(AllHipHop News) Radio and the blog world play nice for most of the year, but there are moments when the two entities collide and Hot 97’s Program Director Ebro Darden and RapRadar’s “blogger” B. Dot Miller are usually at the center of it.
Ebro has taken issue with B. Dot’s constant insinuation that Hot 97 does not support local New York acts nor do they break artists. In the 90-minute plus interview he explains not only why Hot 97 does not “take risks” with unheralded artists but points out a bit of hypocrisy:
The reason Hot 97 does not take risks like it did in the 90’s is because Clear Channel Radio has commoditize radio to the point where when we take a risk on a record, there is nobody else caring in the city, but they say they’re Hip Hop. You two, RapRadar, just came from a show, The Breakfast Club, where they do not break any music on that radio station, because it is a syndicated national radio that does not care about local music. Your website, RapRadar, you guys care about the culture, you guys care about your business model, you guys care about getting hits. A lot of the content that lives and get a lot of life on there is mainstream content.
B. Dot sent a tweet from his personal Twitter account denying any payola on RapRadar’s side:
@JusAire there’s not one artist on this planet that can say they’ve paid me for coverage. FACT.
— Brian B.Dot™ Miller (@bdotTM) October 15, 2013
Ebro also flatly denies one Hip Hop’s darkest secrets: radio payola. Radio payola involves radio stations accepting money and/or gifts in exchange for song placement. Ebro even referenced Eliot Spitzer’s infamous audit of radio stations which started in 2005 and resulted in Sony and Universal Music Group paying over $10 million each in settlements for payola accusations. According to Ebro, Hot 97 was found of no wrongdoing:
Eliott Spitzer ran through this radio station with a fine tooth comb and the whole city for payola? You know who the fu*ck got in trouble? The Program Director at Power 105, he got fired. They ran through everybody. You know what we got? 0 dollars. So, fu*k y’all n*ggas with that bullshi*.
Check out the full Juan Epstein interview with Elliott Wilson and B. Dot below:
