Here's how it works. The indies are the shadowy middlemen record companies will pay hundreds of millions of dollars to this year to get songs played on the radio. Then, every time the radio station adds a Shaggy or Madonna or Janet Jackson song to its playlist, the indie gets paid by the record label. Indies are not the guys U2 or Destiny's Child thanked on Grammys night, but everyone in the business, artists included, understands that the indies make or break careers. At first glance, the indies are just the people who grease the gears in a typical mechanism connecting wholesaler with retailer.
Radio is an entity unique to the music industry.
Small wonder that the industry for decades has used money in various ways to influence what radio stations play. The days are long gone when a DJ made an impulse decision about what song to spin. Indeed, say many industry observers, very little of what we hear on today's radio stations isn't bought, one way or another. If record companies wanted access to radio, they had to pay. In the 1990s, however, Washington moved steadily to deregulate the radio industry.