Here’s an interesting conundrum for anyone out there who writes about music on the old Interwebs: The Federal Trade Commission just announced that beginning Dec. 1, bloggers will have to disclose whether or not they received payments or free goods in exchange for reviewing products—if they don’t, they could be fined up to $11,000. So how will this affect music blogs, which pretty much depend on a stream of free things (low-cost items like concert tickets and CDs and MP3s, mostly) to keep up with what’s going on in their little world?
From the FTC’s announcement:
The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service. Likewise, if a company refers in an advertisement to the findings of a research organization that conducted research sponsored by the company, the advertisement must disclose the connection between the advertiser and the research organization. And a paid endorsement – like any other advertisement – is deceptive if it makes false or misleading claims.
So what does this mean? A weekly “What I Got In The Mail This Week And Might Trade In For Something I Really Want” post from every music blogger out there? (Even though it might be hard to believe now, CDs still do have some sort of monetary value!) Will online publications that don’t consider themselves “blogs” also be forced to go the full-disclosure route? Will some of the more unsavory sites out there move off WordPress and TypePad and onto alternate content-management systems that don’t dare breathe the word “blog”? Are people really paying music blogs to talk up artists? (If so, el oh el, right?) And finally, not for nothing, but old-school media is just as dependent on freebies as any of their newer-media counterparts might be—in a possibly more insidious way, too!—so why pick on bloggers to begin with? Is this another case of the Internet being a Scary Bad Place in the minds of old-fogey regulatory types?
FTC Publishes Final Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials [FTC]
i’m all for disclosing whether or not one received material incentive to promote another’s merchandise, but it’s crazy that bloggers are required to do this, but that congressmen are not.
could you imagine, “before today’s senate finance committee on health care reform, i just need to disclose that i received over $100,000 in campaign contributions from health care lobbyists representing the insurance industry.” as if that would ever happen.
now a blogger will be penalized $11,000 for not saying in his review they got a free copy of the CD from a label’s PR dept., but senators and congressmen around the country can continue to take hundreds of thousands in dollars in gifts from lobbyists and hide that information on their campaign finance records with the help of their party’s congressional campaign operations.
I almost never blog about stuff that I get in the mail; I’m too busy trying to get someone to pay me to write about it. I do twitter about what I’m listening to, though, and if I have to say “(got for free from publicist)” every time, that’s a big chunk of my 140 characters gone right up front.
@pdfreeman: Gyant, is that you?
I don’t see how they’ll ever be able to police this anyway if they can’t do anything besides slow down the 100,000 blogs out there that zip up full albums and post them for download. Who’s going to even go to the trouble of investigating individual bloggers who all write about the same lame teaser mp3 from the next Sufjan album?
@nOvaMatic: No, I’m a freelancer (AMG, Alternative Press, the Village Voice, a ton of other places), so I’m always trying to book for-money CD reviews, if not features, is what I’m saying.
My understanding (gained from catching maybe 30 seconds on NPR) is that the FTC won’t be expending any real time or money going after bloggers.
Even theoretically, it’s hard to imagine these guys going after reviewers who receive the thing they’re going to review. A free copy never guarantees a good review.
But nevermind that. I second mobius1ski’s proposal to make politicians disclose their contributions. In speeches is a start. In bills would be even better.