Here's the press release by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer's office on the payola settlement with Sony BMG. It includes the nugget of information that a Sony BMG executive, trying to get Audioslave on a Clear Channel station, wrote an email to a radio station programmer that said:

"WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO TO GET AUDIOSLAVE ON WKSS THIS WEEK?!!? Whatever you can dream up, I can make it happen."

Somewhere, Alan Freed is smiling.

Could it be that everybody was just operating in what they thought was a straightforward, honest method of business? Well, here's what Spitzer wrote in his statement and you can be the judge:

The investigation revealed that SONY BMG employees took steps to conceal many of the payments to individuals and radio stations, by using fictitious "contest winners" to document the transactions and make it appear as though the payments and gifts were going to radio listeners instead of station employees.

The big, terrestrial radio companies involved in this haven't yet made much, or anything, in the way of public statements. Yet. (Neither Sony BMG nor WKSS, for example, have any remarks about this posted in their web sites.)

But it's not likely this story is going away.