Ethically Tone Deaf

The Rationale One Online Music Magazine Uses for Charging Fees for Press Coverage Is Woefully Off-Key

Angela Gunn Consumer Reports WebWatch Web Ethics Columnist>

You may be past the point of passionately caring about the ins and outs of the music scene, but a recent dustup in the halls of rock criticism this month has been the best ethics show in town: strong opinions, culture clashes, and meaty credibility issues. At issue: What to make of online publications that require those who wish to be written about by journalists to pay a fee up-front for consideration. The site: NYrock.com, which charges a $20 fee for bands to submit CDs for review on its site.

Some of you may be thinking of a term from rock's early days right about now: payola. Sort of, but whereas payola was the practice of "pay for play" — record company slips the DJ a few bucks or a producer credit, DJ spins the record on the air and thus increases its sales — the practice in question is a bit different. In the case before us, NYrock, an independent online magazine reviewing performances and CDs, requests that those bands either unsigned to any record label or signed to an independent label submit a $20 fee for any CD they'd like the site to review. The fee doesn't guarantee a positive review, only that the site's writers will listen to the disk and write about it. The site discloses this fee to readers on the site.

Enter Fred Mills, a veteran music writer currently contributing to, among other publications, Detroit's Metro Times. When the owner of an indie label forwarded a letter detailing NYrock's policy to Mills, he saddled up and wrote a column full of the kind of cleansing, righteous wrath that normally one must be an ethics columnist to experience, blasting the site, its writers, its policy, and the possibility that anyone, anywhere in publishing might think that this business model is a good idea. He thunders at the possibility that NYrock's policy might sully the credibility of other music-related sites, and even perhaps the credibility of online journalists as a larger group. (Disclosure.)

NYrock's not promising anything for a band's $20; you pay your money and you take your chances. The credibility problem here rises from the profound difference between paying journalists to get press coverage and the idea we as a culture have about the process of journalism. That process is built in large part on the belief that the people writing articles need to operate free of any pressure, real or implied, from the people or companies they're writing about. In other words, movie studios don't pay movie critics to review their films because that money could sway a critic to write a glowing review of an otherwise lousy movie — a disservice to a public seeking unbiased advice.

Readers believe, because publications have promised them that it is so, that the articles they read are as free of certain sorts of bias as possible. Some publications go even farther and accept no advertising or rely heavily on income from subscriptions and various foundation grants. Conversely, NYrock has no print version of itself to sell, and foundations tend to prefer other kinds of candidates for their largesse.

Publications that don't go the nonprofit-plus-subscriptions route usually pay their way thanks to subscribers and advertisers; attracting the latter depends on the desirable demographics of the former. (For instance, advertisers in child-care-related magazines usually have products of interest to people who need information about babies, which tends to mean young adult women.)

So what's an e-zine to do, since selling ads or subscriptions to online content is much tougher — particularly when much of your audience is spending their limited funds on shows and music? Nyrock decided somewhere along the way that since a review on the site is a kind of publicity for the band, bands ought to pay for reviews just as they pay the expenses of PR representatives.

The site's managing editor, Sandi Boerum, says in an e-mail that she doesn't think the site is doing anything wrong. She insists the policy of charging for reviews is a financial necessity for a small Internet publisher and that NYrock was only doing what other sites do, too.

Doing something wrong because others do it? If there's one thing ethically more odiferous online (or off) than pack journalism, it's pay-for-play pack journalism.

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Disclosure: I have worked on a few of the same publications as Mills. One of my friends, Jeanne Fury, writes for NYrock.com.

Gunn is the co-founder of, and former Internet ethics columnist for, Yahoo! Internet Life and is currently the technology editor for Time Out New York weekly magazine. She has written hundreds of articles for PC Magazine, MSNBC.com, The Industry Standard, Business 2.0, CNN.com, Seattle Weekly, LA Weekly, and other publications.