As you might have read two weeks ago in Michael Miner’s media column, Hot Type, Reader music editor Kiki Yablon recently fielded a call from 2K Sounds, a label in Woodland Hills, California, that entered into a joint-venture agreement with Virgin Records earlier this year. The label representative, Alex Waterworth, asked Yablon if she or any of her writers would agree to send him demo tapes of local artists they thought could “make it.” If any of the acts were signed to the label, he promised, the sender would receive half a percentage point on record sales–five or six cents per CD. For an honest journalist such an arrangement would be a clear conflict of interest, akin to insider trading, but when Miner followed up on the call, Waterworth told him that he’d approached papers in seven states–Illinois, Ohio, Minnesota, North Carolina, Missouri, Kansas, and Massachusetts–and that Yablon was the only editor to have said no.
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That may be, but after calling 17 alternative weeklies in those states, I couldn’t find many people who’d said yes either. Dave Chamberlain at New City says he told Waterworth he couldn’t accept any money for leads on artists and never heard from him again. Franklin Soults at Cleveland’s Free Times says he told Waterworth the offer didn’t sound ethical but didn’t give him a definite answer. “It seemed like I’m either a critic or I’m an A and R guy,” says Soults. “I hadn’t completely made up my mind, and I thought I had to talk to other people about it.” Only two of the twelve editors I reached had actually sent demos to 2K Sounds, and both had drawn some sort of ethical line: Andrew Miller of Kansas City’s Pitch Weekly declared that he would turn down the money, and Sara Farr at Dayton’s Impact Weekly said the bands she’d recommended were personal friends, so she couldn’t write about them anyway.
I guess that makes me one of the bad guys, because all I’m willing to do for local bands is listen to their records and check out their live shows. Some time ago I was cornered at a party by a local musician who demanded to know why the Reader didn’t support local music. I pointed out that this column, normally written by Peter Margasak, is devoted almost exclusively to local music, and I might have added that the Reader is the only paper in town to list every local concert every week. But by “local music” he of course meant his band, and by “support” he meant something other than “cover.” Like Hernandez, he seemed to feel local music was a cause and that the paper had a duty to promote it.
