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----------- Part 3 --------------
A closer look at the roots of rock, however, revealed a more complicated picture. Among its defining characteristics, European melodic and harmonic elements rested on a foundation of Africanisms--rhythm as an organizing principle, bent notes, syncopated phrasing, the call-and-response style--as well as a host of other influences as diverse as Latin American, French Creole, and Hawaiian.(37) " It is difficult to argue, therefore," as Andrew Goodwin and Joe Gore pointed out, " that rock music is `Western' in quite the same way that Hollywood cinema or British television news are." (38) From this perspective, it would probably be more accurate to describe the emergence of popular West African genres such as Nigerian Afrobeat and Ghanaian Afro-rock as the culture of the African diaspora returning home, rather than a clear-cut instance of cultural imperialism.
Until this time, most governments and national elites tended to steer clear of the popular music sector, considering it to be a commercial product with little or no cultural value. If there were government policies at all, they were usually directed at preserving traditional musics or developing a national art music, which was usually a colonial vestige of European classical music. The developments of the 1970s caused many nations to reevaluate their policies toward popular music. Among the countries visited by Wallis and Maim, " Sweden and Denmark started to give grants to music groups playing national pop and rock. In Tunesia popular Arabic film music was introduced into government supported festivals as was calypso music in Trinidad, reggae music in Jamaica, Welsh-language rock music in Wales and, prior to 1973, nueva cancion chilena in Chile.... A national pop and rock group, the Afro 70 group, with new electric and electronic instruments, represented Tanzania at FESTAC 77." (39)
Unquestionably, the introduction of Western culture, technology, and organizational forms can exert a transformative influence on traditional cultures. The adoption of electric instruments and amplification can place financial strain on musicians. The establishment of a star system and the introduction of format radio can limit possibilities for exposure. Musics that have developed primarily in live performance and that serve ritual social functions can be packaged and sold to the world as entertainment.(40) The issue, however, is whether or not such changes negate the use value of music. Roots reggae--a product of U.S. rhythm and blues, commercialization, Western technology, and Jamaican mento rhythms--can hardly be described as a music that has been stripped of its cultural power and political edge.
Technology is invariably a double-edged sword. In addition to adding to the coffers of multinational record companies, recording technology also provides small countries with a means of reproducing their own music. Cassette tape is a case in point. It was introduced by Philips in 1963, and later improvements provided the transnational music industry with an efficient format for expansion into remote areas. Cassettes became the preferred configuration for music reception internationally in the mid-eighties. However, precisely because the technology is portable and recordable, it has also been used in the production, duplication, and dissemination of local musics and in the creation of new musical styles. In this way the technology has tended to decentralize control over the production and consumption of music. Decentralized control holds out the possibility that new voices and new musics will find new avenues for expression.
It is important in this regard to consider the social relations of popular music, as distinct from those of other mass media. Most mass cultural products, such as film or video, are generally produced and manufactured in one country and sold as finished products in another. Popular music, on the other hand, is most often exported as a master tape, which is then manufactured locally.(41) This encourages the development of a whole production and distribution infrastructure within the host country. In order to make their facilities cost-effective, multinational recording companies typically get involved in the production of local musics. The employees of the subsidiaries of multinational recording companies are most likely to be residents of the host country. The availability of production facilities, in turn, encourages the development of ancillary small businesses such as clubs and retail outlets, often owned and operated by local residents. With local mentors to turn to, indigenous artists become more aware of their rights and the value of their cultural products.
On a deeper, cultural level, and particularly in those countries with strong musical traditions of their own, there is an interaction between international pop and indigenous musics which simply doesn' t exist with other mass cultural forms. " IT]he world had been flooded with Anglo-American music in the fifties and sixties," asserted Wallis and Maim. " This influenced but did not prevent local musicians from developing their own styles, adapted to their own cultures." (42) While the connection between these musics and various rock styles is often obvious, each is also linked--by some combination of language, concrete references, instrumentation, and performance styles--to an indigenous culture. The results, at least as regards music, usually approximate what Wallis and Maim call " transculturation" --a two-way process whereby elements of international pop, rock, and rhythm and blues are incorporated into local and national musical cultures, and indigenous influences contribute to the development of new transnational styles.(43)
In the early 1980s, the potential of this process might have been pushed to a new level, as advances in satellite transmission, which became apparent in the United States with the launching of MTV in 1981, created the possibility of instant national exposure for recording artists and the simultaneous broadcast of performances on a worldwide scale. On the international stage, the wonders of satellite transmission manifested themselves most dramatically in the phenomenon of mega-events--a series of socially conscious international concerts and all-star performances dubbed " charity rock" --that began in 1985 with Live Aid. Given its humanitarian impulse, charity rock provided a moment of opportunity, albeit a limited one, where internationalization itself was a two-way process. While British and American music was disproportionately broadcast to a worldwide audience, the international sounds of artists like Youssou N' Dour and Sly and Robbie also gained greater access to the world market.
The greater acceptance of artists from developing countries prompted the creation of new international marketing structures and promotional vehicles, as non-Western popular musics were incorporated into umbrella categories such as world music or world beat, for sale in industrialized nations. The transnational music industry could have taken this development as a glimpse into a more decentralized and culturally diverse future. But embracing such a vision would have required the industry to challenge some of its own restrictive patterns, such as privileging the English language as a precondition for success in the largest international markets. Instead, the major labels retreated into a formula mentality that pointed the way to a more limiting international culture.
Globalization: Blockbusters, Superstars, and Revenue Streams
Like all capitalist enterprises, the transnational music industry tends toward expansion and concentration. But try as they might to manipulate the market, history has proven that it is seldom one they can predict or control. The triumph of rock and roll in the 1950s is a case in point. And while a handful of major corporations may rule financially, it is important to note that this is not synonymous with controlling the form, content, and style of popular music. The overwhelming success of hip-hop in the face of exclusion, suppression, and outright censorship is testament enough to that. If anything, record companies have relinquished control over form and content in their relentless pursuit of higher profits.
Beginning in the 1980s, the major companies embarked on a strategy that made production significantly more restrictive, making it harder for new artists to enter the business. The precipitating incident was a recession that hit the industry in the early 1980s. From an all-time high of $11.4 billion in 1980, the sales figures from IFPI' s two dozen or so reporting countries declined some 18 percent to $9.4 billion in 1983. While recovery began in 1984, the industry as a whole did not fully return to its 1980 level until 1986.(44) In an industry thought to be recession-proof, this was a seismic event; labels responded by laying off personnel, trimming artist rosters, and limiting the number of new releases. Between 1980 and 1986 CBS alone eliminated over 7,000 positions worldwide.(45)
The runaway success of Michael Jackson' s Thriller pointed the way to recovery. Released in 1983, Thriller went on to sell some 40 million units worldwide, generating an unprecedented seven Top Ten singles and a record twelve Grammy Awards in the process. For the major companies, this became the model for success. In the cost-cutting fever generated by the recession, major companies looked to reap greater rewards from fewer artists. If a single artist can move 40 million units, they reasoned, why shoulder the extra administrative, production, and marketing costs of 80 artists moving half a million units each? Thriller thus signaled an era of blockbuster LPs featuring a limited number of superstar artists as the solution to the industry' s economic woes.
Over the next few years a significant proportion of music industry revenues were generated by a few dozen superstar artists; in addition to Michael Jackson, there were Lionel Richie, Madonna, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, Wham!, Phil Collins, Steve Winwood, Huey Lewis and the News, the Pointer Sisters, Janet Jackson, Anita Baker, and a handful of others. A surprising number of the new superstars were black. This was perhaps the first hint that the greater cosmopolitanism of a world market might produce some changes in the complexion of popular music.
But if it looked like the industry had at least succeeded in becoming more inclusive of African Americans and women, one couldn' t help but notice that the only artists outside the British-American axis of popular music who could rival these superstars in terms of sales and cultural impact--Bob Marley, U2, Abba--all sang in English. Even Julio Iglesias, at one point the best-selling artist in the world, had to sing in English to generate hits in the United States. This lesson was hardly wasted on Francophone artist Celine Dion, who made her bid for international stardom on the strength of her first all-English LP, Unison, and subsequently cemented her position with the cross-media blockbuster, Titanic.
It was at this point that the transnational music companies began to think of themselves more as exploiters of rights than producers of records. Their new mission was to develop as many " revenue streams" as possible. Music-television and cross-media marketing--particularly movie tie-ins--were crucial to this development. All of the above artists had music videos on MTV, many of which were also connected to first-run Hollywood films. The video promoted the movie. The movie sold the record. The label cashed in at every step. Advertising was also institutionalized as a source of revenue; the Beatles' " Revolution" sold sneakers just as Dylan' s " The Times They Are A' Changin' " made an accounting firm that much hipper. The music industry had effectively harnessed all the technology and marketing tools at its disposal to create an international roster of superstars who were capable of generating unheard-of profits with less product.
As usual, technology--in this case the compact disc--played a key role in the industry' s success story. The CD was introduced in the early 1980s simultaneously by Philips and Sony. In terms of sound quality, resistance to wear, and ease of use, the CD was far superior to the LP. While market penetration was slow at first, because of the added expenditure for new hardware, by 1988 worldwide unit sales of LPs and CDs were roughly on par. Because CDs were priced significantly higher than LPs (even though they cost no more to manufacture), purchases in the new configuration added millions to a label' s bottom line. In 1986 " the sale of 53 million CDs generated almost as much income ($930 million) as the 125 million LPs sold ($983 million)." (46) By the end of the decade, the LP had begun its descent into virtual extinction.
The introduction of the CD opened up yet another revenue stream for the major labels--back catalogue. Back catalogue had always been a valuable commodity, as hit records have often boosted sales on previous recordings as well. With the advent of compact discs in the mid-eighties, back catalogue took on an even greater significance as consumers began buying recordings they already owned in the new configuration. The success of reissued artist retrospectives as boxed sets rendered back catalogue even more valuable. By the early nineties, catalogue sales were estimated as high as 40 percent of all album sales, making back catalogue, for many top-selling artists, their most valuable asset.
As always, however, the technology cut both ways. The CD may have captured the market in terms of quality, but cassette tape, because of its greater versatility as a recordable medium, remained the preferred configuration, still outselling CDs two to one until the end of the decade. Cassette technology may have enabled the transnational music industry to penetrate remote corners of the globe, but it was also responsible for the industry' s two main financial headaches of the 1980s--piracy and home taping.
In 1982 IFPI estimated piracy at 11 percent of the total market in the United States and Canada, 21 percent in Latin America, 30 percent in Africa, and 66 percent in Asia.(47) The organization had begun to deal with the threat as early as 1971, when they convened the Phonograms Convention, which proposed a three-stage strategy to curb piracy. Stages I and II, which dealt with protecting the major and minor markets, respectively, had made significant progress by the early 1980s. For Stage III, aimed at pirates " mainly ... situated in the developing world," the genteel system of international conventions was put aside in favor of a more bare-knuckles approach, tying piracy to trade sanctions against the offending nation. By treating music as an " export industry," the more powerful record-producing nations used their economic and political weight to reign in piratical practices elsewhere.(48) This strategy, it should be noted, presupposes an uneven flow of capital and cultural goods, in that developing countries would likely have neither a positive balance of trade in intellectual property nor the economic clout to resist the pressure of industrialized nations. As a result of this approach, musical copyright issues have increasingly been built into trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), the EC' s Single European Market program, and the international General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
As regards home taping, IFPI argued that the decline in industry revenues during the recession was directly related to the rising sales of cassette tape recorders and blank tape. There was little hard evidence to support the claim. Nevertheless, IFPI initiated an international campaign to levy a tax on blank tape and equipment that could be used to compensate copyright holders for their loss of income. The industry was not monolithic on this issue. The economic self-interest of hardware manufacturers like Philips, Sony, and Matsushita, who were in the process of bringing digital audio tape (DAT) recorders to market, was quite at odds with that of record companies, who saw blank tape levies as another potential revenue stream. This tension sometimes played itself out among different divisions of the same firm (e.g., Sony, which bought CBS Records in 1988). The hardware manufacturers and record companies finally came to terms in the IFPI-brokered Athens Agreement of 1989. The resulting " memorandum of understanding" provided a blueprint for legislation like the U.S. Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which imposes levies on digital audio-recording devices and media. The legislation mandates that record companies get 38 percent of the royalty pool, performers 26 percent, and writers and publishers 17 percent each, with the remainder divided among unfeatured musicians and vocalists.(49)
While such legislation appears, at first glance, to confer some measure of recognition on performers (a first in the United States), it is limited in a number of respects. In the first place, only digital hardware and recordable media (i.e., DAT) were subject to the royalty initially. And since the Athens Agreement mandated that all digital recording devices would be equipped with Philips' digital Serial Copy Management System (SCMS), which permits only one digital copy of a digital recording, DAT never caught on as a consumer medium in Europe or the United States. Since the U.S. legislation also included provision for Congress to amend the law as needed to accommodate new technologies, however, it may yet become a significant source of industry revenue, as new configurations like recordable CDs (CD-R and CD-RW) take hold.
Although the rhetoric surrounding intellectual property and the logic of copyright often appears to support the struggling artist, in practice, the result is a very imprecise and uneven system. In the industrialized world, most copyright distribution formulas favor older, more established artists. In 1982, for example, a mere 12 percent of the PRS' s 12,000 members shared 80 percent of the Society' s earnings.(50) In developing countries, the question of collecting royalties across national boundaries at all presents major problems and internal distribution to artists and writers is even more haphazard.
For all its complaining about lost revenues, the major music corporations quickly resumed a pattern of steady growth following the recession of the early eighties. By 1993 the IFPI family of nations reported $30 billion in worldwide sales. Given the reconfigurations of the global economy, however, full recovery did not come about without some profound structural changes in the ownership patterns of the transnational music industry. Record companies were being bought and sold in a speculative atmosphere that made the merger mania of the late 1960s pale by comparison. In 1988 MCA bought Motown for $60 million. A couple of years later PolyGram purchased A&M and Island for upwards of $300 million each. Then MCA shelled out $545 million for Geffen Records.
These huge recording combines were, in turn, bought out by larger multinational corporations. EMI Records remained a division of Thorn EMI (created in 1979), which also controlled Capitol, Virgin, Chrysalis, IRS, and Rhino, among others. The German publishing conglomerate Bertelsmann purchased RCA Records and its affiliated labels when the record division was dumped in the General Electric takeover of RCA. When Sony bought CBS Records (renamed Sony Music) in 1988 for $2 billion, it was the biggest record-company sale in the history of the industry. Those numbers were dwarfed in 1990 when Matsushita forked over $6.6 billion for MCA and its affiliated labels, only to resell the combined companies to Seagrams of Canada five years later. When all was said and done, only one of the Big Five transnational record companies--WEA (Warner/Elektra/Atlantic), a division of Time-Warner--remained in U.S. hands, and in 1991 Time-Warner entered a partnership agreement with Toshiba and C. Itoh to the tune of one billion U.S. dollars.
These new configurations clearly had implications for cultural representation. When Michael Jackson recorded Thriller in 1983, Epic Records was U.S.-owned. By the time Dangerous was released, the label had become a division of Japanese-owned Sony-CBS, which constructed not so much a supranational cultural identity as a global manufacturing and distribution network, ready to mass market anything that will sell internationally. Queried Simon Frith: " whose culture do Sony-CBS and BMG-RCA represent?" (51)
Even though the world may have been poised to accept a rather broad range of musics pointing toward a more decentralized plan for artist development, the music industry did not alter its marketing strategies in the least. " Instead of investing in and nurturing a wide range of new talents," observed Anthony DeCurtis in 1992, " record companies are betting wildly like drunks at the roulette table, hoping that one big score--whether by an old favorite or a new lucky number--will cover all past debts." (52) Ever since Thriller, the music industry has been stuck in a notion of artist development that demands superstardom. Consequently, record companies spent the early nineties ponying up millions for contracts that were as unprecedented as they were unrecoverable.
When Janet Jackson switched from A&M to Virgin in 1991, with only two albums (albeit both number 1) to her credit, she scored a reported $30-million deal. Virgin chairman Richard Branson compared the signing to buying a Rembrandt. Columbia' s Don Ienner described Mariah Carey' s platinum debut more crassly. " We don' t look at Mariah Carey as a dance-pop artist," said Ienner. " We look at her as a franchise." (53) Aerosmith inked a new deal with Columbia in 1991 worth upwards of $30 million. That same year, Motley Crue re-upped with Elektra for a $25-million guarantee. ZZ Top scored $30 million at RCA. The Rolling Stones topped them with a $40-million, three-album deal at Virgin. And even these contracts couldn' t compete with the deals offered to Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince (by then known simply as The Artist), each of which were reportedly worth more than $60 million in guarantees.
Interestingly, the biggest superstars failed to sell like superstars. Pearl Jam outsold Michael Jackson. New releases by Madonna and The Artist rose and fell on the charts as never before. The Artist sustained himself with three greatest-hits packages; Madonna with a fifty-dollar " art" book of revealing photographs of herself called Sex. But instead of learning from these lessons, in 1996 Warner signed R.E.M. to a five-album, $80-million deal, the largest contract in record-company history.
Into the New Millennium
On the eve of the new millennium, corporate shuffling continued unabated. The unexpected demerger of Thorn EMI set the music division afloat, creating a prime target for acquisition. In 1998 Seagrams combined the holdings of MCA (acquired from Matsushita in 1995) and PolyGram (purchased for $10.4 billion) into a single corporate entity called, modestly enough, the Universal Music Group. Among the labels that UMG controls are MCA, Universal (formerly PolyGram), Geffen, A&M, Motown, Island, Mercury, London, and Interscope. The new mega-firm operates in forty-eight countries and boasts a market share (extrapolating from combined 1997 figures of both corporations) of 23 percent. This kind of merger represents a significant level of concentration in the music industry. The downside, of course, is that as many as 20 percent of the company' s 15,500 employees could be fired and literally hundreds of bands could be dropped from its artist roster.(54) No matter. While waiting for the next Michael Jackson to come along, the company will be able to sustain itself on the exploitation of catalogue from its more than forty wholly owned publishing offices.
In this regard, it is interesting to note that corporate capital has expanded its hold over intellectual property rights in at least three critical areas: extending the term of copyright, narrowing the arena for fair use, and creating brand-new intellectual property rights. In the 1990s both the European Community and the United States extended the term of copyright to a point that effectively eliminates the public domain for music written in the twentieth century. In a sweeping revision designed to bring the United States in line with changes in the European Community dating back to 1993, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended U.S. copyrights owned by corporations to ninety-five years and individually held copyrights to the life of the author plus seventy years. While the move was spearheaded by Disney because, under the existing law, Mickey Mouse was about to enter the public domain, such legislation obviously serves the interests of transnational capital, which is becoming better organized on an administrative level.
One of the main avenues through which the international music industry currently seeks to protect its interests is the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), established in 1970 and currently representing 171 member nations. WIPO is charged with developing treaties for protecting the rights of intellectual property owners. These agreements are, in turn, codified in national legislation such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 in the United States, which makes it illegal to circumvent technological measures for protecting sound recordings and other copyrighted material. Seemingly in the interest of creative artists, such measures compel us to revisit the diminishing terrain of fair use. " If data can be protected by code--and it' s illegal to break the code," argues Robert J. Samuelson, " then `fair use' for anything that arrives digitally may vanish." (55)
Extending the reach of corporations even further, the most recent WIPO treaty calls for the creation of a completely new intellectual property right to protect the owners of electronic databases. " The general objective of this right," according to the treaty, " is to protect the investment of time, money, and effort by the maker of a database, irrespective of whether the database is in itself innovative." (56) Depending on how narrowly the treaty is implemented, it may not only be illegal to duplicate a record, it may also be illegal to quote its chart position without permission.
Ironically, it may be the double blade of the technology that makes all of this possible which cuts into corporate control once again. Just as cassettes issued a challenge to centralized control in the seventies and eighties, newer technologies such as the MPEG 1--Audio Layer 3 (MP3) software compression format provides near-CD-quality, downloadable audio over the Internet. MP3 dates back to a 1987 collaboration between Germany' s Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen and Dieter Seitzer from the University of Erlangen, whose work yielded a compression/decompression algorithm, or codec, that could shrink sound files to about one-tenth their normal size without sacrificing quality. In 1992 MP3 was approved as a standard by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), founded by Leonardo Chariglioni in Italy. But it wasn' t until modem and computer clock speeds permitted efficient downloads of MP3 files that the technology threatened to turn the music industry on its head. By the late nineties music enthusiasts--indeed, artists themselves--were converting audio CD files to MP3 and posting them on websites for easy, and most often unauthorized, download. Since that time the term " MP3" has become second only to the word " sex" as the most requested item on Internet search engines.
Technologies like MP3 are threatening to the music industry for a number of reasons. In the first place, MP3 holds out the possibility of a business model that links artists directly with consumers, bypassing the record companies completely. And with articulate industry critics like Chuck D and forward-looking artists like Sheryl Crow already on board, MP3 is generating a momentum that the industry can ill afford to ignore. According to Wired magazine: " About 846 million new CDs were sold last year. But at least 17 million MP3 files are downloaded from the Net each day. That adds up to almost 3 billion in the first six months of 1999." (57) As a result electronic distribution sites like MP3.com and online record labels like Atomic Pop, new home to such artists as Public Enemy and Ice-T, are challenging the status quo.
More upsetting from the industry point of view is the fact that MP3 is an unprotected format, which leaves the industry with no way to regulate its use. Desktop MP3 players such as MacAMP and Winamp (since purchased by America OnLine) have proliferated, enabling users to download and listen to MP3 files on their computers. They have become so successful that MP3 has attracted mainstream computer-industry giants like Microsoft and RealNetworks, who introduced the Windows Media Player and the RealJukebox, respectively, the latter of which was downloaded one million times within ten days of its launch.
It was the introduction of Diamond Multimedia' s Rio, a portable MP3 player that moved MP3 beyond the computer desktop, which really caused the industry to stand up and take notice. The Rio is a walkman-like digital player, with no SCMS copy-protection chip, capable of downloading, storing, and playing back 60 minutes of MP3 music. Fearing piracy on a grand scale, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was quick to bring suit, claiming a violation of the Audio Home Recording Act. Diamond, however, squeezed through a loophole by successfully arguing that the legislation targeted only recording devices and the Rio was a storage device. With the injunction quashed, other portable MP3 players were rushed to market, including Creative Labs' Nomad, Pontis' MPlayer3, and Empeg' s Empeg Car, which can hold up to 5,000 songs.
Taking a more proactive stance, the international music industry, as represented by the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of Japan, IFPI, and the Big Five recording companies, proposed the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI), an open standard that would encode a sound file with a digital " watermark" identifying its owner and origin, as a way of discouraging piracy on the Internet. Interestingly, the person the industry tapped to head up the SDMI project was none other than Leonardo Chariglioni, the founder of MPEG, who certified MP3 in the first place.
With well over 100 organizations participating, SDMI required an enormous amount of collaboration. At the same time, record companies were feeling the pressure to have a commercially viable online presence by the 1999 holiday season, whether it was standardized or not. As a result, individual record companies began making independent deals to advance their own online interests. Universal Music Group and Bertelsman launched GetMusic.com using the Liquid Audio Player for downloading. Free-floating EMI also chose to work with Liquid Audio for secure downloads. Sony formed an alliance with Microsoft using their Media Player software and, together with Warner, merged their jointly owned Columbia House Record Club with the online retail outlet CD Now.
As of this writing, the industry is far from implementing standardized security protocols that work, and new technologies like MP3 show no signs of abatement. While transnational music corporations scramble to protect their bottom lines on new fronts, artists and fans may, at least momentarily, gain some measure of direct access to each other and to sound reproduction possibilities that are becoming increasingly harder to control.
NOTES
(1.) Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 2:296.
(2.) Ibid., 1:37.
(3.) Ibid., 1:38.
(4.) Sidney Finkelstein, How Music Expresses Ideas (New York: International Publishers, 1952, 1976), 26.
(5.) Dave Laing, " Copyright and the. International Music Industry," in Music and Copyright, ed. Simon Frith (Edinburgh: University Press, 1993), 22.
(6.) Ibid., 24-25.
(7.) Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 285. In After the Ball: Popular Music from Rag to Rock (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974), Ian Whitcomb put the figure at 10 million copies over a twenty-year period (4).
(8.) Hamm, Yesterdays, 290.
(9.) Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, 2:365.
(10.) C. A. Schicke, Revolution in Sound: A Biography of the Recording Industry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 41.
(11.) Interestingly, at this point, the term gramophone was dropped from the language in the United States, where phonograph became the generic term for all record players. Gramophone remained the preferred term in Britain and Germany.
(12.) As if to compliment the gentility of the series, Johnson then introduced the Victrola, the first " console" record player, which featured an enclosed turntable, tone arm, and playback horn, and a price tag of two hundred dollars.
(13.) For a more developed discussion of this international structure, see Pekka Gronow, " The Record Industry: The Growth of a Mass Medium," in Popular Music 3, ed. Richard Middleton and David Horn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 55-62.
(14.) Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, 3:23.
(15.) Gronow, " The Record Industry," 59.
(16.) Ibid., 60.
(17.) Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, 3:28.
(18.) See Simon Frith, " Copyright and the Music Business." Popular Music 7, no. 1 (1987): 58.
(19.) In 1971, the United States passed a law that allowed a " limited copyright in sound recordings," but its purpose was to protect record companies against piracy.
(20.) House Report (Judiciary Committee) No. 94-1476, September 3, 1976, p. 106.
(21.) Gleason L. Archer, History of Radio to 1926 (New York: American Historical Society, 1938), 178.
(22.) Roger Wallis and Krister Malm, Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries (London: Constable, 1984), 233.
(23.) " This is London Calling, 2LO calling ..." BBC website, Dec. 15, 1998.
(24.) B. H. Rujnnikov, Tak nachinalos (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1987), 169 (trans. Lenny Zeltser).
(25.) It should be noted that due to a limitation of the 1909 Copyright Act novels and plays could be read on the air without infringing copyright, a loophole that wasn' t plugged until 1952; much of the classical music that was performed was already in the public domain, which again required no royalty payments.
(26.) Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, 3:81.
(27.) Erik Barnouw, The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, 1933-1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 6.
(28.) Complementing the efforts of the AFRS, it was during this period that the U.S. military and the entertainment industry joined forces in the production of V-discs (Victory discs)--special monthly releases featuring popular recording artists, from Frank Sinatra to Louis Jordan, that were distributed to U.S. soldiers in the field. From 1942 to 1944, eight million V-discs, representing some 400 recordings of more than 640 artists, were distributed. Donating their time and music for free, artists from rival record labels, who might otherwise have been prohibited from recording together for contractual reasons, created a number of " once-in-a-lifetime" sessions for the V-disc program. V-discs were particularly valuable in that they were the only recordings that were permitted during the AFM strike of 1942. To discourage personal gain from this enterprise, most of the V-discs were recalled and destroyed after the war.
(29.) Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business, 3:166.
(30.) Michael Lydon, " Rock for Sale," in The Age of Rock 2: Sights and Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution, ed. Lydon (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 53.
(31.) For a detailed discussion of the merger movement see Steve Chapple and Reebee Garofalo, Rock `n' Roll Is Here to Pay: The History and Politics of the Music Industry (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1977), 82-87.
(32.) Ben Fong-Torres, ed., The Rolling Stone Interviews, vol. 2 (New York: Warner Books, 1973), 292.
(33.) Michele Hung and Esteban Garcia Morencos, World Record Sales, 1969-1990: A Statistical History of the World Recording Industry (London: International Federation of the Phonogram Industry, 1990), 85.
(34.) Wallis and Malm, Big Sounds from Small Peoples, 261.
(35.) Part of the surprisingly high international sales figures resulted from international artists like Julio Iglesias, who barely made a dent in the U.S. market, even though he lived in the United States and was the best-selling artist in the world at the time. Disco also tended to transcend national boundaries, but disco was a transnational music right from the beginning. Its global success was based more on the ubiquity of its international connections than a marketing triumph of U.S.-based record companies.
(36.) Wallis and Malm, Big Sounds from Small Peoples, 302.
(37.) See, for example, Reebee Garofalo, " Crossing Over, 1939-1989," in Split Image: African-Americans in the Mass Media, ed. Jannette L. Dates and William Barlow (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1990); George Lipsitz, " `Ain' t Nobody Here but Us Chickens' : The Class Origins of Rock and Roll," in his Class and Culture in Cold War America (South Hadley, Mass.: J. E Bergin, 1982); and Portia K. Maultsby, " Africanisms in African-American Popular Music," in Africanisms in American Culture, ed. Joseph E. Holloway (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
(38.) Andrew Goodwin and Joe Gore, " World Beat and the Cultural Imperialism Debate," Socialist Review 20, no. 3 (July-Sept. 1990): 71.
(39.) Wallis and Malm, Big Sounds from Small Peoples, 219.
(40.) See Reebee Garofalo, " Whose World, What Beat: The Transnational Music Industry, Identity, and Cultural Imperialism," The World of Music 35, no. 2 (1993): 21.
(41.) Laurence Kenneth Shore, " The Crossroads of Business and Music: A Study of the Music Industry in the United States and Internationally," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1983, 283-84.
(42.) Wallis and Malm, Big Sounds from Small Peoples, 302.
(43.) Ibid., 300-301.
(44.) Hung and Morencos, World Record Sales, 1969-1990, 85.
(45.) Simon Frith, " Picking Up the Pieces: Video Pop," in Facing the Music, ed. Frith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 93.
(46.) Ibid., 102-3.
(47.) Ibid., 117.
(48.) For a more detailed discussion of this strategy and its implications, see Laing, " Copyright and the International Music Industry," 31-33.
(49.) Cited in Steve Jones, " Music and Copyright in the USA," in Music and Copyright, ed. Frith, 70.
(50.) PRS Yearbook, 1982, reported in Wallis and Malm, Big Sounds from Small Peoples, 172.
(51.) Simon Frith, " Anglo-America and Its Discontents," Cultural Studies 5, no. 3 (Oct. 1991): 267.
(52.) Anthony DeCurtis, " The Year in Music," Rolling Stone, Dec. 10-24, 1992, p. 26.
(53.) " 1990 Yearbook," Rolling Stone, Dec. 13-27, 1990, 72.
(54.) Dave Ferman and Malcolm Mayhew, " Merger Could Lead to Band Layoffs," Boston Globe, Jan. 2, 1999, D9.
(55.) Robert J. Samuelson, " Meanwhile Back on the Hill . . ." Washington Post, Sept. 17, 1998, A21.
(56.) WIPO, " Basic Proposal for the Substantive Provisions of the Treaty on Intellectual Property in Respect of Databases to be Considered by the Diplomatic Conference," Geneva, Aug. 30, 1996, notes on Article 1.07.
(57.) Vito Peraino, " The Law of Increasing Returns," Wired, Aug. 1999, 144.
Reebee Garofalo is a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he has taught since 1978. He has written numerous articles on racism, censorship, the political uses of music, and the globalization of the music industry. His most recent book is Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA (Allyn and Bacon, 1997). For relaxation, he enjoys drumming and singing with the Blue Suede Boppers, a fifties rock and roll band.
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