20: Does payola exist in underground music?

A fairly big 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 you might think.


Some background: in our Fish56Octagon episode, Tom mentioned that
he was pretty sure that Fish was being seeded and potentially
paid to play people’s music. 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 dance 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.


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