How to Use payola in a Sentence

payola

noun
  • These radio disc jockeys accepted payola to play particular songs.
  • One method resembles payola — pay-for-play on certain playlists.
    — Elizabeth Lopatto, The Verge, 16 Jan. 2025
  • Refresh for more…No payola going on here, just pure ticket sales around the world.
    — Anthony D'alessandro, Deadline, 17 May 2026
  • The music industry’s challenges have simply evolved and so has payola.
    — Jared Brenner, Forbes.com, 11 Sep. 2025
  • That money shifts college sports even further away from purity and closer to payola.
    — Mike Bianchi, The Orlando Sentinel, 5 Aug. 2025
  • Still, rolling out a new set of payola demands in the middle of a global pandemic that has working artists struggling to stay afloat marks a new low.
    — The Artist Rights Alliance, Rolling Stone, 18 May 2021
  • Artist advocate Krukowski describes the offering as a new kind of payola.
    — Randall Roberts, Los Angeles Times, 19 Apr. 2021
  • Some of the payola claims seem at least plausible, but the one involving Spotify seems misleading.
    — Bill Hochberg, Forbes, 17 Jan. 2025
  • There remain battles to be fought, whisper campaigns to be hatched, payola scandals to be investigated.
    — Glenn Whipp, Los Angeles Times, 19 Jan. 2024
  • Today’s payola may look different, but the mechanics are familiar.
    — Jared Brenner, Forbes.com, 11 Sep. 2025
  • If $13 billion a year in payola can’t appease Quebec, the cause is probably beyond salvaging.
    — Holman W. Jenkins, WSJ, 22 Jan. 2019
  • These days, payola takes different shapes, but each practice amounts to a form of payment to twist public perception and secure an unfair advantage.
    — Kyle Eustice, VIBE.com, 30 Mar. 2026
  • But in between innovating new forms of payola and cozying up to authoritarian regimes, the Globes still found time to vote.
    — Jen Chaney, Vulture, 9 Dec. 2024
  • There’s the illicit deal that Ava has struck with the lawyer from the golf course who’s giving Abbott payola, hush money, essentially.
    — Michael Schneider, Variety, 9 Jan. 2025
  • The payola scandal of the 1950s, where radio DJs in the US were paid to play records, was one of the first big shots.
    — Christopher Null, WIRED, 7 Feb. 2024
  • And since the 1960s, this practice, known as payola, has been regulated by the federal government.
    — Billboard, 28 June 2021
  • When embarrassing information or legal threats don’t work, people with power and financial means often turn to old-fashioned payola.
    — Ben Widdicombe, Town & Country, 18 Jan. 2019
  • The payola-scheming music executive and the police officer who controls the drug cartel are not just grifters but sharky megalomaniacs.
    — Jesse Green, New York Times, 15 Mar. 2023
  • In the label’s early days, the music industry practice later known as payola—paying DJs to play your records—was not only legal but common.
    — Bryan Greene, Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Feb. 2022
  • In an industry once plagued by payola and still poisoned by cronyism, there needs to be transparency about the Rock Hall process to insure credibility.
    — Jon Bream, Star Tribune, 13 May 2021
  • The line between these two had been continuously blurring through decades of mergers and vertical integrations (and vast amounts of payola) until listeners had enough.
    — Danny Garcia, Rolling Stone, 7 Jan. 2022
  • These promoters had monopolized radio airplay through payola and other questionable practices.
    — Jessica Lynch, Billboard, 25 July 2024
  • Industry insiders, with their truffle-pig noses for sniffing out scandal from the air, suspected more to the story, perhaps involving prostitution, large-scale payola, or a hard-drug racket.
    — Amy X. Wang, Rolling Stone, 9 Sep. 2021
  • The internet, on the other hand, is capable of disseminating virtually limitless data, and therefore the payola laws don’t apply.
    — Rebecca Jennings, Vox, 1 July 2024
  • What started as modest compensation shilling for a local car dealer or pizza parlor has quickly become unapologetic recruiting payola in the win-at-all-costs world of college football and men’s basketball.
    — Mark Zeigler, San Diego Union-Tribune, 22 Apr. 2022
  • The Discovery Mode feature, which is somewhat reminiscent of a payola – currency in exchange for plays – creates an interesting business case for artists and labels alike.
    — Jacqueline Schneider, Forbes, 9 Mar. 2023
  • When the American Bandstand host was swept up in a radio payola scandal in 1959 and called to testify before Congress, Shalit dropped him.
    — Chris Koseluk, HollywoodReporter, 12 June 2026
  • For Holter, all the discussion about fractions of pennies, parity and payola, while crucial, is less a concern than Spotify’s power and potential consequences for musicians.
    — Randall Roberts, Los Angeles Times, 19 Apr. 2021
  • The parents, Singer, and college coaches played a direct role in the scandal, while negligent admissions officials and campus shakedown artists helped create the culture in which sleazoids like Singer and payola parents operated.
    — Frederick Hess, Forbes, 12 Oct. 2021
  • The label went into decline by the mid-1960s, following a payola scandal in 1959 in which Nathan was accused of making payments to radio DJs to promote his songs.
    — Gil Kaufman, Billboard, 14 Oct. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'payola.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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