The Industrialization of Music

Project description
Write 1 paragraph for each of the following questions

1. After reading the article, “The Industrialization of Music” by Simon Firth and pp. 253-258 in your textbook, discuss how marketing and commercialization shaped the

early development of rock and roll. What affect does commercialization have on your favorite rock band or pop performer?

2. Describe the two different paths that were established by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and how these two paths defined rock music and musicians for decades.

THE INDUSTRIALIZATION s
s 0 F IV] U SIC s i s r

i?%f”~
Introduction
THE CONTRAST BETW EEN music-as-expression and music‘-as-coinn3odity
defines twentietlmcentury pop experience. It means that however much we may ‘_ – I

‘C1:.- ‘ -: i”
use and enjoy its products, we retain a sense that the music industry is a bad thing
bad for music, bad for us. Read any pop history and you will find in outline the
same sorry tale. However the story starts, and Whatever the author’s politics, the – _ __ – _ E
industrialization of music means a shift from active musical production to passive 7 I.
pop consumption, the decline of folk or community or subcultural traditions, and 5_

a general loss of musical skill. . , . – . . _ _ I
What such arguments assume (and they are part of the common sense of every
rock fan) is that there IS some essential human activity, musiomaking, which has
been colonized by commerce. Pop is a classic case of alienation: something human ‘ _’ – i
is taken from us and returned in the form of a commodity. Songs and singers are ‘ 1
Fetishized, made magical, and We can only reclaim them through possession, via a ‘ ‘ 5
cash transaction in the market place. In the language of rock criticism, what is at . _ _ . _ . I
stake here is the truth of music fl truth to the people who created it, truth to our . ‘- I ‘ ‘ 5?
experience. What is had about the music industry is the layer of deceit and hype
and exploitation it places between us and our creativity.
The flaw in this argument is the suggestion that music IS the starting point of
the industrial rocess – the raw material over which ever one H hts – when it is, ,_ ‘ ‘ – – 3
in Fact, the final product. The industrialization of music cannot be understood as – ‘ _ . I
something which happens to music, since it describes a process in which music itself 3;‘
is made – a process, that is, which fuses (and confuses) capital, technical and musical
arguments. Twentieth-century popular music means the twentieth-century popular ‘_ _- -’ Z __ – , i‘ .‘ 2

ecord; not the record of something (a song? a singer? a performance?) which exists
II , independently of the music industry, but a form of Communication which deter-
ff.: mines what songs, singers and performances are and can be.
We are coming to the end of the record era now (and so, perhaps, to the end
II of pop music as we know it) and so what I want to stress here is that, from a histor-
ical 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 began with
E-E;-;__;__f_§:’: Edison’s phonograph. To explain the music industry we have, then, to adopt much
wider perspective of time than rock scholars usually allow. . [T]his means
II:I.:‘f,{;i.”I ..I’.:5:., focusing on three issues:
f92??-Ié.IIEf-iii” EEIE
1 The gfirects of technological change. The origins of recording and the recording
-I,I::I,,.= I ‘_ -1:_- industry lie in the nineteenth century, but the emergence of the grarnophone
‘If’;-I’_3_ . ;::_E record as the predominant musical commodity took place after the 1914-18
5 .5 ‘.:’:I _-:-:;=: _ war. The history of the record industry is an aspect of the history of the elec-
trical goods industry, related to the development of radio, the cinema and
ll. y , television
2 The economics of pop. The early history of the record industry is marked by
I _ Cycles of boom (192os}, slump (19305) and boom (194-Os). Record company
practices reflected first the competition for new technologies and then the
1: _ ‘if, _ _ even more intense competition for a shrinking market. By the 19505 the record
ZI business was clearly divided into the ‘major’ companies and the ‘indepen-

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dents’. Rock analysts have always taken the oligopolistic control of the industry
I I, “I for granted, without paying much attention to how the majors reached their
I”, __I_: _I: I” I. position. What were the business practices that enabled them to survive the
5 _I’:;I II slumps? What is their role in boom times?
ZI 3 A new musical culture. The development of a large-scale record industry
I_ -_ _’=:}.I .- I marked a profound transformation in musical experience, a decline in estab_
I If;-I, lished ways of amateur music-making, the rise of new sorts of musical
consumption and use. Records and radio made possible new national (and
II ‘_ ‘ -_ . -‘ international) musical tastes and set up new social divisions between ‘classical’
Z and ‘pop’ audiences. The 19205 and 19303 marked the appearance of new
music professionals m pop singers, session musicians, record company ASIR
-I_ – _’: : – -_ people, record producers, disc jockeys, StL1Cl10 engineers, record critics, etc.
These were the personnel who both resisted and absorbed the ‘threat’ of rock I
I} -_; I and roll in the 19505 and of rock in the 19605.
I-;_ , . /1 The making of a record industry __ Z
I.’ The origins of the record industry are worth describing in some detail because of
I -_ :. the light they cast on recent developments. The story really begins with the North
3- ‘_ ‘ . _ American Phonograph Company Which, in 1888, was licensed to market
Edison’s phonograph . They sought to rent machines, as telephones were rented:
H . _;_.:j ‘ _ . K3“. via regional franchises to offices: the phonograph was offered as a dictating device.
3 I. y The resulting marketing campaign was a flop. The only regional company to
have any success was the Columbia Phonograph Company (Washington had more

At this stage,” record companies were simply part of the electrical goods
industry, and quite separate in terms of financial control and ownership from
3 :._ previous musicai entrepreneurs. [. . .] Few companies were interested in promoting
5; -_’I=5:f._j- ’5_‘ new ninnbers or new stars, and there was a Widely held assumption in the industry
that while pop records were a useful novel in the initial ublicizin of phono-
5;§:-_f-.”,_1?_ I: C 7_’ graphs, in the long run the industry’s returnsfywould depend Ion peoplf Wanting to
build up permanent libraries of ‘serious’ music. Fred Gaisberg, for example, the
5L’:__ __-: -_ E first A&R man, whose work soon took him from America to Britain and then across
3-_:’_’:.3__, Europe and Asia, was essentially, a classical music impresario.

Z” ; . _ This argument has had a continuing resonance: while each new technological
if”; I” change in mass miisic-ma}<ing is a further ‘threat’ to ‘authentic’ popular music,
j_ ,_ classical music always benefits from such changes, which from hi-fidelity record-
I’.j”-: in to com act discs have been ioneered b ‘ record com anies’ classical divisions.
3?-’_;’-:_f.’;:.:_ Tfe recordpindustry has always gold itself by what it could do for ‘serious’ music.
The important point here is that in the history of electric media, the initial ‘mass
‘Z, _’; market’ (this was true for radio, TV and video as well) is the relatively allluent
middle-class household. ‘The organization of the record industry around the pop
i I. rrgcolrd find the pop audience) was a later development – a consequence, indeed,
3.3. For anyone writing the history of the record industry in 1932, there would have
-‘I: I: ’5 .3 been as little doubt that the phonograph was a novelty machine that had come and
-::’:”_l= ‘ gone as there was about the passing of the piano-roll. Sales of records in the USA
1, _ had dropped from 104- million in 1927 to 6 million; the number of phonograph
5?_:’;”I_f machines manufactured had fallen from 987,000 to 40,000. In Roland Gellatt’s
words, ‘the talking machine in the parlor, an American institution of redolent
if _:. memory, had passed From the scene. There was little reason to believe that it would
Z ” 5 _ ever come back’ [Gellatt, 1977: 256].

Zj/j ~_:-_: .:_ The 19303 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 I
3. _’;_: . 5,: ” :_’ ‘- . and the arrival of talking pictures meant that a declining share of a deciining income
3: _3 ‘i :; Went on records (just as in the recession of the late 197os and early 198os, there
was less money overall to spend on leisure and more products, such as video
xi-3,. recorders and computer games, to spend it on). I will not go into the details of the
-,3: “slump here, but simply note its consequences. Firstly, it caused the collapse of all
small recording companies and re-established the record business as an oligopoiy,
a form of production dominated by a small number of ‘major’ companies. . By
Z.‘ I. In thedend cgf the 193dos, Wllellli lC31l/‘Kill and Decc: 1?naI1]1lUf}E:Ct%1:YEd nearly aéll th}e1 recoriclls
j. _ ‘:5’; _. ma e in ritain an contro e t e rocess w “c t e ot into e s o s, t e

‘.5 -f . _.: contemporary meaning of ‘a major rrecord corynpany’ had lbegen estabiished. P

5?}; -I In the USA the development of an oligopoly was equally apparent – by 1933
{E =3 three-quarters of records sold were manufactured by RCA or Decca, and most of
-Z. :5 the rest by the American Record Company, which controlled Brunswick and
I, iii: __ _. Columbia. But the meaning of a ‘record company’ was more complicated: the music business was now part of film and radio corporations of a sort that did

not yet exist i I
in Britain (where radio was a state monopoly and the film industry feeble). . i

By 1926, RCA was networking shows via its National Broadcasting ” ‘- 3
Company. There was, too, an early broadcasting emphasis on ‘potted palm music’ – – _ I
(to attract relatively affluent and respectable listeners) which meant that while radio
did ‘kill’ record sales it also left pockets of taste unsatisfied. Early radio stations I
were not interested in black audiences, for example, and so the market for jazz and _ ‘ ‘_ ‘ ‘ 1 T
blues records became, relatively, much more significant.
As radios replaced record players in people’s homes, so the source of music _ I
profits shifted from record sales to performing rights and royalties. The basic teCl1- _ 5 . _’ I H
nological achievement of this period – the development of electrical recording by
Western Electric – marked a fusion of interests between the radio, cinema and _ __ In
record industries. Western Electric could claim a royalty on all electrical record-
ings, and was the principal manufacturer of theatre talkie installations; film studios ‘ 7
like Warners had to start thinking about the costs (and returns) of publishers’ I 1 32.”.
performing rights, and began the Hollywood entry into the music business by taking
over the Tin Pan Alley publishers Witrnark in 1928. . ‘ ‘_I
Decca was [then] the first company to realize that an investment in advertise- _ I
ment 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 passed, the _ .: – 3
accumulation of profit is stunningly quick – the costs of reproduction are a small I ; -_’I: ‘ _’ l
proportion of the costs of producing the original master disc or tape. It follows that Z”
huge sales of one title are much more profitable than tidy sales of lots of titles, and – ;_ i
that money spent on ensuring those huge sales is thus a ‘necessary’ cost.

Decca

developed the marketing logic that was to become familiar to rock fans in the late = _ I I
i96os: promotion budgets were fixed at whatever figure seemed necessary to _ In ’1
produce big sales. Only major companies can afford such risks (and such sums of _ _ ._ -,_ _ .. . . I
capital) and the strategy depends on a star system, on “performers whose general – ‘ ;_ ‘ l
popularity is guaranteed in advance.
In the 19305 the recording star system depended on a tiegup with film and radio _ l – “: 7
(hence the arrival of Bing Crosby e Decca was, again, the first company to realize I _ “I
how valuable he was). . _f . _ I”
{A]ggressive selling and the star system meant a new recording strategy.
Companies became less concerned to exploit big stage names, more interested in . ‘ – ‘ _ 5
building stars from scratch, as recording stars. They became less concerned to service ‘ – ‘ – _ _ – I
an existing public taste than to create new tastes, to manipulate demand. Electrical 3.
recording helped here – crooning stars like Crosby could suggest an intimate, _’ 3- I ‘_‘ __ _. .3
personal relationship with fans that Worked best for domestic listeners. His live ‘ I -I
performances had to reproduce the recorded experience, rather than vice versa. – ’5 3 _’ . 2
And jukebox programmers offered a direct way to control national taste. But radio ‘_ . .’ – ; ‘_ I
mattered most of all. By the end of the 193os it was the most important musical .. . . I
medium: radio gave record companies a means of promoting their stars, while the f
record companies provided radio with its cheapest form of programming. Two
media which had seemed to be in deadly competition, had become inseparable. 2
Radio, after all, did not kill the record star.