And in the music business - and probably also the movie business, and to some extent the writing business - there's been a strong subculture of payola and indus

And in the music business - and probably also the movie business, and to some extent the writing business - there's been a strong subculture of payola and industrial promotion. The major labels hire pluggers - as they're known - who used to deal with radio DJs and now deal with playlist curators. Sometimes money changes hands and marketable but otherwise not very interesting music suddenly appears on hundreds of playlists - in the hope that it will break through into mass appeal. You can only push this so far because ultimately listeners still decide what's hot and what isn't. But they're forced to make their choices from a limited and crafted pool of suspected high-performing product, and not from a much wider pool of more varied styles and less homogenous artists.