DISK JOCKEYS: The Big Payola

If the pampered jades of Asia had turned up in Miami Beach last week they might have melted with envy. One of the most pampered trades in the U.S.—the disk jockeys—had come to town 2,500 strong, and Big Daddy, in the shape of U.S. record companies, was there to take care of them. Officially, the jocks were attending the Second International Radio Programing Seminar and Pop Music Disk Jockey Convention. Actually, the convention was attending them.

When each D.J. showed up, RCA Victor handed him $1,000,000 in “play money,” but the scrip called for solid value. The D.J.s were supposed to increase their holdings by gambling and by making frequent trips to the company’s “Hospitality Suite” where they could obtain liquid refreshments plus 5,000 “dollars” for every visit. On Memorial Day, in exchange for the play money, RCA Victor auctioned off a stereo set, a color TV set, 500 real dollars worth of clothes, a trip for two to Europe, and a Studebaker Lark to the highest bidders—and the bidders by that time were high all right.

“Dead Without You.” At least 50 other record companies had a finger in the gaudy handout. ABC-Paramount paid for all taxi rides. Columbia made tapes of D.J.s interviewing celebrities and gave them to the jocks to play on the air at home. There were free bus trips, promised airborne junkets to Mexico. Squads of local beach girls in Bikinis were relieved by company-strength detachments flown in from New York. A Texas firm gave away eight pairs of sunglasses with built-in transistor radios (proud flacks claimed they cost $5,000 apiece).

Headquarters for most companies were in the Lanai suites of the Americana hotel. There the lordly jocks drifted from backslapper to backslapper, soaked up booze from novel dispensers—Panama Records had a machine with faucets for martinis and Manhattans. And everywhere a D.J. went, record company promoters kept telling him: “Without you we’re dead, boy.”

The promoters had other things to say when the jocks were out of range. “Some of these guys actually believe they’re God,” said one. Explained another: “Suppose a D.J. calls New York and says he wants to see the city. What are you going to tell him—to pay for it himself? You pay for his hotel and his meals and his liquor, and if he wants a girl you pay for that. An average New York weekend will cost the record company $500 to $1,000, and if you don’t pay it there’s another company that will.”

Annual Dew. An RCA man estimated that his firm spends up to $300,000 a year on various methods of forming friendships with disk jockeys, gave an example of the effectiveness of such promotion: when a 19-year-old named Neil Sedaka cut The Diary, RCA spent $50,000 on “the full treatment,” and four weeks later the D.J.s pushed the disk into the top ten.

But the disk jockeys’ convention was not all payola. The sponsoring (Omaha-based ) Storz radio chain had, after all, slipped the word “seminar” into the official title. The jocks heard lectures on such subjects as “News Should Be New,” “Do We Live and Die By Ratings?” (answer: yes), “Are Live Radio Commercials Dead?” (no, they just sound that way).

At week’s end the D.J.s were still collecting their annual dew, sloshing from hospitality suite to hospitality suite getting ready for an all-night party with top entertainers (Patti Page, Vic Damone, Peggy Lee, Pat Boone, etc.). The temperature in Miami was in the 80s, and there were circles of sweat even under the tone arms of the companies’ endlessly blaring phonographs. But most of the D.J.s would stay happy for another year, and that is what mattered—for, as all the companies agreed: “Without you, boy, we’re dead.”