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Dai grammofoni agli mp3 (menzionano anche l' Empeg!), la storia dell' editoria musicale.
E' interessantissimo, ed include una discussione di tutte le vicende legali sul Copyright, File Sharing, ed altro di cui abbiamo parlato qui in passato. Lo spezzo in due messaggi e lo posto qui 
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From Music Publishing to MP3: Music and Industry in the Twentieth Century.
Author/s: Reebee Garofalo
Like any culture industry in a market economy, the role of the music business is fundamentally to transform its cultural products into financial rewards. This process, of course, has been significantly influenced by the technological advances that have determined the production, dissemination, and reception of music. To understand the trajectory of popular music in the twentieth century from its beginnings as a nation-based, mass cultural phenomenon to its current state as part of a global system of interactive, transnational cultural flows, one must trace the uneven relationship between cultural development, technological advancement, professional organization, political struggle, and economic power. Since technological advances and the economic power that drives them have been historically centered in industrialized nations (primarily Great Britain, Western Europe, and the United States), these countries have tended to provide the models for the relationship between popular music and the industry that produces it. Given that two world wars were fought on European soil, with devastating material consequences, at key points in the development of the mass media, the industrialization of popular music has been defined disproportionately by the dominant and often controversial practices of the United States. It is also the case that the pivotal musical moment of the twentieth century in terms of cultural redefinition and structural change in music industry--the eruption of rock and roll--was centered in the United States in the 1950s, and expanded to Great Britain in the 1960s. More recently, however, the relationship between corporate capital and musical culture has transcended national boundaries, as the music industry has become an increasingly global phenomenon.
In broad strokes, the history of the music industry can be seen in three phases, each dominated by a different kind of organization:
1. Music publishing houses, which occupied the power center of the industry when sheet music was the primary vehicle for disseminating popular music;
2. Record companies, which ascended to power as recorded music achieved dominance; and
3. Transnational entertainment corporations, which promote music as an ever-expanding series of " revenue streams" --record sales, advertising revenue, movie tie-ins, streaming audio on the Internet--no longer tied to a particular sound carrier.
Because the centrality of record companies has predominated in the second half of the twentieth century, this phase of development remains the popular conception of the music industry, even though its structure has shifted markedly in recent years. Consequently, the prevailing view of the popular music industry is that of record companies at the center, with radio, music videos, live concerts, booking agencies, management firms, indeed musicians themselves, playing various supporting roles. Because some of the major changes in popular music in the twentieth century can be traced to the technological developments that enabled record companies to displace publishing houses as the power center of the music business, the tendency is to use the terms " music industry" and " recording industry" synonymously. Initially, however, they were quite separate and there was little contact between the two.
Throughout the early development of sound recording, sheet music was the main vehicle for the mass dissemination of music and music publishers were at the center of the music business. At this time, the centerpiece of middle-class home entertainment was the piano. From the turn of the twentieth century until the end of World War I, the number of pianos and player pianos manufactured in the United States alone averaged about 300,000 annually.(1) Recording started as a sideline business, initially given to spoken word comedy, instrumental brass-band releases, and other novelty selections. It is not surprising, then, that the publishers initially regarded the revolution in technology that would eventually transform the production and consumption of popular music as little more than a supplement to their earnings from sheet music. They were too busy enjoying the fruits of a very lucrative, centuries-old relationship with this earlier form of music software.
Music Publishing: The Origins of an Industry
When Johann Gutenberg invented movable type around 1450, he laid the foundation for the modern music-publishing industry. After his hometown of Mainz was sacked by invading armies shortly after the introduction of his invention, the fledgling printing industry was dispersed, first to France and Italy, and then to England. This was a period of significant social upheaval, involving the establishment of merchant cities throughout Europe, the concomitant expansion of a new middle class, and a growing secularization of church-based cultures. In this process, according to Russell Sanjek, " [c]ontrol of the duplicating process had moved from the hands of the church into those of the entrepreneur. Literature was becoming secularized to meet the demands of its new audience, and music, too, would soon be laicized as its principal patron, the church, was replaced by the public consumer." (2) Operating under an exclusive contract with the city of Venice, Ottaviano dei Petrucci prepared his first publication, a collection of 96 popular songs (mostly French chansons), which qualified him for the title, the Father of Music Publishing.(3)
In the new mercantile economy, the dependency of feudal relations and the elitism of the patronage system were gradually replaced by the relative democracy of the marketplace. As sites of manufacturing and central distribution points for merchant ships and caravans from distant lands, medieval cities served as host for diverse cultures. Slowly a pan-European body of literary and musical works appeared. As the financial interests of merchant bookseller-publishers expanded, they began to join forces to lobby for legal protection.
The first copyright law was enacted in Britain in 1710, when Parliament passed the Statute of Anne, the basis for legal protection of intellectual property in the English-speaking world. While the law included an author' s copyright and protections for consumers (by limiting the term of copyright and creating a " public domain" ), it clearly favored the stationer' s guild, which enjoyed royal sanctions granting an effective monopoly on publishing in return for cooperation in ferreting out and suppressing seditious literary or musical material. In this reciprocal arrangement, booksellers fared considerably better than authors or composers. It wasn' t until the end of the eighteenth century, according to Finkelstein, " that composers were able to actually make an important part of their living from the printing and sale of their music." (4) This coincided with the growth of a domestic market for pianos and the establishment of the instrument as a cultural status symbol throughout Europe.
By the nineteenth century, music-publishing interests had begun to turn their attention toward international copyright systems because, as Dave Laing has pointed out, " music, more than other arts, easily crossed national linguistic and cultural boundaries." (5) Britain enacted its first International Copyright Act in 1838 and extended its provisions to include music in 1842. In the latter half of the nineteenth century there ensued a number of multilateral meetings across the continent among members of the music trade which culminated in the Berne Convention of 1886. Berne was essentially a treaty that provided for reciprocal recognition of copyright among sovereign nations. Seven of the initial nine signatories to the Berne Convention were European. Since 1886 the convention has been amended six times essentially to keep pace with the emergence of new technologies: Berlin (1908) incorporated photography, film, and sound recording; Rome (1928) added broadcasting; Brussels (1948), television. By 1993 there were almost 100 signatories to the Berne Convention.(6) Significantly, the United States did not sign on until 1988, more than 100 years after the founding convention.
At the time of Berne, U.S. popular music was only just beginning to come into its own, primarily through blackface minstrelsy and the works of Stephen Foster, which became popular throughout Europe. In the balance of trade, the United States would still have been showing a net loss on the import/export ratio of cultural products; it was not yet in the interest of the United States to embrace reciprocal arrangements with foreign publishers. Within a short time, however, U.S. music publishers would consolidate their operations into the most efficient music machine the world had yet seen--Tin Pan Alley.
At a time when European art music was considered to be superior to popular selections, U.S. music publishers derived their income from the manufacture and sale of classical scores, many of which were in the public domain, and, increasingly, through original popular compositions. In the United States, sheet music retailed for about thirty to forty cents a copy and, for the major publishers, sales in the hundreds of thousands of copies were not unheard of. Charles K. Harris' s " After the Ball," written and published in 1892, " quickly reached sales of $25,000 a week," and, according to Charles Hamm, " sold more than 2,000,000 copies in only several years, eventually achieving a sale of some five million." (7) During this period, the previously scattered conglomeration of U.S. publishing houses, who would dominate mainstream popular music until the Second World War, were beginning to converge on the area of New York City that came to be known as Tin Pan Alley, after the tinny output of its upright pianos. Tin Pan Alley anticipated many of the practices of the music business in later years--and therefore provides the clearest model for how business would be conducted.
While it is noteworthy that in less than twenty years leading up to the turn of the century, Tin Pan Alley centralized control of an industry that had been spread throughout major cities across the United States, it is perhaps more important that Tin Pan Alley produced only popular songs. Unlike the older, more traditional music-publishing houses, which issued a broad range of material, the " song factories" of Tin Pan Alley promoted an overwhelmingly successful formulaic pop mentality that yielded " a much more homogeneous style than had ever before been the case in the history of song in America." (8) If the songwriting style of Tin Pan Alley was distinctive, its success was due in equal measure to its aggressive marketing tactics. Tin Pan Alley publishers routinely visited popular venues, offering star performers everything from personal favors to songwriting credits to include a particular song in their acts. Such an investment could be returned many-fold in sheet-music sales.
As was the case with publishing enterprises elsewhere, at this stage in its development Tin Pan Alley turned its attention toward legal protection. While these publishers clearly saw sheet music as their stock-in-trade--and, as a result, never fully embraced records--they saw no reason why their income shouldn' t be supplemented with revenues from record sales. Thus, at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century--when it was clear that records were becoming a force to be reckoned with--there ensued a widespread revision of existing copyright laws to accommodate the new medium. In 1909, following the Berlin revision to the Berne Convention, Victor Herbert and John Philip Sousa led the charge for a revision to the U.S. copyright laws which mandated a royalty of two cents for each cylinder, record, or piano roll manufactured, in addition to revenues already derived from live performances. Because the U.S. Copyright Act of 1909 used the language of " mechanical reproduction," these new fees came to be known as a " mechanicals." Comparable laws were passed in Britain in 1911 and elsewhere on the continent at around the same time.
To recover their sources of revenue more efficiently, publishers in the industrialized world, in alliance with composers and songwriters, began to organize themselves into professional associations known in the trade as performing rights organizations. France had anticipated this development, forming the Societe des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeirs de Musique (SACEM) in 1850. Italy and Austria followed suit before the turn of the century. Three other industrialized music-producing nations came on board before World War I. Publishers in Great Britain formed the Performing Rights Society (PRS), and in Germany, Geselleschaft fur Musikalische Auffuhrungs (GEMA). The Tin Pan Alley publishers established the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1914. In 1926 these various national societies formed an international confederation, Confederation Internationale des Societes Auteurs et Compositeurs (CISAC), headquartered in France.
In general, in their formative stages performing rights organizations were exclusive societies with national monopolies on copyrighted music. Membership in ASCAP for example, was skewed toward the more " literate" writers of show tunes and semi-serious works such as Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin. Writers of more vernacular forms, such as the blues and country music, were excluded from ASCAP. As proprietors of the compositions of their members, these organizations exercised considerable power in shaping public taste.
Just as technological advances such as movable type favored industrialized nations, copyright laws kept artistic expression firmly anchored to the European cultural tradition of notated music, in that the claim for royalties was based on the registration of melodies and lyrics, the aspects of music that most readily lend themselves to notation. Artists or countries with musical traditions based on rhythm rather than melody or those that valued improvisation over notation were excluded from the full benefit of copyright protection right from the start. Further, as an extension of literary copyright, musical copyright was based on a conception of authorship, which tended to penalize societies in which composition was conceived as a collective activity.
Recording Companies: The Commodification of Sound
Although it was clear before the dawn of the twentieth century that the future of the recording industry would be tied to music and entertainment, this was not obvious at first. When Thomas Edison unveiled his legendary " talking machine" in 1877, which is generally considered the birth of recording, the reproduction of music was fourth down his list of intended uses. Edison, as well as most of his competitors, initially saw the phonograph, as he called it, as an office machine, with practical applications in stenography, books for the blind, and teaching elocution. How the fledgling industry gravitated toward music and what they chose to record speaks volumes about the role of the music industry in the production of music.
Edison unwittingly provided a glimpse of the future when he chose to introduce the phonograph by highlighting its novelty value. In countless public demonstrations in Great Britain and the United States, vocalists, whistlers, and local instrumentalists from the audience were invited to make live recordings on the spot, anticipating what would become the dominant use of the invention. Other than the spoken word, it was found that brass reproduced best. Because of the poor sound quality of Edison' s early tinfoil cylinders, however, Edison himself dismissed the phonograph as " a mere toy, which has no commercial value" (9) and put the project on the shelf, but only temporarily.
The next steps in the development of sound recording in the United States were taken in Bell Laboratories and eventually consolidated into the North American Phonograph Company, a national combine focused on office technology. It was Louis Glass, manager of North American' s West Coast franchise, who pointed the way to the future. Beginning in 1889 Glass placed these " dictating" machines in the Palais Royal Saloon in San Francisco where patrons could listen to a prerecorded " entertainment" cylinder for a nickel. Within a year, these " nickel in the slot" machines were bringing in as much as $1,200 annually. The enterprise earned Glass a place in music history as the Father of the Jukebox.
The Columbia Phonograph Company, North American' s District of Columbia franchise, quickly distinguished itself as the leading producer of quality entertainment cylinders. Among those that caught on with the mainstream listening audience were spoken-word comic Irish tales, " coon" songs, which exploited negative stereotypes of African Americans, and brass bands. By 1892 Columbia had issued about 100 recordings of the United States Marine Band, which included Sousa marches and Strauss waltzes, among other favorites.
It was German American immigrant Emile Berliner who first envisaged the contours of the modern music industry full-blown. Berliner had developed a recording process based on a flat disc for a machine he called the gramophone. At its very first demonstration in 1888, Berliner prophesied the ability to make an unlimited number of copies from a single master, the development of a mass-scale home-entertainment market for recorded music, and a system of royalty payments to artists derived from the sale of discs.(10)
During this same time frame, similar developments were being undertaken elsewhere in the industrialized world. The work of Charles and Emile Pathe in Paris paralleled the development of the Edison phonograph. Opening their first phonograph factory in the Paris suburb of Chatou in 1894, Pathe Freres became a full-fledged recording company in 1897. That same year William Barry Owen left his position as head of Berliner' s National Gramophone Company in New York and established the Gramophone Company in London to exploit the Berliner European gramophone patents. Deutsche Grammophon, another related company, was set up by Joseph Berliner in Hanover, Germany. Then, in 1901, Emile Berliner founded the Victor Talking Machine Company in the United States.
Even though these companies knew that they were headed for entertainment--not dictation--the fledgling industry faced a number of serious roadblocks--technical, legal, and financial. Because of their limited sound quality, early recordings tended to favor spoken-word and instrumental selections; writers and publishers were not yet entitled to receive royalties from the sale or use of recorded music; and, because cylinders couldn' t yet be mass produced, manufacturing couldn' t compete with the consumer demand that already existed for sheet music. In addition, a series of patent wars prevented the industry from progressing smoothly. After the turn of the century, however, the major recording companies determined that pooling their patents would advance the technology, as well as their economic self-interest, far more rapidly and, in the process, provide them with a form of oligopolistic control of the industry.
Emile Berliner delivered on his first prophecy when he made negative discs called " stampers," which evolved into the shellac-based, 78-rpm pressings that went on to become the industry standard until the late 1940s. He then contracted with an enterprising machinist named Eldridge R. Johnson, who developed a competitive twenty-five-dollar machine, creating the possibility of a home-entertainment market for records. To realize his second prophecy, Berliner judged correctly that he would need someone with more musical ability than himself to coordinate talent and recording. A single demonstration of the " beautiful round tones" of Berliner' s disc was enough to lure Columbia' s Fred Gaisberg--in effect, the first a&r (artist and repertoire) man/producer--to Victor.
If Berliner was the industrial visionary, Gaisberg provided the cultural input. Because recording artists weren' t yet paid royalties and received no credit on records or in catalogues, Gaisberg had relatively little trouble persuading popular Columbia artists to record for Victor. Neither was he limited to performers in the United States. Gaisberg had already set up the first recording studio in London in 1898 before he moved from Columbia to Victor. Then in the early 1900s Victor acquired 50 percent ownership of the British Gramophone Company.(11) Through the efforts of William Barry Owen, Gaisberg was soon recording in every music capital in Europe and Russia.
Because of an elitist bias toward high culture, European classical music was considered to be the hallmark of good taste and opera singers occupied the highest rung on the entertainment ladder. Accordingly, the British Gramophone Company catalogue included songs and arias in every European language and many Asian languages as well. Gaisberg also made recordings at the Imperial Opera in Russia. In 1902 Italian tenor Enrico Caruso recorded ten arias in a hotel room in Milan for Gramophone, helping to establish the company as a serious outlet for classical as well as popular music. Eldridge Johnson imported these higher priced " Red Seal" recordings for sale in the United States and then began a domestic Red Label series of his own, which featured the stars of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.(12) Producer C. G. Childs placed a jewel in the crown of the new series when he signed Caruso to an exclusive Victor contract by offering him the unprecedented provision of a royalty on records sold, thereby fulfilling the last of Berliner' s 1888 prophecies.
In the 1910s the recording industry extended its tentacles into the most lucrative markets of the world, through pressing plants in the most important areas and through a network of subsidiaries elsewhere. The two largest and most powerful companies, U.S. Victor and British Gramophone, furthered their mutual interests by dividing portions of the globe cooperatively. Victor had the Americas, North and South, and what they called the Far East; Gramophone operated factories in Europe, Russia, and India. After the outbreak of World War I the assets of Deutsche Grammophon were confiscated by the German government as enemy property, forcing a split between the British and German companies. By this time, however, Germany' s Lindstrom company had become an international player and Pathe was not far behind.(13)
By this time, it was clear that records would become a powerful cultural force. In 1909, the United States alone manufactured more than 27 million discs and cylinders, with a wholesale value of nearly $12 million.(14) Comparable figures from around the world were equally impressive. One observer estimated German record production at 18 million copies (including exports) in 1907, Russian sales at 20 million copies in 1915, and the British and French markets at 10 million units each in the same time frame.(15) It was figures such as these which caused the publishers to stand up and take notice.
While the economic vision of the major record companies was nothing short of world domination, their cultural strategy at this time was seemingly more democratic. All of the major companies not only exported their own domestic products internationally, they also recorded and distributed local artists in the countries where they operated, " so that by the early 1910s, Icelandic, Estonian, Welsh and Breton record buyers, the ethnic minorities of the Russian Empire, the twenty largest immigrant groups in the United States, and the most important groups of the Indian subcontinent were all supplied by recordings of their own musical traditions." (16) Given the history of European colonialism and patterns of racism in the United States, however, it is likely that this broad range of cultural products resulted more from considerations of cost effectiveness than a commitment to cultural diversity.
It is also the case that there were (and are) pronounced biases in the way that the music industry conceived of itself and its world. Africa (with the occasional exception of South Africa) and certain other locales are conspicuously absent in much of the writing about the early internationalization of the music industry. Even within the industrialized world, there was internal class and race stratification. Record companies were slow to learn the cultural lesson that while the European classics brought prestige to their labels, the steady income--indeed, the future of the recording industry--was tied more to popular appetites. Victor' s prestigious Red Seal series never accounted for more than 20 percent of the sales of the popular black-label recordings.(17) While the record companies grappled with the tension between an elite conception of culture and the financial realities of popular taste, many rich sources of musical culture went beneath their notice, particularly within regions that were insufficiently penetrated by capital and/or populations that were too poor to be thought of as consumers.
Significant cultural blind spots notwithstanding, by the 1910s the recording industry was clearly in an ascending phase, one which, with numerous fits and starts, would continue. The addition of a mechanical royalty to the copyright laws in the early twentieth century was timely in that it opened the door for collaborations between publishers and recording companies which had not existed previously. Companies in Great Britain and the United States were particularly well served, as a lucrative market for musical theater albums was discovered among American soldiers and native Britons during World War I when Gramophone issued a recording of the songs from Business as Usual, a popular musical revue. This was followed by recordings of two of Irving Berlin' s shows, Watch Your Step and Cheep, with equal success. Victor emulated the success of its British partner by recording the best-known stage entertainers in the United States. Columbia and Edison soon followed suit.
It should be noted that there were distinctions between the new copyright laws which differentially affected the standing of record companies in different countries. While both the U.S. and British revisions added mechanical rights to already existing performing rights, enabling publishers to extend their reach to a new medium, the British law also included language that was later used to argue for an additional right, referred to somewhat confusingly as a " performance right," which enabled record companies to claim a copyright that inheres in the recording itself " as if such contrivances were musical works." (18) The performance right allows a record company to recover a royalty when a record is used for a public performance, as in a jukebox or on the radio. In Great Britain, Phonographic Performance Ltd. (PPL) was set up to administer these payments and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) was established to lobby other governments for similar provisions in their domestic laws.
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