After recording a series of demos and gigging across the north of England, they began to get local radio airplay.
This album's 11th-hour manifestation – even its uppercase title, BEYONCÉ, looked like someone jumping out from behind a bush with a klaxon – meant that it was too late for inclusion on most end-of-year lists, but as well as leapfrogging music critics, its release depended on precisely zero airplay, hinged on not one TV appearance, and was not even teased online.
Hope it will get some airplay before the summer.
He calculates the quality of songs recorded since then has been either stable (based on the number that made it onto critics' "best-of" lists) or significantly improved (based on the pattern of sales and airplay).
For one thing, they are fighting to stop further consolidation among the majors because that would make it even harder for the independents themselves to compete for shelf space and airplay.
Hoss Allen, who began at WLAC as a utility deejay, is known for giving James Brown's "Please, Please, Please" its first airplay in 1956, spinning it, in fact, before it was an official release.
With a bent toward alternative rock, college stations gave artists like the Police, U2, R.E.M., and Elvis Costello their initial radio airplay and provided outlets for all kinds of nonmainstream musics.
When the record industry's payola scandal (involving payment in return for airplay) broke in 1959, Clark told a congressional committee that he was unaware that performers in whom he had a financial interest had received disproportionate play on his programs.
In 1973 Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango made the Top 40 with "Soul Makossa," a pioneering disco hit that sold more than 100,000 copies in the United States despite negligible radio airplay.
The Byrds' debut single, a version of Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man," went to number one in 1965, breaking the British Invasion's year-long dominance of Top 40 airplay and record sales in the United States.
At the 49th annual Grammy Awards in February, the Dixie Chicks—a group that had received little country radio airplay in the extended wake of lead singer Natalie Maines's critical comments in 2003 about Pres.
