Juicing the Charts: Robert Kardashian's Radio & Records
Tracking & Mapping the Kardaschoffs in the Hinterlands
The Kardashians are so ubiquitous in American life that they were the primary target of the celebrity block out movement. This began in May 2024 and aimed to reduce celebrities’ public influence, particularly those who either openly supported Israel’s genocide against Palestinians or remained silent in the face of the #FreePalestine movement.
There have always been gatekeepers in the culture industry, and achieving success in pop music often requires the blessing of entrenched families that have run the industry since its inception.
It was, in fact, Robert Kardashian’s backstage role in the music industry that Kris Jenner leveraged to ascend Kardashian, Inc. into the cultural heavens. Yet, we must consider at what cost. Is there a path to redemption for them? I think so, but it requires a humbling under the glare of the public eye.
Pop culture is shaped by repetition, which establishes a baseline of collective knowledge. In this essay, our starting point is the seemingly harmless act of payola, but the broader theme here is not just the transmitter (gatekeepers)/receiver (consumers) duality but the critical role of distribution networks by which transmissions travel. Few things can travel faster than the sound of music.
The Medium Is The Message
Every major shift in power allows for an ascension of someone who has been waiting in the wings, often regardless of their past transgressions, because the overall benefit to society/stability of a system is deemed more essential than individual accountability. The Kardashians are too public facing to be the final boss of the ruling puppeteers of pop culture. Robert Kardashian, an underling of Irving Azoff, played a significant role in expediting the Kardashians to cultural prominence.
The importance of the Kardashians’ relationship with Irving Azoff in their ascent to becoming America's First Family of Reality TV cannot be overstated. Today, Azoff remains one of the most influential figures in the music industry. He is currently central to the DOJ’s antitrust case against Live Nation-Ticketmaster, despite having stepped down from leadership in 2012. As his power network declines, we must quickly consider who will fill the void—a vacuum where sound waves cannot travel.
Azoff’s much younger, glamorous wife, Shelli, became one of Kris Kardashian’s close friends, a confidant, and a member of her Beverly Hills posse. The two pals had children around the same time—Kim Kardashian and Allison Azoff grew up together and were friends—and sometimes the two moms sported the same outfits by chance for social occasions, and were said to party together at times.
- The Kardashians: An American Drama, p. 141
There is currently a surge of investigative influencers who may not fully grasp the liminal space the music industry occupies. This industry is shaped by complex ethnic power dynamics and often exists in a realm where organized crime flourishes within blurred borders and distribution channels. For instance, it is rarely mentioned that “Kardashian” is an Americanized version of the Russophone “Kardaschoff.” While it’s commonly stated that the music industry is run by people who are white and Jewish, many of its key figures, like Irving Azoff, Len Blavatnik, and Clive Davis, are of Russian Jewish descent.
Perhaps Robert Kardashian’s Russian Armenian heritage permitted him to become a close associate of the Russian Jewish mafia, which largely controls the music industry. Many Russians are also Israeli citizens, and several children of Israeli immigrants, like David Geffen and Lyor Cohen, are music industry moguls. Recognizing that the music industry has complex ties to transnational organized crime—including the trafficking of music, drugs, arms, and people—can deepen our understanding of its far-reaching influence. Since Israel’s establishment in 1948, it has also played a key role in global illicit transactions, acting as an intermediary for both nation-states and criminal organizations. This positioning has contributed to Israel’s ability to continue its genocide in Palestine and incursions into neighboring countries.
In light of the ongoing genocide in Palestine and current conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, I’d argue that if the Russian Armenian Kardashians split with the Russian Jewish mafia and supported broadly ending genocides in honor of their ancestors, they could reshape their legacy as seminal cultural figures. Such actions could help atone for their numerous questionable business dealings, like taking dirty foreign cash and creating a tax-shelter church.
Recurrent Themes In A Closed Circuit
Marrying well enabled the Kardashians’ ancestors to flee Armenia in the early 1900s—specifically, their great aunt Hamas Kardashian married into the wealthy Agajanian family, who sponsored much of her family’s migration to the U.S. Thus, James Thaddeus Agajanian became the proto-patriarch of the contemporary Kardashian empire.
I have previously detailed their early history of their Russian Armenians dominance over the meat-packing and waste removal industries throughout Southern California.
What's the Frequency, Kardaschoff?
When Kim Kardashian’s self-proclaimed godfather, Irving Azoff, started his artist management company, he named it Front Line comparing the music business to warfare. This is the tale of how the Azoff and Kardashian families forged their alliance in the wake of Beatlemania mixed into the classic SoCal sound. It is strange, if not intentional, how few people know Robert Kardashian was a significant, albeit low-key, hitter in the music industry.
It’s well known that the Kardashians are of Armenian descent, but less known that their ancestors fled escalating Armenian persecution at the turn of the 19th century, which culminated in the Armenian genocide during World War I. Armenia lies at crossroads of disparate ontological positions: the Ottoman Empire, Russian Empire, and Persia in the past, and today, the NATO-allied Turkey, former Soviet bloc countries, and Iran.
Under The Influencer: A Payolaschoff Family Tradition
The Kardashians’ generational access to the halls of power mirrors many systemic issues we face today: antitrust concerns, consumer rights, fraud, and hegemonic cultural dominance through media manipulation. It is easy to understand the Kardashians’ controversial public image, given their ancestral ties to the vice-laden music industry and organized. Consider their long-standing relationship with Joe Francis, creator of Girls Gone Wild, and the way reality tv itself seems to be an invention of organized crime. How many criminals have been cast members in the Real Housewives franchise? Even Paris Hilton gives off mafia princess vibes.
Robert Kardashian’s work in the music industry was central to the payola schemes of the ‘70s and ‘80s, where songs were artificially presented as popular to create tangible demand and immense profits.
Today, the Kardashian clan continues this tradition of payola, whether through juicing social media stats or manipulating media coverage. It’s no surprise, then, that…
Kim Kardashian agreed to pay a $1.26 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle civil charges after the reality TV star touted a crypto asset, EthereumMax, on Instagram.
The SEC charged Kardashian with failure to disclose that she was paid $250,000 to publish her Instagram post. In addition to paying the fine, she agreed to cooperate with the SEC’s ongoing investigation.
- CNN, October 3, 2022
To capture the historical legacy of payola by the Kardashians, and honor their father’s work in the music industry, we turn now to the first payola scandal in the 1950s.
The First Wave Payola Scandal
The first wave of payola scandals broke into the public’s consciousness in tandem with the quiz show scandals in the late 1950s, when producers were rigging game shows to make for more exciting television. At that time, there were only three major television networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC—a level of captive audience we can scarcely imagine today. The public was both shocked by the quiz show scandals and captivated by the press coverage.
As rock 'n' roll's profitability skyrocketed, so did the ways in which bigwigs like Dick Clark could grab a slice of every piece of the pie. When federal oversight began to scrutinize the music industry, Clark quickly sold off his interests in numerous companies, revealing just how extensively he profited from “his” hit records.
At the level of radio stations, disc jockeys were often paid to play records, whether in cash or through other perks. Wages Of Spin offers an excellent overview of these mid-century payola scandals.
The most important takeaway from this scandal, for our purposes, is to question why Dick Clark emerged unscathed while Alan Freed, one of the most famous disc jockeys in the United States, became the fall guy for the entire payola scandal.
Why did the U.S. House Oversight Committee single Alan Freed out?
Freed was abrasive. He consorted with black R&B musicians. He jive talked, smoked constantly and looked like an insomniac. Clark was squeaky clean, Brylcreemed, handsome and polite. At least on the surface.
- Performing Songwriter, August 20, 2015
Though the initial payola scandal brought about new regulations, it did little to mute the illicit practices that would reemerge in even more insidious ways during the 1970s.
Payola Scandal Vol. 2
The second wave payola scandals hit in 1972, and it had become even seedier with the influx of illicit goods and services. This go around, record executives were caught up in the scandal alongside disc jockeys and promoters, and their blatant connections to organized crime. Radio stations and industry “tip sheets” (music charts) received sizable awards for promoting new music, ranging from cars and vacations to drugs.
At that time, the record industry was stratospherically profitable and everyone was clamoring for their next hit. It is hard to even imagine that revenues from records sales exceeded those of “all professional sports and the entire film industry combined.”1 Initial reports on this scandal were sweeping in scope, highlighting the widespread use of business fronts to hide payola payments and the mafia control of the record industry’s distribution network.
Although it’s impossible to elucidate every ongoing federal investigation into the music industry in 1973, one key takeaway is the pattern of how investigations often bait and switch on culpability, allowing business as usual to continue.2
Even CBS’s own news division was so alarmed by the criminal shenanigans at CBS Records and in the broader music industry, that in August 1974, CBS News aired the exposé The Trouble With Rock. The program quoted a rock management figure who stated, "‘if you needed an ounce of cocaine that minute, there was a place at CBS Records you could get it.”
Clive Davis at Columbia Records
The federal investigation into payola and drugs at CBS Records, and the industry at large, was triggered by the indictment of talent agent Pasquele Falcone for international heroin trafficking.3 (Falcone was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.) Investigators then linked him to Columbia Records VP David Wynshaw, who was swiftly fired from CBS and pointed the feds in the direction of Columbia’s President, Clive Davis.
“Wynshaw was the first to bring up the subject of payola. Shortly after his dismissal from Columbia, and before Davis was fired seven weeks later, Wynshaw began weekly meetings with the Strike Force, reportedly detailing how Columbia had spent $250,000 on payola to black-oriented stations alone.”
- Rolling Stone, July 19, 1973
To Narc, Or To Shark, That Is The Question
Following Wynshaw’s ouster, CBS cooperated with federal investigators and conducted an internal investigation. While this led to Clive Davis’s firing and a civil lawsuit against him for misappropriating company funds, both CBS and federal prosecutors were adamant that Davis’s consequences were unrelated to payola or drugs.
Many believed the evidence against Davis was so damning that he would see the inside of a prison:
“That seemed a live possibility, given the prosecutors’ eagerness to go to trial. But a jurisdictional call transferred the case to Manhattan, where Davis arranged to plead guilty to a single felony—failing to pay $2,700 in taxes on CBS-financed vacations in 1972. In handing down a $10,000 fine and a suspended jail term, Federal District Court judge Thomas Griesa excoriated the press for subjecting Davis to “unprecedented . . . appalling innuendo” and went out of his way to note that the crime was in no way connected to the activities of Wynshaw and Falcone, who were residing in the federal lockup. Eighteen months later, Davis appeared to put the last of his troubles behind him by settling CBS’s civil suit.”
- Vanity Fair, February 2, 2000
Despite the federal convictions on the Falcone-heroin case, Davis managed to lower his profile temporarily, only to reemerge and continue wielding significant influence over the music industry for the next 50 years.
This raises the question: Why did Clive Davis have such a soft landing after a national payola scandal?
Clive Davis Reflects On Being A Felon
“The problem was, when it became clear to Wynshaw and his attorneys that his joyride was over, he began making accusations about payola and drug use at Columbia and throughout the music industry in order to show active cooperation with the U.S. attorney’s office and, thereby, lessen his eventual sentence. That threat of an ensuing scandal was ultimately to lead to my demise. The decision to fire me had nothing to do with the facts. As was eventually shown, I had neither participated in nor known about any drug use or payola at Columbia or anywhere else, and, other than Wynshaw, no other executive at Columbia ended up ever being charged with those crimes.”
- Clive Davis4
A Corporate Protection Racket
In the entertainment industry, when a scandal that implicates the whole industry, certain tactics often emerge. One approach is to get ahead of the story to contain the scope of inquiry, as was seen with Harvey Weinstein. There are credible accusations that Weinstein wasn’t merely a sexual predator, but that trafficking talent for sex was institutionalized by certain businesses. For example, Rose McGowan asserted the talent agency CAA acted as Weinstein’s “pimp,” and Julia Ormond has sued CAA and Disney for enabling Weinstein’s crimes. Is it a stretch to assume that Weinstein was their only client?
Consider why corporations might protect abusers at an individual level. Jared Leto—actor, director, producer, and musician—has been accused of soliciting sex from minors for over a decade, yet he remains untouchable. Why might that be? If these accusations became widely known, how would they taint his extensive body of work across films, albums, and more? Could the damage to those assets even be quantified? With investors now spending hundreds of millions on musicians’ back catalogs, the convergence of personal and corporate brands drives institutions to go to great lengths to protect predators.
The Industry’s Mentor/Mentee Power Relations
Diddy Talks Jive With Clive
Bad Boy Records was founded by Clive Davis and Diddy in 1993. There’s plenty of content online about how Clive mentored Diddy in the music industry, including their vice-fueled parties that allegedly served the purpose of sexual blackmail. You can find those details elsewhere. While it’s crucial to support trauma survivors, I caution against the dangers of secondary and vicarious trauma. Using a true crime frame to delve into the graphic details of these crimes can be harmful. Instead, we should employ a social network analysis approach to finally trust-bust an exceedingly powerful industry that must be uprooted and dismantled.
Many have spoken out about Diddy’s abhorrent behavior for decades, but it has rarely broken into the mainstream, likely due to gatekeepers who chose not to allow it. Diddy maintains close relationships with top-level industry executives, and I suspect many were aware of his actions but chose to look the other way—perhaps their hands were clean, even if their eyes and ears were not. Just look at the documentary Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story, produced by Live Nation. While musicians may dream of induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the truth is they need to be inducted into the industry itself. Proven commodities are the safest bets, but the industry will also go to great lengths to cover up a bad bet.
Clive Davis played a key role in Diddy’s rise in the music industry. Diddy began his career at Uptown Records in 1990, owned by MCA Records, and was introduced to Clive by L.A. Reid, Clive’s co-founder at LaFace Records. (Interestingly, Irving Azoff initially planned to fund LaFace Records but made a quick exit from MCA in 1989.)
The scandal surrounding Diddy erupted when singer Cassie filed a damning lawsuit against him in the fall of 2023, which was swiftly settled. This lawsuit didn’t render Diddy a persona non grata in the industry; by January 2024, Clive Davis was still willing to be publicly photographed with him. Live Nation, as a sponsor of the event, could have blocked Diddy’s attendance but chose not to. Was the industry so deluded by its own sense of invincibility that it believed Diddy’s mogul status could be rehabilitated? The downfall of the industry’s “business as usual” is likely imminent, as corporate consolidation leaves the public with no other targets to hold accountable for Diddy’s decades of abuse—underscoring the existence of a powerful protection racket that shields him.
Notably, the same federal judge, Arun Subramanian, in the Southern District of New York is presiding over both Diddy’s trafficking case and the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster
Diddy and Lou Taylor’s Come Up In The Long Con
Both of Diddy’s mansions that were raided by Homeland Security are owned by LLCs managed by Tri Star Sports and Entertainment. In the lawsuit filed by Lil’ Rod against Diddy, he claimed that Tri Star employee Robin Greenhill was responsible for wiring money to sex workers on Diddy’s behalf. Tri Star was founded by Lou Taylor, a business manager who built her career by ensnaring Britney Spears as a client once she was placed under a conservatorship.
Despite Britney’s case making headlines worldwide and the revelations that she was essentially enslaved by the industry, no one has been held criminally accountable. This is not only an egregious miscarriage of justice but also an embarrassment to the United States, supposedly "the land of the free." Why has this happened, given that grassroots researchers have meticulously documented the setup of Britney’s conservatorship con job?
With Diddy’s federal indictments, the national media was forced to start covering the connections between Lou Taylor, Diddy, and Britney Spears—especially considering Britney described her conservatorship in open court as akin to “sex trafficking.”
Just as with Diddy, it’s been glaringly apparent that the industry believed Lou Taylor could escape a public downfall. Earlier this year, she was even welcomed as a guest speaker at a Tennessee college’s music business program, sponsored by Live Nation and Apple Music.
As recently as September 19, 2024, she was seen on the red carpet with Live Nation and the Black Music Action Coalition.
No one is in a better position to expose Lou Taylor’s shady dealings than the Kardashians, who are current clients of Tri Star. To understand the connections at play, we now turn to Robert Kardashian’s humble beginnings in the entertainment industry in the early 1970s.
Robert Kardashian Joins the Entertainment Industry
Robert Kardashian wanted to make his mark in the entertainment industry, choosing not to join the family meat-packing empire like his brother Tom. After graduating from the University of San Diego Law School in 1969, he joined the law firm Eamer & Bedrosian, eventually becoming a partner.
Robert met O.J. “The Juice” Simpson in 1970 when a mutual friend arranged a doubles tennis match between Robert and his brother, and O.J. and Al Cowlings. This group quickly became close, regularly playing tennis at the Beverly Hills mansion of Harry and Pete Rothschild, whose father was a wealthy oil executive.
These young, wealthy men saw Los Angeles was their glitzy playground. An anecdote from this era tells of Robert trying to impress some ladies at a bar by saying he was an enforcer in the Armenian mafia who enjoyed breaking people’s knees.5
Robert became a key business partner in O.J.’s post-football career, helping him start various businesses and launching his entertainment career. O.J. began pursuing acting in the mid-1970s, a few years before retiring from football. A 1976 article in Circus Magazine referred to Robert as an “attorney, consultant, and confidant to pro football’s hottest star.”6
Another instance when Robert represented talent was when he assisted Chris Christian with signing to Boardwalk Records circa 1981.7
Radio & Records: 1973-1979
In 1973, Robert Kardashian, his brother Tom, and Robert “Bob” Wilson founded the trade publication Radio & Records.8 9 Given the latest payola scandal that had tainted the industry, it was an opportune time to launch a new “tip sheet.” Wilson, a well-known disc jockey at KDAY in Los Angeles, had the idea to launch Radio & Records as a trade publication that would provide more rapid and comprehensive real-time data and trends to radio stations and record labels. Robert Kardashian met Wilson through his law firm, and they seized this moment to fill a gap in the market.
In the inaugural issue, Wilson explained how Radio & Records aimed to fill a void in the existing music industry trade publications.
The founders of Radio & Records already had close ties with Irving Azoff, who fully supported the publication’s launch. As recounted in The Kardashians: An American Drama, Tom Kardashian reflected on this partnership:
“The Kardashian brothers got others to “buy into the concept”— people in the record business. One of those was Azoff, a kingmaker, who Tom Kardashian boasts was “one of my brother’s close friends, a really successful record guy because he represented the right guys early on, like the Eagles, Chicago, and then he became a promoter, and my brother did a Jot with Irving, who was pretty much the frontrunner, one of those kind of guys who was just a killer business guy.”
- The Kardashians: An American Drama, p. 139
Bob Wilson also shared how his position at KDAY granted him valuable insights and connections:
Heading a station in LA did give me good insight and contacts, no doubt about it. I knew every mover and shaker in the biz. KDAY was the first major market station to play John Denver, which gave me a great relationship with Jerry Weintraub ... we were first on the Eagles - which got me close to David Geffen and Irving Azoff. We also did weekly concert broadcasts from the Whiskey and the Troubadour ... pretty early on that concept. - Bob Wilson10
It was ideal timing to launch a new trade publication unsullied by the payola scandal of the early 1970s. If you study the history of rock ’n’ roll from the onset of Beatlemania to today, you’ll find that Irving Azoff is either in the background or at the forefront of every seismic shift in the industry. The power center didn’t move—it simply rebranded for a new era, as we will see again with the launch of HITS in 1986.
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