Identify and introduce your favorite musician, band, or type of music.

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73 The Development of Sound Recording

81 U.S. Popular Music and the Formation of Rock

88 A Changing Industry: Reformations in Popular Music

95 The Business of Sound Recording

103 Sound Recording, Free Expression, and Democracy

Sound Recording and Popular Music For years, the recording industry has been pan- icking about file swappers who illegally down- load songs and thereby decrease recorded music sales. So it struck many in the industry as unusual when the Grammy Award–winning Brit- ish alternative rock group Radiohead decided to sell its 2007 album In Rainbows on the Internet (www.inrainbows.com) for whatever price fans wished to pay, including nothing at all.

Radiohead was able to try this business model because its contract with the record corporation EMI had expired after its previous album, 2003’s Hail to the Thief. Knowing it had millions of fans around the world, the group turned down multi- million-dollar offers to sign a new contract with major labels, and instead decided to experiment by offering its seventh studio album online with a “pay what you wish” approach. “It’s not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a re- sponse to a situation,” Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead, said. “We’re out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do? This was the obvious thing. But it only works for us because of where we are.”1

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Radiohead didn’t disclose the sales rev- enue or numbers of the downloads, but one source claimed at least 1.2 million copies of the album were downloaded in the first two days.2 In an interview with an Australian newspaper, Yorke mentioned that about 50 percent of the downloaders took the album for free.3 But a study conservatively estimated that Radiohead made an average of $2.26 on each album download. If that’s the case, Radiohead may have made more money per recording than the tra- ditional royalties the group might have earned with a release by a major label.4

Although Radiohead’s Thom Yorke said the online album release experiment was not supposed to be a model for anyone else, it ended up being just that. Hip-hop artist Saul Williams released digital downloads of The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust (saulwilliams.com) for $5, with a “free” option to the first hundred thousand customers. Williams’s recording was produced by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. In March 2008, Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I–IV, a four-album recording with thirty-six songs, at ghosts.nin.com. Ghost I, the package of the first nine songs, was available as a free download, with the rest avail- able for purchase. Coldplay boosted the release of its 2008 recording Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends by giving away free downloads of its single “Violet Hill” for a week.

Another alternate avenue music artists are exploring for promoting their music is posting their music videos on the Internet. As MTV’s programming turned away from videos, video-hosting Web sites like YouTube, Dailymotion,

and Vevo have become a way to get less expensive (free) and much wider music video distribution. In 2006, the band OK Go gained enormous attention by posting its treadmill dancing video for its song “Here It Goes Again” on You- Tube. The video went viral and made OK Go a profitable act for EMI. Yet EMI later prohibited OK Go’s videos from being embedded on any site but You- Tube, since only YouTube paid royalties to EMI for views on its site. Immediately, views of the group’s videos dropped by 90 percent, and OK Go lost one of its best methods of promotion. In March 2010, OK Go parted ways with EMI and released an imaginative Rube Gold- berg machine video for “This Too Shall Pass” that, absent EMI’s constraints on distribution, became another viral music video. Without a major label, the band creatively financed the video with sup- port from State Farm Insurance (whose logo appears a few times in the video)— an approach that demonstrates, as OK Go frontman Damian Kulash says, “We’re trying to be a DIY [do-it-yourself] band in a post–major label world.”5

“For years, the recording industry has been panicking about file swappers who illegally download songs and thereby decrease recorded music sales.”

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THE MEDIUM OF SOUND RECORDING has had an immense impact on our culture. The music that helps shape our identities and comfort us during the transition from childhood to adulthood resonates throughout our lives, and it often stirs debate among parents and teenagers, teachers and students, and politicians and performers, many times leading to social change.

Throughout its history, popular music has been banned by parents, school officials, and even governments under the guise of protecting young people from corrupting influences. As far back as the late 1700s, authorities in Europe, thinking that it was immoral for young people to dance close together, outlawed waltz music as “savagery.” A hundred years later, the Argentinean upper class tried to suppress tango music because the roots of this sexualized dancing style could be traced to the bars and bordellos of Buenos Aires. When its popularity migrated to Paris in the early twentieth century, tango was condemned by the clergy for its allegedly negative impact on French youth. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, jazz music was criticized for its unbridled and sometimes free-form sound and the unrestrained dance crazes (such as the Charleston and the jitterbug) it inspired. Rock and roll from the 1950s onward and hip-hop from the 1980s to today have also added their own chapters to the age-old musical battle between generations.

In this chapter, we will place the impact of popular music in context and:

• Investigate the origins of recording’s technological “hardware,” from Thomas Edison’s early phonograph to Emile Berliner’s invention of the flat disk record and the development of audiotape, compact discs, and MP3s

• Explore the impact of the Internet on music, including the effects of online piracy and how the industry is adapting to the new era of convergence with new models for distributing and promoting music

• Study radio’s early threat to sound recording and the subsequent alliance between the two media when television arrived in the 1950s

• Examine the content and culture of the music industry, focusing on the predominant role of rock music and its extraordinary impact on mass media forms and a diverse array of cultures, both American and international

• Explore the economic and democratic issues facing the recording industry

As you consider these topics, think about your own relationship with popular music and sound recordings. Who was your first favorite group or singer? How old were you, and what was important to you about this music? How has the way you listen to music changed in the past five years? For more questions to help you think through the role of music in our lives, see “Ques- tioning the Media” on page 105 in the Chapter Review.

“If people knew what this stuff was about, we’d probably all get arrested.”

BOB DYLAN, 1966, TALKING ABOUT ROCK AND ROLL

The Development of Sound Recording

New mass media have often been defined in terms of the communication technologies that preceded them. For example, movies were initially called motion pictures, a term that derived from photography; radio was referred to as wireless telegraphy, referring back to telegraphs; and television was often called picture radio. Likewise, sound recording instruments were initially described as talking machines and later as phonographs, indicating the existing innovations, the telephone and the telegraph. This early blending of technology foreshadowed our contemporary era, in which media as diverse as newspapers and movies converge on the Internet. Long before the Internet, however, the first major media convergence involved the relationship between the sound recording and radio industries.

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From Cylinders to Disks: Sound Recording Becomes a Mass Medium In the 1850s, the French printer Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville conducted the first experi- ments with sound recording. Using a hog’s hair bristle as a needle, he tied one end to a thin membrane stretched over the narrow part of a funnel. When the inventor spoke into the funnel,

the membrane vibrated and the free end of the bristle made grooves on a revolving cylinder coated with a thick liquid called lamp black. De Martinville noticed that different sounds

made different trails in the lamp black, but he could not figure out how to play back the sound. However, his experiments did usher in the development stage of sound record- ing as a mass medium. In 2008, audio researchers using high-resolution scans of the recordings and a digital stylus were able to finally play back some of de Martinville’s recordings for the first time.6

In 1877, Thomas Edison had success playing back sound. He recorded his own voice by using a needle to press his voice’s sound waves onto tinfoil wrapped around

a metal cylinder about the size of a cardboard toilet-paper roll. After recording his voice, Edison played it back by repositioning the needle to retrace the grooves in the

foil. The machine that played these cylinders became known as the phonograph, derived from the Greek terms for “sound” and “writing.”

Thomas Edison was more than an inventor—he was also able to envision the practical uses of his inventions and ways to market them. Moving sound recording into its entrepreneurial stage, Edison patented his phonograph in 1878 as a kind of answering machine. He thought the phonograph would be used as a “telephone repeater” that would “provide invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.”7 Edison’s phono- graph patent was specifically for a device that recorded and played back foil cylinders. Because of this limitation, in 1886 Chichester Bell (cousin of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell) and Charles Sumner Tainter were able to further sound recording by patenting an improvement on the phonograph. Their sound recording device, known as the graphophone, played back more durable wax cylinders.8 Both Edison’s phonograph and Bell and Tainter’s graphophone

Sound Recording and Popular Music

Victrolas Around 1910, music players enter living rooms as elaborate furniture centerpieces, replacing pianos as musical entertainment (p. 75).

Radio Threatens the Sound Re- cording Industry By 1925, “free” music can be heard over the airwaves (p. 80).

Audiotape Developed in Germany in the early 1940s, audiotape enables multitrack recording. Taping technology comes to the United States after WWII (p. 76).

1850 1880 1890 1910 1920 1930 19401900

Phonograph In 1877, Edison invents and figures out how to play back sound, thinking this invention would make a good answering machine (p. 74).

Flat Disk Berliner invents the flat disk in 1887 and develops the gramo- phone to play it. The disks are easily mass-produced, a labeling system is introduced, and sound recording becomes a mass medium (p. 75).

de Martinville The first experiments with sound are con- ducted in the 1850s us- ing a hog’s hair bristle as a needle; de Martinville can record sound, but he can’t play it back (p. 74).

THOMAS EDISON  In addition to the phonograph, Edison (1847–1931) ran an industrial research lab that is credited with inventing the motion picture camera and the first commercially successful light bulb, and a system for distributing electricity.

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had only marginal success as voice-recording office machines. Eventually, both sets of inventors began to produce cylinders with prerecorded music, which proved to be more popular but dif- ficult to mass-produce and not very durable for repeated plays.

Using ideas from Edison, Bell, and Tainter, Emile Berliner, a German engineer who had im- migrated to America, developed a better machine that played round, flat disks, or records. Made of zinc and coated with beeswax, these records played on a turntable, which Berliner called a gramophone and patented in 1887. Berliner also developed a technique that enabled him to mass- produce his round records, bringing sound recording into its mass medium stage. Previously, using Edison’s cylinder, performers had to play or sing into the speaker for each separate record- ing. Berliner’s technique featured a master recording from which copies could be easily dupli- cated in mass quantities. In addition, Berliner’s records could be stamped with labels, allowing the music to be differentiated by title, performer, and songwriter. This led to the development of a “star system,” because fans could identify and choose their favorite sounds and artists.

By the early 1900s, record-playing phonographs were widely available for home use. In 1906, the Victor Talking Machine Company placed the hardware, or “guts,” of the record player inside a piece of furniture. These early record players, known as Victrolas, were mechanical and had to be primed with a crank handle. The introduction of electric record players, first available in 1925, gradually replaced Victrolas as more homes were wired for electricity; this led to the gramophone becoming an essential appliance in most American homes.

The appeal of recorded music was limited at first because of sound quality. While the original wax records were replaced by shellac discs, shellac records were also very fragile and didn’t improve the sound quality much. By the 1930s, in part because of the advent of radio and in part because of the Great Depression, record and phonograph sales declined dramatically. However, in the early 1940s shellac was needed for World War II munitions production, so the record industry turned to manufacturing polyvinyl plastic records instead. The vinyl recordings turned out to be more durable than shellac records and less noisy, paving the way for a renewed consumer desire to buy recorded music.

In 1948, CBS Records introduced the 33⅓-rpm (revolutions-per-minute) long-playing record (LP), with about twenty minutes of music on each side of the record, creating a market for

MP3 A new format com- pressing music into digi- tal files shakes up the music industry in 1999, as millions of Internet users share music files on Napster (p. 77).

Music in the Cloud and on the Go Streaming services such as MOG and Rhapsody launch apps for the iPhone and Android, making it possible to stream music anytime, any- where (p. 79).

Radio Turns to Music Industry As television threatens radio, radio turns to the music industry in the 1950s for salvation. Ra- dio becomes a marketing arm for the sound record- ing industry (p. 80).

Hip-Hop This major musical art form emerges in the late 1970s (pp. 93–94).

A Sound Recording Standard In 1953, this is established at 33�1 3 rpm for long-playing albums (LPs), 45 rpm for two-sided singles (pp. 75–76).

Rock and Roll A new music form arises in the mid- 1950s, challenging class, gender, race, geographic, and religious norms in the United States (p. 82).

Cassettes This new format appears in the mid-1960s; making music portable, it gains popularity (p. 76).

CDs The first format to incorporate digital tech- nology hits the market in 1983 (p. 77).

1950

Online Music Stores In 2008, iTunes becomes the No.1 retailer of music in the United States (p. 78).

iTunes In 2010, iTunes sells its ten billionth download (p. 79).

1960 1970 1990 2000 2010 20201980

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multisong albums and classical music. This was an improvement over the three to four minutes of music contained on the existing 78-rpm records. The next year, RCA developed a competing 45-rpm record that featured a quarter-size hole (best for jukeboxes) and invigorated the sales of songs heard on jukeboxes throughout the country. Unfortunately, the two new record standards were not technically compatible, meaning they could not be played on each other’s machines. A five-year marketing battle ensued, similar to the Macintosh vs. Windows battle over computer- operating-system standards in the 1980s and 1990s or the mid-2000s battle between Blu-ray and HD DVD. In 1953, CBS and RCA compromised. The LP became the standard for long-playing albums, the 45 became the standard for singles, and record players were designed to accommo- date 45s, LPs, and, for a while, 78s.

From Phonographs to CDs: Analog Goes Digital The invention of the phonograph and the record were the key sound recording advancements until the advent of magnetic audiotape and tape players in the 1940s. Magnetic tape sound recording was first developed as early as 1929 and further refined in the 1930s, but it didn’t catch on initially because the first machines were bulky reel-to-reel devices, the amount of tape required to make a recording was unwieldy, and the tape itself broke or damaged easily. How- ever, owing largely to improvements by German engineers who developed plastic magnetic tape during World War II, audiotape eventually found its place.

Audiotape’s lightweight magnetized strands finally made possible sound editing and multiple-track mixing, in which instrumentals or vocals could be recorded at one location and later mixed onto a master recording in another studio. This led to a vast improvement of studio recordings and subsequent increases in sales, although the recordings continued to be sold pri- marily in vinyl format rather than on reel-to-reel tape. By the mid-1960s, engineers had placed miniaturized reel-to-reel audiotape inside small plastic cassettes and had developed portable cassette players, permitting listeners to bring recorded music anywhere and creating a market for prerecorded cassettes. Audiotape also permitted “home dubbing”: Consumers could copy their favorite records onto tape or record songs from the radio. This practice denied sales to the recording industry, resulting in a drop in record sales, the doubling of blank audiotape sales during a period in the 1970s, and the later rise of the Sony Walkman, a portable cassette player that foreshadowed the release of the iPod two decades later.

Some thought the portability, superior sound, and recording capabilities of audiotape would mean the demise of records. Although records had retained essentially the same format since the advent of vinyl, the popularity of records continued, in part due to the improved sound fidelity that came with stereophonic sound. Invented in 1931 by engineer Alan Blumlein, but not put to commercial use until 1958, stereo permitted the recording of two separate chan- nels, or tracks, of sound. Recording-studio engineers, using audiotape, could now record many instrumental or vocal tracks, which they “mixed down” to two stereo tracks. When played back through two loudspeakers, stereo creates a more natural sound distribution. By 1971, stereo sound had been advanced into quadrophonic, or four-track, sound, but that never caught on commercially.

The biggest recording advancement came in the 1970s, when electrical engineer Thomas Stockham made the first digital audio recordings on standard computer equipment. Although the digital recorder was invented in 1967, Stockham was the first to put it to practical use. In contrast to analog recording, which captures the fluctuations of sound waves and stores those signals in a record’s grooves or a tape’s continuous stream of magnetized particles, digital recording translates sound waves into binary on-off pulses and stores that information as numerical code. When a digital recording is played back, a microprocessor translates these numerical codes back into sounds and sends them to loudspeakers. By the late 1970s, Sony

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and Philips were jointly working on a way to design a digitally recorded disc and player to take advantage of this new technology, which could be produced at a lower cost than either vinyl records or audiocassettes. As a result of their efforts, digitally recorded compact discs (CDs) hit the market in 1983.

By 1987, CD sales were double the amount of LP record album sales (see Figure 3.1). By 2000, CDs rendered records and audiocassettes nearly obsolete, except for DJs and record enthusiasts who continue to play and collect vinyl LPs. In an effort to create new product lines and maintain consumer sales, the music industry promoted two advanced digital disc for- mats in the late 1990s, which it hoped would eventually replace standard CDs. However, the introduction of these formats was ill-timed for the industry, because the biggest development in music formatting was already on the horizon—the MP3.

Convergence: Sound Recording in the Internet Age Music, perhaps more so than any other mass medium, is bound up in the social fabric of our lives. Ever since the introduction of the tape recorder and the heyday of homemade mixtapes, music has been something that we have shared eagerly with friends.

It is not surprising then that the Internet, a mass medium that links individuals and com- munities together like no other medium, became a hub for sharing music. In fact, the reason college student Shawn Fanning said he developed the groundbreaking file-sharing site Napster in 1999 was “to build communities around different types of music.”9

Music’s convergence with radio saved the radio industry in the 1950s. But music’s convergence with the Internet began to unravel the music industry in the 2000s, and it became the precedent for upheavals in every other media industry as more content—movies, TV shows, books—found distri- bution over the Internet. The changes in the music industry were set in motion about two decades ago with the proliferation of Internet use and the development of a new digital file format.

MP3s and File Sharing The MP3 file format, developed in 1992, enables digital recordings to be compressed into smaller, more manageable files. With the increasing popularity of the Internet in the mid-1990s,

S a

le s

in M

il li

o n

s o

f D

o ll

a rs

Year

14,000

12,000

10,000

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980

Compact Discs

Vinyl LP/EP

Mobile

Tapes Digital (legal)

1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

FIGURE 3.1 ANNUAL VINYL, TAPE, CD, MOBILE, AND DIGITAL SALES Source: Recording Industry Association of America, 2009 year-end statistics.

Note: “Digital” includes singles, albums, music videos, and kiosk sales. Cassette tapes fell under $1 million in sales in 2008.

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computer users began swapping MP3 music files online because they could be uploaded or downloaded in a fraction of the time it took to exchange noncompressed music and because they use up less memory.

By 1999, the year Napster’s now infamous free file-sharing service brought the MP3 format to popular attention, music files were widely available on the Internet—some for sale, some legally available for free downloading, and many traded in violation of copyright laws. Despite the higher quality of industry-manufactured CDs, music fans enjoyed the convenience of downloading and burning MP3 files to CD. Some listeners skipped CDs altogether, storing their music on hard drives and essentially using their computers as stereo systems. Losing countless music sales to illegal downloading, the music industry fought the proliferation of the MP3 format with an array of law- suits (aimed at file-sharing companies and at individual downloaders), but the popularity of MP3s continued to increase (see “Tracking Technology: Digital Downloading and the Future of Online Music” on page 79).

In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the music industry and against Napster, declaring free music file-swapping illegal and in violation of music copyrights held by recording labels and artists. It was relatively easy for the music industry to shut down Napster (which later relaunched as a legal service), because it required users to log into a centralized system. However, the music industry’s elimination of illegal file-sharing was not complete, as decentralized peer-to- peer (P2P) systems, such as Grokster, Limewire, Morpheus, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule, and BitTor- rent, once again enabled online free music file-sharing.

The recording industry fought back in 2002 by increasing the distribution of copy– protected CDs, which could not be uploaded or burned. But the copy-protected CDs created controversy, because they also prevented consumers from legally copying their CDs for their own personal use, such as uploading tracks to their iPods or other digital players. In 2005, P2P service Grokster shut down after it was fined $50 million by U.S. federal courts and, in upholding the lower court rulings, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the music industry could pursue legal action against any P2P service that encouraged its users to illegally share music or other media. In 2006, eDonkey settled with the music industry and went out of business, while Kazaa settled a lawsuit with the music industry and became a legal service. Morpheus went bankrupt in 2008, and a federal court ruled against Limewire in 2010. More- over, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed thousands of lawsuits, with many of its legal efforts targeting university computer network users for copyright infringement.

At the same time, the music industry realized that it would have to somehow adapt its business to the digital format and embraced services like iTunes (launched by Apple in 2003, to accompany the iPod), which has become the model for legal online distribution. By 2010, iTunes had sold more than ten billion songs. It became the No. 1 music retailer in the United States in 2008, surpassing Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. Even with the success of Apple’s

iTunes and other online music stores, illegal music file- sharing still far outpaces legal downloading by a ratio of at least 10 to 1.10

In some cases, unauthorized file-sharing may actually boost legitimate music sales. Since 2002, BigChampagne.com has tracked the world’s most popu- lar download communities and compiled weekly lists of the most popular file-shared songs for clients like the radio industry. Radio stations, in turn, may adjust their play-lists to incorporate this information and, ironically, spur legitimate music sales.

“Today’s Internet landscape— with millions of consumers downloading songs from the iTunes Music Store, watching videos on YouTube or Hulu and networking on social media sites like Facebook—can be traced back to the day in early June of 1999 when [eighteen- year-old inventor Shawn] Fanning made Napster available for wider distribution.”

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, 2009

APPLE’S iPOD, the leading portable music and video player, began a revolution in digital music.

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I t is a success story that could only have happened in the hyperspeed of the digital age. Since its debut in April 2003, iTunes has gone from an intriguing concept to the world’s No. 1 music retailer, accounting for 70 percent of global online digital music sales. Recently celebrating the occasion of its ten billionth download (by seventy- one-year-old Louie Slucer), iTunes has conclusively proven that consumers, irre- spective of age, have readily and happily adapted to downloading, preferring it to purchasing CDs. Frustrated by escalat- ing CD prices and convinced that most releases contain only a few good songs and too much filler—not to mention the physical clutter created by CDs—digital music sites offer consumers an à la carte menu where they can cherry-pick their favorite tracks and build a music library that is easily stored on a hard drive and transferable to an MP3 player.

Digital downloading has also forever altered locating and accessing non- mainstream music and recordings by unsigned bands. If iTunes resembles a traditional retailer with a deep cata- logue, then a competitor such as eMusic (which Rolling Stone dubbed “iTunes’ cheaper, cooler cousin”) is the online equivalent of a specialty record store, designed for connoisseurs who are uninterested in mass-marketed pop. The success of social networking sites such as Facebook (400 million active users) and, to a lesser extent MySpace, has made them important gathering places for virtual communities of fans for thousands of bands in dozens of genres. By capitalizing on the Internet’s ability to “marginalize the traditional bodies of mediation between those who make music and those who listen to it,”1 social networking sites make

Digital Downloading and the Future of Online Music by John Dougan

searching for new music and performers much easier. Similarly, the Internet radio service Pandora (available online and in mobile versions for smartphones) allows its forty-eight million listeners to access nearly one million tracks in its library link- ing listeners’ requests with other songs or artists in its library deemed musically similar. Pandora also connects directly to iTunes and Amazon.com, so listeners can purchase the tracks they enjoy.

The Internet is chang- ing not only how consumers are exposed to music but how record label A&R (Artist & Repertoire) departments scout talent. A&R reps, who no longer travel as much to locate talent, are searching for acts who do their own marketing and come with a built-in community of fans. While MySpace’s attempt at a major label supported music site (MySpace Music) has underperformed, YouTube has become a particularly powerful player in turning unknown performers into international phenom- ena. One such example is middle-aged Scottish singer Susan Boyle, whose performance on Britain’s Got Talent in 2009 went viral on YouTube and, in the past year, has racked up nearly forty- three million views. Her debut album went on to sell an astonishing eight million copies in six weeks.

Despite Susan Boyle’s success, the digital age has made the album-length

CD increasingly obsolete. While digital downloading allows consumers greater and more immediate access to music, aesthetically it harkens back to the late 1950s and early 1960s when the 45-rpm single was dominant and the most reliable indicator of whether a song was a hit. Downloading a variety of tracks means that consumers build their own collection of virtual 45s that, when taken as a whole, become a personalized greatest hits collection. Increasingly, art-

ists are imagining a future where they no longer release album-

length CDs, but rather a series of individual tracks

that consumers can piece together however they please.

But if the death knell has been sounded for the

compact disc, what of the digital download? There

are those who claim that, after only seven years, iTunes

is showing its age and will face a stiff challenge from Google’s Android mobile operating system. With Android, users will be able to purchase music from any computer and have the files appear instantly on their phones. Users will also be able to send the music on their hard drive to the Internet, so they can access it on their phone as long as they have an Internet connection (unlike iTunes’ syncing system, which requires plugging your MP3 player into your computer). With Apple said to be de- veloping a Web-based iTunes, perhaps the future means accessing music from anywhere at any time.2

John Dougan is an Associate Professor in the Department of the Recording Industry at Middle Tennessee State University.

TRACKING TECHNOLOGY

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The Future: Music in the Stream, Music in the Cloud If the history of recorded music tells us anything, it’s that over time tastes change and formats change. While artists take care of the musical possibilities, technology companies are develop- ing formats for the future. One potential successor to the MP3 is called MusicDNA, an enhanced MP3 file that would contain images, lyrics, and news updates embedded into the file. The mak- ers of MusicDNA are hoping that this will discourage piracy since only legal downloads of the MusicDNA would contain the additional content.

Alternate music distribution channels could eliminate downloads entirely. Existing services like Pandora stream user-formatted Internet music radio channels for free, with financial sup- port from advertising and data mining. Other streaming services like Rhapsody, MOG, Deezer, and Spotify have monthly subscriptions, but they enable listeners to play songs on-demand and create playlists. These streaming services can be accessed via the Internet or a smartphone device, but listeners don’t “own” physical copies of the music (though some link to outside sources where listeners can purchase the music). Another system being tested by FreeAllMusic .com would let consumers download songs for free, but only after watching an advertisement or “liking” a company on Facebook. Finally, some companies (perhaps even Apple, with its recent purchase of Lala.com) envision music to be purchased but not downloaded onto an MP3 player. Instead, one’s music would reside “in the cloud” of the Internet—meaning that songs would never have to be downloaded or synchronized between mobile devices and computer, but instead would always be available to stream on any Internet-connected device.11

The Rocky Relationship between Records and Radio The recording industry and radio have always been closely linked. Although they work almost in unison now, in the beginning they had a tumultuous relationship. Radio’s very existence sparked the first battle. By 1915, the phonograph had become a popular form of entertainment. The recording industry sold thirty million records that year, and by the end of the decade sales more than tripled each year. In 1924, though, record sales dropped to only half of what they had been the previous year. Why? Because radio had arrived as a com- peting mass medium, providing free entertainment over the airwaves, independent of the recording industry.

The battle heated up when, to the alarm of the recording industry, radio stations began broadcasting recorded music without compensating the music industry. The American Soci- ety of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), founded in 1914 to collect copyright fees for music publishers and writers, charged that radio was contributing to plummeting sales of records and sheet music. By 1925, ASCAP established music rights fees for radio, charging sta- tions between $250 and $2,500 a week to play recorded music—and causing many stations to leave the air.

But other stations countered by establishing their own live, in-house orchestras, dissemi- nating “free” music to listeners. This time, the recording industry could do nothing, as original radio music did not infringe on any copyrights. Throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, record and phonograph sales continued to fall, although the recording industry got a small boost when Prohibition ended in 1933 and record-playing jukeboxes became the standard musical entertain- ment in neighborhood taverns.

The recording and radio industries only began to cooperate with each other after television became popular in the early 1950s. Television pilfered radio’s variety shows, crime dramas, and comedy programs and, along with those formats, much of its advertising revenue and audi- ence. Seeking to reinvent itself, radio turned to the record industry, and this time both indus- tries greatly benefited from radio’s new “hit songs” format. The alliance between the recording

“The one good thing I can say about file-sharing is it affords us a chance to get our music heard without the label incurring crazy marketing expenses.”

GERARD COSLEY, COPRESIDENT OF THE INDIE RECORD LABEL MATADOR, 2003

“Music should never be harmless.”

ROBBIE ROBERTSON, THE BAND

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industry and radio was aided enormously by rock and roll music, which was just emerging in the 1950s. Rock created an enduring consumer youth market for sound recordings and provid- ed much-needed new content for radio precisely when television made it seem like an obsolete medium. In 2010, though, the music industry—seeking to improve its revenues—was proposing to charge radio broadcast performance royalty fees for playing music on the air, something radio stations opposed.

U.S. Popular Music and the Formation of Rock

Popular or pop music is music that appeals either to a wide cross section of the public or to sizable subdivisions within the larger public based on age, region, or ethnic background (e.g., teenagers, southerners, Mexican Americans). U.S. pop music today encompasses styles as diverse as blues, country, Tejano, salsa, jazz, rock, reggae, punk, hip-hop, and dance. The word pop has also been used to distinguish popular music from classical music, which is written primarily for ballet, opera, ensemble, or symphony. As various subcultures have intersected, U.S. popular music has developed organically, constantly creating new forms and reinvigorating older musical styles.

The Rise of Pop Music Although it is commonly assumed that pop music developed simultaneously with the phono- graph and radio, it actually existed prior to these media. In the late nineteenth century, the sale of sheet music for piano and other instruments sprang from a section of Broadway in Manhattan known as Tin Pan Alley, a derisive term used to describe the way that these quickly produced tunes supposedly sounded like cheap pans clanging together. Tin Pan Alley’s tradition of song publishing began in the late 1880s with music like the marches of John Philip Sousa and the ragtime piano pieces of Scott Joplin. It continued through the first half of the twentieth century with the show tunes and vocal ballads of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter; and into the 1950s and 1960s with such rock-and-roll writing teams as Jerry Leiber–Mike Stoller and Carole King–Gerry Goffin.

At the turn of the twentieth century, with the newfound ability of song publishers to mass- produce sheet music for a growing middle class, popular songs moved from being a novelty to being a major business enterprise. With the emergence of the phonograph, song publishers also discovered that recorded tunes boosted interest in and sales of sheet music. Although the popu- larity of sheet music would decline rapidly with the introduction of radio in the 1920s, songwrit- ing along Tin Pan Alley played a key role in transforming popular music into a mass medium.

As sheet music grew in popularity, jazz developed in New Orleans. An improvisational and mostly instrumental musical form, jazz absorbed and integrated a diverse body of musical styles, including African rhythms, blues, and gospel. Jazz influenced many bandleaders through- out the 1930s and 1940s. Groups led by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller were among the most popular of the “swing” jazz bands, whose rhythmic music also dominated radio, recording, and dance halls in their day.

The first pop vocalists of the twentieth century were products of the vaudeville circuit, which radio, movies, and the Depression would bring to an end in the 1930s. In the 1920s, Eddie Cantor, Belle Baker, Sophie Tucker, and Al Jolson were all extremely popular. By the

SCOTT JOPLIN (1868– 1917) published more than fifty compositions during his life, including “Maple Leaf Rag”—arguably his most famous piece.

“Frank Sinatra was categorized in 1943 as ‘the glorification of ignorance and musical illiteracy.’�”

DICK CLARK, THE FIRST 25 YEARS OF ROCK & ROLL

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ROBERT JOHNSON (1911– 1938), who ranks among the most influential and innovative American guitarists, played the Mississippi delta blues and was a major influence on early rock and rollers, especially the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton. His intense slide-guitar and finger- style playing also inspired generations of blues artists, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bonnie Raitt, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. To get a sense of his style, visit The Robert Johnson Notebooks, http://xroads .virginia.edu/~MUSIC/ rjhome.html.

1930s, Rudy Vallée and Bing Crosby had established themselves as the first “crooners,” or sing- ers of pop standards. Bing Crosby also popularized Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” one of the most covered songs in recording history. (A song recorded or performed by another artist is known as cover music.) Meanwhile, the bluesy harmonies of a New Orleans vocal trio, the Boswell Sisters, influenced the Andrews Sisters, whose boogie-woogie style helped them sell more than sixty million records in the late 1930s and 1940s. In one of the first mutually ben- eficial alliances between sound recording and radio, many early pop vocalists had their own

network of regional radio programs, which vastly increased their exposure. Frank Sinatra arrived in the 1940s, and his romantic ballads foreshadowed

the teen love songs of rock and roll’s early years. Nicknamed “The Voice” early in his career, Sinatra, like Crosby, parlayed his music and radio exposure into movie stardom. (Both singers made more than fifty films apiece.) Helped by radio, pop vo- calists like Sinatra—and many others, including Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Judy Garland, and Sarah Vaughan—were among the first vocalists to become popular with a large national teen audience. Their record sales helped stabilize the industry, and in the early 1940s Sinatra’s concerts caused the kind of audience riots that would later characterize rock-and- roll performances.

Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay The cultural storm called rock and roll hit in the mid-1950s. As with the term jazz, rock and roll was a blues slang term for “sex,” lending it instant controversy. Early rock and roll combined the vocal and instrumental traditions of pop with the rhythm-and-blues sounds of Memphis and the country twang of Nashville. It was considered the first “integrationist music,” merging the black sounds of rhythm and blues, gospel, and Robert Johnson’s screeching blues guitar with the white influences of country, folk, and pop vocals.12 From a cultural perspective, only a few musical forms have ever sprung from such a diverse set of influences, and no new style of music has ever had such a widespread impact on so many different cultures as rock and roll. From an economic perspective, no single musical form prior to rock and roll had ever simultaneously transformed the structure of two mass media industries: sound recording and radio. Rock’s development set the stage for how music is produced, distributed, and performed today. Many social,

cultural, economic, and political factors leading up to the 1950s contributed to the growth of rock and roll, including black migration, the growth of youth culture, and the beginnings of racial integration.

Blues and R&B: The Foundation of Rock and Roll The migration of southern blacks to northern cities in search of better jobs during the first half of the twentieth century had helped spread different popular music styles. In particular, blues music, the foundation of rock and roll, came to the North. Influenced by African American spiri- tuals, ballads, and work songs from the rural South, blues music was exemplified in the work of Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, Son House, Bessie Smith, Charley Patton, and others. The introduc- tion in the 1930s of the electric guitar—a major contribution to rock music—made it easier for musicians “to cut through the noise in ghetto taverns” and gave southern blues its urban style, popularized in the work of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, B.B. King, and Buddy Guy.13

During this time, blues-based urban black music began to be marketed under the name rhythm and blues, or R&B. Featuring “huge rhythm units smashing away behind screaming

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blues singers,” R&B appealed to young listeners fascinated by the explicit (and forbidden) sexual lyrics in songs like “Annie Had a Baby,” “Sexy Ways,” and “Wild Wild Young Men.”14 Although it was banned on some stations, by 1953 R&B continued to gain airtime. In those days, black and white musical forms were segregated: Trade magazines tracked R&B record sales on “race” charts, which were kept separate from white record sales tracked on “pop” charts.

Youth Culture Cements Rock and Roll’s Place Another reason for the growth of rock and roll can be found in the repressive and uneasy atmo- sphere of the 1950s. To cope with the threat of the atomic bomb, the Cold War, and communist witch-hunts, young people sought escape from the menacing world created by adults. Teens have always sought out music that has a beat— music they can dance to. In Europe in the late 1700s, they popularized the waltz; and in America during the 1890s, they danced the cakewalk to music that inspired marches and ragtime. The trend continued during the 1920s with the Charleston, in the 1930s and 1940s with the jazz swing bands and the jitterbug, in the 1970s with disco, and in the 1980s and 1990s with hip-hop. Each of these twentieth-century musical forms began as dance and party music before its growing popularity eventually energized both record sales and radio formats.

Racial Integration Expands Rock and Roll Perhaps the most significant factor in the growth of rock and roll was the beginning of the integration of white and black cultures. In addition to increased exposure of black literature, art, and music, several key historical events in the 1950s broke down the borders between black and white cultures. In the early 1950s, President Truman signed an executive order integrating the armed forces, bringing young men from very different ethnic and economic backgrounds together. Even more significant was the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Edu- cation decision in 1954. With this ruling, “separate but equal” laws, which had kept white and black schools, hotels, restaurants, restrooms, and drinking fountains segregated for decades, were declared unconstitutional. Thus mainstream America began to wrestle seriously with the legacy of slavery and the unequal treatment of its African American citizens. A cultural reflection of the times, rock and roll would burst forth from the midst of these social and political tensions.

Rock Muddies the Waters In the 1950s, legal integration accompanied a cultural shift, and the music industry’s race and pop charts blurred. White deejay Alan Freed had been playing black music for his young audi- ences in Cleveland and New York since the early 1950s, and such white performers as Johnnie Ray and Bill Haley had crossed over to the race charts to score R&B hits. Meanwhile, black artists like Chuck Berry were performing country songs, and for a time Ray Charles even played in an otherwise all-white country band. Although continuing the work of breaking down racial borders was one of rock and roll’s most important contributions, it also blurred other long- standing boundaries. Rock and roll exploded old distinctions between high and low culture, masculinity and femininity, the country and the city, the North and the South, and the sacred and the secular.

High and Low Culture In 1956, Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” merged rock and roll, considered low culture by many, with high culture, thus forever blurring the traditional boundary between them with lyrics like: “You know my temperature’s risin’ / the jukebox is blowin’ a fuse . . . Roll over

BESSIE SMITH (1895– 1937) is considered the best female blues singer of the 1920s and 1930s. Mentored by the famous Ma Rainey, Smith’s hits include “Down Hearted Blues” and “Gulf Coast Blues.” She also appeared in the 1929 film St. Louis Blues.

“The songs of Muddy Waters impelled me to deliver the down- home blues in the language they came from, Negro dialect. When I played hillbilly songs, I stressed my diction so that it was harder and whiter. All in all it was my intention to hold both the black and white clientele.”

CHUCK BERRY, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1987

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Beethoven / and tell Tchaikovsky the news.” Although such early rock-and-roll lyr- ics seem tame by today’s standards, at the time they sounded like sacrilege. Rock and rollers also challenged music decorum and the rules governing how musicians should behave or misbehave: Berry’s “duck walk” across the stage, Elvis Presley’s pegged pants and gyrating hips, and Bo Diddley’s use of the guitar as a phallic symbol were an affront to the norms of well-behaved, culturally elite audiences. Such antics would be imitated endlessly throughout rock’s history. In fact, rock and roll’s live shows and the legends surrounding them became key ingredients in promoting record sales.

The blurring of cultures works both ways. Since the advent of rock and roll, musicians performing in traditionally high culture genres such as classical have even adopted some of rock and roll’s ideas in an effort to boost sales and popular- ity. Some virtuosos like violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Matt Haimovitz (who does his own version of Jimi Hendrix’s famous improvisation of the national anthem) have performed in jeans and in untraditional venues like bars and subway stations to reinterpret the presentation of classical music.

Masculinity and Femininity Rock and roll was also the first popular music genre to overtly confuse issues of sexual identity and orientation. Although early rock and roll largely attracted males as performers, the most fascinating feature of Elvis Presley, according to the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, was his androgynous appearance.15 During this early period, though, the most sexually outrageous rock-and-roll performer was Little Richard (Penniman), who influenced a generation of extravagant rock stars.

Wearing a pompadour hairdo and assaulting his Steinway piano, Little Richard was consid- ered rock and roll’s first drag queen, blurring the boundary between masculinity and feminin- ity (although his act had been influenced by a flamboyant 6½-foot-tall gay piano player named Esquerita, who hosted drag-queen shows in New Orleans in the 1940s).16 Little Richard has said that given the reality of American racism, he blurred gender and sexuality lines because he feared the consequences of becoming a sex symbol for white girls: “I decided that my image should be crazy and way out so that adults would think I was harmless. I’d appear in one show dressed as the Queen of England and in the next as the pope.”17 Although white parents in the 1950s may not have been concerned about their daughters falling for Little Richard, many saw him as a threat to traditional gender roles and viewed his sexual identity and possible sexual orientation as anything but harmless. Little Richard’s playful blurring of gender identity and sexual orientation paved the way for performers like David Bowie, Elton John, Boy George, An- nie Lennox, Prince, Grace Jones, Marilyn Manson, and Adam Lambert.

The Country and the City Rock and roll also blurred geographic borders between country and city, between the black ur- ban rhythms of Memphis and the white country & western music of Nashville. Early white rock- ers such as Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins combined country or hillbilly music, southern gospel, and Mississippi delta blues to create a sound called rockabilly. Raised on bluegrass music and radio’s Grand Ole Opry, Perkins (a sharecropper’s son from Tennessee) mixed these influences with music he heard from black cotton-field workers and blues singers like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, both of whom used electric guitars in their performances.

Conversely, rhythm and blues spilled into rock and roll. The urban R&B influences on early rock came from Fats Domino (“Blueberry Hill”), Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton (“Hound Dog”), and Big Joe Turner (“Shake, Rattle, and Roll”). Many of these songs, first popular on R&B

ROCK AND ROLL PIONEER A major influence on early rock and roll, Chuck Berry, born in 1926, scored major hits between 1955 and 1958, writing “Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Day,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and “Johnny B. Goode.” At the time, he was criticized by some black artists for sounding white and by conservative critics for his popularity among white teenagers. Today, young guitar players routinely imitate his style.

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labels, crossed over to the pop charts during the mid- to late 1950s (although many were performed by more widely known white artists). Chuck Berry bor- rowed from white country & western music (an old country song called “Ida Red”) and combined it with R&B to write “Maybellene.” His first hit, the song was No. 1 on the R&B chart in July 1955 and crossed over to the pop charts the next month.

Although rock lyrics in the 1950s may not have been especially provoca- tive or overtly political, soaring record sales and the crossover appeal of the music itself represented an enormous threat to long-standing racial and class boundaries. In 1956, the secretary of the North Alabama White Citizens Council bluntly spelled out the racism and white fear concerning the new blending of urban/black and rural/white culture: “Rock and roll is a means of pulling the white man down to the level of the Negro. It is part of a plot to undermine the morals of the youth of our nation.”18 These days, distinctions between traditionally rural music and urban music continue to blur, with older hybrids such as country rock (think of the Eagles) and newer forms like “alternative country,” with performers like Ryan Adams, Steve Earle, Wilco, and Kings of Leon.

The North and the South Not only did rock and roll muddy the urban and rural terrain, it also combined northern and southern influences. In fact, with so much blues, R&B, and rock and roll rising from the South in the 1950s, this region regained some of its cultural flavor, which (along with a sizable portion of the population) had migrated to the North after the Civil War and during the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, musicians and audiences in the North had absorbed blues music as their own, eliminating the understanding of blues as specifically a southern style. Like the many white teens today who are fascinated by hip-hop (buying the majority of hip-hop CDs on the commercial market), Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly—all from the rural South— were fascinated with and influenced by the black urban styles they had heard on the radio or seen in nightclubs. These artists in turn brought southern culture to northern listeners.

But the key to record sales and the spread of rock and roll, according to famed record producer Sam Phillips of Sun Records, was to find a white man who sounded black. Phillips found that man in Elvis Presley. Commenting on Presley’s cultural importance, one critic wrote: “White rockabillies like Elvis took poor white southern mannerisms of speech and behavior deeper into mainstream culture than they had ever been taken.”19

The Sacred and the Secular Although many mainstream adults in the 1950s complained that rock and roll’s sexuality and questioning of moral norms constituted an offense against God, in fact many early rock figures had close ties to religion. As a boy, Elvis Presley dreamed of joining the Blackwoods, one of country-gospel’s most influential groups; Jerry Lee Lewis attended a Bible institute in Texas (although he was eventually thrown out); Ray Charles converted an old gospel tune he had first heard in church as a youth into “I Got a Woman,” one of his signature songs; and many other artists transformed gospel songs into rock and roll.

Still, many people did not appreciate the blurring of boundaries between the sacred and the secular. In the late 1950s, public outrage over rock and roll was so great that even Little Rich- ard and Jerry Lee Lewis, both sons of southern preachers, became convinced that they were playing the “devil’s music.” By 1959, Little Richard had left rock and roll to become a minister. Lewis, too, feared that rock was no way to salvation. He had to be coerced into recording “Great Balls of Fire,” a song by Otis Blackwell that turned an apocalyptic biblical phrase into a highly

ADAM LAMBERT Like Little Richard, David Bowie, and Prince before him, Lambert is the most recent popular artist to push the boundaries between traditional gender roles. As a contestant on American Idol, he became known for his music as much as for his glam-rock leather outfits and consistent use of makeup and “guyliner.”

“[Elvis Presley’s] kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac.”

FRANK SINATRA, 1956

“There have been many accolades uttered about [Presley’s] talent and performan- ces through the years, all of which I agree with wholeheartedly.”

FRANK SINATRA, 1977

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charged sexual teen love song that was banned by many radio stations, but nevertheless climbed to No. 2 on the pop charts in 1957. Throughout the rock and roll era to today, the bound- aries between sacred and secular music and religious and secular concerns continue to blur, with some churches using rock and roll to appeal to youth, and some Christian-themed rock groups recording music as seemingly incongruous as heavy metal.

Battles in Rock and Roll The blurring of racial lines and the breakdown of other con- ventional boundaries meant that performers and producers were forced to play a tricky game to get rock and roll accepted by the masses. Two prominent white disc jockeys used differ- ent methods. Cleveland deejay Alan Freed, credited with popu- larizing the term rock and roll, played original R&B recordings from the race charts and black versions of early rock and roll on his program. In contrast, Philadelphia deejay Dick Clark be- lieved that making black music acceptable to white audiences

required cover versions by white artists. By the mid-1950s, rock and roll was gaining acceptance with the masses, but rock and roll artists and promoters still faced further obstacles: Black artists found that they were often undermined by white cover versions; the payola scandals portrayed rock and roll as a corrupt industry; and fears of rock and roll as a contributing factor in juvenile delinquency resulted in censorship.

White Cover Music Undermines Black Artists By the mid-1960s, black and white artists routinely recorded and performed one another’s original tunes. For example, established black R&B artist Otis Redding covered the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and Jimi Hendrix covered Bob Dylan’s “All along the Watchtower,” while just about every white rock and roll band established its career by covering R&B classics. Most notably, the Beatles covered “Twist and Shout” and “Money” and the Rolling Stones—whose name came from a Muddy Waters song—covered numerous Robert Johnson songs and other blues staples.

Although today we take such rerecordings for granted, in the 1950s the covering of black artists’ songs by white musicians was almost always an attempt to capitalize on popular songs from the R&B “race” charts and transform them into hits on the white pop charts. Often, white producers would not only give co-writing credit to white performers like Elvis Presley (who never wrote songs himself ) for the tunes they only covered, but they would also buy the rights to potential hits from black songwriters who seldom saw a penny in royalties or received song- writing credit.

During this period, black R&B artists, working for small record labels, saw many of their popular songs covered by white artists working for major labels. These cover records, boosted by better marketing and ties to white deejays, usually outsold the original black versions. For instance, the 1954 R&B song “Sh-Boom,” by the Chords on Atlantic’s Cat label, was immediately covered by a white group, the Crew Cuts, for the major Mercury label. Record sales declined for the Chords, although jukebox and R&B radio play remained strong for their original version. By 1955, R&B hits regularly crossed over to the pop charts, but inevitably the cover music versions were more successful. Pat Boone’s cover of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” went to No. 1 and stayed on the Top 40’s pop chart for twenty weeks, whereas Domino’s original made it only

ELVIS PRESLEY Although his unofficial title, “King of Rock and Roll,” has been challenged by Little Richard and Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley remains the most popular solo artist of all time. From 1956 to 1962, he recorded seventeen No. 1 hits, from “Heartbreak Hotel” to “Good Luck Charm.” According to Little Richard, Presley’s main legacy was that he opened doors for many young performers and made black music popular in mainstream America.

“Consistently through history it’s been black American music that’s been at the cutting edge of technology.”

MARK COLEMAN, MUSIC HISTORIAN, 2004

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to No. 10. During this time, Pat Boone ranked as the king of cover music, with thirty- eight Top 40 songs between 1955 and 1962. His records were second in sales only to Presley’s. Slowly, however, the cover situation changed. After watching Boone outsell his song “Tutti-Frutti” in 1956, Little Richard wrote “Long Tall Sally,” which included lyrics written and delivered in such a way that he believed Boone would not be able to adequately replicate them. “Long Tall Sally” went to No. 6 for Little Richard and charted for twelve weeks; Boone’s version got to No. 8 and stayed there for nine weeks.

Overt racism lingered in the music business well into the 1960s. When the Mar- velettes scored a No. 1 hit with “Please Mr. Postman” in 1961, their Tamla/Motown label had to substitute a cartoon album cover because many record-store owners feared customers would not buy a recording that pictured four black women. A turning point, however, came in 1962, the last year that Pat Boone, then age twenty- eight, ever had a Top 40 rock-and-roll hit. That year, Ray Charles covered “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” a 1958 country song by the Grand Ole Opry’s Don Gibson. This marked the first time that a black artist, covering a white artist’s song, had notched a No. 1 pop hit. With Charles’s cover, the rock-and-roll merger between gospel and R&B, on one hand, and white country and pop, on the other, was complete. In fact, the relative acceptance of black crossover music provided a more favorable cultural context for the political activism that spurred important Civil Rights legislation in the mid-1960s.

Payola Scandals Tarnish Rock and Roll The payola scandals of the 1950s were another cloud over rock and roll music and its artists. In the music industry, payola is the practice of record promoters paying deejays or radio program- mers to play particular songs. As recorded rock and roll became central to commercial radio’s success in the 1950s and the demand for airplay grew enormous, independent promoters hired by record labels used payola to pressure deejays into playing songs by the artists they repre- sented.

Although payola was considered a form of bribery, no laws prohibited its practice. How- ever, following closely on the heels of television’s quiz-show scandals (see Chapter 5), congres- sional hearings on radio payola began in December 1959. After a November announcement of the upcoming hearings, stations across the country fired deejays, and many others resigned. The hearings were partly a response to generally fraudulent business practices, but they were also an opportunity to blame deejays and radio for rock and roll’s negative impact on teens by portraying it as a corrupt industry.

The payola scandals threatened, ended, or damaged the careers of a number of rock and roll deejays and undermined rock and roll’s credibility for a number of years. In 1959, shortly before the hearings, Chicago deejay Phil Lind decided to clear the air. He broadcast secretly taped discussions in which a representative of a small independent record label acknowledged that it had paid $22,000 to ensure that a record would get airplay. Lind received calls threaten- ing his life and had to have police protection. At the hearings in 1960, Alan Freed admitted to participating in payola, although he said he did not believe there was anything illegal about such deals, and his career soon ended. Dick Clark, then an influential deejay and the host of TV’s American Bandstand, would not admit to participating in payola. But the hearings committee chastised Clark and alleged that some of his complicated business deals were ethically question- able, a censure that hung over him for years.

Congress eventually added a law concerning payola to the Federal Communications Act, pre- scribing a $10,000 fine and/or a year in jail for each violation. But given both the interdependence

MUSIC INDUSTRY RACISM manifested in many ways. Despite The Marvelettes’ song “Please Mr. Postman” reaching No. 1 in 1961, fear that customers might not buy an album that pictured black women caused the record label to substitute their images with a cartoon.

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between radio and recording and the high stakes involved in creating a hit, the practice of payola persists. In 2005, for example, Sony BMG and Warner Music paid millions to settle payola cases brought by New York State (see Chapter 4).

Fears of Corruption Lead to Censorship Since rock and roll’s inception, one of the uphill battles it faced was the perception that it was a cause of juvenile delinquency. In truth, juvenile delinquency was statistically on the rise in the 1950s. Looking for an easy culprit rather than considering contributing factors such as neglect, the rising consumer culture, or the growing youth population, many assigned blame to rock and roll. The view that rock and roll corrupted youth was widely accepted by social authorities, and rock and roll music was often censored, eventually even by the industry itself.

By late 1959, many key figures in rock and roll had been tamed. Jerry Lee Lewis was exiled from the industry, labeled southern “white trash” for marrying his thirteen-year-old third cous- in; Elvis Presley, having already been censored on television, was drafted into the army; Chuck Berry was run out of Mississippi and eventually jailed for gun possession and transporting a mi- nor across state lines; and Little Richard felt forced to tone down his image and leave rock and roll to sing gospel music. A tragic accident led to the final taming of rock and roll’s first frontline. In February 1959, Buddy Holly (“Peggy Sue”), Ritchie Valens (“La Bamba”), and the Big Bopper (“Chantilly Lace”) all died in an Iowa plane crash—a tragedy mourned in Don McLean’s 1971 hit “American Pie” as “the day the music died.”

Although rock and roll did not die in the late 1950s, the U.S. recording industry decided that it needed a makeover. To protect the enormous profits the new music had been generating, record companies began to discipline some of rock and roll’s rebellious impulses. In the early 1960s, the industry introduced a new generation of clean-cut white singers, like Frankie Avalon, Connie Francis, Ricky Nelson, Lesley Gore, and Fabian. Rock and roll’s explosive violations of racial, class, and other boundaries were transformed into simpler generation gap problems, and the music developed a milder reputation.

A Changing Industry: Reformations in Popular Music

As the 1960s began, rock and roll was tamer and “safer,” as reflected in the surf and road music of the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, but it was also beginning to branch out. For instance, the success of producer Phil Spector’s “girl groups,” such as the Crystals (“He’s a Rebel”) and the Ronettes (“Be My Baby”), and other all-female groups, such as the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack”) and the Angels (“My Boyfriend’s Back”), challenged the male-dominated world of early rock and roll. In addition, rock and roll music and other popular styles went through cultural reformations that significantly changed the industry, including the international appeal of the “British invasion”; the development of soul and Motown; the political impact of folk-rock; the experimentalism of psychedelic music; the rejection of music’s mainstream by punk, grunge, and alternative rock movements; and the reassertion of black urban style in hip-hop.

The British Are Coming! Rock recordings today remain among America’s largest economic exports, bringing in billions of dollars a year from abroad. In cultural terms, the global trade of rock and roll is even more

“Hard rock was rock’s blues base electrified and upped in volume . . . heavy metal wanted to be the rock music equiv- alent of a horror movie—loud, exaggerated, rude, out for thrills only.”

KEN TUCKER, ROCK OF AGES, 1986

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evident in exchanges of rhythms, beats, vocal styles, and musical instruments to and from the United States, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia/New Zealand. The origin of rock’s global impact can be traced to England in the late 1950s, when the young Rolling Stones listened to the urban blues of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and the young Beatles tried to imitate Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

Until 1964, rock-and-roll recordings had traveled on a one-way ticket to Europe. Even though American artists regularly reached the top of the charts overseas, no British performers had yet appeared on any Top 10 pop lists in the States. This changed almost overnight. In 1964, the Beatles invaded America with their mop haircuts and pop reinterpretations of American blues and rock and roll. Within the next few years, more British bands as diverse as the Kinks, the Zombies, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, the Who, the Yardbirds, Them, and the Troggs had hit the American Top 40 charts.

Ed Sullivan, who booked the Beatles several times on his TV variety show in 1964, helped promote their early success. Sullivan, though, reacted differently to the Rolling Stones, who were always perceived by Sullivan and many others as the “bad boys” of rock and roll in con- trast to the “good” Beatles. The Stones performed black-influenced music without “whitening” the sound and exuded a palpable aura of sexuality, particularly frontman Mick Jagger. Although the Stones appeared on his program as early as 1964 and returned on several occasions, Sul- livan remained wary and forced them to change the lyrics of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” for a 1967 broadcast. The band complied, but it had no effect on their “dangerous” reputation.

With the British invasion, “rock and roll” unofficially became “rock,” sending popular mu- sic and the industry in two directions. On the one hand, the Stones would influence generations of musicians emphasizing gritty, chord-driven, high-volume rock, including bands in the glam rock, hard rock, punk, heavy metal, and grunge genres. On the other hand, the Beatles would influence countless artists interested in a more accessible, melodic, and softer sound, in genres such as pop-rock, power-pop, new wave, and alternative rock. In the end, the British invasion verified what Chuck Berry and Little Richard had already demonstrated—that rock-and-roll

BRITISH ROCK GROUPS  like the Beatles (above, left) and the Rolling Stones (above) first invaded American pop charts in the 1960s. When the Beatles broke up in 1970, each member went on to work on solo projects. The Stones are still together and touring over forty years later.

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performers could write and produce popular songs as well as Tin Pan Alley had. The success of British groups helped change an industry arrangement in which most pop music was produced by songwriting teams hired by major labels and matched with selected performers. Even more important, the British invasion showed the recording industry how older American musical forms, especially blues and R&B, could be repackaged as rock and exported around the world.

Motor City Music: Detroit Gives America Soul Ironically, the British invasion, which drew much of its inspiration from black influences, drew many white listeners away from a new generation of black performers. Gradually, however, throughout the 1960s, black singers like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Ike and Tina Turner, and Wilson Pickett found large and diverse audiences. Transforming the rhythms and melodies of older R&B, pop, and early rock and roll into what became labeled as soul, they countered the British invaders with powerful vocal performances. Mixing gospel and blues with emotion and lyrics drawn from the American black experience, soul contrasted sharply with the emphasis on loud, fast instrumentals and lighter lyrical concerns that characterized much of rock music.20

The most prominent independent label that nourished soul and black popular music was Motown, started in 1959 by former Detroit autoworker and songwriter Berry Gordy with a $700 investment and named after Detroit’s “Motor City” nickname. Beginning with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Shop Around,” which hit No. 2 in 1960, Motown enjoyed a long string of hit records that rivaled the pop success of British bands throughout the decade. Motown’s many successful artists included the Temptations (“My Girl”), Mary Wells (“My Guy”), the Four Tops (“I Can’t Help Myself ”), Martha and the Vandellas (“Heat Wave”), Marvin Gaye (“I Heard It through the Grapevine”), and, in the early 1970s, the Jackson 5 (“ABC”). But the label’s most suc- cessful group was the Supremes, featuring Diana Ross, who scored twelve No. 1 singles between 1964 and 1969 (“Where Did Our Love Go,” “Stop! In the Name of Love”). The Motown groups had a more stylized, softer sound than the grittier southern soul (later known as funk) of Brown

THE SUPREMES One of the most successful groups in rock-and–roll history, the Supremes started out as the Primettes in Detroit in 1959. They signed with Motown’s Tamla label in 1960 and changed their name in 1961. Between 1964 and 1969 they recorded twelve No. 1 hits, including “Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” “Come See about Me,” “Stop! In the Name of Love,” “I Hear a Symphony,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” and “Someday We’ll Be Together.” Lead singer Diana Ross (center) left the group in 1969 for a solo career. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.

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and Pickett. Motown producers realized at the outset that by cultivating romance and dance over rebellion and politics, black music could attract a young, white audience.

Folk and Psychedelic Music Reflect the Times Popular music has always been a product of its time, so the social upheavals of the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and the Vietnam War naturally brought social concerns into the music of the 1960s and early 1970s. Even Motown acts sounded edgy, with hits like Edwin Starr’s “War” (1970) and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” (1971). By the late 1960s, the Beatles had transformed themselves from a relatively lightweight pop band to one that spoke for the social and political concerns of their generation, and many other groups followed the same trajectory.

Folk Inspires Protest The musical genre that most clearly responded to the political happenings of the time was folk music, which had long been the sound of social activism. In its broadest sense, folk music in any culture refers to songs performed by untrained musicians and passed down mainly through oral traditions, from the banjo and fiddle tunes of Appalachia to the accordion-led zydeco of Louisiana and the folk-blues of the legend- ary Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter). During the 1930s, folk was defined by the music of Woody Guthrie (“This Land Is Your Land”), who not only brought folk to the city but also was extremely active in social reforms. Groups such as the Weavers, featuring labor activist and songwriter Pete Seeger, carried on Guthrie’s legacy and inspired a new generation of singer-songwriters, including Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Phil Ochs; and—perhaps the most influential—Bob Dylan. Dylan’s career as a folk artist began with acoustic performances in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1961, and his notoriety was spurred by his measured nonchalance and unique nasal voice. Significantly influenced by the blues, Dylan identified folk as “finger pointin’” music that addressed current social circumstances. At a key moment in popular mu- sic’s history, Dylan walked onstage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival fronting a full, electric rock band. He was booed and cursed by traditional “folkies,” who saw amplified music as a sellout to the commercial recording industry. However, Dylan’s move to rock was aimed at reaching a broader and younger constituency, and in doing so he inspired the formation of folk- rock artists like the Byrds, who had a No. 1 hit with a cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and led millions to protest during the turbulent 1960s.

Rock Turns Psychedelic Alcohol and drugs have long been associated with the private lives of blues, jazz, country, and rock musicians. These links, however, became much more public in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when authorities busted members of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. With the increas- ing role of drugs in youth culture and the availability of LSD (not illegal until the mid-1960s), more and more rock musicians experimented with and sang about drugs in what were frequently labeled rock’s psychedelic years. Many groups and performers of the psychedelic era (named for the mind-altering effects of LSD and other drugs) like the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin), the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Doors, and the Grateful Dead (as well as established artists like the Beatles and the Stones) believed that artistic expression could be enhanced by mind-altering drugs. The 1960s drug explorations coincided with the free-speech movement, in which many artists and followers saw experimenting with drugs as a form of personal expression and a response to the failure of traditional institutions

BOB DYLAN Born Robert Allen Zimmerman in Minnesota, Bob Dylan took his stage name from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He led a folk music movement in the early 1960s with engaging, socially provocative lyrics. He also was an astute media critic, as is evident in the seminal documentary Don’t Look Back (1967).

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to deal with social and political problems such as racism and America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. But after a surge of optimism that culminated in the historic Woodstock concert in August 1969, the psychedelic movement was quickly overshadowed. In 1970, a similar con- cert at the Altamont racetrack in California started in chaos and ended in tragedy when one of the Hell’s Angels hired as a bodyguard for the show murdered a concertgoer. Around the same time, the shocking multiple murders committed by the Charles Manson “family” cast a negative light on hippies, drug use, and psychedelic culture. Then, in quick succession, a number of the psychedelic movement’s greatest stars died from drug overdoses, including Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison of the Doors.

Punk, Grunge, and Alternative Respond to Mainstream Rock Considered a major part of the rebel counterculture in the 1960s, rock music in the 1970s was increasingly viewed as just another part of mainstream consumer culture. With major music acts earning huge profits, rock soon became another product line for manufacturers and retail- ers to promote, package, and sell. Although some rock musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Elton John; glam artists like David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop; and soul artists like Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye continued to explore the social possibilities of rock or at least keep its legacy of outrageousness alive, the radio and sound recording businesses had returned to

marketing music primarily to middle-class white male teens. According to critic Ken Tucker, this situation gave rise to “faceless rock—crisply recorded, eminently catchy,” featuring anonymous hits by bands with “no established individual per- sonalities outside their own large but essentially discrete audi- ences” of young white males.21 Challenging artists, for the most part, didn’t sell records anymore. They had been replaced by “faceless” supergroups like REO Speedwagon, Styx, Boston, and Kansas that could fill up stadiums and entertain the largest number of people with the least amount of controversy. By the late 1970s, rock could only seem to define itself by saying what it wasn’t; “Disco Sucks” became a standard rock slogan against the popular dance music of the era.

Punk Revives Rock’s Rebelliousness After a few years, punk rock rose in the late 1970s to challenge the orthodoxy and commercialism of the record business. By

this time, the glory days of rock’s competitive independent labels had ended, and rock music was controlled by just a half-dozen major companies. By avoiding rock’s consumer popular- ity, punk attempted to return to the basics of rock and roll: simple chord structures, catchy melodies, and politically or socially challenging lyrics. The premise was “do it yourself”: Any teenager with a few weeks of guitar practice could learn the sound and make music that was both more democratic and more provocative than commercial rock.

The punk movement took root in the small dive bar CBGB in New York City around bands such as the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads. (The roots of punk essentially lay in four pre-punk groups from the late 1960s and early 1970s—the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the New York Dolls, and the MC5—none of whom experienced commercial success in their day.) Punk quickly spread to England, where a soaring unemployment rate and growing class inequality ensured the success of socially critical rock. Groups like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Buzzcocks, and Siouxsie and the Banshees sprang up and even scored Top 40 hits on the U.K.

“Through their raw, nihilistic singles and violent performances, the [Sex Pistols] revolutionized the idea of what rock and roll could be.”

STEPHEN THOMAS ERLEWINE, ALL-MUSIC GUIDE, 1996

THE TALKING HEADS’ first gig was opening for the Ramones at the infamous New York City punk club CBGB. Over a two decade- plus career, the band become music legends with songs like “Psycho Killer,” “Life during Wartime,” and “Burning Down the House.” Known for their artistic style, the original three band members (David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina Weymouth) all went to the Rhode Island School of Design together.

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charts. Despite their popularity, the Sex Pistols, one of the most controversial groups in rock history, was eventually banned for offending British decorum.

Punk, which condemned the mainstream music industry, was not a com- mercial success in the United States, where (not surprisingly) it was shunned by radio. However, punk’s contributions continue to be felt. Punk broke down the “boy’s club” mentality of rock, launching unapologetic and unadorned front women like Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Debbie Harry, and Chrissie Hynde; and it introduced all-women bands (writing and performing their own music) like the Go Go’s into the mainstream. It also reopened the door to rock experimen- tation at a time when the industry had turned music into a purely commercial enterprise. The influence of experimental, or post-punk, is still felt today in popular bands such as Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Franz Ferdinand.

Grunge and Alternative Reinterpret Rock Taking the spirit of punk and updating it, the grunge scene represented a significant development in rock in the 1990s. Getting its name from its often messy guitar sound and the anti-fashion torn jeans and flannel shirt appear- ance of its musicians and fans, grunge’s lineage can be traced back to 1980s bands like Sonic Youth, the Minutemen, and Hüsker Dü. In 1992, after years of limited commercial success, the younger cousin of punk finally broke into the American mainstream with the success of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the album Nevermind. Led by enigmatic singer Kurt Cobain—who committed suicide in 1994—Nirvana produced songs that one critic described as “stunning, concise bursts of melody and rage that occasionally spilled over into haunting, folk-styled acoustic ballad.”22 Nirvana opened up the floodgates to bands such as Green Day, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, the Breeders, Hole, Nine Inch Nails, and many others.

In some critical circles, both punk and grunge are considered subcategories or fringe movements of alternative rock, even though grunge was far more commercially successful than punk. This vague label describes many types of experimental rock music that offered a departure from the theatrics and staged extravaganzas of 1970s glam rock, which showcased such performers as David Bowie and Kiss. Appealing chiefly to college students and twenty- somethings, alternative rock has traditionally opposed the sounds of Top 40 and commercial FM radio. In the 1980s and 1990s, U2 and R.E.M. emerged as successful groups often associ- ated with alternative rock. A key dilemma for successful alternative performers, however, is that their popularity results in commercial success, ironically a situation that their music often criticizes. While alternative rock music has more variety than ever, it is also not produc- ing new mega-groups like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Green Day. Still, alternative groups like Friendly Fires, Vampire Weekend, and MGMT have launched successful recording careers the old-school way, but with a twist: starting out on independent labels, playing small concerts, and growing popular quickly with alternative music audiences through the immediate buzz of the Internet.

Hip-Hop Redraws Musical Lines With the growing segregation of radio formats and the dominance of mainstream rock by white male performers, the place of black artists in the rock world diminished from the late 1970s onward. By the 1980s, few popular black successors to Chuck Berry or Jimi Hendrix had emerged in rock, though Michael Jackson and Prince were extremely popular exceptions. These trends, combined with the rise of “safe” dance disco by white bands (the Bee Gees), black artists

NIRVANA’S lead singer, Kurt Cobain, during his brief career in the early 1990s. The release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in September 1991 bumped Michael Jackson’s Dangerous from the top of the charts and signaled a new direction in popular music. Other grunge bands soon followed Nirvana onto the charts, including Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, and Soundgarden.

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(Donna Summer), and integrated groups (the Village People), created a space for a new sound to emerge: hip-hop, a term for the urban culture that includes rapping, cutting (or sampling) by deejays, breakdancing, street clothing, poetry slams, and graffiti art.

Similar to punk’s opposition to commercial rock, hip-hop music stood in direct opposi- tion to the polished, professional, and often less political world of soul. Its combination of social politics, swagger, and confrontational lyrics carried forward long-standing traditions in blues, R&B, soul, and rock and roll. Like punk, hip-hop was driven by a democratic, nonpro- fessional spirit—accessible to anyone who could rap or cut records on a turntable. Deejays, like the pioneering Jamaica émigré Clive Campbell (a.k.a. DJ Kool Herc), emerged first in New York, scratching and re-cueing old reggae, disco, soul, and rock albums. These deejays, or MCs (masters of ceremony), used humor, boasts, and “trash talking” to entertain and keep the peace at parties.

Not knowing about the long-standing party tradition, the music industry initially saw hip-hop as a novelty, despite the enormous success of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979 (which sampled the bass beat of a disco hit from the same year, Chic’s “Good Times”). Then, in 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released “The Message” and forever infused hip-hop with a political take on ghetto life, a tradition continued by artists like Public Enemy and Ice-T. By 1985, hip-hop exploded as a popular genre with the commercial successes of groups like Run-DMC, the Fat Boys, and LL Cool J. That year, Run-DMC’s album Raising Hell became a major crossover hit, the first No. 1 hip-hop album on the popular charts (thanks in part to a collaboration with Aerosmith on a rap version of the group’s 1976 hit “Walk This Way”). Like punk and early rock and roll, hip-hop was cheap to produce, requiring only a few mikes, speakers, amps, turntables, and vinyl record albums. Because most major labels and many black radio stations rejected the rawness of hip-hop, the music spawned hundreds of new independent labels. Although initially dominated by male performers, hip-hop was open to women, and some—Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah among them—quickly became major players. Soon, white groups like the Beastie Boys, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock were combining hip-hop and punk rock in a commercially successful way, while Eminem found enormous success emu- lating black rap artists.

On the one hand, the conversational style of rap makes it a forum in which performers can debate issues of gender, class, sexuality, violence, and drugs. On the other hand, hip-hop, like punk, has often drawn criticism for lyrics that degrade women, espouse homophobia,

THE BUSINESS OF HIP-HOP  Jay-Z and Beyoncé are two of the most recognizable faces in hip-hop and R&B. With his 1998 album Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life, Jay-Z became one of the most critically and commercially successful hip-hop artists of the decade, parlaying his musical career into several successful business ventures. After launching her solo career with Dangerously in Love in 2003, Beyoncé expanded her empire through her acting career (Dreamgirls, Cadillac Records), clothing line, and endorsement deals. With their combined earning power and media influence, the pair was recognized as Forbes magazine’s top “power couple” in 2008.

“We’re like report- ers. We give them [our listeners] the truth. People where we come from hear so many lies the truth stands out like a sore thumb.”

EAZY-E, N.W.A., 1989

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and applaud violence. Although hip-hop encompasses many different styles, including various Latin and Asian offshoots, its most controversial subgenre is probably gangster rap, which, in seeking to tell the truth about gang violence in American culture, has been accused of creating violence. Gangster rap drew national attention in 1996 with the shooting death of Tupac Shakur, who lived the violent life he rapped about on albums like Thug Life. Then, in 1997, Notori- ous B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls), whose followers were prominent suspects in Shakur’s death, was shot to death in Hollywood. The result was a change in the hip-hop industry. Most prominently, Sean “Diddy” Combs led Bad Boy Entertainment (former home of Notorious B.I.G.) away from gangster rap to a more danceable hip-hop that combined singing and rapping with musical elements of rock and soul. Today, hip-hop’s stars in- clude artists such as 50 Cent, who emulates the gangster genre, and artists like will.i.am, Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli, who bring an old-school social consciousness to their performances.

The Reemergence of Pop After waves of punk, grunge, alternative, and hip-hop, the decline of Top 40 radio, and the demise of MTV’s Total Request Live countdown show, it seemed like pop music and the era of big pop stars was waning. But, pop music has endured, and even flourished in recent years, with American Idol spawning a few genuine pop stars like Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Un- derwood. More recently, the television show Glee has given a second life to older hits like Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” on the pop charts. But perhaps the biggest purveyor of pop is iTunes, which is also the biggest single seller of recorded music. As iTunes celebrated its ten billionth download in 2010, it listed its all-time top songs—all by leading pop artists like Black Eyed Peas, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Jason Mraz, Rihanna, Leona Lewis, Miley Cyrus, P!nk, Katy Perry, and Beyoncé.

The Business of Sound Recording

For many in the recording industry, the relationship between music’s business and artistic elements is an uneasy one. The lyrics of hip-hop or alternative rock, for example, often ques- tion the commercial value of popular music. Both genres are built on the assumption that mu- sical integrity requires a complete separation between business and art. But, in fact, the line between commercial success and artistic expression is hazier than simply arguing that the business side is driven by commercialism and the artistic side is free of commercial concerns. The truth, in most cases, is that the business needs artists who are provocative, original, and appealing to the public; and the artists need the expertise of the industry’s marketers, promoters, and producers to hone their sound and reach the public. And both sides stand to make a lot of money from the relationship. But such factors as the enormity of the major labels and the complexities of making, selling, and profiting from music affect the business of sound recording.

LADY GAGA is currently leading the pack of artists reclaiming the pop/dance music scene. With four No. 1 hits in 2009 and multiple Billboard, Grammy, and MTV Music Video awards, Gaga was an instant media sensation for her unique fashion choices, artistic and edgy videos, and catchy pop songs.

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Sony Music Entertainment

28.5%

Warner Music Group

Universal Music Group

30.2%

Independents

EMI Music

11.6%

9.2%

20.5%

Music Labels Influence the Industry After several years of steady growth, revenues for the recording industry experienced significant losses beginning in 2000 as file- sharing began to undercut CD sales. By 2009, U.S. music sales fell to $7.7 billion, down from a peak of $14.5 billion in 1999. The U.S. market accounts for about one-third of global sales, followed by Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada. Despite the losses, the U.S. and global music business still consti- tutes a powerful oligopoly: a business situation in which a few firms control most of an industry’s production and distribution resources. This global reach gives these firms enormous influ- ence over what types of music gain worldwide distribution and popular acceptance. (See “What Sony Owns” on page 97.)

Fewer Major Labels Control More Music From the 1950s through the 1980s, the music industry, though powerful, consisted of a large num- ber of competing major labels, along with numerous independent labels. Over time, the major la- bels began swallowing up the independents and then buying one another. By 1998, only six major labels remained—Universal, Warner, Sony, BMG, EMI, and Polygram. That year, Universal acquired Polygram, and in 2003 BMG and Sony merged. (BMG left the partnership in 2008.) Today, only four major music corporations remain: Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, EMI, and Warner Music Group. Together, the four companies control more than 85 percent of the re- cording industry market in the United States (see Figure 3.2). By 2010, EMI experienced continued financial difficulties, and its possible sale threatened to bring more consolidation to the industry.

The Indies Spot the Trends In contrast to the four global players, some five thousand large and small independent produc- tion houses—or indies—record less commercially viable music, or music they hope will become commercially viable. Producing between 11 and 15 percent of America’s music, indies often enter into deals with majors to gain wider distribution for their artists. The Internet has also become a low-cost distribution outlet for independent labels, which sell recordings and merchandise and list tour schedules online. (See “Alternative Voices” on page 101.)

The majors frequently rely on indies to discover and initiate distinctive musical trends that first appear on a local level. For instance, indies such as Sugarhill, Tommy Boy, and Uptown emerged in the 1980s to produce regional hip-hop. In the early 2000s, bands of the “indie-rock” movement, such as Yo La Tengo and Arcade Fire, found their home on indie labels Matador and Merge. Once indies become successful, the financial inducement to sell out to a major label is enormous. Seattle indie Sub Pop (Nirvana’s initial recording label) sold 49 percent of its stock to Time Warner for $20 million in 1994. However, the punk label Epitaph rejected takeover offers as high as $50 million in the 1990s and remains independent. All four major labels look for and swal- low up independent labels that have successfully developed artists with national or global appeal.

Making, Selling, and Profiting from Music Like most mass media, the music business is divided into several areas, each working in a dif- ferent capacity. In the music industry, those areas are making the music (signing, developing, and recording the artist), selling the music (selling, distributing, advertising, and promoting the music), and sharing the profits. All of these areas are essential to the industry but have always shared in the conflict between business concerns and artistic concerns.

FIGURE 3.2 U.S. MARKET SHARE OF THE MAJOR LABELS IN THE RECORDING INDUSTRY, 2009 Source: Nielsen SoundScan, 2010

“We’re on the threshold of a whole new system. The time where accountants decide what music people hear is coming to an end. Accountants may be good at numbers, but they have terrible taste in music.”

ROLLING STONES GUITARIST KEITH RICHARDS, 2002

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Making the Music Labels are driven by A&R (artist & repertoire) agents, the talent scouts of the music business, who discover, develop, and sometimes manage artists. A&R executives scan online music sites and listen to demonstration tapes, or demos, from new artists and decide whom to sign and which songs to record. A&R executives naturally look for artists who they think will sell, and they are often forced to avoid artists with limited commercial possibilities or to tailor artists to make them viable for the recording studio.

A typical recording session is a complex process that involves the artist, the producer, the session engineer, and audio technicians. In charge of the overall recording process, the producer handles most nontechnical elements of the session, including reserving studio space, hiring session musicians (if necessary), and making final decisions about the sound of the recording. The session engineer oversees the technical aspects of the recording session, everything from choosing recording equipment to managing the audio technicians. Most popular records are recorded part by part. Using separate microphones, the vocalists, guitarists, drummers, and other musical sections are digitally recorded onto separate audio tracks, which are edited and remixed during postproduction and ultimately mixed down to a two-track stereo master copy for reproduction to CD or online digital distribution.

Selling the Music Selling and distributing music is a tricky part of the business. For years, the primary sales out- lets for music were direct-retail record stores (independents or chains such as Sam Goody) and general retail outlets like Walmart, Best Buy, and Target. Such direct retailers could specialize in music, carefully monitoring new releases and keeping large, varied inventories. But as digital sales have climbed, CD sales have fallen, hurting direct retail sales considerably. In 2006, Tower Records declared bankruptcy, closed its retail locations, and became an online-only retailer. Sam Goody stores were shuttered in 2008, and Virgin closed its last U.S. megastore in 2009. Meanwhile, other independent record stores either went out of business or experienced great losses, and general retail outlets began to offer considerably less variety, stocking only top- selling CDs.

At the same time, in just a decade digital sales have grown to capture about 40 percent of the U.S. market and 27 percent of the global market. Apple opened iTunes, the first successful digital music store, in 2003 and now sells songs at prices ranging from $0.69 to $1.49. It has be- come the leading music retailer, selling 28 percent of all music purchased in the United States.23 Amazon.com, which sells digital downloads and physical CDs at its online store, and Walmart, which also sells digital downloads online and CDs at its traditional store locations, are tied for second, with each accounting for 12 percent of U.S. music sales. In just CD sales, Walmart leads with a 17 percent share, with Best Buy at 14 percent, and Amazon at 11 percent of the market. (To explore how personal taste influences music choices, see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Music Preferences across Generations” on page 99.)

As noted earlier, some established rock acts like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails are tak- ing the “alternative” approach to their business model, shunning major labels and using the Internet to directly reach their fans. By selling music online at their own Web sites or CDs at live concerts, music acts generally do better, cutting out the retailer and keeping more of the revenue themselves.

Despite the growing success of legitimate online music sales (there are now more than four hundred legal online music services worldwide), overall music sales globally declined for the tenth year in a row in 2009, much of it because of online piracy—unauthorized online file- sharing.24 Other unauthorized recordings, which skirt official copyright permissions, include counterfeiting—illegal reissues of out-of-print recordings and the unauthorized duplication

WHAT SONY OWNS Consider how Sony connects to your life; then turn the page for the bigger picture.

MUSIC • Sony Music Entertainment

– Arista, Arista Nashville, Columbia, Epic, Jive, RCA, RCA Victor, Sony Masterworks

• Sony/ATV Music Publishing (50% ownership)

MOVIES • Sony Pictures

Entertainment Inc. • Columbia TriStar Motion

Picture Group – Columbia Pictures, Sony

Pictures Classics. Screen Gems, TriStar Pictures

• Sony Pictures Studios • Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Studios • Sony Pictures Home

Entertainment

TELEVISION • Sony Pictures Television

– Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, The Young and the Restless, Breaking Bad, Seinfeld, The Big C

• Crackle • Game Show Network (GSN)

ELECTRONICS • Sony Electronics Inc.

– DVD and Blu-Ray Disc players

– Bravia HDTVs and projectors

– VAIO computers – Handycam Camcorders – Cyber-shot Digital Cameras – Walkman Video MP3

players – Sony Reader Digital Book

SOFTWARE • Sony Creative Software:

Vegas, ACID Pro, and Sound Forge software

DIGITAL GAMES • Sony Computer

Entertainment America Inc. – PlayStation (PS2 and

PS3) – PlayStation Portable

(PSP) – PlayStation Games

MOBILE PHONES • Sony Ericsson Mobile

Communications (50% ownership)

Turn page for more

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of manufacturer recordings sold on the black market at cut-rate prices; and bootlegging—the unauthorized videotaping or audiotaping of live performances, which are then sold illegally for profit.

Dividing the Profits The upheaval in the music industry in recent years has shaken up the once predictable (and high) cost of CDs. But for the sake of example, we will look at the various costs and profits from a typical CD that retails at $16.98. The wholesale price for that CD is about $10.70, leav- ing the remainder as retail profit. Discount retailers like Walmart and Best Buy sell closer to the wholesale price to lure customers to buy other things (even if they make less profit on the CD itself ). The wholesale price represents the actual cost of producing and promoting the recording, plus the recording label’s profits. The record company reaps the highest profit (close to $5.50 on a typical CD) but, along with the artist, bears the bulk of the expenses: manufacturing costs, packaging and CD design, advertising and promotion, and artists’ royalties (see Figure 3.3). The physical product of the CD itself costs less than a quarter to manufacture.

New artists usually negotiate a royalty rate of between 8 and 12 percent on the retail price of a CD, while more established performers might negotiate for 15 percent or higher. An artist who has negotiated a typical 11 percent royalty rate would earn about $1.80 per CD whose sug- gested retail price is $16.98. So a CD that “goes gold”—that is, sells 500,000 units—would net the artist around $900,000. But out of this amount, artists must repay the record company the money they have been advanced (from $100,000 to $500,000). And after band members, managers, and attorneys are paid with the remaining money, it’s quite possible that an artist will end up with almost nothing—even after a certified gold CD. (See “Case Study: In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory” on page 100.)

The profits are divided somewhat differently in digital download sales. A $0.99 iTunes download generates about $0.33 for iTunes and a standard $0.09 mechanical royalty for the song

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Sony’s unique blend of content and hardware means that it owns what you watch and what you watch it on.

• Revenue: Electronics and videogames make up two- thirds of Sony’s revenue,1 which was $78 billion in 2009.2 That’s almost twice as much as the Homeland Security Office budget.

• Innovations: Codeveloped the CD, DVD, Super Audio CD, and Blu-ray Disc 3

• Major Artists: Recording artists include Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, Dixie Chicks, Carrie Underwood, Britney Spears, and Shakira.

• Music Copyrights: Co- owns or administers music copyrights by artists like the Beatles, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, and Hank Williams.

• Movies: Releases about 25 films per year, including Salt, The Green Hornet, The Smurfs, and Priest in 2010 and 2011.

• Content Library: Owns more than 3,500 feature films, 500 television series, and 150,000 television episodes.4

• 3D: Sony is the only global company that is fully immersed in every link of the 3-D value chain. Sony controls the content creation, production, distribution, and presentation in theaters and our homes with its new line of 3-D TVs.

• Synergy: Sony has 1,006 consolidated subsidiaries worldwide, including bank and life insurance companies in Japan, and divisions in countries ranging from India, Indonesia, and Malaysia to New Zealand, Panama, and South Africa.

$5–5.50 Recording

label profits

$3–4 Wholesale

distributors and retail store

profits

50¢–$2 Artist’s royalty

$1–2 $1–2

Recording and studio

costs

$1–2 Design

and packaging

$1–2

Miscellaneous: shipping, musicians’ fees, trust fundPromotion

and advertising

Where Artist’s Royalty Goes on a Gold Record

(500,000 copies)

$250,000– 550,000

Profit*

$150,000 Reserve account

$100,000– 500,000 Payback advance

*(before additional expenses that may result in little net profit)

FIGURE 3.3 WHERE MONEY GOES ON A $16.98 CD

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publisher and writer, leaving about $0.57 for the record company25 (see Figure 3.4 on page 101). With no CD printing and packaging costs, record companies can retain more of the revenue on download sales. Some record companies retain this entire amount for recordings in which artists have no provisions for digital download royalties in their contract. For more recent contracts, artists typically get royalties for downloads, but the percentage depends on how online sales are defined—artists and recording labels don’t often see eye to eye on this issue. A federal district court in Los Angeles resolved one such dispute in 2009. In the case, producers of Eminem’s music argued for a 50 percent royalty rate for digital downloads, stating that digital downloads should be treated as licensed use, like the music used in a television commercial. But the jury came down on the side of the recording label and ruled that digital downloads should be treated the same as in-store retail sales and that artists should be compensated at the same 12 percent royalty rate.

Artist compensation can vary widely depending on the distribution method. For example, for solo artists to earn a minimum monthly wage of $1,160, they would have to sell: 143 self-published

Music Preferences across Generations We make judgments about music all the time. Older generations don’t like some of the music younger people prefer, and young people often dismiss some of the music of previous generations. Even among our peers, we have different tastes in music and often reject certain kinds of music that have become too popular or that don’t conform to our own preferences. The following exercise aims to un- derstand musical tastes beyond our own individual choices. Always include yourself in this project.

1 DESCRIPTION. Arrange to interview four to eight friends or relatives of different ages about their musical tastes and influences. Devise questions about what music they listen to and have listened to at different stages of their lives. What music do they buy or collect? What’s the first album (or single) they acquired? What’s the latest album? What stories or vivid memories do they relate to particular songs or art- ists? Collect demographic and consumer information: age, gender, occupation, educational background, place of birth, and current place of residence.

2 ANALYSIS. Chart and organize your results. Do you recognize any patterns emerging from the data or stories? What kinds of music did your in- terview subjects listen to when they were younger? What kinds of music do they listen to now? What formed/influenced their musical interests? If their musical interests changed, what happened? (If they stopped listening to music, note that and find out why.) Do they have any associations between music and their everyday lives? Are these music associa- tions and lifetime interactions with songs and artists important to them?

Media Literacy and the Critical Process

3 INTERPRETATION. Based on what you have discovered and the patterns you have charted, deter- mine what the patterns mean. Does age, gender, geographic location, or educa- tion matter in musical tastes? Over time, are the changes in musical tastes and buying habits significant? Why or why not? What kind of music is most impor- tant to your subjects? Finally, and most important, why do you think their music preferences developed as they did?

4 EVALUATION. Determine how your interview subjects came to like particular kinds of music. What constitutes “good” and “bad” music for them? Did their ideas change over time? How? Are they open- or closed-minded about music? How do they form judg- ments about music? What criteria did

your interview subjects offer for making judgments about music? Do you think their criteria are a valid way to judge music?

5 ENGAGEMENT. To expand on your findings and see how they match up with industry practices, contact music professionals. Track down record label representatives from a small indie label and a large mainstream label, and ask them whom they are trying to target with their music. How do they find out about the musical tastes of their con- sumers? Share your findings with them, and discuss whether these match their practices. Speculate whether the music industry is serving the needs and tastes of you and your interview subjects. If not, what might be done to change the current system?

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A s Solomon Linda first recorded it in 1939, it was a tender melody, almost childish in its simplicity—three chords, a couple of words and some baritones chanting in the background.

But the saga of the song now known worldwide as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” is anything but a lullaby. It is fraught with racism and exploitation and, in the end, 40-plus years after his death, brings a measure of justice. Were he still alive, Solomon Linda might turn it into one heck of a ballad. Born in 1909 in the Zulu heartland of South Africa, Mr. Linda never learned to read or write, but in song he was supremely eloquent. After moving to Johannes- burg in his midtwenties, he quickly conquered the weekend music scene at the township beer halls and squalid hostels that housed much of the city’s black labor force.

He sang soprano over a four-part harmony, a vocal style that was soon widely imitated. By 1939, a talent scout had ushered Mr. Linda’s group, the Original Evening Birds, into a recording studio where they produced a startling hit called “Mbube,” Zulu for “The Lion.” Elizabeth Nsele, Mr. Linda’s youngest surviving daughter, said it had been inspired by her father’s child- hood as a herder protecting cattle in the untamed hinterlands.

From there, it took flight worldwide. In the early fifties, Pete Seeger recorded it with his group, the Weavers. His ver- sion differed from the original mainly in his misinterpretation of the word “mbube” (pronounced “EEM-boo-beh”). Mr. Seeger sang it as “wimoweh,” and turned it into a folk music staple.

There followed a jazz version, a night- club version, another folk version by the Kingston Trio, a pop version and finally, in 1961, a reworking of the song by an American songwriter, George Weiss. Mr. Weiss took the last 20 improvised seconds of Mr. Linda’s recording and transformed it into the melody. He added lyrics beginning “In the jungle, the mighty jungle.” A teen group called the Tokens sang it with a doo-wop beat—and it topped charts worldwide. Some 150 artists eventually recorded the song. It was translated into languages from Dutch to Japanese. It had a role in more than 13 movies. By all rights, Mr. Linda should have been a rich man.

Instead, he lived in Soweto with barely a stick of furniture, sleeping on a dirt floor carpeted with cow dung. Mr. Linda received 10 shillings—about 87 cents today—when he signed over the copy- right of “Mbube” in 1952 to Gallo Stu- dios, the company that produced his record. When Mr. Linda died in 1962, at 53, with the modern equivalent of $22 in his bank account, his widow had no money for a gravestone.

How much he should have collected is in dispute. Over the years, he and his family have received royalties for “Wimoweh” from the Richmond Organi- zation, the publishing house that holds the rights to that song, though not as much as they should have, Mr. Seeger said. But where Mr. Linda’s family really lost out, his lawyers claim, was in “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a megahit. From 1991 to 2000, the years when “The Lion King” began enthralling audiences in movie theaters and on Broadway, Mr. Linda’s survivors received a total of perhaps $17,000 in royalties, according to Hanro Friedrich, the family’s lawyer.

The Lindas filed suit in 2004, demanding $1.5 million in damages, but their case was no slam-dunk. Not only had Mr. Linda signed away his copyright to Gallo in 1952, Mr. Dean said, but his wife, who was also illiterate, signed them away again in 1982, followed by his daughters several years later. In their lawsuit, the Lindas invoked an obscure 1911 law under which the song’s copyright reverted to Mr. Linda’s estate 25 years after his death. On a separate front, they criticized the Walt Disney Company, whose 1994 hit movie “The Lion King” featured a meerkat and warthog singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Disney argued that it had paid Abilene Music for permission to use the song, without knowing its origins.

In February 2006, Abilene agreed to pay Mr. Linda’s family royalties from 1987 onward, ending the suit. No amount has been disclosed, but the family’s lawyers say their clients should be quite comfortable.  Source: Excerpted from Sharon Lafraniere, “In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory,” New York Times, March 22, 2006, p. A1.

In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory by Sharon Lafraniere

CASE STUDY

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$0.09

$0.33

$0.57 Full record

company share

From record company share: Artist royalty

if a “retail sale”

From record company share:

Artist royalty if a “licensing

deal”

($0.29)

($0.12)

$0.33 – iTunes retains $0.09 – Mechanical royalty to publisher/writer $0.57 – Net money to record company

CDs (gaining about $8 for each CD sold), about 1,160 retail CDs (with a high-end royalty contract that earns them about 10 percent, or $1 a CD), about 12,399 single digital track downloads at iTunes or Amazon (which earn about $0.09 each), or about 849,817 streams on Rhapsody (which generates $0.0022 per stream).26

In addition to sales royalties, there are performance and mechanical royalties. A performance royalty is paid when the song is played on the radio, on television, in a film, in a public space, and so on. Performance royalties are collected and paid to artists and publishers by the three major music performance rights organizations: the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP); the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC); and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). These groups keep track of recording rights, collect copyright fees, and license music for use in commercials and films; on radio, television, and the Internet; and in public places. For example, commercial radio stations pay licensing fees of between 1.5 and 2 percent of their gross annual revenues, and they generally play only licensed music. Large restaurants and offices pay from a few hundred to several thou- sand dollars annually to play licensed background music.

Songwriters protect their work by obtaining an exclusive copyright on each song, ensuring that it will not be copied or performed without permission. Then they receive a mechanical royalty each time a recording of their song is sold. The mechanical royalty is usually split between the music publisher and the songwriter. However, songwriters sometimes sell their copyrights to music publishers for a short-term profit and forgo the long- term royalties they could receive if they retained the copyright.

Alternative Voices A vast network of independent (indie) labels, distributors, stores, publications, and Internet sites devoted to music outside of the major label system has existed since the early days of rock and roll. Although not as lucrative as the major label music industry, the indie industry

FIGURE 3.4 WHERE MONEY GOES ON A $0.99 iTUNES DOWNLOAD

INDIE LABELS often find and sign new musicians or bands with a distinctive sound. Such was the case with neo-psychedelic band MGMT and their first label, Cantora Records. After releasing a successful EP with the indie Cantora, the band was signed to Columbia Records in 2006, where they released the full-length albums Oracular Spectacular and Congratulations.

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nonetheless continues to thrive, providing music fans access to all styles of music, including some of the world’s most respected artists.

Independent Record Labels The rise of rock and roll in the 1950s and early 1960s showcased a rich diversity of independent labels, all vying for a share of the new music. These labels included Sun, Stax, Chess, and Motown. As discussed above, most of the original indies have folded or have been bought by the major labels. Often struggling enterprises, indies require only a handful of people to operate them. They identify and reissue forgotten older artists and record new innovative performers. To keep costs down, indies usu- ally depend on wholesale distributors to promote and sell their music. Indies may also entrust their own recordings or contracts to independent distributors, who ship new recordings to retail outlets and radio stations. Indies play a major role as the music industry’s risk-takers, since major labels are reluctant to invest in commercially unproven artists.

The Internet and Promoting Music Independent labels have become even more viable by using the Internet as a low-cost distribution and promotional outlet for CD and merchan- dise sales, fan discussion groups, regular e-mail updates of tour sched- ules, promotion of new releases, and music downloads. Consequently, bands that in previous years would have signed to a major label have found another path to success in the independent music industry, with labels like Rounder (Alison Krauss, Sondre Lerche), Matador (Yo La Ten- go, Sonic Youth, Pavement), Saddle Creek (Bright Eyes, the Mynabirds, Land of Talk) and Epitaph (Bad Religion, Alkaline Trio, Frank Turner).

Unlike an artist on a major label needing to sell 500,000 copies or more in order to recoup expenses and make a profit, indie artists “can turn a profit after selling roughly 25,000 copies of an album.”27 Some musical artists also self-publish CDs and sell them at concerts or use popular online services like CD Baby, the largest online distributer of independent music, where artists can earn $6 to $12 per CD.

In addition to signing with indies, unsigned artists and bands now build online communi- ties around their personal Web sites—a key self-promotional tool—listing shows, news, tours, photos, downloadable songs, and locations where fans can buy albums. But the biggest new players in the online music scene are social networking sites like MySpace—“the prime con- vergence point for bands and fans.”28 MySpace and other social media sites like Facebook, Friendster, and MOG, and video sites like YouTube and Vevo, have created spaces for bands to promote their music and themselves. Currently, more than three million bands and individual artists use MySpace “to upload songs and videos, announce shows, promote albums and inter- act with fans.” 29 With millions of active users, MySpace also has the power to launch new artists. For example, when she was just sixteen years old, a friend of British soul music singer-songwriter Adele set up a MySpace page to feature her music. The page attracted fans, and two years later independent label XL Recordings (home of Thom Yorke, The White Stripes, Vampire Weekend, Beck, and others) contacted her. “The A&R guy emailed me and I was ignoring it. . . . I didn’t realize they did all these amazing names,” Adele said.30 In 2009, she won Grammy Awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

JUSTIN BIEBER began posting videos of himself singing on YouTube when he was only twelve. By the time he was fifteen, his YouTube channel had over a million views and he caught the attention of a music executive. Signed to a major label (Island Records) in 2008, Bieber is now a certified teen sensation, with multiple hit songs and legions of teenage female fans that have caused at least three stampedes at various appearances.

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Sound Recording, Free Expression, and Democracy

From sound recording’s earliest stages as a mass medium, when the music industry began stamping out flat records, to the breakthrough of MP3s and Internet-based music services, fans have been sharing music and pushing culture in unpredictable directions. Sound record- ings allowed for the formation of rock and roll, a genre drawing from such a diverse range of musical styles that its impact on culture is unprecedented: Low culture challenged high-brow propriety; black culture spilled into white; southern culture infused the North; masculine and feminine stereotypes broke down; rural and urban styles came together; and artists mixed the sacred and the profane. Attempts to tame music were met by new affronts, including the British invasion, the growth of soul, and the political force of folk and psychedelic music. The gradual mainstreaming of rock led to the establishment of other culture-shaking genres, including punk, grunge, alternative, and hip-hop.

The battle over rock’s controversial aspects speaks to the heart of democratic expression. Nevertheless, rock and other popular recordings—like other art forms—also have a history of reproducing old stereotypes: limiting women’s access as performers, fostering racist or homo- phobic attitudes, and celebrating violence and misogyny.

Popular musical forms that test cultural boundaries face a dilemma: how to uphold a legacy of free expression while resisting giant companies bent on consolidating independents and maximizing profits. Since the 1950s, forms of rock music have been breaking boundaries, then becoming commercial, then reemerging as rebellious, and then repeating the pattern. The con- gressional payola hearings of 1959 and the Senate hearings of the mid-1980s triggered by Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center (which led to music advisory labels) are a few of the many attempts to rein in popular music, whereas the infamous antics of performers from Elvis Presley onward, the blunt lyrics of artists from rock and roll and rap, and the independent paths of the many garage bands and cult bands of the early rock-and-roll era through the present are among those actions that pushed popular music’s boundaries.

Still, this dynamic between popular music’s clever innovations and capitalism’s voracious appetite is crucial to sound recording’s constant innovation and mass appeal. The major labels need resourceful independents to develop new talent. So, ironically, successful commerce requires periodic infusions of the diverse sounds that come from ethnic communities, backyard garages, dance parties, and neighborhood clubs. At the same time, nearly all musicians need the major labels if they want wide distribution or national popularity. Such an interdependent pattern is common in contemporary media economics.

No matter how it is produced and distributed, popular music endures because it speaks to both individual and universal themes, from a teenager’s first romantic adventure to a nation’s outrage over social injustice. Music often reflects the personal or political anxieties of a society. It also breaks down artificial or hurtful barriers better than many government programs do. Despite its tribulations, music at its best continues to champion a democratic spirit. Writer and free-speech advocate Nat Hentoff addressed this issue in the 1970s when he wrote, “Popular mu- sic always speaks, among other things, of dreams—which change with the times.”31 The record- ing industry continues to capitalize on and spread those dreams globally, but in each generation musicians and their fans keep imagining new ones.

“People seem to need their peers to validate their musical tastes, making the Internet a perfect medium for the intersection of MP3s and mob psychology.”

INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, 2008

“The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content.”

“The subscription model is the only way to save the music business.”

DAVID GEFFEN, MUSIC MOGUL, 2007

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104���SOUNDS AND IMAGES

COMMON THREADS

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod in 2001, he said that it would enable you to listen to your music “wherever you go” and that “listening to music will never be the same again.” Although iPod users have more recorded music available at their fingertips than ever before, the idea of taking your music “wherever you go” is not a new one. A generation earlier, in the 1980s and 1990s, people used Sony Walkmans and Discmans on their commutes and workouts. Others toted boom box stereos (the bigger, the better) that pumped out the heavy bass lines of hip-hop or rock. In the 1950s, music was made portable with the transistor radio. You didn’t have your own music per se, but you did have powerful Top 40 stations, which played the music that mattered. And since Motorola’s first car radio in the 1930s, cars have had built-in music. (Car stereo systems today can communicate the deep thump of subwoofers from more than a block away.)

What does it mean to take our music with us, playing it directly to our ears with conspicuous devices, or play- ing it loud enough that everyone in earshot is aware of our

presence and music? Why is it that we need our music with us? Are we connecting ourselves to, or disassociating ourselves from, others?

Portable media do not end with sound. In the 1980s, Sony gave the world the Watchman, a handheld television. Today, iPods and smartphones can store and play movies and TV shows on demand. Satellite television companies offer portable satellite TV dish systems, usable almost anywhere. Cheap, portable DVD players have flooded the market, and a laptop computer or iPad connected with Wi-Fi can connect to anything on the Internet.

Which brings us to newspapers, magazines, and the book, the original portable medium. As Chapter 9 explains, since the development of the printing press by Gutenberg in the 1450s, “people could learn for themselves . . . they could differentiate themselves as individuals; their social identi- ties were no longer solely dependent on what their leaders told them or on the habits of their families, communities, or social class.” Is this what the iPod revolution is all about?

One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is about the commercial nature of mass media. This includes the idea of portability—being able to take your media content with you wherever you go. Media technologies have evolved to become increasingly small and portable. But what do portable media mean in terms of cultural expression?

CHAPTER REVIEW

audiotape, 76 stereo, 76 analog recording, 76 digital recording, 76 compact discs (CDs), 77 MP3, 77 pop music, 81 jazz, 81 cover music, 82 rock and roll, 82

blues, 82 rhythm and blues (or R&B), 82 rockabilly, 84 payola, 87 soul, 90 folk music, 91 folk-rock, 91 punk rock, 92 grunge, 93 alternative rock, 93

hip-hop, 94 gangster rap, 95 oligopoly, 96 indies, 96 A&R (artist & repertoire) agents, 97 online piracy, 97 counterfeiting, 97 bootlegging, 98

KEY TERMS The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.

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CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING���105

1. If you ran a noncommercial campus radio station, what kind of music would you play and why?

2. Think about the role of the 1960s drug culture in rock’s history. How are drugs and alcohol treated in contempo- rary and alternative forms of rock and hip-hop today?

3. Is it healthy for, or detrimental to, the music business that so much of the recording industry is controlled by four large international companies? Explain.

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA 4. Do you think the Internet as a technology helps or hurts

musical artists? Why do so many contemporary musical performers differ in their opinions about the Internet?

5. How has the Internet changed your musical tastes? Has it exposed you to more global music? Do you listen to a wider range of music because of the Internet?

For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to media-related Web sites, and more, go to bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture.

The Development of Sound Recording

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. The technological configuration of a particular medium sometimes elevates it to mass market status. Why did Emile Berliner’s flat disk replace the wax cylinder, and why did this reconfiguration of records matter in the history of the mass media? Can you think of other mass media examples in which the size and shape of the tech- nology have made a difference?

2. How did sound recording survive the advent of radio? 3. How did the music industry attempt to curb illegal down-

loading and file sharing? U.S. Popular Music and the Formation of Rock

4. How did rock and roll significantly influence two mass media industries?

5. Although many rock-and-roll lyrics from the 1950s are tame by today’s standards, this new musical develop- ment represented a threat to many parents and adults at that time. Why?

6. What moral and cultural boundaries were blurred by rock and roll in the 1950s?

7. Why did cover music figure so prominently in the devel- opment of rock and roll and the record industry in the 1950s?

A Changing Industry: Reformations in Popular Music

8. Explain the British invasion. What was its impact on the recording industry?

9. What were the major influences of folk music on the recording industry?

10. Why did hip-hop and punk rock emerge as significant musical forms in the late 1970s and 1980s? What do their developments have in common, and how are they different?

11. Why does pop music continue to remain powerful today? The Business of Sound Recording

12. What companies control the bulk of worldwide music production and distribution?

13. Why are independent labels so important to the music industry?

14. What are the three types of unauthorized recordings that plague the recording business?

15. Who are the major parties who receive profits when a digital download, music stream, or physical CD is sold?

Sound Recording, Free Expression, and Democracy

16. Why is it ironic that so many forms of alternative music become commercially successful?

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