A fairly hefty topic this week, as Tom and Chal investigate the issue of payola in underground music. Does it exist? Well, kind of – but not in the way that you might think.
Some background here: in the episode we released on Fish56Octagon (now our most popular to date, so thanks for that!), Tom mentioned that he was pretty sure that Fish was being seeded and potentially paid to play people’s music in his videos. A couple of people got in touch to confirm that the first part of that at least was true, and it got us thinking: accusations of money changing hands for coverage are still pretty rife in underground music discourse, and we’ve not really seen this publicly investigated before.
Given that we’ve both offered quite a lot of our adult lives to cultivating the content farm, we figured we were in a good position to talk about this topic: notable examples of it we’ve seen in our careers, how prevalent it is or isn’t in the music press, and what it tells us about both the current climate of music media and its uncomfortable relationships with advertising and creative agencies. Plus: the story of a certain disgraced record label once pulling its advertising from FACT over a middling album review.
Elsewhere, we address recent accusations of a No Tags anti-baldness agenda, talk the first music from SOPHIE’s forthcoming posthumous album and celebrate an all-timer of a victory lap in the form of Kendrick Lamar’s Pop Out concert. Cool underground dance recommendations? Who needs those when you have a roomful of NBA players and California gang leaders dancing on the grave of Drake’s reputation.
As ever, if you like what we’re doing on No Tags then please do like, rate, review or subscribe on your podcast app of choice, and if you really like what we’re doing, consider supporting us via our paid tier.
20: Does payola exist in underground music?