Last week’s East Bay Express has a well-written cover story by Katy St. Clair titled Has CMJ Become the Monster That Ate College Radio? My wife Sandra is the general manager of KALX, the radio station at UC Berkeley.
The music directors at KALX, like those at many other college radio stations, report their top 30 album playlist to CMJ, the College Music Journal. CMJ puts out a glossy magazine that includes the reported playlists, but only after they have verified them.
Therein lies the problem that KALX first exposed. Ian Hetzner, one of the co-music directors at KALX, happened to notice over the holidays that an album by local band Loretta Lynch had been replaced by the CMJ compilation Certain Damage in the KALX playlist in an issue of the CMJ New Music Report. Record labels pay CMJ up to $3,000 to have a song by one of their bands placed on one of the Certain Damage compilations, so CMJ has an obvious financial stake in seeing their compilation get charted.
It turns out that CMJ had an unpublished and unadvertised rule that when one of the 1,200 or so stations reporting to them listed an album not in the CMJ database, they simply replaced it with their own compilation. KALX had pretty good proof of this when they discovered one of their older playlists in CMJ had Certain Damage charting at two spots in their top thirty! After Ian posted this news to the KALX mailing list, many people at other college stations reported that CMJ had done this to them as well.
Regardless of the company’s intent, its actions have rocked the college radio world. “The thing that strikes me about this,” says KALX general manager Sandra Wasson, “is I can’t imagine that Billboard or R&R would do something like this. If they did, it would be seen as a really big problem.”
There are lots more details in the rather long and detailed story, so check it out if you’re interested in college radio intrigue.
Dig how the scandal at the CMJ New Music Report brought attention to the forthcoming Joey Ramone tribute CD, “What Would Joey Do?” by the band Unverified and how sloppy reporting by the East Bay Express sullied the band’s name.
This article from Wednesday’s East Bay Express covers most of the basics, the open letter to the East Bay Express after that covers the rest:
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2003-03-05/planet.html/1/index.html
Truly Unverified
Last week’s cover story about CMJ’s pay-to-play fiasco (“The Monster That Ate College Radio”) had at least one unexpected outcome.
Quick recap: CMJ New Music Report is the Billboard magazine of college radio, publishing the charts of thousands of stations. The company has recently gotten itself in hot water for replacing entries its computer didn’t recognize with Certain Damage, CMJ’s own commercial sampler, which labels pay big bucks to put their bands on. Once Planet Clair came snooping, the company did what it should have done in the first place, printing “Unverified” in those slots instead.
Albuquerque band Unverified can’t believe its good fortune. (Or perhaps it can.) “Thanks for bringing some attention our way!” e-mails bandleader Scotty Unverified, who claims his Web site has been inundated.
The site quotes e-mails from various music directors, including Brian Turner, music director at New Jersey college station WFMU and a subject of the story: “Best thing I’ve heard since the band that called themselves ‘Various Artists’ to get in record-store bins!”
The band also quotes KZSU Stanford’s Bill Cuevas, as saying, “You must feel like a flag distributor/manufacturer on Sept 12, 2001.”
The music director of University of Southern California’s KSCR was apparently a little hot under the collar: “The very fact that you are benefiting from this horrible occurrence is worse than CMJ’s original actions,” he e-mailed, according to the site. “You claim that you are a Ramones-influenced band. Well, quite frankly, I doubt very much that Joey Ramone would think much of you now.”
And now for the weird part: The folks at CMJ, Scotty claims, have asked Unverified to appear on a future Certain Damage disc. “Whoever made this Web site is my new hero,” Louis Miller, associate editor of CMJ consumer magazine New Music Monthly wrote in an e-mail forwarded by Scotty.
This last one makes Clair wonder if this isn’t all some elaborate hoax. Scotty, after all, could be tech-savvy enough to fake an e-mail. WFMU’s Turner, for one, claims he never e-mailed the band, though Cuevas verifies his own e-mail.
And the plot thickens: Unverified’s Web site recommends a publicity book by Albuquerque writer Mark Mathis called “Feeding the Media Beast.” What’s more, the two songs the band has posted online might well have been written and recorded by a group of drunk-though-intelligent platypuses over a three-day period, with lyrics such as: “When the alarm goes off I slide down the pole/Get on my gear and I’m ready to roll/’Cause I’m a fireman.”
On the other hand, if this is a publicity stunt, it seems to be working. Oh, the horror.