Universal Settles HUGE Payola Case; "Supermassive Black Hole" f-ing rocks

We all knew that the big labels did this. It was just a matter of getting caught. Universal Music, the world's biggest music company, settled for $12 million because of "accusations that executives paid radio programmers to play songs." And not just radio -- apparently they were spamming MTV's TRL to get Lindsay Lohan's videos on. Hi-larious. Ever wonder why you never heard a Lohan song on the radio? Because radio didn't want to play it! And to get her higher up on TRL, Universal hired a "request company" to help out the video. Wow. And it doesn't stop there -- Island Def Jam (a Universal label) hired people to hype up Ludacris' "Stand Up" at radio stations in New York, and paid employees a cool extra $3,500 to hype up Ashanti's "Rain on Me." They did this for a Nick Lachey song too, back in 2004. There's a whole list of songs they did this for. For more info, check out these links: NY Times Online, E! Online, FoxNews.com.

On another note, I'm in love with Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole." It's f-ing awesome. I've had it on repeat. Download it here, thanks to Stereogum.