Music radios corruption

Continuing the radio theme, Salon describes how the labels are fed up with bribing the radio stations to play their records, but dare not stop. This inspired namespan on slashdot to imagine their thinking:

exec #1: Boy, who would have thought our payola efforts would have come back to haunt us like this?

exec #2: Not me! Sure miss the old days when a smaller amount of our billions bought way more influence.

exec #1: This whole consolidated radio network thing stinks. I wish we could just get rid of radio.

exec #2: But we NEED radio to keep distributing free music so people will want to buy CDs!

exec #1: I know. I just can't get around that. If only there were some other avenue for distributing our music freely so that people could listen to it and decide they want to buy it.

[silence]

exec #2: Well, the good news is that we've managed to successfully shut down Napster and some of its ilk. At least we'll have more money from those sales we would have lost to make the payola!

exec #1: Maybe we could sue Clear Channel, or lobby congress for a new law that would favor us! You're brilliant, #2!