Solid Gold

Popular Record Industry

R. Serge Denisoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000679175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

More than 90 record companies release over 9, 000 pop records each year-a staggering total of 52, 000 songs. Each one competes for the gold record, the recording industry's symbol of success that certifies $1 million worth of records have been sold. Solid Gold explains why, for each record that succeeds, countless others fail. This book follows the progress of a record through production, marketing, and distribution, and shows how a mistake made at any point can mean its doom. Denisoff suggests that a drastic shift in the demographic makeup of the pop music audience during the sixties has resulted in a broader listening public, including fans at every level of society.

1.

WHAT IS POPULAR MUSIC: A SILLY QUESTION?

I’ll tell you ‘bout the magic and it’ll free your soul

But it’s like tryin’ to tell a stranger ‘bout a rock and roll

© 1965 Faithful Virtue Music Co.

Popular music is like a unicorn; everyone knows what it is supposed to look like, but no one has ever seen it. Such music connotes a rhythmic idiom—songs, instrumentals, novelties or what-have-you—which reflects the musical preferences of the people. According to this definition, popular music exists for the enjoyment of listeners found in the “general public”; its alleged deficiencies mirror inadequacies in the popular taste. Neither of these definitions is appropriate.

Since the advent of the Beatles, Bob Dylan and other intellectually acceptable artists, few writers have insisted that popular music is kitsch, declassé or somehow without merit. This is a quantum leap from the view of popular music presented in previous decades. S. I. Hayakawa, for example, has insisted that popular songs were “diluted, sweetened, sentimentalized and trivialized … the product of white songwriters for predominantly white audiences tending towards wishful thinking, dreams and ineffectual nostalgia, realistic fantasy, self-pity and sentimental clichés masquerading as emotion.”¹ The popular music of the 1960s retained many of these elements, but it was not dismissed in its entirety, as the wave of serious articles and books on the subject illustrates. However, high points of rock and roll such as Sgt. Pepper, Surrealistic Pillow or Highway 61 Revisited are by no means representative of popular music.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. The components of popular music are in constant flux. Different sounds, personalities and favorites dart on and off of the popular music charts. Certain styles dominate specific historical periods. These are complemented by other genres. Even when the Beatles and other English bands ruled the charts, novelty songs and big band crooners shared in the bounties of public acceptance. Popular music is not typified by any generic style. Marty Cerf, editor of Phonograph Record magazine, notes that just as “society is made up of many specialty, racial and mixed backgrounds, so is music, and the pop charts are made up of minorities.” He continues, “On the pop charts you find 20 percent singles from albums; progressive albums 35 percent; rhythm and blues 25 percent; very straight middle-of-the-road and pop records 20 percent.” Ron Saul, once the Warner/Reprise promotion head, concurs, “You look on the chart and all the records aren’t the same.” Consequently, it is less than accurate to say that rock ‘n’ roll in the 1960s or swing in the 1930s constituted the entire popular music spectrum of the time.

Quantitatively, popular music is a recognized product. The number of records sold is measurable and observable. Billboard, Cashbox and Record World charts define what is being played on radio stations and in part selling in record stores. This amorphous market is quite distinct from others attuned to particular musical forms. Popular music is a much larger and eclectic idiom. Capriciously it takes from specialty areas and momentarily provides an unfamiliar sound its place in the Top 40 sun. Popular music not infrequently is a blending of several specific musical forms. Rock, for example, is a wedding of country music and black blues. However, an important distinction must be made between the sum total of all musical forms and popular music.

Popular music is not just the sum total of all musical styles. It does not include all forms of music. If it reflected all the people’s tastes popular music would then have to include a multitude of styles and all of the esoteric genres enjoyed by hundreds of preference groups. This, of course, is not the case.

Popular music is not beamed at all of the public but at a self-selected audience. This audience elects what is called popular with its listening time and dollars. Popular music then is a specific subcategory of the entire spectrum of music; what is referred to in the everyday language as “pop” is not ipso facto “popular.” As will be seen, popular music is a medium addressed to a particular segment of the American and overseas public. Generally this audience consists of persons under the age of 24; however, some preferences of people past that generational watermark do manage to sneak onto the pop charts. Still, popular music is primarily designed for people between the ages of 9 through 24, the courtship years, and whoever else cares to listen.

An ever-growing number of people seem to fit this latter group. Quantitatively, popular music consists of whichever musical style sells sufficient numbers to be deemed successful or representative of an exoteric audience. Success is determined by indices of the music industry such as radio play and over-the-counter sales. Consequently, sufficient purchases by the youth audience, the main consumers, define what constitutes popular music at any specific time. The actual mechanics of the delineation of the youth market are highly complex. Adolescent and college tastes are not monolithic; they are shaped and influenced by numerous social forces around them ranging from age, race, marital status and sex to geographical location.

POPULAR QUA PEOPLE’S MUSIC

Any teenager who has heard the cry of “you don’t call that music,” will testify that some people—particularly parents—do not enjoy or even tolerate popular music. Feelings and attitudes notwithstanding, it is almost impossible to avoid popular music. Whether one is passing a record rack at the local supermarket or flicking the car radio dial in search of the most up-to-the-minute commuter report, it is usually present.

Popular music is everywhere. Some would call it a symptom of “noise pollution.” Americans operate over 372 million radio receivers in both car and home. A hundred million color and monochrome television sets transmit “In Concert,” “The Midnight Special,” Dick Clark’s transplanted Hollywood “American Bandstand,” local music shows and the myriad of variety programs that occasionally present, with an eye on the youth market, performers deemed in the “pop” medium. The late Ed Sullivan, hardly a supporter of the new music, in the “now for the youngsters” segment of his now-defunct Sunday night show featured acts that appealed to his younger viewers but alienated many of his older viewers. But he also presented “crooners” like Andy Williams, Dean Martin or Doris Day, who appealed to both groups. Owners of television sets are potential popular music listeners, but they are not necessarily consumers.

More significantly, there are 61 million phonographs distributed throughout the United States population, a figure which becomes terribly important in treating record sales as an index of the universality of the popular music medium. In addition, 1967 saw 10,774,000 tape recorders in use in homes, cars and commerce. Three years later, 8,459,000 tape players of all types were sold.

In 1955, 4,542 pop singles were released and 1,615 long-playing albums vied for success. In that year Americans had access to 120 million radio receivers and 24 million phonographs. Nearly 15 years later the number of outlets for recorded music had doubled. In 1967 the record industry passed the billion-dollar mark in annual sales. And in 1968, the banner year of record sales, 6,540 singles were issued. In that same year, 4,057 long-playing albums were released and grossed over $1 billion, while 183,000,000 singles were sold through stores, jukeboxes and other sources. Americans also purchased 196 million long-playing records during 1968. An undeterminable number of bootleg records swelled this number. With these figures the pop qua people’s music thesis seems almost plausible, since nearly every man, woman and child statistically could have bought an LP and a large part of a single. This is not the case.

There are less optimistic aspects of this flood of recordings. Murray Rose, president of an advertising marketing agency, observes: “In a business that saw the release of 4,000 albums and 5,700 singles in 1970, where only 10 percent even smelled ‘break even,’ you almost have to be an egomaniac just to think you can crack those odds.”² A year earlier Henry Brief told a Forbes magazine reporter: “At last count, 74 percent of the 45s, 61 percent of the pop LP’s, and 87 percent of the classical LPs failed to break even.”³ In 1973, 75 percent of the LPs released bombed. Most releases never even get to the public. Only a small portion of the public usually buys a pop record.

The music industry itself places inordinate emphasis upon success as epitomized by the gold record. “A gold record is the success symbol for the youth of the seventies,” wrote Look’s senior editor Ernest Dunbar.⁴ The mark of achievement in the music industry is the gold record, awarded for the bona fide gross of $1 million and on the basis of units sold. The single far outsells the album, of course, since the price of the single is about a dollar in many parts of the United States. Long-playing albums are much more expensive.

In practice, an album which finds about 502,000 buyers in the United States qualifies for the coveted gold record. An album is certified gold when net domestic sales of LPs and tapes values at one-third list price amounts to $1 million. Thus, at $5.98 list price, each sale counts $1.99 toward the gold record. Yet, considering the potential market, the figures are relatively small and certainly representative of only a small portion of the public. A baseball player with a batting average of less than 20 percent would not move past the first rung of sandlot ball. Joe Smith, executive vice-president of Warner Brothers and Reprise Records, underlined this point to Roll- ing Stone: “I’m talking business, because there are 70 million homes in this country, of that 56 million, i.e., 78 percent, have record players or some means of playing a record. Why should we jump up and down to sell a million records?”⁵

The popular qua people’s music notion is further shaken by musical taste and preference surveys conducted over the past decade. The National Family Opinion firm, in a study for Columbia Records, reported from its nationwide panel of consumers in 1969 that “rock and underground” constituted 29 percent of the record market. Country music was second with 16 percent, followed by easy listening or “middle of the road” (MOR) with 15 percent. Pop instrumentals received 14 percent, with classical, jazz, rhythm and blues, folk, Broadway shows and motion picture soundtracks capturing 14 percent. All other genres attracted 12 percent of the market. I sampled a middle-class “bedroom” community of British Columbia and found that musical tastes are very diverse when the generational factor is discounted. Given overrepresentation of adolescents in the sample categories considered, rock was favored. A closer examination of the data suggests that this preference is by no means equally distributed throughout the sample.

Adults predominantly chose speciality categories as their first musical choices. Jazz, show tunes, country and western and symphonic material account for 74 percent of adult preferences. Few in the sample like what is generally being aired on the local Top 40 and semiprogressive radio stations. Pop music, then, is generally the province of youth.

POPULAR QUA YOUNG PEOPLE’S MU...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 What is Popular Music: A Silly Question?
• 2 In the Grooves: The Performer
• 3 He Vinyl Crap Game: He Record Companies
• 4 The Cop Out: Inside the Record Company
• 5 The Gatekeepers of Radio
• 6 Prozines and Fanzines
• 7 “The Street,” John Sinclair and the Industry
• 8 Thie Radical Right and The Fcc
• 9 The Folks Out There
• Bibliography
• Index