The Death Knell Sounds Again: The History of Music Industry Whining

Originally published in my "Aural Fixation" column on PopMatters.com on April 25, 2013. See original post here.

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If the Chicken Little music industry pundits are to be believed, the sky is falling. A business which makes billions of dollars a year can’t stop whining about how illegal downloading, streaming, and Internet radio are sending them to the poor house. There’s one problem with their complaints – we’ve been hearing them since the beginning of recorded music history more than a century ago.

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I blame Thomas Edison. Thanks to his indefatigable curiosity and perpetual instinct to invent, he steered the world into the dawn of a new age: recorded music history. In 1877, he laid down a recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”, and shortly thereafter, we fell down the rabbit hole.

If it weren’t for his voice-recording phonograph, we might not presently be enduring the horrible curse of being able to listen to any music we want anytime, anywhere, and any way we choose. Damn you, Mr. Edison! Look what fury you hath wrought!

Edison ruined the music industry – or at least how the form in which it was known 136 years ago. Before the invention of sound recording, the music business was built on sheet music sales. Once Edison let the cat out of the bag, the big bucks moved to recording music, away from sheet music distribution.

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Stuart Banner wrote a piece for Bloomberg.com (“The First Time Tech Ruined the Music Business”, 14 December 2012) stating:

“The music business was in turmoil at the turn of the century. Technological innovation had made songs much easier to copy, and established artists foresaw their sales plummeting. The companies that had once dominated the industry were rapidly losing ground to upstarts who produced new devices for playing music. The established companies urged Congress to tighten up the law to prohibit copying, while the innovators argued that any such change would only harm consumers.”

Here’s the kicker. While this sounds like a modern assessment of the music industry, it actually describes the state of the business in 1900. Record execs haven’t stopped griping since.

So let’s take a look at the current reasons why a multi-billion-dollar industry would have the public belief the whole system is falling apart – and when these supposedly new problems first surfaced.

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The music industry can’t survive with competing formats or delivery systems.

We’ve heard for more than a decade how the compact disc is suffering a slow death at the hands of the MP3. Clearly this is a late-20th/early-21st century development, right? Uh, no. Try 19th century.

Edison's phonograph, image from wikipedia.org

Within roughly a decade of Edison’s invention of the phonograph, Emile Berliner thrust his alternative, the gramophone, upon the world in 1888. It relied on a disc instead of a cylinder, thus introducing the first “my format’s better than your format” battle.

Thankfully, the dilemma never reared its ugly head again – except for the introduction of piano rolls (1896), 78 RPM records (1906), 33 1/3 RPM records (1928), the LP (1948), the 7” single (1951), the cassette (1964), the 8-track (1966), the compact disc (1978), MTV (1981), the MP3 (1990), streaming (1995), Napster (1999), Pandora (2000), iTunes (2003), YouTube (2005), and Spotify (2008). If some of these dates sound earlier than you expected, well, let that be a lesson to you. These formats did not storm the industry and decimate them overnight.  (Source: PBS.org (““Chronology: Technology and the Music Industry”, 24 May 2004).

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The industry can’t compete with free, or nearly free distribution of music.

Record companies have lobbed their legal heft at Internet radio and streaming services like Pandora and Spotify in the claim that such services are ruining the recording industry. However, radio first “threatened” the music business over 80 years ago.

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The ‘20s saw the mass-production of commercial radio. Record companies were so terrified of the new medium that they signed their major artists to contracts forbidding them from doing radio work. As we all know, once every household in America had a radio, recorded music went away forever.

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Oh, wait. It didn’t. As has happened dozens of times, the music industry adapted – even if it had to get over its initially panicked reaction, first – and transformed radio into a means to promote music sales.

As for the effect of modern-day services like Pandora and Spotify, Hugo Vanessen notes in a Storify.com article (“The Effect of Spotify and Pandora on the Music Industry”, March 2013) that the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said sales actually saw a slight rise in 2012 after 14 years of decline. The article suggests the industry may owe the turn of fortune to Spotify and Pandora. Spotify founder Daniel Ek is quoted in the article as saying, “Old media are always afraid of new media… because when a new media appears on the scene you have to change in order to keep up.” In other words, if the industry would stop panicking and embrace progress, it would be much better off.

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No one will buy music if they can listen and share for free.

This brings us to the dumbest move in the music business in recent memory. After Napster hit in 1999, peer-to-peer file sharing exploded. Convinced illegal downloading would bring the industry to its knees, record companies screamed bloody murder and got the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to take on the image-shattering move of suing everyday music fans. After all, if your customer is fleeing from your company, the best way to woo them back is to chase them down with a legal machete and mercilessly (and publicly) flog them, right?

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As far back as the 1890s, the invention of the jukebox meant no one needed to buy music for their home ever again. At the height of its popularity in the ‘50s, the jukebox was a staple at diners and drive-ins. Teens could hang out with friends at the local burger joint and wait for someone else to drop a dime to listen to the latest rock ‘n’ roll chartbuster. Ah, that fateful day when the record companies announced they were closing up shop for good because no one was buying music, anymore.

Oh wait. That didn’t happen? Well, at least not until blank cassettes threatened to destroy the sale of the beloved LP. The record honchos got the 1909 Copyright Statute amended in 1971 so that those horrible teens who swapped albums with friends could be chased down with legal machetes and mercilessly (and publicly) flogged. Wait – is anyone else experiencing déjà vu?

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Don’t shed too many tears for those poor record execs. In the ‘80s, they pulled off a major coup: a percentage of the profits from the sale of every blank tape. Once again, they managed to weather the storm.

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The availability of individual songs will kill the album.

In 1948, the 12” disc, better known as the LP, was introduced. Within three years, a 7” format – the single – hit the market. The funeral procession for the death of the music industry began immediately.

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Yeah, yeah. I think you see the pattern by now. The reality was that both formats stuck around for decades and gave customers choices. Of course, with billions of potential bucks to be made, the record company fat cats considered customer choice a negative factor on their bottom lines and set out to destroy the single.

In the ‘80s, blockbuster albums like Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A., and Prince’s Purple Rain generated hit after hit and sent fans to record stores in droves. By the ‘90s, record company execs made a concentrated effort to squash the single, often creating massive radio hits (No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak”, Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris”) which weren’t available as commercially available singles. Fans had no choice but to buy the more expensive album.

The CD Era: Death of the Single,
image from blogs.houstonpress.com

Think of it like this. If you go to the grocery store to buy potatoes, they are available individually or by the bag. In the digital age, the return of customer choice – and the ability to buy one song at a time – sent the music biz into a tizzy because it can no longer sell you a sack of potatoes when you only want one. Let the violins play.

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I won’t deny that record companies have taken a hit in the 21st century. However, for all their finger-pointing, they may be pointing at the wrong culprits. In an ABC.net article (“The real reason why the music industry collapsed”, 25 May 2012), Nick Ross graphs the number of albums sold per person from 1973 to 2009. There’s an obvious spike in the ‘90s to more than five album purchases per person. The number peaked in 1994, so when Napster launched five years later, the numbers were already in decline. Numbers dipped back to pre-‘90s levels of two to four album purchases per person. The record industry didn’t so much tank as return to normalcy. 

Matthew Lasar acknowledges in an arstechnica.com article (“Did file-sharing cause recording industry collapse? Economists say no”, 23 March 2011) that global recorded music sales had dropped to about $15 billion in 2010 after being just shy of $27 billion in 2000. However, he argues, these numbers coincide with a global economic downturn in the ‘00s.

image from arstechnica.net

A graph at Ultimate-Guitar.com (“Why Music Industry Observations Suck”, 1 November 2011) looks at US sales dating back to 1999 up to projected sales for 2014. It suggests that since 2009, sales have practically leveled off to just shy of $6 billion a year.

Wake up, music industry folks. Technology and consumers are constantly evolving. Instead of fighting to derail technological advances in the music industry you are certain will destroy your livelihood. Figure out how to embrace change. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter. Music, and the way it is delivered and heard, will change whether you like it or not. If you want to blame anyone, though, I say it’s that evil Thomas Edison’s fault.

Thomas Edison with - an iPopd?,
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The Birth of the LP: June 21, 1948

June 21, 1948: Columbia Records introduced its new 12” long-playing (LP) record at a New York press conference. It rotated at 33⅓ revolutions per minute (rpm) and became the standard for gramophone records. It also became the dominant music format for a large chunk of the second half of the 20th century, eventually succumbing to cassettes and compact discs.

The Voice of Frank Sinatra is commonly referred to as the first LP and could be called the first genuine concept album. It was originally released in 1946 as a collection (or “album”) of four 78 rpm singles. It was actually released in a 10” format which was introduced at the same time as the 12” format. Also, the Sinatra album was only one of 100 different titles released simultaneously; it was simply the album given the first catalog number (CL 6001).




The Voice of Frank Sinatra 78 RPM cover (left) and 33⅓ cover (right)


Columbia’s president Ted Wallerstein was instrumental in the birth of the LP. He envisioned an entire movement of a symphony to be on one side of an album. Hence, the resulting LP format was particularly suited to classical music. This meant that the first official catalog number for the 12” format was actually for Felix Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E Minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 64. It was a performance played by Nathan Milstein with the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York and conducted by Bruno Walter.



By 1949, Capitol Records also began releasing LPs, followed by RCA Victor in 1950. 1949 also marked the first appearance of LPs in Europe thanks to the UK’s Decca Records. Beyond classical music, the first genre to really gain success was cast recordings of Broadway musical, such as 1949’s South Pacific.


Resources:

thelongestlistofthelongeststuffatthelongestdomainnameatlonglast.com World’s First LP Record

Wikipedia Columbia Records: The LP record 1948-1959 entry

Wikipedia Gramophone record entry

Wikipedia LP record entry

Wired.com June 21, 1948: Columbia’s Micogroove LP Makes Albums Sound Good

Once Upon a Time in the Pre-MP3 Era

Gather ‘round, children, for a tale of the days of old when music came from stores instead of cyberspace. What now takes up mere megabytes on a hard drive or an iPod once occupied actual physical space – be it piano rolls, sheet music, 78 RPM records, LPs, cassettes, 8-tracks, or compact discs.

The 8-Track Era

My first dip into the music-as-consumable-product pool came in my tween years. It was the late ’70s and the 8-track had dreams of knocking the LP off its throne. The chunky tape owes its existence to the impracticality of blasting Ted Nugent from a record player while tooling around town in a Trans Am. There was a trade-off; 8-tracks erased the luxury of dropping a needle on a specific song or location within one. And while records might scratch, warp, or even break if abused enough, they never punished listeners with loud, annoying ka-klunks mid-song.

With portability being the 8-track’s only pro and me being a few years shy of the teen dream of blasting whatever I chose from my car stereo, I inexplicably dove into the album world via the 8-track. My first album purchase was a K-Tel various artists compilation called High Energy. While mostly disco *ahem* “classics”, it also inexplicably included Styx’s “Renegade”. Why this album rock standard was keeping company with Amii Stewart’s funked-up take of “Knock on Wood” remains a mystery, but it got K-Tel’s grubby hands on my wallet.

The Cassette Is King

With an eye on correcting the 8-track’s flaws, the cassette introduced fast forward and rewind capability and – most importantly – recordability. Now any tune that traversed its way across the radio airwaves was within grasp of any kid with a tape recorder – so long as DJ-interrupted or chopped-off song intros and outros were acceptable.

My first tape garnered me no bragging rights of growth in musical taste. People deserve forgiveness for their first, generally peer-influenced and therefore often dubious, musical purchases. However, my pass had expired by the time I plunked down change for the Xanadu soundtrack, by Olivia Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra. Even ONJ and ELO fans don’t hail it as either’s greatest work. Nonetheless, I’ll confess to still having a “you’ll-always-cherish-your-first-love” fondness for it.

It was during the cassette-dominated first half of the ‘80s, however, that my radio dial shifted from Q104’s top 40 format to the album rock of KY102. Styx’s “Renegade” was no longer the abnormality amongst pop-oriented fare, but the standard bearer. When my friend Nick and I plunged into the buy-12-albums for-a-penny record club, my first acquisitions included Styx’s Paradise Theater (natch), Journey’s Escape, Foreigner 4, REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity, Queen’s Greatest Hits, and J. Geils Band’s Freeze Frame. They didn’t afford me the hip quotient of Elvis Costello or the Clash, but they were a step-up from the Olivia, John Denver, and Neil Diamond fare in my eight-track collection.

My college years significantly expanded my musical palette. My roommate Steve was buying Aerosmith and Deep Purple and I was taping the Rush and Led Zep catalogs thanks to Steve’s head-banging pal Blake.

Ah, but Blake’s was only one music collection. Every new person represented a new audio library. More than once, I drooled my way back to my dorm room with handfuls of tapes borrowed from recent acquaintances surely skeptical about ever seeing their music again. To all the whoever-you-weres out there – thanks for Squeeze, Violent Femmes, the Smiths, the Indigo Girls – all the alternative-rock oriented stuff that most shaped my music personality. And yes, I think I returned everything.

When I wanted to actually buy music, options were limited. With Wal-Mart being my college town’s only music source, I had to satiate my hunger with occasional road trips to Streetside Records in Sedalia with my fellow tune-obsessed buddy Mike, who also conveniently had a car (a Mustang with “Bad Co.” vanity plates, no less).

Marillion, Malls, and Music Exchange

My most important college-era purchase, however, was over Christmas break during my freshman year. That fall, Marillion’s “Kayleigh” mustered a fair amount of radio airplay on KY. I was intrigued by the song, but hesitant to shell out the dough for the whole album. After all, these were pre-Internet days. There was no surfing Amazon.com to hear track samples. There weren’t used-CD stores for test spinning discs via in-store players. One had only the radio and friends to rely on – and if neither of them were playing it, you were out of luck.

However, taking the plunge was softened by my giddiness about being back on my home turf where I could shop at multiple music stores under one roof (kids, they called them malls – they’re now nearly as extinct as the 8-track). Having some Santa stocking money to blow made the art work of the song’s parent album, Misplaced Childhood, even more appealing. Just what was inside this painting of a barefoot kid in a military jacket surrounded by a rainbow, a magpie, and a poppy flower? Well, when I plunked my cash on the Camelot counter, I took the leap into what became my favorite album of all-time.

Obviously, not every risk has paid off so swimmingly. I’ve nabbed my share of duds that gathered dust on the shelf until eventual banishment to the discard pile. Still, even they resulted in fond memories. The artsy part of town that housed most of Kansas City’s bars also offered up the metro area’s best options for purchasing used music. I’d traipse down to Westport, usually with Steve #2 (so named here to distinguish him from Steve #1, my college roommate), to trade my cast-offs in hopes of venturing home with a new batch of listening treasures.

Steve #2 was quite the sport to tolerate my obsessive need to hit not one, but several stores on each spree. Music Exchange was a given, but there were other shops to hit as well. Steve #2 also patiently endured my methodical search through everything from A to Z. I often left with a dozen or more tapes. I might grab up four or five Sammy Hagar or Bob Seger albums, not because I wanted their complete discographies, but because I was trying to compile anthologies. Once I’d recorded the requisite tunes on to my own greatest-hits collection, back to the discard pile the source material went.

The Dawn of the Disc

I treaded reluctantly into the CD age. As music collectors can attest, there’s nothing quite so maddening as having to overhaul one’s music library to stay technologically current. My first venture into the world of discs was with Marillion’s 1987 album Clutching at Straws, the follow-up to Misplaced Childhood. I didn’t actually own a CD player, but had to have the bonus track not on my cassette version. Thankfully, the Steve who lived across the hall (Steve #3 for those keeping track), let me listen on his CD player.

Needless to say, it was far from my final CD. In my post-collegiate twenty-something years, I became a disc fiend. What used to be pilgrimages to Westport were now weekly treks to Disc Traders (often right after a trip to the library to read up on new releases in Billboard magazine). I was a regular on a first-name basis with the staff and bought more than a few of their recommendations. Thanks, Dan! Thanks, Saul!

A dozen years and over a thousand CDs later, I welcomed the new millennium as a newlywed and a thirty-something. I was now supposed to limit my music spending to only a handful of albums a year, and all by artists I’d first heard 20 years ago. However, music obsession trumps age and I continued to spend every bit of leisurely cash on music by new and established artists.

The Revolution Will Be Converted to MP3 Files

Another music revolution accompanied my life changes. This time, however, it came not at the hands of big-time record execs, but college student and computer programmer Shawn Fanning. The recording industry tried desperately to put the Napster genie back in the bottle. The same companies who shamelessly milked the record-buying public through the LP, 8-track, cassette, and CD eras now made the brilliant move of suing their customer base for illegal downloading and copyright infringement. This was the kind of PR nightmare that made the makers of New Coke breathe sighs of relief that finally, for the first time since 1985, someone else could be the brunt of all the worst-marketing-moves-ever jokes.

I expanded my music library by leaps and bounds. Initially, I burned my legal and ill-gotten booty onto disc (a Clapton in the ‘90s collection was the first CD I made). Eventually, though, the reality of the new age dawned on me and my computer hard drive now houses more music (35,497 songs as of this writing) than my wall of CDs.

What’s next? A card that fits in your wallet that lets you access your entire collection anywhere you go? Music on-demand just by thinking a tune and having it play in your brain? Who knows. But I’ll be ready to overhaul my collection again when the time comes.