Want a Spin Plaque to Go Next to Your Gold Record?

Music connoisseurs tend to thumb their noses at pop radio stations for playing the same songs over and over. The major record companies, on the other hand, just got a chance to back-slap stations for doing exactly that.

Record labels can now buy plaques recognizing “outstanding achievement in radio airplay” when stations play--or “spin”--a song a certain number of times. Labels can purchase the plaques for artists, radio promotion employees or stations when a song reaches milestones of 50,000 spins, 100,000 spins and for every 100,000 spins after that.

The plaques are part of an award program launched by Broadcast Data Systems, a White Plains, N.Y. tracking service that electronically samples airplay on hundreds of top stations across the nation.

Record executives have long given gold or platinum records--the Recording Industry Assn. of America’s album sales awards--to favored stations when particular albums score commercial success. Mark Tindle, Broadcast Data’s West Coast chief, says his firm’s awards make more sense.

“I worked in promotion for 15 years and I noticed labels were giving radio stations sales awards. Why is that? We should give them ‘spin’ awards. This is something a little more applicable to what they do,” Tindle says.

The company is presenting the first award itself to rock band Lifehouse, whose single “Hanging by a Moment” is the most-played song of the year, with more than 467,000 spins so far. That’s tens of thousands of spins ahead of this year’s No. 2 song, Train’s “Drops of Jupiter,” but it’s still far from Santana, whose song “Smooth” tops the company’s list of the most-spun records of all time, with more than 694,000.

Tallying such data was nearly impossible until the company began monitoring radio stations a decade ago. Before then, industry trade magazines relied on station employees to report when records were added and how often they received airplay. Broadcast Data now provides the data used to compile Billboard magazine’s weekly airplay charts.

Tindle said the plaque idea arose after Warner Bros. Records executives asked about a special award for the Goo Goo Dolls, after a pair of hits from their 1998 album “Dizzy Up the Girl” received a combined 1 million spins.

By tying the trophies to numerical milestones, the airplay awards bear some similarity to the record industry association’s certification system, which gives gold records for albums that ship 500,000 copies and platinum records for sales of 1 million.

But there’s a key difference. Broadcast Data’s spin awards will be based on actual plays of a song, as detected by the company’s electronics. The industry association’s awards are based on manufacturers’ album shipments, not point-of-sale data.

According to the industry association, a record is “sold” once it has been in retailers’ hands for 30 days after its commercial release--even though retailers can eventually return unsold product for cash or credit. In some cases over the years, the number of “returns” on an album has reportedly been in the hundreds of thousands.

That can lead to some wide disparities. Mariah Carey’s new album, “Glitter,” was certified as a million-seller by the association Oct. 16. According to SoundScan, which tracks sales based on point-of-purchase data from retail stores, the album has sold fewer than 400,000 copies.

“Iowa,” the heavily promoted album by heavy-rock band Slipknot, was certified platinum by the association Oct. 10, although SoundScan data put the number of albums sold at just 500,000 copies. Back in August, rock band Drowning Pool received a platinum award for the album “Sinner,” while SoundScan estimated sales at just 600,000 copies at the time.

Just as labels can tout such albums as “platinum-selling,” they can also hype a new single as “added” to a radio station playlist without showing how much airplay it actually receives. Tindle said the new awards program may curb such exaggeration.

“We’re in the reality game here,” he says.

Jeff Leeds

GET UP, PACK UP . . . : It’s a massive clutter tinged in red, yellow and green that fills six rooms in an Echo Park house. It’s also a treasure trove that can cast a spell over students of Jamaican music or Caribbean culture. And now it’s going to its homeland.

It is the sprawling archive of reggae music, memorabilia and literature assembled by Roger Steffens, perhaps the genre’s most zealous patron. The collection includes 3,000 books, 3,000 hours of video, 20,000 hours of audiotape and a mountain of vinyl rarities.

A sliver of the archive was cataloged and framed earlier this year as a large exhibition at the Queen Mary complex in Long Beach. Reports of the show’s success reached Jamaican academics and government officials, and now they want to tap the collection for a national reggae museum.

“They dropped the ball 40 years ago and paid no attention to their own art form, so they have nothing,” Steffens says.

He was a visiting speaker at a Peter Tosh symposium in Jamaica earlier this month when the offer was made to buy his collection for a planned museum in the island’s tourist-centric north coast. Steffens says that he will miss his singular collection, but the loss is cushioned by its promised public forum.

And then there’s the money. He has plowed much of his income since the 1970s into his collector’s passion, and he views the offer (“a significant amount of money,” he says) as the return on a heartfelt investment.

Even if Steffens can watch the collection bundled off without regret, he will still have a measure of parental fear.

“There have been 1,100 murders in Kingston this year and there are roads to the airport that are impassable because of drive-by shootings,” he says. “There is so much turmoil the country may be on the verge of civil war. So I am concerned. But I hope for the best.”

Geoff Boucher