Product (Part 1)

Jonny Brick writes about the ways that ‘the product’, then (part 1) and now (part 2), has been sold in similar and different ways in the recorded-sound era

Since the first recording techniques made it possible for ephemeral sounds to be transferred to a physical object, there have always been people attempting to make a steal pushing that object. Whether the Tin Pan Alley hucksters with their two-minute melodies or Simon Cowell taking his lead from the way television did the hard part in a musician’s career for you – instant exposure to the eye and the ear before full development of the act – there’s always been a man (more likely than a woman) behind ‘the talent’.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the time of Bachelor Boys and Mop-topped Merseybeaters, getting the talent heard was as much about timing as about skill. Dick Rowe may have seen the premature death of the guitar as justification for turning down a not-yet-ready Beatles, yet soon he would go on to sign The Rolling Stones and The Zombies, who both broke through in America after the trail blazed by The Beatles. Fifty years from then, much has changed.

Where once there were a few radio stations in the UK dictating pop music policy to a family audience, there are now thousands at the click of a mouse with no need even for a disc jockey, or even discs, to inform a listener of the song they’re hearing. (These discs would be played on the radio in exchange for gifts from the record companies in the form of payola, which digital sharing eradicates.) In the 1970s, Album-Oriented Rock music brought success to acts like The Eagles, Led Zeppelin and Meat Loaf, whose stadium rock shows all drew enormous crowds of people who found they had free time in the postwar years to express themselves through amplified music. If it wasn’t amplified, music was acoustic and perhaps political: Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan had things to say and individual voices in which to say them, but were on major record labels as they railed against the land to whom they paid their business interest.

Local scenes in New York or Detroit would promote certain bands or songwriting teams to record executives whose sound could capture a moment and be turned into profit; often, as with Berry Gordy, the same man wrote and released the songs. The metal scene of California led to the super-selling Guns N’ Roses, which in turn led to the rise of the Seattle sound of existential twentysomethings with guitars (guitar shop tills rang tunefully with profit) and pop sensibilities that led to radio play in the dying days of the Recording Era. Teenagers still wear Nirvana sweaters and Guns N’ Roses t-shirts today, and have them on the personal music devices, but the place of the great album has diminished. [Indeed, Axl Rose is leading a Guns N’ Roses residency in Las Vegas, with details here.]

As has been well documented in the last twenty years, though the music festival has experienced a boom in quantity and popularity, physical paid-for ownership of music is undesirable for a consumer with less real income of which to dispose (see this Independent piece from August of this year for evidence). Attempts to make definitive box sets and compilations are born from those who own the music, who hold the rights, to exploit the artistic value of the copyright they hold, before the act decides to go it alone or the copyright expires and enters the public domain. Examples are numerous, but the Beatles’ back catalogue is to be  reissued on vinyl despite it all being available digitally on CD and mp3 download after a long dispute with Apple’s iTunes.

As for other music of that era and the one just before, the proliferation of budget compilations, using music which has exceeded the fifty-year term set down by law, can dilute the effect of older, vintage artists from the pre-rock era. One can become blase about the blues, jazz and boogie-woogie tunes, redolent of a bygone age where the teenager was still coming into existence and revolution was slowly wafting into the air from California to Carnaby Street. The electronic sounds in the wake of Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder sat alongside the neanderthalism of punk rock, while literate pop music from the North of England acted much the same way as a hypertext online article does today. Record companies sold multiple formats of the same song, be it single mix, 12-inch or club remix, all of which increased their profits on the original song. That is to bypass entirely the presence on the music video, which catapulted Michael Jackson and Madonna to headline-grabbing prominence in the last days of the Recording Era.

As all kinds of music do enter the public domain, the newer music still under copyright restriction has to find ways to be innovative.

 

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