Wednesday, July 29, 2015

COLLEGE RADIO RECAP CMJ ISSUE 1403 WEEK 30

For a week in the middle of the dog days of summer there sure was a lot of excitement out there.  You might recall last week when Tame Impala took #1 most added. Well we thought it might take a few weeks for them to jump up to #1. At least everyone I talked to thought as much. Well they were not messing around this week going from ADD to #1 in one week. Pretty impressive feat.

Ducktails edged out Titus Andronicus for #1 most added this week. I imagine both are destined for top five but it feels like they might miss out on #1 with Tame Impala most likely holding the spot down for a while and next weeks big add Mac Demarco taking over after that. But hey, I never saw Bully coming so I am sure they both have a chance.

I really want to take a minute though to talk about promotions. I love a good contest or promotion for a record. One of my favorites back in the day, and I may of mentioned this before, is when we gave away A whole HAM for the band Jettingham. It was a record on Universal and they had money to burn it would seem. It was a huge success.  Turns out college kids loved the idea of winning a ham.  I bring this up because there was a promotion earlier this week that I would of totally missed this had 3 other promotion companies not brought it to my attention.  Apparently for the project Jack and Eliza--Gentle Warnings they sent out Pizzas with the initials of the band.  Here is one of the stations


and here is another, 


Not surprisingly the record had its best week on the charts going from #32 to #19 in its 4th week on the chart. It is not untypical for a bad to jump a bunch in it's fourth week but the pizza promotion does raise some questions. 

Is it payola? 

The Wikipedia definition of payola can be found here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola

The simple google definition is here 

pay·o·la
pāˈōlə/
noun
NORTH AMERICAN
noun: payola
  1. the practice of bribing someone to use their influence or position to promote a particular product or interest.
    "if a record company spends enough money on payola, it can make any record a hit"



    I am not sure it is. But that question was batted around quite a bit yesterday. If anything I think its just a lazy promotion. Also in looking over the reporters for this record some that got pizza dropped the record so no agreement was in place but it does feel like a bribe, part of the above definition. 

    In searching the internet I was able to find 4 stations that got pizza of those four 3 either were debuts or moved the record up.  I have no idea how many pizzas got sent out overall but I have to imagine that more did. The question remains though is this type of promotion wrong? I am not so sure. As I said before I think its just lazy. Its just removing the step of having a contest to win pizza.

    Lets say they would of done that. Had a contest where you win pizza provided by the band/promoter. No one would of mentioned anything to me. Perhaps they did and we all just missed it. From the comments and posts though it looks like the pizza was a surprise/ reward to the stations that got it. 

    So stations out there that read this, I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this or any other promotion. What do you like, what do you not like. 

    I would also be curious to hear from industry on what is the limit in promoting something? Free tickets, vinyl, CDs all seem fine. When does it not seem fine? 

    Lets talk about it here in the comments or on Twitter. Thanks for reading.

    doug

    Updates will continue throughout the day.


    UPDATE #1.

    A station reached out to me and let me know they also got a pizza bringing the number to 5 confirmed.  They also mentioned that they had to mention on air that they were provided lunch today by the band.  They also mentioned that "I would prefer promotions that the station or MD could opt into. Like Vinyl contests. But getting pizza out of the blue felt weird"






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