Cortney Harding in Billboard ($) details a weird little scam some rock mags play: Making money by selling ads that feature the photos of various artists—without getting permission or compensating them. Chief culprits: XLR8R and Rolling Stone:

Baltimore electronic musician Dan Deacon opened his December issue of XLR8R magazine to find he’d been named one of the worst artists of the year in the reader’s poll.

But that wasn’t what prodded him into making an obscene blog post. Rather, it was Deacon discovering his picture on the front of a postcard ad; on the back was a plug for Greyhound buses, promising to take riders to America’s best underground venues to see artists like himself.

As it turned out, no one had ever contacted Deacon or any of the other bands in the ad to seek permission to use their image, let alone compensate them.

XLR8R wouldn’t comment. Rolling Stone and RJ Reynolds are facing a class action lawsuit from bands included in a big cartoon, “The Indie Rock Universe,” that was backed by a Camel ad. Rolling Stone and RJ Reynolds contend that the ad and the carton were unrelated.

Harding spoke to an entertainment lawyer named Quinn Heraty, who isn’t working on the case:

Heraty says that the reason most indie acts don’t pursue cases against those who use their images without compensating them is a simple question of resources. “A band will see their image and call the company, only to be pawned off on the ad agency,” she says. “It’s a shell game, and it gets discouraging. And let’s face it, lawyers are expensive. Because of this, some brands think they can just railroad indies; they assume they’re broke and dying for exposure.”

p.s.: Am I the only person who finds Billboard’s crazy web site a mess? There’s obviously a lot of information available, but the architecture of the site seems to divide pieces into mystifying categories. I’m a subscriber and have a web account as well; but to find the article I mentioned above, even as I had a hard copy of it in my hand with hed, byline and date of publication, it still took me a half dozen tries in as many search boxes to pull it up.