Rockbites: Yes, Virginia, CMJ sucks

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March 2003 • Rockbites Alternative Daily

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Yes, Virginia, CMJ sucks
3 March 2003

If, like me, you’ve wondered why so many dubious major label artists appear on the CDs included with the magazine CMJ New Music Monthly—which otherwise presents itself as oh so indie—and why the range of selections on the CDs never seems to exhibit any coherence, a recent brouhaha has shed some light on the situation.
    Ian Hetzner, co-music director for University of California at Berkeley student station KALX, was tired of CMJ lying about the music on his play list, and tired of their lack of responsiveness to his repeated queries. So were many other college music directors around the country, including those at Chapel Hill, North Carolina’s WXYC and Jersey City, New Jersey’s WFMU. But Hetzner placed himself in the line of fire by taking on the role of whistle-blower. He issued a mass email to the entire KALX mailing list outlining CMJ’s self-serving practices. And the shit hit the fan.
    While CMJ has now reformed the most egregious of its chart-stuffing behavior, they did so only after further insulting the family of stations on which they rely, giving the world a glimpse of the company’s rather sanctimonious corporate culture. CMJ’s Mike Boyle, vice president and general manager, began a retaliatory letter to KALX’s Hetzner, “Ladies & Gentlemen (and I use the terms VERY lightly), One of the first things you will learn when you finally become adults is how to act in a mature manner when you have a problem or question with something.” You can read more of Boyle’s letter in an article by Katy St. Clair published last week by Emeryville, California weekly paper East Bay Express (check our link).
    That article detailed CMJ’s pay-for-play policy for their monthly CD ($3,000 gets you a slot), and their longstanding practice of stuffing college radio play lists, carried in their weekly trade publication CMJ New Music Report, with their own releases.
    It turns out that CMJ knowingly substituted one of its own compilation CDs in any college play list slot for which it claims to have had trouble verifying the existence of the artist.
    The new evidence challenging CMJ’s ethics is significant not because of any prior reputation to the contrary, but because CMJ remains widely read and quoted, and because it remains the only centralized reporting service for college radio play lists. In many respects it’s the only game in town for small college stations hoping to gain recognition.
    On the other hand, Otis Hart’s Vermont-based, year-old Dusted Magazine compiles a weekly chart from 40 hand-picked college stations. And CMJ, for their part, claim to have modified their system so that unverified chart entries are flagged as such, rather than being stuffed with CMJ’s Certain Damage CD. | Article from East Bay Express | | KALX | | CMJ | | Dusted Magazine | | WXYC | | WFMU | | top of page |

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