New York’s attorney general can take his fight against newfangled forms of payola as far as he wants, but it won’t change the fact that the pop music business is now the purview of a handful of gigantic media companies that want nothing to do with the old method of letting a song rise to the top by virtue of its quality. “the major labels simply have more money and manpower to wheedle programmers into adding their music to broadcast play lists. The big players, far more so than their independent rivals, also have the wherewithal to build demand for their acts by subsidizing their tours and record-store advertising, producing music videos and landing them on television shows. This imbalance in resources accounts, in part, for the disparity between sales and airplay in the music business.”