{#1} When I was a child I lived in dread of having to sing in public. This was a common forfeit in party games, but I'd do anything else humiliating in preference. Singing was too personal, too exposed an activity.

{#2} Singing still seems to me the rawest form of personal expression (which is why I love soul music) and music making, more generally, still seems the most spontaneously human activity. Without thinking much about it, people sing in the bath and on the playground, beat out rhythms on the dance floor, and whistle while they work. It is because of our experience of the immediacy of music making that its industrial production has always been somehow suspect. In fact, of course, people today work with piped-in music and skip to the beat of a ghetto-blaster; they're more likely to listen to the radio than to sing in the bath. Most of the music we hear now, in public or private, has been mechanically produced and reproduced. It reaches us via an elaborate industrial process and is tied into a complex system of money making. And we lake these "artificial" sounds for granted. A couple of years ago I went See Al Green in concert in the Royal Albert Hall in London. At one point he left the stage (and his microphone) and walked through the audience still singing. As he passed me I realized that this was the first time, in 30 years as a pop fan, that I'd ever heard a star's "natural" voice!

{#3} The contrast between music as expression and music as commodity defines twentieth-century pop experience and means that however much we may use and enjoy its products, we retain a sense that the music industry is a bad thingbad for music, bad for us. Read any pop history and you'll find in outline the same sorry tale. However the story starts, and whatever the authors' politics, the industrialization of music means a shift from active musical production to passive pop consumption, the decline of folk or community or subcultural traditions, and a general musical deskilling the only instruments people like me can play today are their disc players and tape decks. The rise of the multinational leisure corporation means, inevitably, efficient manipulation of a new, global pop taste that reaches into every first, second, and Third World household like Coca Cola (and with the same irrelevance to real needs).

{#4} What such arguments assume (and they're part of the common sense of every rock fan) is that there is some essential human activity, music making, which has been colonized by commerce. Pop is a classic case of what Marx called alienation: Something human is taken from us and returned in the form of a commodity. Songs and singers are fetishized, made magical, and we can only reclaim them through possession, via a cash transaction in the marketplace. In the language of rock criticism, what's at issue here is the truth of music truth to the people who created it, truth to our experience. What's bad about the music industry is the layer of deceit and hype and exploitation it places between us and our creation.

{#5} The flaw in this argument is the suggestion that music is the starting point of the industrial process the raw material over which everyone fights when it is, in fact, the final product. The "industrialization of music" can't be understood as something that happens to music but describes a process in which music itself is made a process, that is, that fuses (and confuses) capital, technical, and musical arguments. Twentieth-century popular music means the twentieth-century popular record; not the record of something (a song? a singer? a performance?) that exists independently of the music industry, but a form of communication that determines what songs, singers, and performances are and can be.

{#6} We've come to the end of the record era now (and so, perhaps, to the end of pop music as we know it) and I'll return to the future later. What I want to stress here is that from a historical perspective rock and roll was not a revolutionary form or moment, but an evolutionary one, the climax of (or possibly footnote to) a story that begins with Edison phonograph. To explain the music industry we have, then, to adopt much wider time perspective than rock scholars usually allow. The pop "itself - the nature of its sales activities- is in a constant state "crisis." Business analysts should, by contrast, keep cool. To be examining always the entrails of the "latest thing" is to mistake the trees for the forest, and, as I hope to show, there is more to be learned from continuities in pop history than from the constantly publicized changes. "New things" are rarely as novel as suggested. In 1892, for example, "song slides" became a promotional craze for sheet music publishers. Pictures telling the story were, for years, a necessary sales for a new song sheet they survived the coming of radio and talkies had a measurable effect on the types of songs marketed and sold (Witmark & Goldberg, 1939). Video promotion doesn't just go back to jazz shorts!

{#7} To analyze the music industry through its history means focusing on three issues.
 

Effects of Technological Change

{#8} The origins of recording and the recording industry lie in the nineteenth century, but the emergence of the gramophone record as the predominant musical commodity took place after the 1914-1918 war. The story of the record industry is an aspect of the general history of the electrical goods industry, and has to be related to the development radio, the cinema, and television. The new media had a profound effect on the social and economic organization of entertainment so that, for example, the rise of record companies meant the decline of the music publishing and piano-making empires, shifting roles for concert hall owners and live-music promoters.
 

Economics of Pop

{#9} The early history of the record industry is marked by cycles of boom (1920s), slump (1930s), and boom (1940s). Record company practices reflected first the competition for new technologies and then the even intense competition for a shrinking market. By the 1950s the record business was clearly divided into the "major" companies and the "independents." Rock analysts have always taken the oligopolistic control of the industry for granted, without paying much attention to how the majors reached their position. What were the business practices that enabled them to survive the slump? What is their role in boom times?
 

A New Musical Culture

{#10} The development of a large-scale record industry marked a profound transformation in musical experience, a decline in amateur music making, the rise of a new sort of musical consumption and use. Records and radio made possible both new national (and international, American-based) musical tastes and new social divisions between "classical" and "pop" audiences. The 1920s and 1930s marked the appearance of new music professionals pop singers, session musicians, record company A & R people, record producers, disc jockeys, studio engineers, record critics, and so on. These were the personnel who both resisted and absorbed the "threat" of rock and roll in the 1950s and rock in the 1960s.
 

The Making of a Record Industry

{#11} The origins of the record industry are worth describing in some detail because of the light they cast on recent developments. The story really begins with the North American Phonograph Company which, in 1888, got licenses to market both Edison's phonograph and the Graphophone, a version of the phonograph developed by employees of the Bell Telephone Company. When Edison had predicted, 10 years earlier, how his invention would "benefit mankind," he had cited the reproduction of music as one of its capacities, but this was not the sales pitch of the North American Phonograph Company. They sought to rent machines (as telephones were rented) via regional franchises to offices - the phonograph was offered as a dictating device.

{#12} The resulting marketing campaign was a flop. The only regional company to have any success was the Columbia Phonograph Co. (Washington had more offices than anywhere else!). The company soon found that the phonograph was more successful as a coin-operated "entertainment" machine, a novelty attraction (like the early cinema) at fairs and medicine shows and on the vaudeville circuit. And for this purpose, "entertaining" cylinders were needed. Columbia took the lead in providing a choice of "Sentimental," "Topical," "Comic," "Irish," and "Negro" songs.

{#13} Meanwhile, Emile Berlinger, who in 1887-1888 was developing the gramophone as a means of reproducing sounds using discs, not cylinders, was equally concerned in making recordings he needed to demonstrate the superiority of his machine over Edison's. The United States Gramophone Company was formed in 1893, and the following year Fred Gaisberg, who'd started there as a piano accompanist and thus taken charge of recording, was poached from Columbia to be Berlinger's recording director and talent scout. Berlinger, unlike Edison, regarded the gramophone as primarily a machine for home entertainment and the mass production of music discs such that "prominent singers, speakers or performers may derive an income from royalties on the sale of their phonautograms" (Gelatt, 1977, p.13), and in 1897 Gaisberg opened the first commercial recording studio. For the next five years there was an intense legal struggle between disc and cylinder.

{#14} It is useful at this point to make the usual industry distinction between hardware and software: hardware is the equipment, the furniture, the "permanent" capital of home entertainment; software is what the equipment plays particular records, tapes or discs. The invention, manufacture, and selling of hardware must, obviously, precede the manufacture and selling of software. What normally happens, then, is that hardware companies get involved in software production simply in order to have something on which to demonstrate their equipment we can thus compare the early history of the record industry with the recent history of video. Video manufacturers too have been confused abut what video owners would, in practice, use them for. Software is, in fact, first regarded as a means of advertising hardware (where the initial profits lie) think of the original marketing of stereo equipment, with records of train noises that could be heard to move from one speaker to the other!

{#15} At a certain moment in the development of a new electronic medium, though, the logic changes. If people begin buying records, any will do (train noises, the first compact disc releases, whatever one's tastes), just to have something to play. Then, as ownership of the new equipment becomes widespread, records are bought for their own sake, and people begin to buy new, improved players in order to listen to specific sounds. Records cease to be a novelty. In the record industry this switch began in the 1920s, the real boom time for companies making both phonographs and phonograph records. In the words of Edward Lewis, a stockbroker who helped Decca become a public company in 1928, a company manufacturing gramophones but not records was rather like making razors but not the consumable blades" (Lewis, 1956). In the video industry the switch means a changing source of the best profits.... from the hardware makers (in Britain, for example, the home video market is pretty well exhausted; after its remarkable growth figures the manufacturers can now expect a steady decline in sales) to software (that is, film) rights, hence the interest of mass media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch in film companies: Their back catalogs are the basic resource for both home video users and cable television stations.

{#16} By the 1920s there were, in both Britain and the United States, numerous phonograph manufacturers competing for sales by references to technical advances, design qualities, a variety of gimmicks and, of necessity, by issuing their own records. At this stage record companies were part of the electrical goods industry, and quite separate in terms of financial control and ownership from previous musical entrepreneurs. They were owned and run by engineers, inventors, and stock market speculators that had little to do with song publishers, theater owners, agents and promoters, performers, and managers. They don's even seem to have been much interested in music. Gaisberg comments in his memoirs that "for many years Berlinger was the only one of the many people I knew connected with the gramophone who was genuinely musical" (Gaisberg, 1946, p. 25).

{#17} It follows that these companies' musical decisions, their policies on who and what to record, were entirely dependent on the judgments and tastes of the "live" music entrepreneur (just as the "new" form, pop video, has been dependent so far on the skills and tastes of existing short film that is, advertisementmakers). Companies competed to issue material by the same successful stage and concert hall performers, to offer versions of the latest stage show hit or dance floor craze, a practice that continued into the 1950s and rock and roll with the "cover version". Few companies were interested in promoting new numbers or new stars, and there was a widely held assumption in the industry that while pop records were a useful novelty in the initial publicizing of phonographs in the long run the industry's returns would depend on people wanting to build up permanent libraries of "serious" music. Fred Gaisberg, for example, the first A & R man, whose work soon took him from America to Britain and then across Europe and Asia, was, essentially, a classical music impresario. Record companies are making the same calculations today about compact discs as the sales potential of the back catalog is exhausted. People are once again being encouraged to build up "libraries" of music, and rock-identified labels, whether a major like WEA or independents like Virgin and Factory, have now established their own classical music divisions.

{#18} There is an irony here that has a continuing resonance: While each new technological change in mass music making is seen to be a further threat to "authentic" popular music, classical music is seen to benefit from such changes, which from hi-fidelity recordings to compact discs have, indeed, been pioneered by record companies' classical divisions. The record industry has always sold itself by what it could do for "serious" music. As Cyril Ehrlich points out, the gramophone began as not quite respectable (because of its public novelty use) and so an emphasis on its use for playing classical music was seen as necessary to sell it to middle-class families (Ehrlich, 1976). The early cinema went respectable with similar tactics using classical music for its accompaniment to silent films. The important point here is that in the history of electronic media, the initial "mass market" (this was true for radio, television, and video as well) is the relatively affluent middle-class household. The organization of the record industry around the pop record (and the pop audience) was a later development, a consequence, indeed, of the economic slump.

{#19} For anyone writing the history of the record industry in 1932, there would have been very little doubt that the phonograph was a novelty machine that had come and gone, just like the uneventful passing of the piano roll. Sales of records had dropped from 104 million in 1927 to 6 million; the number of phonograph machines manufactured had fallen from 987,000 to 40,000.

{#20} The 1930s slump was marked not just by an overall decline in leisure spending but also by a major reorganization of people's leisure habits. The spread of radio and arrival of talking pictures meant that a declining share of a declining income went toward records (just as in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when there was, after the rise in gas prices, less money overall to spend on new leisure time products like video recorders and computer games). I won't go into the details of the slump here, but simply note its consequences. First, it caused the collapse of all small recording companies and reestablished the record business as an Oligopoly, a form of production dominated by a small number of "major" companies. This wasn't just a matter of rationalization in the recording business itself failing companies going bankrupt or being taken over but also involved the surviving companies covering the crisis in record sales by putting together more wide-ranging music interests.

{#21} The development of American radio had parallels with the history of the record industry. Various companies were working out how best to exploit a new medium (by carving up the patents) and were discovering that to persuade people to rent transmitters (and make money from advertisement sales) they'd also need to provide entertaining programs. By 1926, RCA was networking shows via its National Broadcasting Company. There was also an early broadcasting emphasis on "potted palm music" (to attract relatively affluent and respectable listeners), which meant that while radio did "kill" record sales it also left pockets of tastes unsatisfied. Early radio stations were not interested in black audiences and so the market for jazz and blues records became much more significant.

{#22} As radios replaced record players in people's homes the primary source of music profit shifted from record sales to performing rights and royalties, and the basic technological achievement of this period, the development of electrical recording by Western Electric, marked a fusion of interests among the radio, cinema, and record industries. Western Electric could claim a royalty on all electrical recordings and was the principal manufacturer of theater talkie installations. Film studios such as Warner's had to start thinking about the costs (and profits) of publishers' performing rights, and began the Hollywood entry into the music business by taking over the Tin Pan Alley publisher Witmark, in 1928.

{#23} The following year RCA (with money advanced by GE and Westinghouse) took over the Victor Talking Machine Company and, with General Motors, formed GM Radio Corporation, to exploit the possibilities of car radio. The subsequent making (and unmaking) of the United State's electrical-entertainment corporations is too complicated to go into here, but in the resulting oligopoly, competition for sales got more intense and, quickly, changed its terms. The initial response to falling sales was a price war records were sold for less and less and the assumption was that people would go for the cheapest record on the market, but this eventually came up against the "irrationality" of tastes - people's musical choices aren't just a matter of price. New sales tactics had to be developed and, for the first time, record companies, led by Decca, ran aggressive advertising campaigns in newspapers and on billboards:

Here they are your favorites of radio, screen and stage in their greatest performances of instrument and voice! Not obsolete records, cut in price to meet a market, but the latest, newest smash hits exclusively DECCA. Hear them when you want as often as you want right in your own home. (Gelatt, 1977, p. 268)

{#24} Decca was the first company to realize that an investment in advertisement and promotion was more than justified by the consequent increase in sales. The peculiarity of record making is that once the break-even point is past, the accumulation of profit is stunningly quick. The costs of reproduction are a small proportion of the costs of producing the original master disc or tape. It follows that huge sales of one title are much more profitable than even cost-covering sales of lots of titles and that the costs of ensuring huge sales are necessary costs. Decca thus developed the marketing logic that was to become familiar to rock fans in the last 1960s: Promotion costs were established at whatever figure seemed necessary to guarantee huge sales. Only major companies can afford such risks (and have the necessary capital avail- able) and the strategy is dependent also on a star system, on performers whose general popularity is guaranteed in advance.

{#25} In the 1930s the recording star system was dependent on a tie-in with film and radio (hence the arrival of Bing Crosby again, Decca was the first company to realize how valuable he was). But in the 1980s, again in a time of recession, we saw very similar strategies being followed an emphasis on a few superstars at the expense of the mass of groups just getting by, those stars in turn being marketed via films and film soundtracks and, more especially, with video promotion on MTV. Industry statistics suggest that the average of 4,000-5,000 new albums per year in the 1970s had become less than 2,000 per year in the 1980s.¹

{#26} Aggressive selling and a star system in the 1930s meant a new recording strategy. Companies became less concerned to exploit existing big names, more interested in building stars from scratch, as recording stars; they became less concerned to service an existing public taste than to create new tastes, to manipulate demand. Electrical recording helped here. New crooning stars like Crosby could suggest an intimate, personal relationship with fans that worked best for domestic listeners: His live performances had to reproduce a recorded experience rather than vice versa, and jukebox programmers offered a direct way to control national taste. But radio mattered most of all, and by the end of the l930s it was the most important musical medium. It gave record companies a means of promoting their stars and record companies provided radio stations with their cheapest form of programming. Media that had seemed totally incompatible radio killed the record star ended up inseparable.

{#27} The 1930s marked, in short, a shift in cultural and material musical power from Tin Pan Alley to broadcasting networks and Hollywood studios, from the publisher /showman /song system to a record/radio/film star system and the judgment of what was a good song or performance shifted accordingly from suitability for a live audience to suitability for a radio show or a jukebox. It was in the 1930s that the "popularity" of music came to be measured (and thus defined) by record sales figures and radio plays. Popular music came to describe a fixed performance, a recording with the right qualities of intimacy or personality, emotional intensity or ease. "Broad" styles of singing taken from vaudeville or the music hall began to sound crude and quaint; pop expression now had to be limited to the two or three minutes of a 78rpm disc, and while musicians still had many of the same concerns to write good tunes, to develop a hook, to sum up a feeling in a lyric, to give people something to whistle or dance to the gatekeepers of this new music industry, the people who now determined what music was recorded, broadcast, and heard, were quite different from their predecessors in the music business. They were no longer directly connected to a public, trying to please it on the spot; their concern was a market, popularity as revealed by the sales that consumers delivered to advertisers. For the record industry (as for the film industry) the audience was essentially anonymous; popularity meant, by definition, something that crossed class and regional boundaries; the secret of success was to offend nobody. The record industry became a mass medium in the 1930s on the back of two assumptions; first, that the pop audience was essentially malleable; second, that pop music (and musicians) were, in cultural terms, vacuous. These assumptions were challenged after World War II by the rise of rock and roll.
 

The Making of the Rock Industry

{#28} By 1945 the basic structure of the modern music industry was in place. Pop music meant pop records, commodities, a technological and commercial process under the control of a small number of larger companies. Such control depended on the ownership of the means of record production and distribution and was organized around the marketing of stars and star performances (just as the music publishing business had been organized around the manufacture and distribution of songs). Live music making was still important but its organization and profits were increasingly dependent on the exigencies of record making. The most important way of publicizing pop now the way most people heard most music was on the radio, and records were made with radio formats and radio audiences in mind.

{#29} The resulting shifts in the distribution of musical power and wealth didn't occur without a struggle. The declining significance of New York publishing houses and big city session musicians, the growing importance of radio programmers and record company A & R people, were marked by strikes, recording bans, disputes over broadcasting rights and studio fees, and, outside the United States, such disputes were inflected with the issue of "Americanization" (and anti-Americanism). The United States's influence on international popular music, beginning with the worldwide showing of Hollywood talkies, was accelerated by the U.S. entry into World War II members of the service became the record industry's most effective exporters. By the end of the war the pop music people heard on radio and records across Europe and even in parts of Southeast Asia was either directly or indirectly (cover versions, copied styles) American. Hollywood's 1930s success in defining internationally what "popular cinema" meant was reinforced in the l940s and 1950s by the American record industry's success in defining the worldwide sound of "popular music".

{#30} Outside the United States the ending of the war and wartime austerity and restraint meant a new boom for the record industry (in Britain, for example, Decca's turnover increased eightfold between 1946 and 1956). In the United States, postwar euphoria was short lived. By the end of the 1940s, television seemed to carry the same threat to the pop industry as radio had 20 years earlier. The industry's resistance to this threat and its subsequent unprecedented profits were due to technological and social changes that, eventually, turned the record industry into the rock business.

{#31} The technological developments that began with CBS's experiments with microgroove recording in the late 1940s and culminated with digital recording and the compact disc in the 1980s, had two objects: to improve recorded sound quality and to make record storage and preservation easier. For the electrical engineers who worked to give their companies a competitive edge in the playback market, the musical aspects of their experiments were straightforward. What they were trying to do was to make recorded sound a more accurate reproduction of "real" sound from the start the new processes were marketed in the name of "high fidelity." But this sales talk of records reaching nearer and nearer to the "complete" experience of "live" music is just that sales talk. Each new advance stereo discs in the l960s, compact discs' elimination of surface noise and wear in the l98Os changes our experience of music (and some changes, such as quadraphonic, have been rejected by consumers despite their supposed superior truth-to-concert experience). Hi-fi opened our ears to a new appreciation of dynamic range and subtlety. By the end of the l960s, records, not concerts, defined the "best" sound. Nowadays both classical and popular musicians have to make sure that their live performances meet the sound standards of their records. The acoustic design of concert halls has changed accordingly, and rock groups take sound checks, sound mixers, elaborate amplification systems, and these days the use of taped material to enhance their "live" performances for granted. The increasing "purity" of recorded sound no extraneous or accidental noises is the mark of its artificiality. Prewar records were always heard as a more or less crackly mediation between listeners and actual musical events; their musical qualities often depended on listeners' own imaginations. To modern listeners these old discs (and particularly classical 78s) are "unlistenable" - we're used to treating albums as musical events in themselves. {#32} A second point follows from this. All hi-fi inventions (and this includes the compact disc) have been marketed, at first, on the assumption that the consumers most concerned about sound quality and a permanent record library are "serious" consumers, consuming "serious" music. The late l940s "battle of the speeds" between CBS's 33 1/3 LPs and RCA's 45 rpm records was resolved with a simple market division LPs were for classical music collectors, 45s for pop, which continued to be organized in three-minute segments, as music of convenience and of the moment (a definition reinforced by the continuing significance of jukeboxes for pop sales).

{#33} Record companies' assumptions about "true" reproduction and pop triviality were, in the end, undermined by the invention that made hi-fi records feasible - magnetic tape. In the long term the importance of tape recording was to be its availability to domestic consumers:

In l969 the industry produced small, self-contained tape cassettes that could run backward or forward, record or replay, skip to specific selections, and hold as much as an LP. These mass-produced cassettes made all the advantages of tape - high quality sound, long wear and ease of storage available, affordable, easy to use, and very popular. By 1970 cassettes accounted for nearly a third of recorded music sales, and in 1971 the value of tape players sold exceeded that of phonographs. (Toll, 1982, p. 74)

{#34} Hence arose the problem of home taping that, in the 1950s, was certainly not foreseen. Tape recording, initially developed by German scientists for broadcasting purposes in the war, was initially picked up not by the music biz but by radio stations (as a relatively cheap way of re-recording talk and jingles) and film studios (as an aid to making soundtracks), but record companies quickly realized tape's flexibility and cheapness too, and by 1950 tape recording had replaced disc recording entirely. This was the technological change that allowed new, independent producers into the market the cost of recording fell dramatically even if the problems of large-scale manufacture and distribution remained. Mid-1950s United States indie labels such as Sun were as dependent on falling studio costs as late-1970s punk labels in Britain, the latter benefitting from scientific breakthroughs and falling prices in electronic recording.

{#35} But tape's importance wasn't just in terms of costs. Tape was an intermediary in the recording process. The performance was recorded on tape, the tape was used to make the master disc. And it was what could be done during this intermediary stage, to the tape itself, that transformed pop music making. Producers no longer had to take performances in their entirety. They could cut and splice, edit the best bits of performances together, cut out the mistakes, make records of ideal, not real, events. And on tape sounds could be added artificially. Instruments could be recorded separately; a singer could be taped, sing over the tape, and be taped again. Such techniques gave producers a new flexibility that enabled them to make records of performances, like a double tracked vocal, that were impossible live (though musicians and equipment manufacturers were soon looking for ways to get the same effects on stage). By the mid-1960s the development of multitrack recording enabled sounds to be stored separately on the same tape and altered in relationship to each other at the final mixing stage, rather than through the continuous process of sound addition. Producers could now work on the tape itself to "record" a performance that was actually put together from numerous, quite separate events, happening at different times and, increasingly, in different studios. The musical judgments, choices, and skills of producers and engineers became as significant as those of the musicians and, indeed, the distinction between engineers and musicians has become meaningless. Studio-made music need no longer bear any relationship to anything that can be performed live; records use sounds, the effects of tape tricks and electronic equipment, that no one has ever heard before as music (Frith, 1983). And the digital storage of sound has made its manipulation even easier. Computers can be used to isolate, extract, and distort any element from a digital recording (a drum sound, a bass note). Such "sampling" is now a norm of record production, though the legal implications in terms of authorship and "theft" remain unresolved.

{#36} It is a pleasing irony of pop history that while classical divisions of record companies have led the way in studio technology, their pursuit of authenticity has limited their studio imagination. It was pop producers, unashamedly using technology to "cheat" audiences (double tracking weak voices, filling out a fragile beat, faking strings) who, in the 1950s and 1960s, developed recording as an art form, thus enabling rock to develop as a "serious" music in its own right. The emergence of rock as art was symbolized by the Beatles' self-conscious studio artifact, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club.

{#37} The rise of rock depended too on a broader social change the appearance of youth as the pop music market. This was partly the result of general demographic and economic trends the increasing number of teenagers in the 1950s (a period of full employment) gave their consumer choices a new market weight and partly reflected changes within the leisure industry itself. As television became the basic medium of family entertainment, previous leisure businesses such as the cinema, radio, dance halls, and theater went into decline. Teenagers were the one age group that still wanted to be out of the house and they began to take over public leisure spaces, to display a distinct teen culture in their own codes of dress and noise. These new leisure consumers were not, at first, catered to by the major leisure companies, and American teenagers had to find their style where they could - in black music, in certain Hollywood images. The resulting demands for records and clothes were first met by small, independent companies, looking for opportunities not already covered by the majors. Their success (and need for further advertisement outlets and promotion) opened the new market to media like radio and cinema desperately in need of it. The Elvis Presley story is typical. His commercial potential was first realized by his local independent label, Sun, but once his potential was realized (and his television appearances proved to the doubters that he could, indeed, be a national youth star) then he was quickly used as a way of selling records, cinema seats, magazines, merchandise, and advertising time on radio (which was adapting easily to Top 40 and rock and roll formats). From the industry perspective rock and roll was a means to an end. As music it was taken to be silly, gimmicky, and with a short shelf life; but as a way to control teenage spending, it couldn't be beaten. As deejay Dick Clark remembers,

it was during this time that I decided to go into the record business. I got into talent management, music publishing, record pressing, label making, distribution, domestic and foreign rights, motion pictures, show promotion and teenage merchandise. (Frith, 1981, p. 96)

{#38} The record industry's post-Presley focus on youth had spectacular results. In 1955 U.S. record sales increased 30% (from their post war low point) to $277 million; in 1956 they reached $377 million; in 1957 $460 million; and in 1959 a peak of $603 million.

{#39} For the moment it seemed as if a sales plateau had been reached. The discovery of teenagers had given the industry a new lease on life but the exploitation of this market by a new network of teenage records/stars/films/TV shows/magazines/concerts/dance steps/radio shows had the effect of confining teenage culture and teenage music to a combination of vacuous fun and romantic self-pity. After the trashy, erotic excitement of the original rock and rollers, teen music had become, under the tutelage of the record biz, an aspect of white middle-class conformity, and it took the arrival of the Beatles to suggest how limited this market was, even in commercial terms. The Beatles revealed a "youth" market that crossed age and class lines, a "pop" market that confounded the distinctions between "serious" and "trivial" records. Beatles fans were the first generation to grow up with hi-fi sounds as the norm. They bought pop records to lay on sophisticated equipment, collected LPs, assumed that their stars would be available in stereo.

{#40} In the United States this market was first tapped not by local independent producers (though significant independent servicing companies were involved FM radio stations, Rolling Stone, new promoters like Bill Graham) but by British acts, and the immediate result of this was the direct entry of the U.S. majors, CBS, RCA, and Warner's, into the British pop scene. They set up offices in London in pursuit of British musicians, not fans. The Beatles and Rolling Stones, Dave Clark, Herman's Hermits, and the rest of the British invasion groups were almost all signed to EMI or Decca, which made them vast profits, but by the end of the 1960s British rock groups such as Led Zeppelin, who made even vaster profits, were on American labels. By the end of the 1970s Decca itself had been taken over by the German-Dutch company, Polygram, and EMI had been reabsorbed by Thorn, the electrical goods manufacturer it had sold off 50 years earlier.

{#41} Rock, even more dramatically than rock and roll, reached sales levels previously thought impossible. In 1967 the American record industry passed the billion dollar annual sales mark for the first time. By 1973 annual sales had reached $2 billion, record companies were taking two million sales of single rock LPs for granted, and classical music's market share, 25% in the 1950s, had dropped to 5%. By 1978 the industry had reached sales of more than $4 billion. This was the industry I described in my book, Sound Effects: "music had become the most popular form of entertainment the sales of records and tapes easily outgrossed the returns on movies or sport" (Frith, 1981, pp. 4-5).

{#42} The 1970s rock industry was focused almost exclusively on record sales. The major music corporations' profits derived from their manufacture and sale of vast numbers of vinyl discs and, as in the 1930s, the fixed costs of record making were such that the profit rate accelerated rapidly as sales rose. By the mid-1970s the potential sales figures of rock's superstars seemed limitless. All other aspects of the music business were subordinated to this record sales campaign. Live performance, radio and television appearances, music press interviews, photo sessions, and the like were all developed as promotional tools. Every rise in costs seemed to be justified by the resulting rise in sales:

By the end of the 1970s the average rock and roll album cost between $70,000 and $100,000 in studio time, and any "sweetening" (adding strings, for example) could add another $50,000 to the bill; promotion budgets began at around $150,000 and rose rapidly. At the beginning of the decade there still some sense of "normal" production costs, "normal" sales and "normal" profits. Now the decision was made the other way round: the object became platinum sales a million copies as a starting point. Company bosses began to turn their noses up at gold records 500,000 sales; studios and promotion costs were established at whatever would ensure platinum. (Frith, 1981, p. 147)

{#43} Throughout the 1970s, on the other hand, 80% of records released failed to cover their costs and so there developed a sharp distinction between "hit" groups, for whom the first sign of success meant a sudden surge of record company investment designed to realize the sales potential to the full, and "miss" groups, the majority, whose records were released without fanfare, vanished without a trace. The record industry can't control pop purchasers partly because people's musical tastes are irrational, partly because some of the crucial gatekeepers in the business such as disc jockeys and journalists have their own interests to pursue. Record companies' usual strategy is, therefore, to release far too much product while trying to maximize the returns of success and to minimize the costs of failure. It's worth noting two points about this. First, stars are the best guarantors of success record companies can get, which is why established stars such as Stevie Wonder can negotiate such good deals when their contracts lapse: The record company ideal is to have a record go platinum before it's even released. Second, all record companies seek to exploit fully their fixed capital the pressing plants, A & R departments, sales teams, and studios, which cost money whether they're being used or not. Record flops are made, then, with little additional costs for the companies, and just often enough a hit is released that covers all these costs anyway.

{#44} One of the most peculiar aspects of this business in the 1970s was that it was a hugely profitable corporate structure resting on two anti-corporate myths. Myth 1 pitched artists and their audiences against an industry that, supposedly, denied people access to their music with a series of greedy, profit-obsessed gatekeepers. Myth 2 celebrated independent labels as rock's real creative entrepreneurs the majors were accused of simply taking over and homogenizing the original sounds and styles the indies developed. Neither of these myths made much sense about how the rock business actually worked as a highly efficient organization of market servicing.

{#45} This involved, first of all, the steady professionalization of every facet of music making. Hucksters, amateurs, and gamblers were replaced by responsible team players musicians, managers, promoters, pluggers, agents, and so on, who were paid not to take risks but to provide a fixed skill. The industry began to be dominated by lawyers and accountants and by the mid-1970s there was very little tension between musicians and the business. Rock performers were more likely to complain about companies not exploiting them properly than to object to being "commercialized."

{#46} Second, "independent" producers and label owners were part of this system. They became, in effect, talent scouts and market researchers for the major companies, while being driven, for survival, into dependent manufacturing and distribution deals. They were the main victims of the ever-increasing financial demands made by each professional in the system, made by the artists and producers and engineers and promotion crews. The costs of success were inflationary and it made sense to let the majors bear them.

{#47} The rock industry was, in short, not only profitable on an unprecedented scale, it also seemed all-enveloping. It was no longer possible to talk sensibly about the moguls' exploitation of the musicians (rock musicians were making enough money to be moguls), or the unfair competition between the majors and the independents ("independence" no longer described how small companies worked), or consumers' unmet demands rock audiences wallowed in the music they got. There was no grit in the system, and when it did appear, as punk, it was in the form of a challenge not to the entertainment business as such but to the very idea of entertainment itself.

{#48} The punk argument was that rock no longer excited or challenged or threatened anyone. Something new was needed and, according to cyclical theorists, this was an inevitable turn of rock's wheel - independent labels develop new forms of music, the majors tame them, independent labels thus develop new forms of music, the majors tame them. But punk didn't feed into the industry this way. Its do-it-yourself ideology was both too radical for the record industry and too feeble. The punk musicians who wanted to be stars signed up to major labels anyway; the musicians who didn't want to be stars were no commercial threat.

{#49} The rock business faced a crisis at the end of the 1970s not because of punk or the cycle of business competition but because of "outside technological and social changes parallel to those that gave birth to rock and roll in the first place. On the one hand, the demographic structure of Western countries was shifting (the number of teenagers fell, the number of people over 25 increased) while mass youth unemployment meant young people had less money to spend on leisure goods anyway. On the other hand, the spread of home taping, computer games, and video recording gave recorded music new sorts of competition for people's time and interest. In Britain, for instance, 1984 market research suggested that 97% of teenagers had access to tape recorders and that 85% used them to record music. By the same year 35% of households had videocassette recorders and 20% home computers, equipment that no one had in 1976. As the British Phonographic Industry commented on computer software (85% of which is "game-oriented"):

The consumer profile is similar, especially in age group, to music buyers, and the pricing level of a game is only marginally more than a top price LP. There is strong evidence that recorded music purchasers are diverting some of their leisure spending to computer software. (BPI, 1985, p. 35)

{#50} This is the context for the end of the rock boom. Between 1973 and 1978 world record sales expanded from $4.75 to $7 billion, but in 1978-1979 there was a 20% drop in record sales in Britain, an 11% fall off in the United States. The growth rate of the rock business (which had reached 25% per year in 1976) was down to 5%-6%, and record companies had to stop assuming ever-increasing sales, an expanding number of platinum discs. The industry in the United States did recover in the mid-1980s, but as Billboard noted in 1984:

The industry's total haul of gold and platinum albums declined for the third straight year. This supports the contention that the trade's recovery in `83 was due more to the runaway success of a handful of smash hits than to an across-the-board pickup in album sales.

The industry also benefitted from the consumer shift from vinyl to compact discs, which have a much higher profit margin (especially as the bulk of CD sales so far have come from back catalog). The number of actual titles released remains much lower than it was in the mid-1970s.
 

 The Politics of Technology

{#51} Most explanations of change in the music industry are derived from general theories of corporate strategy and market control. As I summarized this in Sound Effects:

Historians of American popular music argue that musical innovation has always come from outside the major record companies. "Independent" com- panics have been the outlet for the expression of new ideas and interests, and only when such ideas have been shown to be popular have the major companies used their financial advantages to take them over, to turn them into new, "safe" products. Innovation in such an oligopolistic industry is only possible because technological changes open gaps in existing market control, and if, in the long run, competition means creativity (the more sources of capital, the more chance of musical progress), in the short run, the music business is intensely conservative, more concerned with avoiding loss than risking profit, confirming tastes than disrupting them. Records are made according to what the public is known to want already. (Frith, 1981, p. 89)

{#52} What this analysis describes is a particular pattern of market competition at one moment intense (new producers, new sounds, new media outlets, newly discovered audiences), at another moment stagnant (a small number of large companies producing a homogeneous product for a known consumer group). Technological change has a role in this cycle of competition and consolidation (it affects market conditions), but the underlying dynamo of pop history is human nature: People's musical "needs" are increasingly illmet by conservative corporations until they burst out in a ferment of exciting new styles and stars (and new companies to market them).

{#53} I'm dubious about this model. It feeds into and derives from the 1960s rock delusion that it was possible, at moments, to have a mass produced music (rock and roll, British beat) that wasn't really "commercial," and there is little evidence today, as we've seen, that major and independent record companies are really competing with each other. As Heikki Hellman puts it:

The pattern is rather that the smaller companies offer a test market for the competition between the larger companies, through which these companies can outline their music production. The smaller companies have gained permanent and important although subordinate position in the music industry. The cycles have changed into symbiosis. (Hellman, 1983, p. 355).

{#54} This is not to say that there are no longer contradictions and struggles in the music business, but that they can't be reduced to a simple lineup of goodies and baddies (independent companies, bold musicians, and adventurous fans versus the multinationals, designer groups, and easy listeners). If there's one thing to be learned from twentieth-century pop history it is that technological inventions have unexpected consequences. The "industrialization of music" has changed what we do when we play or listen to music, and it has changed our sense of what "music" is, both in itself and as an aspect of our lives and leisure, but these changes aren't just the result of producer decisions and control. They also reflect musicians' and consumers responses.

{#55} Music "machines" have not, in short, been as dehumanizing as mass media critics from both left and right perspectives have suggested. For a start, it was technological developments that made our present understanding of musical "authenticity" possible. Recording devices enabled previously unreproducible aspects of performance improvization, spontaneity to be reproduced exactly, and so enabled Afro-American music to replace European art and folk musics at the heart of Western popular culture (and the global reach of black American sounds is even more remarkable than the global reach of white American capital). This affected not just what sort of music people listened to but also how they listened to it, how they registered the emotional meanings of sounds and the musical shape of their own emotions. Recording gave a public means of communication to otherwise socially inarticulate people, and its continuing technical refinement, particularly since the development of the electrical microphone, has extended the possibilities of expression in all pop genres. Out of such developments came the star system the marketing of individual performers as spuriously "knowable" friends and idols but out of these same developments also came new means of self-definition, musical identities that could (as in "minority" cultures and subcultures) challenge the common sense of bourgeois ideology (Frith, 1986).

{#56} Technological change has also been the basic source of resistance to the corporate control of popular music. Examine the history of inventions in the recording industry and you find that those that catch on are the ones that lead, at least in the short term, to the decentralization of music making and listening video tapes caught on, for example, video discs did not. The music industry uses new instruments and devices to do old things more efficiently or cheaply; it is musicians and consumers who discover their real possibilities. The mechanization of popular music has not, then, been a simple story of capitalist takeover. Think, for example, of how Jamaican dub culture and New York hip-hop took over the technology of recording to undermine the status of the record as a finished product; scratching and mixing "found" sounds together, challenging the whole idea of copyright.

{#57} But the most significant example of new technological habits challenging old record company ways is home taping. Cassette recorders have given fans a new means of control over their sounds; they can compile LPs and radio shows for themselves, use a Walkman to carry their soundscapes around with them. And, for the industry, this is the source of all its troubles. Behind the recurring (and increasingly successful) campaigns for levies to be imposed on blank tapes is the suggestion that people are using them to acquire music illicitly, without paying for it, without even giving the musicians involved their just reward. Every blank tape sold is a record not sold. This is another example of the multinationals' inability to control the use of their own inventions (the effects of home taping were not anticipated) and their failure to grasp the point that to throw another electronic toy into the leisure market is to disrupt all consumer habits. The suggestion that blank tapes are simply replacing records is, therefore, misleading. What home taping signifies, rather, is the changing place of music in leisure generally. Records are being replaced not by tapes as such but by other leisure activities; music is being used differently and in different, more flexible forms.

{#58} If record companies often misread the future they also regularly mistake passing fads for lasting habits (hence Warner's fateful over investment in Atari computer games) and this raises a third point: how leisure pattern change can vary remarkably among countries even when they have similar entertainment setups. In 1975, for example, sales of Stereo 8 cartridges reached 25% of all recorded music sales in the United States but were statistically insignificant in Britain. By contrast, the "penetration" of videocassette recorders was an estimated 40% of households in Britain in 1984 and only 14% in the United States (no one in Britain had expected this VCR boom Thorn-EMI even decided not to invest in its initial development). Britain, meanwhile, lags far behind both the United States and the rest of Northern Europe in cable TV connections. This has had the interesting consequence that Britain's first cable pop channel, Music Box, was in practice developed as a record promotion tool only in Holland and Belgium.

{#59} This is the context in which two terms of nineteenth-century ideology nationalism and romanticism have become crucial to the politics of twentieth-century technology. Countries are increasingly defending their music industries against the spread of cable and satellite broadcasting, against the marketing decisions of multinational communications groups, in the name of their "national heritage." The Dutch government demanded that Music Box give time to Dutch pop groups; the Swedish government uses blank tape levies to subsidize the production of Swedish music; the Canadians have a quota system for Canadian records on Canadian radio; Third World countries establish state- funded recording studios. And the irony is that the resulting "national" music is, more often than not, just a local variant of global style; the real idea is that small countries will generate international hits of their own.

{#60} Multinational profits are, meanwhile, being defended against new technology in the language of individual creativity. Home taping, scratch mixing, and the various forms of piracy have disrupted the equation of artists' "ownership" of their creative work and companies' ownership of the resulting commodities - the latter is being defended by reference to the former. Copyright has become the legal and ideological weapon with which to attack 'illegal' copying, and the battle is being fought in the name of justice for the artist.
 

Conclusion

{#61} Rock is the sound of a commercial, the sound of people chasing each other on Miami Vice, the music to a World Series or a Broadway show. The 60s discovered that voice and that voice has now become the voice of corporate America. (Graham, 1986)

{#62} Record executives no longer wake up in the night worried they were the ones who turned down the next Michael Jackson. They've got a worse nightmare now: They sign up the next MJ and then make no money out of him! For every record they sell, 1,000 are copied on to tape by fans at home and 100,000 are produced illicitly in Singapore and Taiwan! His video clips are stolen from satellite services and the World is awash with unauthorized posters and tee-shirts!

{#63} Even by 1982 the piracy figures were daunting 66% of the Asian record and tape market, 30% in Africa and the Middle East, 21% in South America, 11% in Canada and the United States. European figures were lower (3% in Britain) but only by dint of expensive and time-consuming legal and detective work (and even in Eastern Europe "piracy" the ability of small producers and private consumers to use their own taping facilities to bypass state recording policy is now a major problem even in the former East Germany there was more sophisticated recording equipment in private than in public hands). The western music industry will remain wary even of post-communist Eastern bloc countries until they have established appropriate (i.e., Western) copyright laws. And if there's one thing we can predict with certainty it is that by the end of the century copying and reproducing equipment (developed relentlessly by Japanese electronic hardware firms) will be cheaper, better, and more widely owned. Not even the rise of the compact disc will solve this problem. Domestic digital recording equipment, blank CDs, the compact Walkman, and the rest of the necessary items for "home discing" are already developed.

{#64} What we have seen is, effectively, the "death of black vinyl." As John Qualen (1985) points out, the "crisis" in the music industry in the last decade has been marked by three important shifts in the organization of profit making. First, recording and publishing companies are now integrated, and an increasing proportion of record company profits come from the exploitation of publishing copyrights. Second, the majors now derive a regular source of income from licensing material from their back catalogs to independent TV and specialist music packagers. Third, record companies have begun to treat radio and TV use of records and videos not as advertisements for which they provide new material cheaply, but as entertainment services that should pay competitive prices for the recordings they use:

In many ways the record industry is facing similar problems to the film industry. Its base market is being eroded and fragmented (pre-recorded music sales are down, as are cinema admissions), costs are spiralling and the traditional distribution system is threatened by new technologies.

Though there will always be box-office biggies like ET (or Thriller), for the most part the earnings of the producers of films (pre-recorded music) come not from their physical sale but from the exploitation by the producers of the rights they hold in their productions to broadcast and cable TV. The double advantage of this strategy for the record industry (which is far more vertically integrated than the film industry) is that, for the majors, it could eliminate the high cost of manufacturing and distribution. (Qualen, 1985, p. 16)

{#65} The move from record sales to rights exploitation as the basic source of music income has two implications. First, as Bill Graham (1986) suggests, it puts rock in corporate America. Already the biggest stars, like Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen, are being offered their biggest pay checks by companies keen to use their names in advertisements, and get their biggest concert returns not from ticket sales but from the tie-in merchandise. Companies are lining up to sponsor rock tours and TV shows. At the end of the 1980s the British group Sigue Sigue Sputnik even offered, only half-jokingly, to sell advertising space in the grooves between their LP tracks. Such multimedia tie-ins record /film /advertisement /book /cable /clothes - change the purpose of pop, the reason why companies sign and develop their stars in the first place. Like films, the best-selling records of the 1990s will be made only when they've been presold as a sound/video/image packet presold, that is, not to consumers directly, but to television shows and sponsors. The basic source of the multinational leisure corporations' income will be the licensing fees they charge for the use of their productions by other companies across all of the mass media. One interesting aspect of the new global leisure market is that it is not dominated by American-based corporations. CBS is now part of the Japanese SONY empire (as a hardware manufacturer looks to its software interests in classic fashion); RCA has been absorbed by the Bertlesmann Group (BMG), a German-based company whose central interests are publishing and distributing books and magazines. As the other two "majors" (Thorn~EMI and Polygram) are also based in Europe, WEA is the only American major label left, though the MCA-Geffen conglomerate is rather more a major these days than an independent.

{#66} Second, as the majors' interest in individual record buyers falls and the promotional drive shifts from radio to TV and video, new opportunities will arise for the independents. As Qualen says:

The one trend that is positive is the likelihood of the continued growth and expansion of the independent sector into the manufacture and distribution of black vinyl as the majors continue their process of withdrawal, as well as into production by capitalizing on the possibilities for producing music with the aid of the new technologies and keeping in touch with the sound of the streets. (Qualen, 1985, p. 33)

{#67} And this reference to "the sound of the streets" brings me back to my starting point music as human activity. The industrialization of music hasn't stopped people from using it to express private joys or public griefs; it has given us new means to do so, new ways of having impact, new ideas of what music can be. Street music is certainly industrial noise now, but it's a human noise too so it is perhaps fitting to conclude that the most exciting and political music of the early l990s should be the hip-hop sounds of young urban black bands like Public Enemy, groups that are heavily dependent on both the latest technology and street credibility. The struggle for fun continues!
 
 
 

Note 1. Thanks to Reebee Garafalo for these figures.

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Frith, S. (1986). Art vs. technology. Media, Culture and Society, 8.

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