Hum186 wk3
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7 Radio, Recording, and Popular Music
Learning Objectives Radio was the first electronic mass medium; it was the first national broadcast medium. It
̖ Homemade YouTube videos brought the then 12-year-old Justin Bieber to music industry attention and then fame. © Ethan Miller/Billboards2012/Getty Images
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produced the networks, program genres, and stars that made television an instant success. But for many years radio and records were young people’s media; they gave voice to a generation. As such, they may be our most personally significant mass media. After studying this chapter you should be able to
Outline the history and development of the radio and sound record ing industries and radio and sound recording themselves as media. Describe the importance of early financing and regulatory decision s regarding radio and how they have shaped the nature of contemp orary broadcasting. Explain how the organizational and economic natures of the conte mporary radio and sound recording industries shape the content o f both media. Identify new and converging radio and recording technologies and their potential impact on music, the industries themselves, and list eners. Apply key radio-listening media literacy skills, especially in assessi ng the cultural value of shock jocks.
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“CAN WE LISTEN TO THE RADIO?” “We are listening to the radio.” “I mean something other than this.” “You want music?” “Yes, please, anything but public radio. Too much talk.” “OK. Here.” “What! That’s the classical music station!” “What’s wrong with that?” “Nothing . . . much.” “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘Nothing . . . much’?” “Nothing . . . much. Let me choose.” “OK. You find a station.” “Fine. Here.” “What’s that?!” “It’s the New Hot One. All the hits all the time.” “That’s not music.” “You sound like my parents.” “I don’t mean the stuff they play isn’t music, I mean the DJ is yammering away.” “Hang on. A song is coming up. Anyway, this is funny stuff.” “I don’t find jokes about minority wheelchair races funny.” “It’s all in fun.” “Fun for whom?” “What’s your problem today?” “Nothing, I just don’t find that kind of stuff funny. Here, I’ll find something.” “What’s that?” “The jazz station.” “Give me a break. How about Sports Talk?” “Nah. How about All News?” “No way. How about the All Talk station?” “Why? You need another fix of insulting chatter?” “How about silence?” “Yeah, how about it?”
In this chapter we study the technical and social beginnings of both radio and sound recording. We revisit the coming of broadcasting and see how the growth of regulatory, economic, and organizational structures led to the medium’s golden age.
The heart of the chapter covers how television changed radio and produced the medium with which we are now familiar. We review the scope and nature of contemporary radio, especially its rebirth as a local, fragmented, specialized, personal, and mobile medium. We examine how these characteristics serve advertisers and listeners. The chapter then explores the relationship between radio, the modern recording industry, popular music, and the way new and converging technologies serve and challenge all three. The popularity of shock jocks inspires our discussion
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of media literacy.
A Short History of Radio and Sound Recording The particular stations you disagree about may be different, but almost all of us have been through a conversation similar to the one in the opening vignette. Radio, the seemingly ubiquitous medium, matters to us. Because we often listen to it alone, it is personal. Radio is also mobile. It travels with us in
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the car, and we take it along in our iPods and smartphones. Radio is specific as well. Stations aim their content at very narrowly defined audiences. But these are characteristics of contemporary radio. Radio once occupied a very different place in our culture. Let’s see how it all began.
Early Radio Because both applied for patents within months of one another in the late 1890s, there remains disagreement over who “invented” radio, Eastern European immigrant Nikola Tesla, or Guglielmo Marconi, son of a wealthy Italian businessman and his Irish wife. Marconi, however, is considered the “Father of Radio” because not only was he among the first to send signals through the air, he was adroit at gaining maximum publicity for his every success. His improvements over earlier experimental designs allowed him to send and receive telegraph code over distances as great as two miles by 1896. His native Italy was not interested in his invention, so he used his mother’s contacts in Great Britain to find support and financing there. England, with a global empire and the world’s largest navy and merchant fleets, was naturally interested in longdistance wireless communication. With the financial and technical help of the British, Marconi successfully transmitted wireless signals across the English Channel in 1899 and across the Atlantic in 1901. Wireless was now a reality. Marconi was satisfied with his advance, but other scientists saw the transmission of voices by wireless as the next hurdle, a challenge that was soon surmounted.
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In 1903 Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian, invented the liquid barretter, the first audio device permitting the reception of wireless voice transmissions. His 1906 Christmas Eve
̖ Guglielmo Marconi (seated). © AP Photo
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broadcast from Brant Rock, a small New England coastal village, was the first public broadcast of voices and music. His listeners were ships at sea and a few newspaper offices equipped to receive the transmission.
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Later that same year American Lee DeForest invented the audion tube, a vacuum tube that improved and amplified wireless signals. Now the reliable transmission of clear voices and music was a reality. But DeForest’s second important contribution was that he saw radio as a means of broadcasting. The early pioneers, Marconi included, had viewed radio as a device for point-to-point communication—for example, from ship to ship or ship to shore. But in the 1907 prospectus for his radio company DeForest wrote, “It will soon be possible to distribute grand opera music from transmitters placed on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House by a Radio Telephone station on the roof to almost any dwelling in Greater New York and vicinity. . . . The same applies to large cities. Church music, lectures, etc., can be spread abroad by the Radio Telephone” (as quoted in Adams, 1996, pp. 104–106). Soon, countless “broadcasters” went on the air. Some broadcasters were giant corporations, looking to dominate the medium for profit; some were hobbyists and hams, playing with the medium for the sheer joy of it. There were so many “stations” that havoc reigned. Yet the promise of radio was such that the medium continued to mature until World War I, when the U.S. government ordered “the immediate closing of all stations for radio communications, both transmitting and receiving.”
Early Sound Recording The late 1800s have long been considered the beginning of sound recording. However, the 2008 discovery in a Paris archive of a 10-second recording by an obscure French tinkerer,
̖ Lee DeForest. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-54114]
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Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, has some audio historians rethinking recording’s roots. Scott recorded a folk song on a device he called a phonautograph in 1860, and he always thought that Thomas Edison had stolen credit that should have been his (“Edison Not,” 2008). Nonetheless, in 1877 prolific inventor Edison patented his “talking machine,” a device for replicating sound that used a hand-cranked grooved cylinder and a needle. The mechanical movement caused by the needle passing along the groove of the rotating cylinder and hitting bumps was converted into electrical energy that activated a diaphragm in a loudspeaker and produced sound. The drawback was that only one “recording” could be made of any given sound; the cylinder could not be duplicated. In 1887 that problem was solved by German immigrant Emile Berliner, whose gramophone used a flat, rotating, wax- coated disc that could easily be copied or pressed from a metal master. Two equally important Berliner contributions were the development of a sophisticated microphone and later (through his company, RCA Victor Records) the import from Europe of recordings by famous opera stars. Now people had not only a reasonably priced record player but records to play on it. The next advance was introduction of the two-sided disc by the Columbia Phonograph Company in 1905. Soon there were hundreds of phonograph or gramophone companies, and the device, by either name, was a standard feature in U.S. homes by 1920. More than 2 million machines and 107 million recordings were sold in 1919 alone. Public acceptance of the new medium was enhanced even more by development of electromagnetic recording in 1924 by Joseph P. Maxwell at Bell Laboratory.
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The parallel development and diffusion of radio and sound recording is significant. For the first time in history, radio allowed people to hear the words and music of others who were not in their presence. On recordings they could hear words and music that may have been created days, months, or even years before.
The Coming of Broadcasting The idea of broadcasting—that is, transmitting voices and music at great distances to a large number of people—predated the development of radio. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone company had a subscription music service in major cities in the late 1800s, delivering music to homes and businesses by telephone wires. A front-page story in an 1877 edition of the New York Daily Graphic suggested the possibilities of broadcasting to its readers. The public anticipated and, after DeForest’s much publicized successes, was eager for music and voices at home. Russian immigrant David Sarnoff, then an employee of the company
̖ In 1887 Emile Berliner developed the flat disc gramophone and a sophisticated microphone, both important to the widespread public acceptance of sound recordings for the home. Nipper, the trademark dog for his company, RCA Victor, is on the scene even today. © Mooziic/Alamy
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American Marconi, recognized this desire and in 1916 sent his superiors what has become famous as the “Radio Music Box Memo.” In this memo Sarnoff wrote of
a plan of development which would make radio a “household utility” in the same sense as the piano or phonograph. The idea is to bring music into the house by wireless. . . . The receiver can be designed in the form of a simple “Radio Music Box” and arranged for several different wavelengths, which should be changeable with the throwing of a single switch or pressing of a single button. (Sterling & Kitross, 1990, p. 43)
The introduction of broadcasting to a mass audience was delayed in the first two decades of the 20th century by patent fights and lawsuits. DeForest and Fessenden were both destroyed financially by the conflict. Yet when World War I ended, an enthusiastic audience awaited what had become a much-improved medium. In a series of developments that would be duplicated for television at the time of World War II, radio was transformed from an exciting technological idea into an entertainment and commercial giant. To aid the war effort, the government took over the patents relating to radio and continued to improve radio for military use. Thus, refinement and development of the technical aspects of radio continued throughout the war. Then, when the war ended in 1919, the patents were returned to their owners—and the bickering was renewed.
Concerned that the medium would be wasted and fearful that a foreign company (British Marconi) would control this vital resource, the U.S. government forced the combatants to merge. American Marconi, General Electric, American Telephone & Telegraph, and Westinghouse (in 1921)—each in control of a vital piece of technology—joined to create the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). RCA was a government-sanctioned monopoly, but its creation avoided direct government control of the new medium. Twenty-eight-year-old David Sarnoff, author of the Radio Music Box Memo, was made RCA’s commercial manager. The way for the medium’s popular growth was paved; its success was guaranteed by a public that, because of the phonograph, was already attuned to music in the home and, thanks to the just- concluded war, was awakening to the need for instant, wide-ranging news and information.
On September 30, 1920, a Westinghouse executive, impressed with press accounts of the number of listeners who were picking up broadcasts from the garage radio station of company engineer Frank Conrad, asked him to move his operation to the Westinghouse factory and expand its power. Conrad did so, and on October 27, 1920, experimental station 8XK in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, received a license from the Department of Commerce to broadcast. On November 2 this station, KDKA, made the first commercial radio broadcast, announcing the results of the presidential election that sent Warren G. Harding to the White House. By mid- 1922, there were nearly 1 million radios in American homes, up from 50,000 just a year before (Tillinghast, 2000, p. 41).
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The Coming of Regulation As the RCA agreements demonstrated, the government had a keen interest in the development, operation, and diffusion of radio. At first government interest focused on point-to-point communication. In 1910 Congress passed the Wireless Ship Act, requiring that all ships using U.S. ports and carrying more than 50 passengers have a working wireless and operator. Of course, the wireless industry did not object, as the legislation boosted sales. But after the Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic in 1912 and it was learned that hundreds of lives were lost needlessly because other ships in the area had left their radios unattended, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912, which not only strengthened rules regarding shipboard wireless but
̖ This cover of an 1877 newspaper proved prophetic in its image of speakers’ ability to “broadcast” their words. © Collection of the New-York Historical Society, USA/Bridgeman Images
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also required that wireless operators be licensed by the Secretary of Commerce and Labor.
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The Radio Act of 1912 established spheres of authority for both federal and state governments, provided for distributing and revoking licenses, fined violators, and assigned frequencies for station operation. The government was in the business of regulating what was to become broadcasting, a development that angered many operators. They successfully challenged the 1912 act in court, and eventually President Calvin Coolidge ordered the cessation of government regulation of radio despite his belief that chaos would descend on the medium.
He proved prophetic. The industry’s years of flouting the 1912 act had led it to the brink of disaster. Radio sales and profits dropped dramatically. Listeners were tired of the chaos. Stations arbitrarily changed frequencies, power, and hours of operation, and there was constant interference between stations, often intentional. Radio industry leaders petitioned Commerce Commissioner Herbert Hoover and, according to historian Erik Barnouw (1966)—who titled his book on radio’s early days A Tower in Babel—“encouraged firmness” in government efforts to regulate and control the competitors. The government’s response was a series of four National Radio Conferences involving industry experts, public officials, and government regulators. These conferences led to the Radio Act of 1927. Order was restored, and the industry prospered. But the broadcasters had made an important concession to secure this saving intervention. The 1927 act authorized them to use the channels, which belonged to the public, but not to own them. Broadcasters were thus simply the caretakers of the airwaves, a national resource.
The act further stated that when a license was awarded, the standard of evaluation would be the public interest, convenience, or necessity. The Federal Radio Commission (FRC) was established to administer the provisions of the act. This trustee model of regulation is based on two premises (Bittner, 1994). The first is the philosophy of spectrum scarcity. Because broadcast spectrum space is limited and not everyone who wants to broadcast can, those who are granted licenses to serve a local area must accept regulation. The second reason for regulation revolves around the issue of influence. Broadcasting reaches virtually everyone in society. By definition, this ensures its power.
The Communications Act of 1934 replaced the 1927 legislation, substituting the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for the FRC and cementing its regulatory authority, which continues today.
Advertising and the Networks
̖ The wireless-telegraphy room of the Titanic. Despite the heroic efforts of wireless operator Jack Philips, scores of people died needlessly in the sinking of that great ocean liner because ships in its vicinity did not monitor their receivers. © Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty Images
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While the regulatory structure of the medium was evolving, so were its financial bases. The formation of RCA had ensured that radio would be a commercial, profit-based system. The industry supported itself through the sale of receivers; that is, it operated radio stations in order to sell radios. The problem was that once everybody had a radio, people would stop buying them. The solution was advertising. On August 22, 1922, New York station WEAF accepted the first radio commercial, a 10-minute spot for Long Island brownstone apartments. The cost of the ad was $50.
The sale of advertising led to establishment of the national radio networks. Groups of stations, or affiliates, could deliver larger audiences, realizing greater advertising revenues, which would allow them to hire bigger stars and produce better programming, which would attract larger audiences, which could be sold for even greater fees to advertisers. RCA set up a 24-station network, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), in 1926. A year later it bought AT&T’s stations and launched a second network, NBC Blue (the original NBC was renamed NBC Red). The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was also founded in 1927, but it struggled until 26-year-old millionaire cigar maker William S. Paley bought it in 1928, making it a worthy competitor to NBC. The fourth network, Mutual, was established in 1934 largely on the strength of its
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hit Western The Lone Ranger. Four midwestern and eastern stations came together to sell advertising on it and other shows; soon Mutual had 60 affiliates. Mutual differed from the other major national networks in that it did not own and operate its own flagship stations (called O&Os, for owned and operated). By 1938 the four national networks had affiliated virtually all the large U.S. stations and the majority of smaller operations as well. These corporations grew so powerful that in 1943 the government forced NBC to divest itself of one of its networks. It sold NBC Blue to Life Saver candy maker Edward Noble, who renamed it the American Broadcasting Company (ABC).
The fundamental basis of broadcasting in the United States was set:
The Golden Age The networks ushered in radio’s golden age. Although the 1929–1939 Great Depression damaged the phonograph industry, with sales dipping to as few as 6 million records in 1932, it helped boost radio. Phonographs and records cost money, but once a family bought a radio, a whole world of entertainment and information was at its disposal, free of charge. The number of homes with radios grew from 12 million in 1930 to 30 million in 1940, and half of them had not one but two receivers. Ad revenues rose from $40 million to $155 million over the same period. Between them, the four national networks broadcast 156 hours of network-originated programming a week. New genres became fixtures during this period: comedy (The Jack Benny Show, Fibber McGee and Molly), audience participation (Professor Quiz, Truth or Consequences, Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge), children’s shows (Little Orphan Annie, The Lone Ranger), soap operas (Oxydol’s Own Ma Perkins, The Guiding Light), and drama (Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater of the Air). News, too, became a radio staple.
Radio broadcasters were private, commercially owned enterprises, rather than government operations.
Governmental regulation was based on the public interest. Stations were licensed to serve specific localities, but national networks programmed the most lucrative hours with the largest audiences.
Entertainment and information were the basic broadcast content. Advertising formed the basis of financial support for broadcasting.
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̖ George Burns and Gracie Allen were CBS comedy stars during radio’s golden age. They were among the many radio performers to move easily and successfully to television. © Bettmann/Corbis
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RADIO AND SOUND RECORDING IN WORLD WAR II The golden age of radio shone even more brightly after Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese in 1941, propelling the United States into World War II. Radio was used to sell war bonds, and much content was aimed at boosting the nation’s morale. The war increased the desire for news, especially from abroad. The war also caused a paper shortage, reducing advertising space in newspapers. No new stations were licensed during the war years, and the 950 existing broadcasters reaped all the broadcast advertising revenues, as well as additional ad revenues that otherwise would have gone to newspapers. Ad revenues were up to $310 million by the end of World War II in 1945.
Sound recording benefited from the war as well. Prior to World War II, recording in the United States was done either directly to master metal disc or on wire recorders, literally magnetic recording on metal wire. But GIs brought a new technology back from occupied Germany, a tape recorder that used an easily handled paper tape on a reel. Then, in 1947, Columbia Records introduced a new 3⅓ rpm (rotations-per-minute) long-playing plastic record perfected by Peter Goldmark. A big advance over the previous standard of 78 rpm, it was more durable than the older shellac discs and played for 23 rather than 3⅓ minutes. Columbia offered the technology free to all other record companies. RCA refused the offer, introducing its own 45 rpm disc in 1948. It played for only 3⅓ minutes and had a huge center hole requiring a special adapter. Still, RCA persisted in its marketing, causing a speed war that was settled in 1950 when the two giants compromised on 33⅓ as the standard for classical music and 45 as the standard for pop. And it was the 45, the single, that sustained the music business until the mid-1960s, when the Beatles not only ushered in the “British invasion” of rock ‘n’ roll but also transformed popular music into a 33⅓ album-dominant cultural force, shaping today’s popular music and helping reinvent radio.
TELEVISION ARRIVES When the war ended and radio licenses were granted again, the number of stations grew rapidly to 2,000. Annual ad revenues reached $454 million in 1950. Then came television. Network affiliation dropped from 97% in 1945 to 50% by the mid-1950s, as stations “went local” in the face of television’s national dominance. National radio advertising income dipped to $35 million in 1960, the year that television found its way into 90% of U.S. homes. If radio were to survive, it would have to find new functions.
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̖ The Iowa radio station that bought space on the cover of industry “bible” Broadcasting/Telecasting wanted readers to believe that all was well in radio–and in 1953. It wasn’t. Courtesy of Broadcasting & Cable
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Radio and Its Audiences Radio more than survived; it prospered by changing the nature of its relationship with its audiences. The easiest way to understand this is to see pretelevision radio as television is today —nationally oriented, broadcasting an array of recognizable entertainment program formats, populated by well-known stars and personalities, and consumed primarily in the home, typically with people sitting around the set. Posttelevision radio is local, fragmented, specialized, personal, and mobile. Whereas pretelevision radio was characterized by the big national networks, today’s radio is dominated by formats, a particular sound characteristic of a local station.
Who are the people who make up radio’s audience? In an average week, more than 298 million people, 91% of all Americans 12 and over, will listen to the radio. Broadcast radio’s audience growth, however, is stagnant. That 91% figure is in fact a decline from the 95.6% who listened regularly in 2009. And while the audience’s size has remained relatively constant for the last few years, time spent listening has fallen, dropping several minutes in
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that span. But most troubling to radio professionals is that time listening among young people is in decline (Graser, 2015). You can see a demographic breakdown of listeners in Figure 1. Note that other than those over 65, it’s teens and young adults who listen the least. The industry itself attributes this situation to dissatisfaction with unimaginative programming, hypercommercialization—on average about 12 minutes of commercials an hour—and the availability of online music sources and mobile technologies like tablets and smartphones. Broadcast veteran Bob Lefsetz explains, “If you don’t think new [digital] services will kill [commercial] radio, you must like inane commercials, you must like me-too music, you must think airplay on one of these outlets will sell millions of albums, but that almost never happens anymore” (2013, p. 30). As it is, 47% of Americans now listen to audio on digital devices, 75% of all 12- to 24-year-olds (Webster, 2014).
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̖ Figure 1 Percentage of Americans Who Listen to the Radio Every Week by Age. Source: Nielsen, 2014.
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Scope and Nature of the Radio Industry There are 15,432 broadcast radio stations operating in the United States today: 4,705 commercial AM stations, 6,652 commercial FM stations, and 4,075 noncommercial FM stations. These are joined on the dial by 942 Low Power FM (LPFM) stations. There are more than two radios for every person in the United States. The industry as a whole sells more than $17 billion a year of ad time, and radio remains people’s primary means of consuming audio content.
FM, AM, and Noncommercial Radio
Photo Source: © Stockbyte/PunchStock RF
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Although FMs constitute 59% of all commercial stations (to AMs’ 41%), they account for 85% of all radio listening (Wyatt, 2013). This has to do with the technology behind each. The FM (frequency modulation) signal is wider, allowing the broadcast not only of stereo but also of better fidelity to the original sound than the narrower AM (amplitude modulation) signal. As a result, people attracted to music gravitate toward FM. People favoring news, sports, and information tend to find themselves listening to the AM dial. AM signals travel farther than FM signals, making them perfect for rural parts of the country. But rural areas tend to be less heavily populated, and most AM stations serve fewer listeners. The FCC approved stereo AM in 1985, but relatively few people have AM stereo receivers. There seems to be little demand for news, sports, and information in stereo.
Many of today’s FM stations are noncommercial—that is, they accept no advertising. When the national frequency allocation plan was established during the deliberations leading to the 1934 Communications Act, commercial radio broadcasters persuaded Congress that they alone could be trusted to develop this valuable medium. They promised to make time available for religious, children’s, and other educational programming. No frequencies were set aside for noncommercial radio to fulfill these functions. At the insistence of critics who contended that the commercial broadcasters were not fulfilling their promise, in 1945 the FCC set aside all FM frequencies between 88.1 and 91.9 megahertz for noncommercial radio. Today these noncommercial stations not only provide local service, but many also offer national network quality programming through affiliation with National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Radio International (PRI) or through a number of smaller national networks, such as Pacifica Radio.
Radio Is Local No longer able to compete with television for the national audience in the 1950s, radio began to attract a local audience. Because it costs much more to run a local television station than a local radio station, advertising
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rates on radio tend to be much lower than on television. Local advertisers can afford radio more easily than they can television, which increases the local flavor of radio. And radio can be localized even more narrowly than by city or town. For example, Chicago’s two airports are served by a round-the-clock station, AIR Chicago.
Radio Is Fragmented Radio stations are widely distributed throughout the United States. Virtually every town—even those with only a few hundred residents—has at least one station. The number of stations licensed in an area is a function of both population and proximity to other towns. Small towns may have only one AM or FM station, and a big city can have as many as 40 stations. This fragmentation—many stations serving many areas—makes possible contemporary radio’s most important characteristic, its ability to specialize.
Radio Is Specialized When radio became a local medium, it could no longer program the expensive, star-filled genres of its golden age. The problem now was how to program a station with interesting content and do so economically. A disc jockey playing records was the best solution. And stations soon learned that a highly specialized, specific audience of particular interest to certain advertisers could be attracted with specific types of music. Format radio was born. Of course, choosing a specific format means accepting that many potential listeners will not tune in. But in format radio the size of the audience is secondary to its composition.
American radio is home to about 60 different formats, from the most common, which include Country, Top 40, Album-Oriented Rock, and All Talk, to the somewhat uncommon, for example, World Ethnic. Many stations, especially those in rural areas, offer secondary servic es (formats). For example, a country station may broadcast a religious format for 10 hours on Saturday and Sunday. Figure 2 shows those typical formats. A more precise number and listing is difficult because radio’s specialization allows for an infinite variety of formats, for example Houston’s B92, whose format changed from News to All-Beyoncé in 2014.
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̖ Figure 2 Radio Formats. Source: Radio Station World, 2015. Photo Source: © RubberBall Productions RF
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Format radio offers stations many advantages beyond low-cost operations and specialized audiences that appeal to advertisers. Faced with falling listenership or declining advertising revenues, a station can simply change disc jockeys (DJs) and discs. Neither television nor the
̖ In 2014, Houston’s B92 changed formats from News to All-Beyoncé © Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty Images
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print media have this content flexibility. When confronted with competition from a station with a similar format, a station can further narrow its audience by specializing its formula even more.
Music format radio requires a disc jockey. Someone has to spin the discs and provide the talk. The modern DJ is the invention of Todd Storz, who bought KOWH in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1949. He turned the radio personality/music formula on its head. Before Storz, radio announcers would talk most of the time and occasionally play music to rest their voices. Storz wanted more music, less talk. He thought radio should sound like a jukebox—the same few songs people wanted to hear played over and over again. His Top 40 format, which demanded strict adherence to a playlist (a predetermined sequence of selected records) of popular music for young people, up-tempo pacing, and catchy production gimmicks, became the standard for the posttelevision popular music station. Gordon McClendon of KLIF in Dallas refined the Top 40 format and developed others, such as Beautiful Music, and is therefore often considered, along with Storz, one of the two pioneers of format radio.
Radio Is Personal With the advent of television, the relationship of radio with its audience changed. Whereas families had previously gathered around the radio set to listen together, we now listen to the radio alone. We
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select personally pleasing formats, and we listen as an adjunct to other personally important activities.
Radio Is Mobile The mobility of radio accounts in large part for its personal nature. We can listen anywhere, at any time. We listen at work, while exercising, while sitting in the sun. By 1947 the combined sale of car and alarm clock radios exceeded that of traditional living-room receivers, and in 1951 the annual production of car radios exceeded that of home receivers for the first time. Today, nearly three-quarters of all traditional radio listening occurs away from home (McDuling, 2014).
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The Business of Radio The distinctive characteristics of radio serve its listeners, but they also make radio a thriving business.
Radio as an Advertising Medium Advertisers enjoy the specialization of radio because it gives them access to homogeneous groups of listeners to whom products can be pitched. Income earned from the sale of airtime is called billings. Local time and national spots (for example, Prestone Antifreeze buys time on
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several thousand stations in winter areas) account for 97% of all billings; network time makes up the rest (Sass, 2015b). The cost of time is based on the ratings, the percentage of the total available audience reached.
Radio is an attractive advertising medium for reasons other than its delivery of a homogeneous audience. Radio ads are inexpensive to produce and therefore can be changed, updated, and specialized to meet specific audience demands. Ads can also be specialized to different times of the day. For example, a hamburger restaurant may have one version of its commercial for the morning audience, in which its breakfast menu is touted, and a different version for the evening audience driving home, dreading the thought of cooking dinner. Radio time is inexpensive to buy, especially when compared with television. An audience loyal to a specific format station is presumably loyal to those who advertise on it. Radio is the listeners’ friend; it travels with them and talks to them personally.
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Deregulation and Ownership The business of radio is being altered by deregulation and changes in ownership rules. To ensure that there were many different perspectives in the cultural forum, the FCC had long limited the number of radio stations one person or company could own to one AM and one FM locally and seven AMs and seven FMs nationally. These numbers were revised upward in the late 1980s, and controls were almost totally eliminated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Now, thanks to this deregulation, there are no national ownership limits, and one person or company can own as many as eight stations in one market, depending on the size of the market. This situation has allowed duopoly—one person or company owning and managing multiple radio stations in a single market—to explode. Since the passage of the 1996 act, more than 10,000 radio stations have been sold, and there are now 1,100 fewer station owners, a 30% decline. The vast majority of these sales have been to already large radio groups such as Clear Channel and Cumulus, with 850 and 525 stations, respectively. As a result, in 25 of the 50 largest radio markets, three companies claim 80% of all listeners. In 43 different cities, one- third of the radio stations are owned by a single company, making radio “the most consolidated industry in the media” (Morrison, 2011).
This concentration is a source of concern for many radio professionals. Local public affairs shows now make up less than one-half of 1% of all commercial broadcast time in the United States. “There is a crisis,” said FCC Commissioner Michael Copps (2011), “when more than one- third of our commercial broadcasters offer little to no news whatsoever to their communities of license. America’s news and information resources keep shrinking and hundreds of stories that could inform our citizens go untold and, indeed, undiscovered. Where is the vibrancy when hundreds of newsrooms have been decimated and tens of thousands of reporters are walking the street in search of a job instead of working the beat in search of a story?” As for the music, in 2011, when Clear Channel and Cumulus collectively laid off “dozens to hundreds” of DJs in a move toward “more automated or national syndicated programming” (Sass, 2011), veteran Los Angeles rock DJ Jim Ladd said, “It’s really bad news. It was people in my profession that first played Tom Petty, first played the Doors. But the people programming stations now are not music people—they’re business people” (in Knopper, 2011, p. 19). Low Power FM, 10- to 100- watt nonprofit community radio stations with a reach of only a few miles, are one response to radio concentration. As a result of the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which enjoyed wide bipartisan support in Congress, 942 LPFM stations, serving all 50 states, now offer opportunities for additional radio voices to serve their local listenerships. The FCC to this day encourages the growth of LPFM with regular online webinars explaining the application process to potential operators of what Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel calls a special “voice in the air. One that rises above the din and provides local radio with unique character” (2014).
̖ Fans debate whether Todd Storz or Gordon McClendon first invented the DJ. But there is no dispute that Alan Freed, first in Cleveland and then in New York, established the DJ as a star. Freed, here in a 1958 photo, is credited with introducing America’s White teenagers to rhythm ‘n’ blues artists like Chuck Berry and Little Richard and ushering in the age of rock ‘n’ roll. © Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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Scope and Nature of the Recording Industry When the DJs and Top 40 formats saved radio in the 1950s, they also changed for all time popular music and, by extension, the recording industry. Disc jockeys were color-deaf in their selection of records. They introduced record buyers to rhythm ‘n’ blues in the music of African American artists such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Until the mid-1950s the work of these performers had to be covered—rerecorded by White artists such as Perry Como—before it was aired. Teens loved the new sound, however, and it became the foundation of their own subculture, as well as the basis for the explosion in recorded music. See the essay, “Rock ‘n’ R oll, Radio, and Race Relations,” for more on rock’s roots.
Today more than 5,000 U.S. companies annually release around 100,000 new albums on thousands of different labels. American music buyers purchased 1.69 billion pieces of music— digital and physical—in 2013, a 6.5% decline from the previous year (Friedlander, 2014).
The Major Recording Companies Three major recording companies control 89% of the global recorded music market. Two (Sony and Universal) control 60% of the world’s $15 billion global music market. Two of the three are foreign-owned:
Sony, controlling about 22% of the world music market, is a Japanese-owned
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Critics have long voiced concern over conglomeration and internationalization in the music business, a concern that centers on the traditional cultural value of music, especially for young people. Multibillion-dollar conglomerates typically are not rebellious in their cultural tastes, nor are they usually willing to take risks on new ideas. These duties have fallen primarily to the independent labels, companies such as Real World Records and Epitaph. Still, problems with the music industry–audience relationship remain and have contributed to its current turmoil.
Cultural homogenization is the worrisome outcome of virtually all the world’s influential recording being controlled by a few profit-oriented giants. If bands or artists cannot immediately deliver the goods, they aren’t signed. So derivative artists and manufactured groups dominate—for example, Miley Cyrus and One Direction.
The dominance of profit over artistry worries many music fans. When a major label must spend millions to sign a bankable artist such as Michael Jackson ($250 million to his estate) or Jay Z ($150 million) or Bruce Springsteen ($110 million), it typically pares lesser-known, potentially more innovative artists from its roster.
Critics and industry people alike see the ascendance of profits over artistry as a problem for the industry itself, as well as for the music and its listeners. Record industry sales have dropped consistently over the past decade, with the steepest fall-off coming in more recent years. The reason for this state of affairs, say many music critics, is not Internet piracy, as asserted by the recording industry, but the industry itself. As music critic John Seabrook (2003) explains, “The record industry has helped to create these thieving, lazy, and disloyal fans. By marketing superficial, disposable pop stars, labels persuade fans to treat the music as superficial and disposable.” He quotes legendary music producer Malcolm McLaren: “The amazing thing about the death of the record industry is that no one cares. If the movie industry died, you’d probably have a few people saying, ‘Oh, this is too bad—after all, they gave us Garbo and Marilyn
corporate group. Its labels include Columbia, Epic, RCA, and Arista.
New York–based Warner Music Group, controlling about 16%, is owned by billionnaire Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries and several private investors. Its labels include Atlantic, Asylum, and Warner Brothers. Universal Music Group, controlling about 37%, is owned by French conglomerate Vivendi Universal and controls labels such as MCA, Capitol, and Def Jam Records (all data from Smirke, 2014 and “UMG,” 2014).
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Monroe.’ But now the record industry is dying, and no one gives a damn” (p. 52). What kept the red ink from flowing even faster was strong sales in catalogu e albums (more than 30% of all discs sold), albums more than three years old. However, sales of recent catalogue albums, that is, those that have been out for 15 months to three years, have fallen dramatically over the last five years, further damaging the industry’s bottom line. “Recent catalogue” cannot become “catalogue” unless a label stays with an artist, allowing him or her to grow, possibly through three or four albums. Look at the names of the best-selling albums and artists in Figure 3. How many recent or current artists and albums do you think will ever join these ranks? Critics of the ascendance of profits over artistry argue that the industry simply lacks the patience to develop careers.
Promotion overshadows the music, say the critics. If groups or artists don’t come across well on television or are otherwise a challenge to promote (for example, they do not fit an easily recognizable niche), they aren’t signed. Again, the solution is to create marketable artists from scratch. Promoting tours is also an issue. If bands or artists do not have corporate sponsorship
̖ Figure 3 The Top 10 Best-selling Albums and Artists of All Time, U.S. Sales Only. Source: Recording Industry Association of America (www.riaa.com). Photo Source: © P. Ughetto/PhotoAlto RF
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for their tours, there is no tour. If musicians do not tour, they cannot create an enthusiastic fan base. But if they do not have an enthusiastic fan base, they cannot attract the corporate sponsorship necessary to mount a tour. This makes radio even more important for the introduction of new artists and forms of music, but radio, too, is increasingly driven by profit- maximizing format narrowing and is therefore dependent on the major labels’ definition of playable artists. As a result, when the Internet began to undermine a complacent industry’s long-profitable business model, it was ill prepared to meet the challenges that came its way. Radio veteran Lefsetz comments again, “Music has become a second-class citizen because it’s got no self-respect. . . . The enemy is not the techies, but those who make the music and promote it—who have no conviction and can’t say no to a payday. We judge everything by money, and however much we’ve got is never enough” (2015, p. 26).
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USING MEDIA TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE Rock ’n’ Roll, Radio, and Race Relations
After World War II African Americans in the United States refused to remain invisible. Having fought in segregated units in Europe and proven their willingness to fight and die for freedom abroad, they openly demanded freedom at home. Some Whites began to listen. President Harry Truman, recognizing the absurdity of racial separation in the self- proclaimed “greatest democracy on earth,” desegregated the armed forces by executive order in 1948. These early stirrings of equality led to a sense among African Americans that anything was possible, and that feeling seeped into their music. What had been called cat, sepia, or race music took on a new tone. While this new sound borrowed from traditional Black music—gospel, blues, and sad laments over slavery and racial injustice— it was different, much different. Music historian Ed Ward said that this bolder, more aggressive music “spoke to a shared experience, not just to Black (usually rural Black) life,” and it would become the “truly biracial popular music in this country” (Ward, Stokes, & Tucker, 1986, p. 83).
Hundreds of small independent record companies sprang up to produce this newly labeled rhythm and blues (R&B), music focusing on Americans’ shared experience with topics like sex and alcohol that were part of life for people of all colors. With its earthy lyrics and thumping dance beat, R&B very quickly found an audience in the 1950s, one composed largely of urban Blacks (growing in number as African Americans increasingly fled the South) and White teenagers.
The major record companies took notice, and rather than sign already successful R&B artists, they had their White artists cover the Black hits. The Penguins’ “Earth Angel” was covered by the reassuringly named Crew Cuts, who also covered the Chords’ “Sh-Boom.” Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” was covered by both the Johnny Long and Ralph Marterie orchestras. Even Bill Haley and the Comets’ youth anthem “Shake, Rattle and Roll” was a cover of a Joe Turner tune.
But these covers actually served to introduce even more White teens to the new music, and these kids demanded the original versions. This did not escape the attention of Sam Phillips, who in 1952 founded Sun Records in an effort to bring Black music to White kids (“If I could find a White man who had the Negro sound, I could make a billion dollars,” he is reported to have mused [“Why Elvis Still Lives,” 2002]). In 1954 he found that man: Elvis Presley.
The situation also caught the attention of Cleveland DJ Alan Freed, whose nationally distributed radio (and later television) show featured Black R&B tunes, never covers. Freed began calling the music he played rock ‘n’ roll (to signify that it was Black and White youth
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music), and by 1955, when Freed took his show to New York, the cover business was dead. Black performers were recording and releasing their own music to a national audience, and people of all colors were tuning in.
Now that the kids had a music of their own, and now that a growing number of radio stations were willing to program it, a youth culture began to develop, one that was antagonistic toward their parents’ culture. The music was central to this antagonism, not only because it was gritty and real but also because it exposed the hypocrisy of adult culture.
For young people of the mid-1950s and 1960s, the music of Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, and Chuck Berry made a lie of all that their parents, teachers, and government leaders had said about race, the inferiority of African Americans, and Blacks’ satisfaction with the status quo.
Ralph Bass, a producer for independent R&B label Chess Records, described the evolution to historian David Szatmary. When he was touring with Chess’s R&B groups in the early 1950s, “they didn’t let whites into the clubs. Then they got ‘white spectator tickets’ for the worst corner of the joint. They had to keep the white kids out, so they’d have white nights sometimes, or they’d put a rope across the middle of the floor. The blacks on one side, the whites on the other, digging how the blacks were dancing and copying them. Then, hell, the rope would come down, and they’d all be dancing together. Salt and pepper all mixed together” (Szatmary, 2000, p. 21).
R&B and rock ‘n’ roll did not end racism. But the music made a difference, one that would eventually make it possible for Americans who wanted to do so to free themselves of racism’s ugly hold. Rock music (and the radio stations that played it) would again nudge the nation toward its better tendencies during the antiwar and civil rights movements of the late 1960s. And it is against this backdrop, a history of popular music making as real a difference as any piece of official legislation, that contemporary critics lament the homogenizing of popular music. Music can and has made a difference. Can and will it ever again? they ask.
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Trends and Convergence in Radio and Sound Recording Emerging and changing technologies have affected the production and distribution aspects of both radio and sound recording.
The Impact of Television We have seen how television fundamentally altered radio’s structure and relationship with its audiences. Television, specifically cable channel MTV, changed the recording industry, too. MTV’s introduction in 1981 helped pull the industry out of its disastrous 1979 slump, but at a price. First, the look of concerts has changed. No longer is it sufficient to pack an artist or group
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into a hall or stadium with a few thousand screaming fans. Now a concert must be an extravagant multimedia event approximating the sophistication of a music video. The set for Lady Gaga’s recent “Born This Way Ball” tour, for example, required 15 moving trucks to haul it from venue to venue. This means that fewer acts take to the road, changing the relationship between musicians and fans. Second, the radio-recording industry relationship has changed. Even as MTV began to program fewer and fewer music videos, record companies grew even more reliant on television to introduce new music. American Idol contestants, for example, accounted for 60 Number One hits and 14 platinum (over a million sales) albums in the first seven years after the show’s 2002 debut. Labels now time record releases to artists’ television appearances, and new and old tunes alike find heavy play on television shows. Songs from Glee made their way to the Billboard Hot 100 25 times in the show’s first season and 80 in its second; the largely unknown cast sold 62 million songs in its first five seasons (Barker, 2014). And if television has become the new radio, so has the Internet. YouTube served as the career launch pad for pop star Justin Bieber, who in 2008 used a series of homemade videos of his 12- year-old self singing in the mirror and around his hometown to catch the eye of the star-hungry record industry, as it did for 16-year-old New Zealander Lorde. Her success as a self-release, free-download Internet music star led Universal to commercially distribute her work, making both the song “Royals” and the artist global smash hits. Universal has since established Awesomeness Music, a label specifically designed to record YouTube talent like Cimorelli, singing sisters from California whose channel has more than 2.7 million subscribers.
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Satellite and Cable The convergence of radio and satellite has aided the rebirth
̖ TV is the new radio. Labels time record releases to tunes’ presence on shows like Glee. © Adam Rose/Fox/Courtesy Everett Collection
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of the radio networks. Music and other forms of radio content can be distributed quite inexpensively to thousands of stations. As a result, one “network” can provide very different services to its very different affiliates. Sports broadcaster ESPN, for example, maintains its own radio network, and Westwood One distributes the Rick Dees Weekly Top 40. In addition, Westwood One, through its syndication operations, delivers thousands of varied network and program syndication services to almost every commercial station in the country. The low cost of producing radio programming, however, makes the establishment of other, even more specialized networks possible. Satellites, too, make access to syndicated content and formats affordable for many stations. Syndicators can deliver news, top 10 shows, and other content to stations on a market-by-market basis. They can also provide entire formats, requiring local stations, if they wish, to do little more than insert commercials into what appears to listeners to be a local broadcast.
Satellite has another application as well. Many listeners now receive “radio” through their cable televisions in the form of satellite-delivered DMX (Digital Music Express). Direct satellite home, office, and automobile delivery of audio by digital audio radio service (DAR S) brings Sirius XM Radio to more than 27 million subscribers by offering hundreds of commercial channels—primarily talk, sports, and traffic—and commercial-free channels— primarily music. Those numbers will likely continue to grow because the company has arrangements with every major carmaker in the country to offer its receivers as a factory- installed option.
Satellite radio’s true impact on the radio and recording industries, however, may be more than simply offering a greater variety of listening options. Because despite the fact that traditional radio station operators continue to dismiss satellite radio for its relatively small audience, those same operators have begun to change the sound of their stations in response to the new technology. Some are reducing the number of commercials they air, adding new songs and artists to their playlists, and introducing new formats. Many are also beefing up their local news operations. Both radio and popular music should be better for the change.
Terrestrial Digital Radio Since late 2002, thousands of radio stations have begun broadcasting terrestrial (land-base d) digital radio. Relying on digital compression technology called in-band-on-channel (IB OC), terrestrial digital radio allows broadcasters to transmit not only their usual analog signal, but one or more digital signals using their existing spectrum space. And although IBOC also improves sound fidelity, making possible high-definition radio, most stations using the technology see its greatest value in pay services—for example, subscription data delivery. IBOC has yet to completely replace analog radio, as many stations today continue to air both digital and analog services.
Web Radio and Podcasting Radio’s convergence with digital technologies is nowhere more pronounced and potentially
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profound than in Web radio, the delivery of “radio” directly to individual listeners over the Internet, and in podcasting, recording and downloading of audio files stored on servers, or, in the words of Fortune technology writer Peter Lewis (2005), “Simultaneously a rebellion against the blandness of commercial radio, a demonstration of time shifting for radio, just as TiVo allows time shifting for television, and a celebration of the Internet’s power to let individuals offer their own voices to a global audience” (p. 204).
First, Web radio. Tens of thousands of “radio stations” exist on the Web in one of two forms. Radio simulcasts are traditional, over-the-air stations transmitting their signals online. Some simply re-create their original broadcasts, but more often, the simulcast includes additional information, such as song lyrics or artists’ biographical information and concert dates.
Bitcasters, Web-only radio stations, can be
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accessed only online. There are narrowly targeted bitcasts, such as Indie 103.1, a Los Angeles alternative rock station, and allwor-ship.com, a Christian station Webcasting from Birmingham, Alabama. But the most dramatic evidence of the popularity of bitcasting exists in the success of the scores of streaming services that allow the simultaneous downloading and accessing of music. The most successful streaming service, Pandora, is platform agnostic, available on virtually every new digital device, not only the obvious like smartphones, televisions, and car radios, but also the less-so, for example WiFi-enabled refrigerators. Listeners, who log more than 1.7 billion hours a month (Sisario, 2015), can pay a small monthly fee to hear the service without commercials, but the vast majority of its 81 million subscribers tune in for free and hear demographically and taste-specific commercials. Pandora accomplishes this ad specificity by coupling it with its Music Genome Project. After listeners tell Pandora what artists they like, the Genome Project, according to the company, “will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings— new and old, well known and completely obscure—to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice.” Listeners can create up to 100 unique “stations,” personally refining them even more if they wish, and at any time, they can purchase the tune they are hearing with a simple click.
With more than 15 million subscribers worldwide, Spotify came to the U.S. in 2011. Using a “freemium model,” it offers listeners more than 30 million songs. They can listen for free, hearing commercials and living with limits on how much music they can stream, or they can pay a small monthly fee for premium limitless, commercial-free listening. Including other streaming services such as Slacker, Rdio, Apple’s iTunes Radio, Microsoft’s game console– based Xbox Music, Clear Channel’s iHeart Radio, and YouTube Music Key, nearly half of U.S. Internet users stream music, and this online radio is the country’s fastest-growing way to listen to music (Sass, 2015a).
Podcasts, however, because they are posted online, do not require streaming software. They can be downloaded, either on demand or automatically (typically by subscription), to any digital device that has an MP3 player, including PCs, laptops, and smartphones. Nearly 23,000 active podcasters are now online, and they cover every conceivable topic on which an individual or organization cares to comment. And while podcasting was begun in earnest in 2004 by individual techies, audio bloggers, and DJ-wannabes, within a year they were joined by “professional” podcasters such as record companies, commercial and public radio stations, and big media companies like ESPN, CNN, Bravo, and Disney. Lis–tenership has also exploded as smartphones and Bluetooth-enabled cars have become ubiquitous and as more people have broadband Internet access. Fifteen percent of Americans regularly listen to podcasts, more than 75 million people and up from 8% in 2008 (“Opening shot,” 2015); and in 2014, the iTunes store recorded its one billionth podcast subscription (Kang, 2014).
Smartphones, Tablets, and Social Networking Sites One of radio’s distinguishing characteristics, as we’ve seen, is its portability. Smartphones and tablets reinforce that benefit. For example, more than half of all Pandora listening is mobile,
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and it is the leading audio app on the iPhone and iPad. Twenty-six percent of smartphone owners listen to streamed
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music while driving by connecting their devices to their cars’ sound systems, and overall, two-thirds of radio listeners access music from their smartphones regardless of location (Webster, 2014). You can see the sources of music consumption for people between 18 and 29 years old in Figure 4.
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Much smartphone and tablet listening occurs via social networking sites’ streaming services such as Facebook’s free music links to sites such as Spotify and Pandora. Digital technology, so much a threat to the traditional recording industry business model, has also helped the labels’ balance sheets in an unlikely manner—the sale of music to mobile phones. The number of ring- tone downloads, people downloading recorded music to serve as the alerting sound on their phones, has fallen off precipitously over the last few years, but it is still a $1 billion a year global business (Friedlander, 2014).
Digital Technology In the 1970s the basis of both the recording and radio industries changed from analog to digita l recording. That is, sound went from being preserved as waves, whether physically on a disc or tape or through the air, to conversion into 1s and 0s logged in millisecond intervals in a computerized translation process. When replayed at the proper speed, the resulting sound was not only continuous but pristine—no hum, no hiss. The CD, or compact disc, was introduced in 1983 using digital coding on a 4.7-inch disc read by a laser beam. In 1986 Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits became the first million-selling CD. In 1988 the sale of CDs surpassed that of vinyl discs for the first time, and today CDs account for 10% of all music sales.
Convergence with computers and the Internet offers other challenges and opportunities to the radio and recording industries. The way the recording industry operates has been dramatically altered by the Internet. Traditionally, a record company signs an artist, produces the artist’s music, and promotes the artist and music through a variety of outlets but primarily through the distribution of music to radio stations. Then listeners, learning about the artist and music through radio, go to a record store and buy the music. But this has changed. Music fans are now “in a new century and floating free with more sounds than ever,” writes music critic Gabriel Boylan (2010, p. 34). And while it is true that the top 1% of all bands and solo artists collect 80% of all the revenue from recorded music (Thompson, 2015), more artists than ever are building profitable musical careers by finding new ways of interacting with their fans and the music industry, as you can read in the essay, “The Future of the Music Business?”
̖ Figure 4 How 18- to 29-Year-Olds Consume Music. Source: Graser, 2015. Photo Source: © L. Mouton/PhotoAlto RF
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Artists themselves are using the Internet for
̖ Even the stars are bypassing the big labels. Kanye West and Jay-Z, pictured here, have exclusive distribution deals with Amazon and iTunes. © Jason Squires/WireImage/Getty Images
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their own production, promotion, and distribution, bypassing radio and the recording companies altogether. Musicians are using their own sites, social networking sites, and sites designed specifically to feature new artists, such as purevolume.co m, to connect directly with listeners. Fans can hear (and in some cases, even download) new tunes for free, buy music downloads, CDs, and merchandise, get concert information and tickets, and chat with artists and other fans. You may never have heard of the bands Hawthorne Heights, Pomplamoose, or Nicki Bluhm and the Gamblers, but using the Internet they have created “a new middle class of popular music: acts that can make a full-time living selling only a modest number of discs, on the order of 50,000 to 500,000 per release” (Howe, 2005, p. 203). Big-name artists, too, are gravitating to the Web. In 1999, Public Enemy released There’s a Poison Goin’ On exclusively online for the first four weeks of the album’s release and was the first band to have music available for download. Thom Yorke also released his album Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes online, as did U2 with Songs of Innocence and Beyoncé with her fifth solo album, Beyoncé. Artists like Lady Gaga, Kanye West, and Jay-Z have exclusive deals with digital stores like Amazon and iTunes.
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The Internet and the Future of the Recording Industry The Internet music revolution began with the development of MP3 (for MPEG-1, Audio Layer 3), compression software that shrinks audio files to less than a tenth of their original size. Originally developed in 1987 in Germany by computer scientist Dieter Seitzer, it began to take off in the early 1990s as more users began to hook up to the Internet with increasingly faster m odems. This open source software, or freely downloaded software, permits users to download recorded music. Today, given the near-universal presence of computers, smartphones, and tablets, rare is the American—especially young American— who cannot access online music.
The crux of the problem for recording companies was that they sold music “in its physical form,” whereas MP3 permitted music’s distribution in a nonphysical form. First discussed as “merely” a means of allowing independent bands and musicians to post their music online where it might attract a following, MP3 became a headache for the recording industry when music from the name artists they controlled began appearing on MP3 sites, making piracy, the illegal recording and sale of copyrighted material and high-quality recordings, a relatively simple task. Not only could users listen to their downloaded music from their hard drives, but they could make their own CDs from MP3 files and play those discs wherever and whenever they wished.
Rather than embrace MP3, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing all of the United States’ major labels, responded to the threat by developing their own “secure” Internet technology, but by the time it was available for release it was too late: MP3, driven by its availability and ease of use, had become the technology of choice for music
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fans already unhappy with the high cost of CDs and the necessity of paying for tracks they didn’t want in order to get the ones they did. “The industry thought it was selling music,” industry analyst James McQuivey explains. “It was really selling physical objects containing music—CDs—and it wasn’t prepared for people buying fewer of them” (in Sommer, 2014, p. BU1). But they are now. The CD is quickly going the way of the vinyl record. It has been replaced by the download. Downloading occurs in two forms: industry-approved and P2P (peer-to-peer).
Industry-Approved Downloading Illegal file sharing proved the popularity of downloading music from the Internet. So the four major labels combined to offer “approved” music download sites. None did well. They offered downloads by subscription, that is, so many downloads per month for a set fee. In addition, they placed encrypted messages in the tunes that limited how long the song would be playable and where the
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download could be used and copied. As a result, illegal file sharing continued. But it was Apple’s 2003 introduction of its iPod and iTunes Music Store that suggested a better strategy. Yes, Apple ceased production of the iPod in 2014, largely because of the ubiquity of other mobile devices, but it taught fans that they could simply buy and own albums and individual songs for as little as 99 cents. Apple controlled only 5% of the PC market, yet it sold over a million tunes in its first week of operation. This activity led Warner Brothers CEO Tom Whalley to enthuse, “This is what the people who are willing to pay for music have been looking for all along” (quoted in Oppelaar, 2003, p. 42). For many observers, CEO Whalley’s comments signaled the industry’s recognition of the inevitability of the cyber revolution. Still, the major labels insisted that their music be downloaded with copy protection built in. But when Sony became the last of the major labels to relent, announcing in 2008 that it would allow the sale of much of its catalog free of copy protection, the distribution and sale of music by Internet became standard, aided by the 2009 announcement from the world’s leading music retailer, iTunes (it sold its 10 billionth download in February 2010; Plambeck, 2010), that it would sell downloads from its 10-million-title catalog without antipiracy restrictions. There are now hundreds of legally licensed websites selling tens of millions of different music tracks. Digital music sales surpassed physical sales for the first time in 2011, and the CD’s 10% share of sales is a far cry from its dominance of 60 to 70% of all sales just a few years ago. This rise in downloading has also been fueled by cloud-music services, subscription sites that allow users to store their digital music online and stream it to any computer or digital device anywhere. Amazon Cloud, iTunes Match, and Google Music offer this service, sometimes called digital lockers. Not coincidently, the number of brick-and-mortar record stores in America has been halved since 2003, their function—that which hasn’t been displaced by the Internet— taken over by retail giants like Wal-Mart and Target that account for a majority of all physical music retail sales. But even they are stocking fewer CDs, and Starbucks, in 2015, went as far as to stop selling discs altogether (Herstand, 2015).
P2P Downloading Despite the availability of industry-approved music downloads, illegal downloading still occurs. U.S. Internet users annually download between $7 and $20 billion worth of digitally pirated recorded music (Recording Industry of America, 2015), and 70% of 18- to 29-year-olds admit to pirating online music or video, 30% building their collections that way (Wortham, 2014). Sites such as Gnutella, Freenet, and BearShare use P2P technologies, that is, peer-to-peer software that permits direct Internet-based communication or collaboration between two or more personal computers while bypassing centralized servers. P2P allows users to visit a constantly and infinitely changing network of machines through which file sharing can occur. The record companies (and movie studios) challenged P2P by suing the makers of its software. In 2005, the Supreme Court, in MGM v. Grokster, unanimously supported industry arguments that P2P software, because it “encouraged” copyright infringement, rendered its makers liable for that illegal act. The industry’s next challenge, then, is BitTorrent, file-sharing software that allows anonymous users to create “swarms” of data as they simultaneously download and upload
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“bits” of a given piece of content from countless, untraceable servers. Despite recent efforts to legitimize—teaming with big-name musical acts like Madonna and Moby and video producers like Vice Media to sell content—BitTorrent is accused of facilitating half of all illegal file sharing. As it stands, 99.97% of all copyright-infringing downloads, in other words piracy, is BitTorrent-based. The service’s more than 170 million active users routinely use as much as 7.4% of all the space on North America’s broadband networks (Spangler, 2014).
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̖ The now-retired iPod, Apple’s answer to piracy: cheap, permanent, go-anywhere downloads. Courtesy of Apple
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CULTURAL FORUM The Future of the Music Business?
The recording industry has seen a 50% decline in revenue in the last 15 years (Seabrook, 2014); that is a fact. But how it, artists, and fans will shape the future of the music business is less certain. Legendary recording executive David Geffen explained, “The music business, as a whole, has lost its faith in content. Only 10 years ago, companies wanted to make records, presumably good records, and see if they sold. But panic has set in, and now it’s no longer about making music, it’s all about how to sell music. And there’s no clear answer about how to fix that problem.” Columbia Records head Rick Rubin added, “Fear is making the record companies less arrogant. They’re more open to ideas” (both in Hirschberg, 2007, pp. 28-29). There is, in fact, no shortage of ideas, and they are being debated in the cultural forum.
Talking Heads leader David Byrne (2008) wrote, “What is called the music business today is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that’s not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians” (p. 126). He detailed six ideas for reshaping the relationship between the recording industry, musical artists, and fans:
1. The 360 deal (sometimes called an equity or multiple rights deal) renders artists brands. Every aspect of their careers—recording, merchandising, marketing, touring—is handled by the label. Because artists and their music are “owned” by the label, that company, freed from the tyranny of the hit CD, will ostensibly take a long-term perspective in its artists’ careers. The Pussycat Dolls have a 360 deal with Interscope Records. Madonna left Warner after 25 years with that label to sign a $120 million 360 deal with concert promoter Live Nation.
2. The standard distribution deal is how the music business operated for decades. The label underwrites the recording, manufacturing,
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distribution, and promotion of its artists’ music. The label owns the copyright to the music and artists earn their percentage of profits only after all the recording, manufacturing, distribution, and promotion costs have been recouped by the label.
3. The license deal is the same as a standard distribution arrangement except that artists retain the copyright to their music and ownership of the master recordings, granting the rights to both to a label for a specified period of time, usually seven years. After that, artists are free to do with their music what they wish. Canadian rockers Arcade Fire have such an arrangement with indie label Merge Records.
4. The profit-sharing deal calls for a minimal advance from a label, and as such, it agrees to split all profits with the artist before deducting its costs. Artists maintain ownership of the music, but because the label invests less in them than it might otherwise, they may sell fewer records. Both sides benefit, however. The label takes a smaller risk; the artist receives a greater share of the income. Byrne’s Talking Heads has a profit-sharing arrangement with label Thrill Jockey for its album Lead Us Not Into Temptation.
5. A manufacturing and distribution deal requires artists to undertake every aspect of the process except manufacturing and distribution. They retain ownership and rights to their music, but assume all other costs, for example, recording, marketing, and touring. Big labels avoid these deals because there is little profit in it for them. Smaller labels benefit from association with well-known artists, such as Aimee Mann, and artists have the benefit of artistic freedom and greater income (although they take on greater risk).
6. The self-distribution model grants artists the greatest freedom. They play, produce, market, promote, and distribute the music themselves. Byrne (2008) calls this “freedom without resources—a pretty abstract sort of
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Enter your voice. After all, the success of any or all of these different ideas depends on your willingness to buy the music that they produce. Which of these models do you think will dominate music’s future, if any? The first, a 360 deal, gives musicians the least artistic freedom, but the greatest guarantee of success. The last, self-distribution, grants the greatest freedom, but the smallest guarantee of success. Which, including those in between, would you choose? Why? Might different models work better for different kinds of acts or for artists at different levels of notoriety? In which form would you be most comfortable buying your favorite music? If it were up to you, what would you pay for a download of your favorite artist’s latest release? Why? Byrne thinks the upheaval in the music business is “not bad news for music, and it’s certainly not bad news for musicians.” Do you agree? Will independence from the big labels and their demand for profitable hits free artists to make the music they want? Will there be more or less music of interest to you?
No matter what model of music production
independence” (p. 129), but many artists big and small, aided by the Internet, have opted for this model. Musicians are using their own sites, social networking sites, and sites designed specifically to feature new artists to connect directly with listeners. Fans can hear and download new tunes for free; buy downloads, CDs, and merchandise; get concert information and tickets; and chat with artists and other fans. My Chemical Romance is one of the thousands of musical artists using the Internet to self-distribute and connect with fans.
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and distribution eventually results from this technological and financial tumult, serious questions about the Internet’s impact on copyright (protecting content creators’ financial interest in their product) will remain. See the chapter on media freedom, regulations, and ethics for more on copyright.
DEVELOPING MEDIA LITERACY SKILLS
Listening to Shock Jocks The proliferation of shock jocks—outrageous, rude, crude radio personalities—offers an example of the importance of media literacy that may not be immediately apparent. Yet it involves four different elements of media literacy: development of an awareness of media’s impact, cultivation of an understanding of media content as a text that provides insight into our culture and our lives, awareness of the process of mass communication, and an understanding of the ethical demands under which media professionals operate. Different media-literate radio listeners judge the shock jocks differently, but they all take time to examine jocks’ work and their role in the culture.
The literate listener asks this question of shock jocks and the stations that air them: “At what cost to the culture as a whole, and to individuals living in it, should a radio station program an offensive, vulgar personality to attract listeners and, therefore, profit?” Ours is a free society, and freedom of expression is one of our dearest rights. Citing their First Amendment rights, as well as strong listener interest, radio stations have made Howard Stern and other shock jocks like Rush Limbaugh and Don Imus the fashion of the day. Stern, for example, took poorly rated WXRK in New York to Number One, and, as Infinity Broadcasting’s top attraction, he was syndicated throughout the country where he was free to pray for cancer to kill public officials he did not like, joke constantly about sexual and other bodily functions, make homophobic and misogynistic comments, and insult guests and callers. But when Infinity began pulling Stern from the air in response to an FCC anti-indecency crusade, Stern moved his show to satellite radio provider SiriusXM.
Self-proclaimed inventor of the shock jock, Don Imus, created a well-known ruckus. On the air for 30 years, Imus in the Morning was cancelled in April 2007 by CBS Radio. Host Imus had referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team, then playing for a national championship against the University of Tennessee, as a bunch of “nappy-headed hos,” a term Gwen Ifill (2007) called “a shockingly concise sexual and racial insult” (p. A21). Ifill, an African American who before moving to public television had covered the White House for the New York Times and Capitol Hill for NBC, had herself been called a “cleaning lady” by Imus in 1993. That racist slur passed, but the insult to the Rutgers women did not. Imus was fired.
But it is Rush Limbaugh’s 2012 attack on Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke and the subsequent listener and advertiser response that recently energized the media literacy discussion about shock jocks’ value. After she testified before Congress on the need for employers’ insurance plans to offer coverage for women’s contraception for both reproductive
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and broader medical reasons, Limbaugh attacked the 30-year-old by name 46 times over three straight days, offering commentary such as “Can you imagine if you were her parents how proud . . . you would be? Your daughter . . . testifies she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills . . . What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex . . . She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex . . . [Ms. Fluke] is having so much sex, it’s amazing she can still walk . . . [Fluke] is a woman who is happily presenting herself as an immoral, baseless, no-purpose-to- her life woman. She wants all the sex in the world whenever she wants it, all the time, no consequences. No responsibility for her behavior.”
Public reaction was immediate and fierce. Not only had Limbaugh misrepresented Ms. Fluke’s testimony (for example, employees and their employers, not taxpayers, pay for insurance and Mr. Limbaugh seemed not to understand how the
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pill works), but he was seen to have attacked a private citizen doing nothing more than exercising her right as a citizen to comment on an important issue of the day. More than 50 sponsors quickly pulled their spots from Limbaugh’s show; within a week it was practically devoid of paid advertisements. Limbaugh, the self-proclaimed Most Dangerous Man in America, was hardly cowed, continuing his outrageous commentary on liberals, homosexuals, immigrants, and rape victims; but something had changed from his pre- Fluke days: the Internet. “Hosts’ words far more easily reach non-listeners than they did 25 years ago,” explains talk-radio expert Brian Rosenwald. “Indeed, a show’s actual audience need not be bothered for comments to cause trouble. Campaigns against a host can build over time, and social media makes it easy to pressure station management and advertisers. In fact, the provocative, unpredictable content that produces the best talk radio fits poorly with an advertiser-based business model in the Internet and social media era” (2015). That may be so, argue shock jocks’ defenders, but censorship is censorship.
“This is not censorship,” reply the critics, “The government is not involved; in fact, it is the
̖ Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on law student Sandra Fluke tested people’s media-literate listening skills. © Alex Wong/Getty Images
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market at work. Advertisers listened to their customers.” As journalist Hank Kalet said at the time of the Imus affair, this was an example of “repugnant speech being met with more speech . . . It was the powerful . . . a host who has been rubbing shoulders with presidential candidates and power-brokers, a host who has made his reputation by shocking for shock’s sake and belittling the powerless in the process—being held to account” (2007, p. 21).
But it’s all in fun, say shock jock defenders. Can’t you take a joke? What are you, the thought police? Why not just turn the dial? These questions do indeed pose a problem for media-literate listeners. Literacy demands an understanding of the importance of freedom not only to the operation of our media system but to the functioning of our democracy. Yet literacy also means that we can’t discount the impact of the shock jocks. Nor can we assume that their expression does not represent a distasteful side of our culture and ourselves.
Media-literate listeners also know that Imus, Stern, Limbaugh, and the other shock jocks exist because people listen to them. All three are on the air—radio and television—and enjoy large followings. Are their shows merely a place in which the culture is contested? Are they a safe place for the discussion of the forbidden, for testing cultural limits? In fact, a literate listener can make the argument, as do shock jocks’ fans, that they serve the important cultural function of “hypocrisy-buster . . . truth-teller . . . scatological sage” (Cox, 2005, p. 101).
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MEDIA LITERACY CHALLENGE Listening to Shock Jocks with a Media-Literate Ear
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