29 July 2008
Music: The Business
Bringing the music to the people
(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)
To understand the history of American popular music, we need to learn about the workings of the music business. The production of popular music typically involves the work of many individuals performing different roles.
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.
[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]
