Joe: You know that feeling when a song is just everywhere? You hear it in the car, at the grocery store, in a movie. You assume it's because it's a great song, right? That it just naturally rose to the top. Lewis: Yeah, of course. It's a hit because it's a hit. That's the definition. Joe: Well, for a long time, especially in the 70s and 80s, it was more likely because a guy with alleged mob ties got paid a bag of cash to make it happen. Lewis: Wait, what? Are you saying my favorite 80s power ballads were mob-approved? That sounds like a joke. Joe: It's shockingly close to the truth. And that's the world we're diving into with Fredric Dannen's explosive book, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business. Dannen was a sharp investigative journalist, winning awards for his business reporting, and he brought that same intensity to uncovering the music industry's darkest secrets. Lewis: So this isn't just industry gossip, this is documented, hardcore journalism. Joe: Absolutely. The book was so controversial and revealing it won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award and is now considered one of the greatest music business books ever written. It peels back the glamorous facade to show the rot underneath. Lewis: Okay, I'm in. Where do we even start with a story that big? Joe: We start with a simple experiment that went horribly wrong. It involves Pink Floyd, a number one album, and a song that radio stations in one of the biggest cities in the world refused to play.

Lewis: Hold on. Pink Floyd? In their prime? What song could a radio station possibly refuse to play? Joe: "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2." You know, the "We don't need no education" song. In 1980, the album The Wall was number one. The band had five sold-out shows in Los Angeles. The song was a global smash. But in L.A., there was a near-total blackout on Top 40 radio. Lewis: That makes no sense. That's like a bookstore refusing to sell a new Harry Potter book. It's just leaving money on the table. Why? Joe: That's exactly what a CBS Records executive named Dick Asher wanted to know. He was trying to prove a point. See, for years, record labels had been paying millions of dollars to so-called "independent promoters" to get their songs on the radio. Asher thought this was a waste of money, a form of payola. So he made a rule for this one song in L.A.: we will not pay the indies. Lewis: And the result was… silence. Joe: Complete silence. The moment he caved and let his team hire the indies, the song was suddenly on every major station in L.A. What Asher ran into was "The Network"—a powerful group of independent promoters who effectively controlled what got played on Top 40 radio across the country. Lewis: This is blowing my mind. So it wasn't about promoting a song. It was a protection racket for the airwaves. You pay them, or your song "has an accident" and never gets heard. Joe: Precisely. Dannen describes it as extortion. One record executive is quoted saying, "You got the feeling you had to hire them so bad things wouldn’t happen." It wasn't about getting them to say yes; it was about preventing them from enforcing a no. Lewis: And how did this even work? Were they just slipping cash to DJs? Joe: It was more sophisticated than that. Dannen uncovers these wild tactics. One was the "paper add." A radio station programmer, who was friends with a Network promoter, would report to the industry trade magazines that they'd "added" the song to their playlist. The promoter gets their big bonus from the record label for the "add." But the station never actually plays the song. Lewis: That's brilliant and horrifying. So the labels are paying millions for fake airplay. It's all a mirage. Joe: A very expensive mirage. Or they'd put a song into what they called "lunar rotation"—playing it once at 3:00 A.M. on a Tuesday to technically fulfill the obligation. Lewis: And these promoters weren't just slick salesmen. Dannen connects some of the biggest players to organized crime, right? Joe: Deep connections. He profiles figures like Morris Levy, the head of Roulette Records, who was known as the "Godfather" of the music business. Levy was a notorious figure with documented mob ties. Dannen quotes him with these cynical, hard-bitten philosophies like, "If a guy’s a cocksucker in his life, when he dies he don’t become a saint." This wasn't a clean, corporate business. It was a street fight run by guys who understood power in its rawest form. Lewis: So the music that defined a generation was essentially curated by a system of bribery and intimidation. That's a pretty dark thought. Joe: And it gets even darker when you look at the guys at the top of the record labels themselves. The corruption wasn't just coming from the outside.

Joe: This whole corrupt system of indie promotion was allowed to flourish, and was even weaponized, by a handful of executives who were basically rock and roll warlords. The most notorious, and a central character in Hit Men, was Walter Yetnikoff, the president of CBS Records. Lewis: This is Dick Asher's boss, right? The guy who ultimately let the Pink Floyd experiment fail because he needed the hit. Joe: The very same. Yetnikoff was a fascinating figure—brilliant, charismatic, but incredibly volatile and driven by ego. Dannen paints this incredible picture of him deciding to start a literal "war" with the rival label, Warner Bros. Records. Lewis: A war? What does that even mean in the record business? They're not sending armies to storm the Warner lot, are they? Joe: It was the corporate equivalent. It wasn't based on a sound business strategy. It was a personal vendetta. Yetnikoff felt slighted by Warner's chairman, Mo Ostin, a much more low-key and respected figure. So, Yetnikoff decided to hurt him where it mattered: his artists. He threw a ridiculous amount of money—we're talking a guaranteed $1 million per album in 1976—to steal James Taylor from Warner. Lewis: Wow. So he's spending millions just to spite one guy. That's the most expensive ego trip I've ever heard of. How does Warner possibly retaliate against that kind of spending? Joe: This is the best part of the story, and it shows the difference in styles. Mo Ostin at Warner doesn't get into a screaming match. He waits. He plays the long game. He finds out Paul Simon's contract is up for renewal at CBS and that Simon's relationship with the loud, abrasive Yetnikoff is strained. In a quiet, surgical strike, Ostin snatches Paul Simon. Lewis: No way. He poached Paul Simon right from under Yetnikoff's nose. Joe: And Yetnikoff was so enraged that Dannen reports he personally tried to sabotage Simon's career. He allegedly forbade other CBS artists from collaborating with him and held up his royalty payments. It got so bad that Paul Simon ended up suing CBS. Lewis: This is unbelievable. So two of the most iconic singer-songwriters of their generation, James Taylor and Paul Simon, are just pawns in a personal grudge match between two executives. The artists themselves, and the music, are almost secondary. Joe: Completely. It marked a huge shift in the industry. It became an era of the dealmakers, not the music men. It wasn't about nurturing an artist for years; it was about the acquisition, the big score, the "win." Dannen shows how this rivalry drove artist costs through the roof. CBS spent a fortune to sign The Rolling Stones, a deal that ended up being a massive money-loser, but for Yetnikoff, it was a status symbol. He had the Stones. Lewis: So while the indie promoters are running their racket on the ground floor, the label presidents are up in the penthouse, playing these high-stakes poker games with artists' careers. Joe: And the two worlds were deeply connected. Yetnikoff supported the expensive indie promotion system because, as his rival Irving Azoff claimed, it drove the cost of breaking a record so high that only a giant like CBS could afford to compete. It was a way to muscle smaller labels out of the business. Lewis: It's a closed system. The corruption at the top feeds the corruption at the bottom, and it all just spirals. It’s amazing any good music made it through at all.

Joe: When you put it all together, you see this bizarre, toxic ecosystem. You have the street-level corruption of The Network controlling the airwaves through what was essentially extortion. And then you have the boardroom-level corruption of the Warlords, fueled by ego, turning art into ammunition for their personal feuds. Lewis: It's wild. It makes you rethink the whole idea of a "hit song." A hit wasn't just a great song that connected with people. It was a song that survived this gauntlet of bribery and ego. It had to be paid for, fought over, and pushed through a system that was actively hostile to it unless the right palms were greased. Joe: Exactly. And Fredric Dannen's book is so powerful because it's not just an exposé of a corrupt system; it’s a human story. It shows the real cost—on artists who were treated like commodities, on executives like Dick Asher who tried to fight the system and were fired for it, and even on the warlords themselves. Yetnikoff's reign ended, and he eventually fell from power. Lewis: It really makes you wonder what amazing music we never got to hear because the artist didn't want to, or couldn't, play the game. That's the truly sad part. Joe: It is. The book leaves you with this profound question about the relationship between art and commerce. How much of what we consider our cultural soundtrack was shaped not by public taste, but by backroom deals and personal vendettas? Lewis: It's a sobering thought. What are your thoughts on this? Did you live through the 80s and ever wonder why that one song was on the radio 24/7? Let us know your theories. We'd love to hear them. Joe: This is Aibrary, signing off.