The question confused the young program director. He had just taken over a small urban, or R&B, radio station down South; he was talking to a local independent record promoter, or "indie."

It was confusing because, like programmers at music stations around the country who decide what songs get spun, the P.D. certainly didn't need any more copies of the new single the indie was pitching on behalf of a record company.

"I said, 'We got CDs,'" the P.D. recalls. "I didn't know what he was talking about. So he says, 'Oh, let me call you on your cellphone.'"

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The programmer thought this was strange, too. Why would the promoter want to discuss the song on a cellphone?

The conversation continued on a wireless. "Anything I can do for you?" asked the indie. "Anything y'all need? How many CDs you need?"

The P.D. reiterated that the station had plenty of CDs on hand.

That's when the indie took a moment to explain the ground rules to the rookie P.D. "He said, 'You don't understand the game, do you?'" the programmer recalls. "I was still green. I didn't know how the system works. He shed the light."

The programmer had always wondered how his previous boss, who made $35,000 a year, could afford a Lexus. But now, thanks to the educating indie, he knew that many urban programmers take illicit payments -- bribes -- on the side.

"There are code words they use," he says today. "'How many CDs you need?' 'CDs' are $100 bills. He explained there's a budget for this and a budget for that, and how much money people get paid for each record added" to a station's playlist.

The young P.D. had been working at the station for some time, but hadn't seen any of that money yet, because unbeknown to him a consultant working for the station had convinced record companies that he alone controlled the playlist, and was pocketing all the indie payments. When the P.D. confronted him, the consultant generously offered to let the programmer cash in too, by giving him control of two slots each week on the station's playlist.

The P.D. declined, having learned an object lesson in the forces that rule in the world of urban radio: "It's payola, basically."

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As a recent series of articles in Salon has made clear, payola is alive and well in the music business. But urban radio remains a world apart, the Wild Wild West of the music industry. In the world of white pop and rock radio, virtually everything on the air is bought and paid for, but in an increasingly corporatized way, with the money going to the station's budget. In urban radio, by contrast, the cash still goes into the personal bank accounts of powerful programmers and consultants, sources say.

Crucial airplay "reports" to the industry's trade magazines, sources say, are up for sale. Some stations are paid for songs that are never even played on the air. And as for the money, these same sources say the business is rife with overnighted packages stuffed with cash and shipped off to recipients with phony names, or money orders made out to programmers and sent to home addresses. The practice is widely known in the mainstream radio industry, but almost never talked about, both because the white radio industry has its own payola problems and because of a fear of charges of racism, industry members say. And so far, this insular industry has rebuffed attempts by mainstream indies to penetrate it.

The result is a brazenly money-driven system that revolves around chronic payoffs; it actually costs artists earnings; and it is often indifferent to the songs it puts on the air. Says one source who left radio programming to work in promotion for an urban record company, "I didn't realize how dirty it was until I went to the label side. Now I know."

From the days of wildcat DJs and fly-by-night promoters in the 1950s and 1960s, black radio has always been a unique and passionate American institution. And while white mainstream radio has grown increasingly corporatized and monochromatic in recent years, the country's nearly 300 urban outlets, whether spinning smooth crooners like Usher and Alicia Keys or bad boy rappers like Jay-Z and Ja Rule, have resisted co-optation.

That's the good news. The bad news is that black radio's hit music stations play by two rules: Everyone gets paid to play, and nobody ever talks about the first rule.

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