Question: How did the payola scandal begin?
Answer: The radio payola scandal of 1959 actually originated a year earlier, with the equally infamous "game show" scandals of 1958, in which federal investigators revealed that the wildly popular NBC show Twenty-One and $64,000 Question were rigged. The world's largest publishing house, ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), pushed the investigators of that scandal -- the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight, led by Rep. Oren Harris (D - Arkansas) -- to investigate radio. Some believe this is because ASCAP wished to destroy rival publishers BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.), which had been started by new, smaller, broadcast-related forces within the industry to promote "race," folk, and "hillbilly" records. Since ASCAP refused to handle these genres, and with all three on the rise among the important youth demographic, it decided to cripple BMI's infrastructure wherever possible.
When the committee announced its intention to investigate radio payola, the industry moved quickly to minimize the damage, firing some disc jockeys and forcing others to relinquish the interests they had in other areas of the field such as publishing, promotion, and record companies. Chicago DJ Phil Lind, of WAIT, first made headlines by broadcasting tapes on which a small indie label representative admitted to paying $22,000 for airplay. The position of ASCAP and the committee seemed to be that rock and roll's popularity over "real" music could only be explained by payola, when in fact the practice was not illegal and vital for broadcast interests to compete on an equal footing with the established record industry forces.
