The Voice & Payola

In the fractured English of the pop-music world, "payola" is whatever the guy or doll in search of a hit slips to the guy or doll who can make one. Performers, writers and publishers and their song pluggers pass payola to A & R (artists and repertory) chiefs, who decide what the record companies will record; the companies, in turn, spread payola around to selected disk jockeys. If the custom is fully understood in the trade, it is rarely discussed outside it. But last week Singer Frank Sinatra fired a telegram from Hollywood (a town with its own brand of payola) to Florida's Senator George A. Smathers of the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, accusing Columbia Records' bearded pop A & R chief Mitch Miller of self-confessed payolatizing.

A Shot of Pizazz. Sinatra's telegram was transparently timed to pump a little publicity pizazz into the weary, long-running argument between 33 members of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and the organization known as Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). For a generation, ASCAP has been collecting flat, annual fees from broadcasting stations for broadcast performances of its members' works. In 1939, some 250 pinched broadcasters, including all the major networks, formed a rival organization, BMI, and the two have been skirmishing ever since. The point currently at issue: Does the broadcasters' control of BMI and large interest in the recording industry (NBC is related to RCA Victor, CBS owns Columbia) lead to discrimination against ASCAP tunes?

Before a House Judiciary subcommittee last fall (TIME, Oct. 1), ASCAP Sympathizer Sinatra charged that Mitch Miller had tried to foist BMI songs on him while Frankie was at Columbia (Miller produced statistics in an effort to disprove the charge). In his telegram last week, Sinatra stated that Miller, Frankie's longtime bogey, had admitted accepting "large sums of money" from writers whose songs he recorded. Sinatra quoted Miller's words from sworn testimony: "Bob Merrill [responsible for If I Knew You Were Coming, I'd 've Baked a Cake and other hit tunes] would bring all the songs to me first. After the songs were a hit I got a check from his royalties to me. It amounted to $5,000 to $6,000--different checks."

Legit Services. That and other similar quotes, Miller replied last week, were "isolated portions of my testimony." Mitch Miller, a many-sided man about music (besides being Columbia's A & R man, he conducts recording orchestras, arranges songs, produces TV commercials, presides at a Sunday chitchat show, and plays a first-rate oboe), argued that he got his fees for legitimate services, e.g., "editing" songs, fixing up lyrics, etc.

While the headliners each sang their own tunes, Florida's Smathers introduced an amendment to the Federal Communications Act to prevent broadcasters from owning stock in BMI or in publishing and record companies. Said he: "Had these [monopolistic] practices been in existence in prior years, many great songs such as The Missouri Waltz might not have been available for the enjoyment of the public."

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