Was the payola investigation necessary?
Was the payola investigation necessary?Answer: Not really. Debate continues over whether bad records were unfairly promoted over good ones due to the payola practice, but that’s a matter of personal taste, and so can’t be proven or disproven. The fact remains that payola was not illegal in 1959, however, and had in practice been going on for decades, so the investigation seems at best a waste of time and, at worst, a witch hunt. There’s also no evidence that DJs like Freed and Clark, who had many different interests in the music business, were powerful enough to influence the entire field. And Clark’s statistics seem to bear that out, as well.
