From payola to P2P sharing to digital-era royalties to AI fakery, there’s never been a moment in recorded music without its period-specific business and distribution brouhaha, and varying degrees of resulting professional and public concern. I was reminded of this particular ancient rallying cry when I saw the sticker on an old LP, dating from the early 1990s. If the phrase isn’t familiar, “When You Play It, Say It!” was a push by record labels the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), beginning in the late 1980s, for radio DJs to always identify, on air, the songs that they have been playing. The plays of course were tracked for payments to songwriters, but the “Say It!” matter was an admonition meant to encourage record sales by keeping audiences informed about what precisely they were listening to. This sticker is an elegant bit of semi-astroturf (if by no means wrongheaded) propaganda from a less digitized if no more civilized age.
