Sony ready to confess to radio payola scheme

As reported by the New York Times today, Sony "is close to a settlement with one of the world's largest record companies to resolve accusations that it used improper tactics to influence radio programmers to play its songs." You would think that this was common knowledge, and in fact I think it is, but evidently it's illegal to give money to pre-programmed massive radio chains to play dreary corporate-created music. Who would have thought?

Perhaps the most interesting part is: "As part of the settlement, Sony BMG is expected to admit to misconduct in its radio promotion practices and agree to changes that would limit attempts to influence airplay, according to people involved in the discussion." I'm not holding my breath that radio stations will suddenly start playing indie music. The real issue is that radio stations largely play pre-existing hit music, the music people already have indicated they want to hear, based on sales figures. So, big money will continue to drive what is heard on radio, radio will be as safe as possible.

The "long tail" shows us that the majority of the market is interested in non-mass market music (see the experiences of Amazon, eMusic, Netflix, Magnatune), and there's no reason to think this wouldn't be the case for the radio market. Thus, once inexpensive radio distribution technology is available (I'm staking my bets on p2p radio broadcasting, of which PeerCast works the best so far, I think) we should see an explosion of radio stations, or at the very least, much greater diversity from a few larger players (Satellite radio being the example of this scenario).