we are trying to get radio airplay. We plan to use a combination of new technologies and grass roots pressure to try to break the system.

For a test run we focused on a small station in State College, PA, one of our hometowns. We thought we were off to a good start when one of the station’s major advertisers, who is also a fan of the Orgy’s, took the CD to the station and asked them to play it. We followed this up by asking Myspace people in the station’s area to request out song.

Despite this I knew something was askew when I tried to call the station’s music director multiple times and he refused to take my calls. What’s odd about this is that I do radio promo for my day job, so I spend all day talking to people like him at stations all across the country, yet this little backwoods-station music director is too arrogant to take my calls.

Then after about a week of people requesting the song I got an email from the music director asking us to “call off out minions.” “We get the picture” he said. He said they will play the song Sunday night at 10PM. While this sounds good, I know that Sunday night is the dumping ground where they play local bands song once then throw it in the garbage. We want to be in regular rotation and receiving 20 to 30 spins a week. Nothing else will do.

In his email he also said that requests will not cause the song to be played more at the station, which is to say that they don’t care what their listening audience wants to hear. You can’t fuck with the system.

While this is a frustrating situation, we have just begun our campaign. We know how to use tactics they will never expect. We know how to get the public going and we know how to manipulate the media to give them bad press. If I can’t beat this little passant station, I will never be able to get anywhere with a big station in New York City or Los Angeles where the big money is at stake.

Please help by either calling in a request to 1105.9 THE BUZZ at 814-272-BUZZ (2899)

Or email a request by clicking here

You might say or copy and paste this into the email:

Could you please play Job & His Brethren by Caeser Pink & The Imperial Orgy?