The Irish pub near your work doesn’t advertise a broad range of music, and I don’t think its reasonable to expect ‘music’ in that context to mean ‘different types of music’ either. (It doesn’t exclude jazz, but it doesn’t suggest that jazz is included either.)

If I went to a club that had a good sound system, but then the power went out and the system failed, I wouldn’t call that unethical behaviour. If I went to a club where a DJ was advertised, and his flight was cancelled or his records were stolen, I wouldn’t blame the club. And I wouldn’t blame a restaurant if the chef threw a fit one day, even though its not behaviour I’d expect. But if the power went out because the club hadn’t paid its bills, the promoter knew the DJ wouldn’t make it a week in advance and didn’t tell anyone, or the chef went crazy every single night and the owners did nothing about it, I would say their behaviour was unethical.

Again, I think your problem is with the idea of implicit agreements, the idea that customers can have legitiomate expectations of a product that aren’t specified in a contract, and that the courts will recognise and give weight to those expectations. If you think that’s silly thatis up to you, but payola is probably issue 95,763 on the list of things affected.

Otherwise I would be churning out children to meet my grandmother’s demands. :)

You, and Chris, are asserting that payola is unethical and therefore paying DJs to play particular music is bribery. I am wondering what happens if a DJ does not agree with your view and pointing out that if the criteria for bribery is simply offering to pay for something that someone else regards as unethical, there is a vast amount of bribery going on around the world.

When I am going to a club, I generally expect the music to vary somewhat, the sound system to be of reasonable quality, and there to be more than one song. But that has a lot to do with how I live in a city with a competitive nightlife scene and people would just go somewhere else if the music was bad. I have other expectations of nightlife that have been surprised, e.g. that the chef doesn’t come out of the kitchen waving a machete around and then slam it into the table, but I didn’t get all upset and claim that behaviour was not ethical because it upset some implicit agreement (the chef was putting on an act).

And I’m not upset that the Irish pub near work advertises “live music every Friday night” and yet I have never heard it playing classical or jazz, despite how it sets no restrictions on the sort of music that will be played. Presumably you are.

For example, most clubs will only have basic information on their posters – the names of the DJs playing, the hours, and the price. Nowhere on a poster does the promoter promise that the DJ will not play the same record over and over again, that the sound system is not an iPod with a couple of car speakers attached, that the DJs will be playing more than one song each before the music is turned off. But all of these things are understood to be part of the deal.

You may think it is unethical, but why is that a basis for deciding the transaction is bribery? If a devout Christian thinks buying and consuming porn is unethical, does that mean that a completely unrelated person who buys “Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure” is really bribing the bookseller? Or the publisher? (And, if the criteria is that someone, out there, thinks that what you are doing is unethical, then the Christian is committing bribery whenever he buys a bible.)

And, to take the case closer to Hazlett’s, if I argue that your ethical rule is wrong, am I therefore advocating bribery?

Yes it is, in principle and I for one would like to see some truth-in-advertising requirement that disc jockeys who don’t choose their own records make some acknowledgement of the fact because they are trading off the past and present of disc jockeys who do. In related news, pop stars who lip-sync at their live appearances ought to acknowledge the fact on their publicity material.

If payola is wrong, is corporate dictation of the playlist wrong? If DJs aren’t really choosing their own playlist, how can they fraudulently endorse anything?

“If insiders trade, the share price will move closer to what it would have been had the information been disclosed.” Or, the insiders could issue a statement from the company. Allowing insider trading would encourage holding back information until the insiders made money from the deal. Their other defenses for insider trading are equally weak.

[1]yes yes clear channel I know

“The market” is an amnesiac, masturbating.
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“The market” is an amnesiac, masturbating.
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For a start, it’s a case of perverse incentives. The payer’s interest is to increase the sales of the record by more than the cost of the bribe. Assuming more airplay=more sales, playing it more often will do it. But if the record is a dog, it might induce as many if not more listeners to switch radio stations even if it did boost the sales. The point is that the DJ is being paid to sabotage the station’s interests.

And secondly, why assume that the payer’s decision to pay maps to their judgment of quality? “Hey, have you heard this really great song? It’s so fantastic we’ll PAY you to play it!” Would that really suggest to you that it was good? Wouldn’t it be more likely that they would bribe you to play music you wouldn’t otherwise play – after all, if the bribe is the price of playing that record rather than another, there’s no value in bribing the DJ to play a record he or she would anyway!

No it’s not. In bookshops and groceries there are these things which we economists call “neighbouring shelves”. You can compare and select between different books on the shelf a lot more easily and enjoyably than you can listen to two radio stations at the same time. I’m less surprised at economists’ studied inability to make quite obvious distinctions between media and between forms of advertising than I should be (advertising is a massive blind spot in modern economics) but Ray’s implicit model is the correct one; disk jockeys provide an implicit certification role by playing a record which bookshops don’t by putting the book on a shelf.

Tracy, the difference is obvious. If you hire a DJ to play 60’s music, then you are establishing a set of ethical rules for the DJ to follow (if she accepts the job) – notably, that she should only play 60’s music.

If you advertise a gig at which this DJ will be playing, and don’t tell anyone that the DJ will only be playing 60’s music, you are acting unethically.

If someone pays that DJ to only play 60’s music from one publisher, the DJ is acting unethically. She’s restricting her choice in ways that you’re not aware of, and you didn’t agree to. Sure, she will still be playing 60’s music, but you have a right to be pissed off.

From Wikipedia: Bribery is the practice of offering a professional or an authority person money or other favours in order to circumvent ethics or other rules in a variety of situations. It is a form of corruption and is generally illegal, or at least cause for sanctions from one’s employer or professional organisation.

By that definition, payola is only bribery if there are rules or ethics binding DJs to not accept money to play particular music.

Noticeably this definition does not say whose ethics or legal rules are binding. If there is a law against playing ‘60s music, then presumably my offer to the DJ is bribery. However, if the DJ thinks that playing ‘60s music is unethical, and I think it is perfectly okay, then am I committing an act of bribery? How about if both I and the DJ are perfectly fine with playing ‘60s music, and Chris thinks it is unethical? Am I then committing bribery?

Consequently, I think to argue that payola is bribery requires some argument that payola violates some ethical or other rule that the DJs are required to uphold.

Now, let us assume that there is a legal or ethical rule that DJs should uphold. E.g. The International Association of DJs has passed a resolution that payola is bribery. If someone then advocates changing this rule, are they therefore advocating bribery?

To put this in a different example. Let us say that the NZ government bans hiring DJs to play ‘60s music. If I write an article arguing that there are economics benefits to allowing people to hire DJs to play ‘60s music, am I therefore advocating bribery? If I am not, how can you say that Thomas W. Hazlett is?