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Paul Riddell's avatar

If you get the chance, check out the documentary “The Ramones: End of the Century,” which shows how hard this game was working in the 1970s and 1980s. Every attempt the Ramones made to get airplay, including hiring Phil Spector to produce the album “End of the Century,” was instantly neutralized by the label. In the early days of MTV, Ramones videos, particularly for the songs “I Wanna Be Sedated” and “We Want the Airwaves,” played constantly, but people going to most record shops to buy them were simply told “they should be available in two weeks” until they caught on that the shops would NEVER carry Ramones albums, no matter what. Even today, you’re more likely to hear Ramones songs as ad jingles, especially after all of the original band members died in the 2000s, than you are to hear them on terrestrial radio in the States or England, and while labels will make the songs available NOW, all of the band members pretty much died in poverty, for no other reason than a group of Rolling Stone alums figured that Phil Collins and Stone TemplePilots could move more units.

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Shaggy Snodgrass's avatar

I tend to think that executives "blacklist" artists as a display of power; particularly to thwart corporate-political rivals or punish agents that have irked them. It's only very rarely about the artists themselves.

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