Bringing the music to the people

The music business shapes both the production of popular music and the means by which it is transmitted to the consumer. From the 19th century until the 1920s, sheet music was the principal means of disseminating popular songs to a mass audience. This process typically involved a complex network of people and institutions: the composer and lyricist who wrote a song; the publishing company that bought the rights to it; song pluggers, who promoted the song in stores and convinced big stars to incorporate it into their acts; the stars themselves, who often worked in shows that toured along a circuit of theaters controlled by yet other organizations; and so on, right down to the consumer, who bought the sheet music and performed it at home.

The rise of radio, recording, and movies as the primary means for popularizing music added many layers of complexity to this process. Today hundreds of people will have a hand in producing the music you listen to. In mainstream pop music, the composer and lyricist are still important; the songs they write are reworked to complement a particular performer’s strengths by an arranger, who decides which instruments to use to accompany them, what key the song should be in, how many times it should be repeated, and a host of other details. The A&R (artists and repertoire) personnel of a record company seek out talent, often visiting nightclubs and rehearsals to hear new groups. The producer of a record plays several roles: convincing the board of directors of a record company to back a particular project, shaping the development of new “talent,” and often intervening directly in the recording process. Engineers work in the studio, making hundreds of important decisions about the balance between voice and instruments, the use of effects such as echo and reverb, and other factors that shape the overall “sound” of a record. The publicity department plans the advertising campaign, and the public relations department handles interactions with the press.

The emergence of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s illustrates how this model adapted to changes in technology, popular taste, and the emergence of an increasingly influential youth culture. The overall vitality of the American economy after World War II helped push the entertainment industry’s profits to new levels. Sales of record players and radios expanded significantly after the war.  Total annual record sales in the United States rose from $191 million in 1951 to $514 million in 1959. This expansion was accompanied by a gradual diversification of mainstream popular taste, and by the reemergence of independent record companies, whose predecessors had been wiped out 20 years before by the Great Depression. Most of these smaller companies – established by entrepreneurs in New York and Los Angeles, and in secondary centers such as Chicago, Cincinnati, Nashville, Memphis, and New Orleans – specialized in rhythm & blues and country and western recordings, which had begun to attract a national mass audience. This process was viewed with a mixture of interest and alarm by the directors of the “majors” (large record companies such as RCA Victor, Capitol, Mercury, Columbia, MGM, and Decca), which still specialized mainly in the music of Tin Pan Alley, performed by crooners. A few of the majors – for example, Decca, which had already made millions from the sale of R&B and country records – did manage to produce some early rock ’n’ roll hits. Other large record companies took a couple of years to react to the emergence of rock ’n’ roll. RCA Victor, for example, scored a Number One hit in 1956 with Kay Starr’s rendition of “Rock and Roll Waltz” (a song that described a teenager watching her parents try to dance to the new music, accompanied by music more akin to a ballroom waltz than to rock ’n’ roll ). But RCA also signed the rockabilly singer Elvis Presley and set to work transforming him into a Hollywood matinee idol and rock ’n’ roll’s first bonafide superstar.

The sales charts published in industry periodicals like Billboard and Cashbox during the 1950s chronicle changes in popular taste, the role of the indies in channeling previously marginal types of music into the pop mainstream, and the emergence of a new teenage market. The charts also reveal a complex pattern of competition among musical styles. As an example, let’s have a look at the Billboard charts for July 9, 1955, when Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock around the Clock” became the first rock ’n’ roll hit to reach the Number One position on the “Best Sellers in Stores” chart. This event is cited by rock historians as a revolutionary event, the beginning of a new era in American popular culture. However, two very different recordings, reminiscent of earlier styles of popular music, held the Number One positions on the jukebox and radio airplay charts on July 9 – the Latin American ballroom dance hit “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” by Perez Prado and His Orchestra, and “Learning the Blues,” performed by the former big-band crooner Frank Sinatra with the accompaniment of Nelson Riddle and His Orchestra. And lest we assume that this contrast in styles represented a titanic struggle between small and large record companies, it should be noted that all three of the records were released by majors (Decca, RCA Victor, and Capitol, respectively).

The record that pushed “Rock Around the Clock” out of the Number One position two months later was “The Yellow Rose of Texas” (a 19th-century minstrel song), performed in a deliberately old-fashioned sing-along style by the Mitch Miller Singers. Miller was the powerful director of the A&R (artists and repertoire) department at Columbia Records, and in that role had helped to establish the careers of pop crooners such as Doris Day, Tony Bennett, and Frankie Laine. He was also an arch-enemy of rock ’n’ roll music and of its increasing influence on AM radio programming, which he derided as being geared to “the eight- to 14-year-olds, to the pre- shave crowd that make up 12 percent of the country’s population and zero percent of its buying power.” It is not hard to understand Miller’s anger over the domination of radio by Top 40 playlists – predetermined lists of records by a limited number of artists, often backed up by bribes from record company officials to radio station personnel. One could see the free-form FM broadcasts of the late 1960s and the rise of alternative stations in the 1980s and 1990s – where disc jockeys were free to play eclectic and often challenging music – as similar reactions against the playlist concept. But his refusal to recognize the teenage market was nothing if not short-sighted. A 1958 survey of the purchasing patterns of the 19 million teenagers in the United States showed that they spent a total of nine billion dollars a year and strongly influenced their parents’ choices of everything from toothpaste and canned food to automobiles and phonographs. And, of course, they bought millions and millions of records.

 

Production and Promotion of Popular Music
Many specialists play vital roles in producing and promoting popular music

Before music hits the stores and airwaves, business agents, video producers, graphic artists, copy editors, record stores, stage hands, truck drivers, T-shirt companies, and the companies that produce musical hardware – often owned by the same corporations that produce the recordings – play vital roles in the production and promotion of popular music today. It is hard to know where to draw the boundaries of an industry that has extended itself into so many aspects of commerce and culture.

In addition, many of the roles described above have become intermingled in complex ways. A person like Quincy Jones, for example, is a performer, a song-writer, an arranger, a producer (who makes lots of engineering decisions), and a record label executive. And the wider availability of digital recording equipment means that some performers may also act as their own arranger, producer, and engineer (Stevie Wonder and Prince are good examples of this kind of collapsing of roles).

Theodor Adorno, a German philosopher who wrote in the 1940s and 1950s, powerfully criticized the effects of capitalism and industrialization on popular music. He suggested that the music industry promotes the illusion that we are all highly independent individuals defined by our personal tastes – “I’m a country music fan,” “You’re a metalhead.” In fact, Adorno argued, the industry manipulates the notion of personal taste to sucker us into buying its products. Emotional identification with the wealthy superstars portrayed on television and in film – the “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” syndrome – is, in Adorno’s view, a poor substitute for the humane and ethical social relations that typify healthy communities.

In some ways Adorno was right: Americans are probably less individualistic than they like to think, and it is often true that record companies con us into buying the latest thing on the basis of tiny differences in musical style, rather like the little design changes that mark off different kinds of automobiles or mp3 players or tennis shoes. And it is true that the private experience of listening over headphones – like the experience of driving alone in an automobile with the windows rolled up – can isolate people from one another.

But there’s more to it than that. Just ask anyone who’s worked in the music business and developed an ulcer trying to predict what the next trend will be. Compared to other industries that produce consumer products, the music business is quite unpredictable. Today, only about one out of eight recordings makes a profit. One platinum record – something like Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Madonna’s Like a Virgin, Nirvana’s Nevermind, or Dr. Dre’s The Chronic – must compensate for literally hundreds of unprofitable records made by unknown musicians or faded stars. As record company executives seek to guarantee their profits by producing variations on “the same old thing,” they also nervously eye the margins to spot and take advantage of the latest trends.

The relationship between the “majors” – large record companies with lots of capital and power – and the “indies” – small independent labels operating in marginal markets – has been an important factor in the development of American popular music. In most cases, the majors have played a conservative role, seeking to ensure profits by producing predictable (some would say “bland”) music for a large middle-class audience. The indies, run by entrepreneurs, have often had to be more daring, searching out new talent, creating specialized niches, and feeding new styles into the musical mainstream. It is mostly these small labels that initially popularized blues, country music, rhythm & blues, rock ’n’ roll, funk, soul music, reggae, punk rock, rap, grunge, worldbeat, and other “alternative” styles. In some cases, indie labels have grown large and powerful; one example of this is Atlantic Records, which began as a small R&B label in the late 1940s and grew into a multimillion-dollar corporation.

Today, the relationship between indies and majors has been extended over the globe – five corporations (only one of them actually based in the United States) now control at least 75 percent of the world’s legal trade in commercially recorded music. Each of these transnational corporations has bought up many smaller labels, using them as incubators for new talent, a system reminiscent of the relationship between major and minor league baseball teams.

This consolidation will not likely be the end of the story. With the rise of the mp3 and other digital formats – developments discussed in chapter 10 – and of Internet and personal digital device distribution models, the music business will continue to evolve. One constant will remain: listeners will continue to seek out and enjoy their favorite tunes.