In consequence, the mainstream Soviet radio and television ignored Soviet rock bands, which often reached audiences only through word of mouth. The monopoly for the music publishing in the USSR belonged to Melodiya, the one and only Soviet record label owned and operated by the Council of Ministers thru the Ministry of Culture, and it had a strict policy against publishing straightforward rock music or underground musicians unrecognized, while promoting the VIAs, whose members as well as the composers and writers who worked with them were members of the Union of Composers. Some of the artists (Yuri Shevchuk, Yegor Letov and many others) even had problems with KGB due to their public activities. During the early 1980s Soviet authorities started to exert heavy pressure on amateur bands, banning underground concerts as a sort of illegal commercial activity, and even imprisoning some music promoters and sound engineers for earning money from underground concerts. At the same time, several rock clubs were established to allow amateur bands to perform legal concerts.