Tarnished Gold

Record Industry Revisited

R. Serge Denisoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000679427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The great depression in the popular recording industry that began in 1979 still continues. There are signs, however, that the industry is adjusting to new technologies and may soon revive. R. Serge Denisoff documents the decline and possible revival of this comprehensive study of the recording business, a sequel to his widely acclaimed Solid Gold: The Popular Record Industry. Denisoff offers a brief history of popular music and then, in detail, traces the life cycle of a record, beginning with the artist in the studio and following the record until its purchase. He explains the relationships between artist, manager, producer, company, distributor, merchandiser, and media. They all play roles in the scenario of a hit record. He also discusses the new technologies and how they may affect record sales, especially round-the-clock rock and roll on cable television. Tarnished Gold joins Solid Gold as a staple in the popular culture literature.

1 What is Popular Music?

DOI: 10.4324/9780429338816-1

Hey, Hey, My, My,Rock n' roll can never die

—©Silver Fiddle BMI

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—that reflects the musical preferences of the people. According to this definition, popular music exists for the enjoyment of listeners within 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, Neil Young, and other intellectually acceptable artists, few writers have insisted that popular music is kitsch, déclassé, or somehow without merit. This is a quantum leap from the view of popular music presented in previous decades. Former U.S. Senator S. I. Hayakawa, for example, 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 cliches masquerading as emotion."¹ Popular music has retained many of these elements but it was not dismissed in its entirety, for the wave of high points of rock and roll such as Sgt. Pepper, Dark Side of the Moon, 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 the 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, when at United Artists, noted 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 continued, "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." A former Warner/Reprise promotion head concurred, "You look on the chart and all the records aren't the same." It is less than accurate to say that rock and roll 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. Charts in Billboard, Cashbox, Friday Morning Quarterback, and Rolling Stone list 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. It takes capriciously 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 originally was 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, it would then have to include a multitude of styles and all of the esoteric genres enjoyed by hundreds of taste publics. This, of course, is not the case. Popular music is not beamed at all of the public but at a self-selected audience that 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 everyday language as "pop" is not ipso facto "popular." Popular music is a medium addressed to a particular segment of the U.S. and overseas public. Generally this audience consists of persons under the age of 34, but 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 and 34, 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 sufficiently to be deemed successful or representative of an exoteric audience. Success is determined by such indices of the music industry as radio play and over-the-counter sales. Billboard's "Hot 100" chart is based on 63 radio stations, 25 distributors, and 22 retailers. 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 "You call that music?" can 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 mall or twisting 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 some $7,661,115,000's worth of media vehicles ranging from tuners to television sets. Television in nearly all U.S. homes is increasingly focusing on music programming. Eighteen and a half million homes receive Warner Amex's Music Channel (MTV). The late Ed Sullivan, hardly a supporter of rock music, in the "now-for-the-youngsters" segment of his Sunday night show featured acts that appealed to his younger viewers but thereby alienated much of his older audience. He also presented singers liked Andy Williams, Dean Martin, or Doris Day, who appealed to older viewers. Owners of television sets are potential popular music listeners, but they are not necessarily consumers.

In 1955, 4,542 pop singles and 1,615 long-playing albums were released. In 1967 the record industry passed the billion-dollar mark in annual sales. In 1968, 6,540 singles were issued, and 183,000,000 singles were sold in stores, and to jukebox operators and other buyers. In that same year 4,057 long-playing albums (LPs) were released and grossed over $1 billion; 196 million LPs were purchased. An indeterminable number of bootleg records swelled this number. A decade later record sales peaked at $4.1 billion gross, no doubt aided by the staggering sales of Saturday Night Fever, which legitimately sold over 25 million copies. (The FBI estimates twice that number of sales if counterfeits are included.) With these figures the pop qua people's music thesis seems almost plausible because nearly every man, woman, and child statistically could have bought an LP and a large number of singles. This is not the case.

Beginning in the first fiscal quarter of 1979 record sales plummeted. As we will see, the industry blamed every cause under the sun. The objective fact was that the industry's growth was dropping a significant 11 percent per year. The heydays of the 1960s and the 1970s were over. In response record companies diversified and cut back, including the number of releases. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) reported the release of 2,630 new albums in 1982. Cassette titles numbered 2,710 (some observers believe that cassettes will outstrip albums), and 2,285 singles appeared in the same year. There were minialbums, midline albums—popular oldies, reissues, and new acts listing at $5.98. In total 5,375 new records were issued. Despite the product reduction, gold and platinum albums decreased in significant numbers. The boom year, 1978, had produced some 295 gold and platinum albums, and 71 singles had fared as well. By 1982 there was 40 percent drop in these successful and prestigious albums. Only 24 singles went gold, the lowest yearly total since 1966. Even more confusing was the fact that eleven recipients of the gold trophy were new acts like Stray Cats, Men at Work, and Tom Tom Club. The superstars did well, but not by previous standards. Fleetwood Mac, for example, could not repeat multiple platinums such as Rumors or Peter Frampton's Alive.

Prior to 1979 the volume of product had been a historic problem in the record industry. There were less than optimistic aspects of this flood of recordings. Murray Rose, president of an advertising marketing agency, once observed, "In a business that saw the release of 4,000 albums and 5,700 singles . . ., where only 10 percent even smelled 'break even,' you almost have to be an egomaniac just to think you can crack those odds."² More recently the "stiff' ratio was closer; 85 percent of the singles and 80 percent of albums failed to return their investment. 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, the success symbol. The gold record is awarded for the bona fide gross of $1 million and on the basis of units sold. The single far outsells the album, of course, because the price of the single is about two dollars in many parts of the United States and long-playing albums are much more expensive. In practice an album that 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 valued at one-third list price amount to $1 million; a million albums sold garners a platinum record. Thus, at $8.98 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 15 percent would not move past the first rung of sandlot ball. Record company executive Joe Smith underlined this point to Rolling 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?"³

The notion of popular music qua people's music is further shaken by musical taste and preference surveys conducted over the past decade. Starting in 1977 Warner Communications published a study indicating a profile of the tastes and consumption habits of record buyers. Although methodologically exhibiting a number of classification problems (rock qua Simon and Garfunkel), it is one of the few surveys available not surprisingly rock the dominant preferred genre. However, it showed that as the under 30 taste group declines rock's share of the market had dramatically increased while overall sales drop 11 percent annually.

The National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM), which reported its sales figures in 1981, found rock and "pop" constituted nearly half the market, 49.8 percent. Country remained fairly constant, about 15 percent. For other than these categories, the numbers plummet; soul garners nearly 10 percent, showing little variance, but all other genres with the exception of children's records are below 5 percent. Pop music, then, is generally the province of youth.

Popular qua Young People's Music

Popular music is virtually the exclusive playground of the young. A vast majority of the records sold in North America are purchased by young adults. In a Canadian survey 77 percent of the high school students picked rock music as their favorite idiom; only 11 percent echoed the tastes of their parents and teachers. When comparing generations on the variable of support for or appreciation of rock and roll as either their first or second choice, a significant 87.9 percent of those adolescents sampled made these choices: their elders followed suit only in 4 percent of the cases. In discussing the genres of show tune and classical, a combined 96 percent of the adults indicated a strong preference for this material.

Taste and record-buying habits are strongly influenced by age. Bubblegummers or prepuberty females between the ages of 9 and 12 buy the lion's share of singles. After the age of 16, white youths begin to concentrate upon long-playing albums. Blacks, without comparable economic power, continue to buy singles for a longer period of time. As the courtship process begins, teenage males become increasingly involved in record consumerism. Record buying begins to decline at age 34, much to the consternation of retailers.

The question of adult membership in the popular music constituency is a thorny one. The passing of the statistical watermark of 30 does not push a person into the out-of-it category except in record-buying. People over 34 buy fewer popular records than do people half their age. Charts reflect this. Most acts on the Top 40, MTV, or the Billboard "Hot 100" are not performers known for their adult appeal. Nonetheless, radio programmers and record-company executives are aware that housewives who take care of the kids listen to daytime radio and occasionally buy a record. After age 30, the wife or mother makes most of the family record purchases. Although hard statistical data at this time are not available, the argument is that as more women enter the "pink-collar" world of commerce, fewer will be exposed to the so-called cookie-cutter material of daytime radio.

The type of music supported by housewives is called "easy listening" or "middle of the road" (MOR). It is a part of the popular-music idiom, but it is also a fairly small specialty area. MOR ranges from the piped-in Muzak heard in a dentist's waiting room to the soft strains of Lionel Richie or Barry Manilow heard on the car radio. MOR material frequently crosses over into popular music, yet a good deal of rock music is totally banned from easy-listening stations. "If I played Alice Cooper or Black Sabbath at 10 in the morning," said one MOR program director, "100,000 women would find another station. ... I'd be looking for another job." Easy listening as it exists in ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents Page
• Acknowledgments Page
• Foreword Page
• Preface Page
• 1. What Is Popular Music?
• 2. Emptiness in Harmony: The Artist
• 3. The Star-Making Machinery: The Record Companies
• 4. Inside the Record Company
• 5. "And the Hits Keep Coming"? Radio
• 6. Print: A Necessary Evil?
• 7. Video Killed the Radio Star?
• 8. Backmasking, Bonfires, and the Right
• 9. "Who Knows?"—The Demise of the Rock Culture?
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• General Index
• Index of Names of People and Singing Groups
• Index of Recording/Video Clips