Numenor Homepage | Cartha di Ilquen .
~ .
Mia Numenor | Mappa di Numenor .
Scrittoio Personale | PM .
Elenco Gruppi | Elenco Ilquelin .
Ilquelin on-line .
Sondaggi | Ricerca .
~ .
Calendari | Galleria Fotografica .
~ .
Segnalazioni | Messaggio ai Valar .

Entra in Numenor Esci da Numenor

Galleria Foto ed Immagini Vai a Virindor Vai ad Ea

Bellissimo articolo sull' editoria musicale! 2/3

 
Visualizza i threads correlati: (in questo forum | in tutti i forum)

Mae Govannen Guest
Ilquelin attualmente su questo topic: nessuno
  Versione da Stampa
Home >> [Mittalmar] >> Aula delle Arti di Arandor ~ Arte ~ >> Aula della Musica ~ Musica ~ >> Bellissimo articolo sull' editoria musicale! 2/3 Pagina: [1]
ID-Ilquelin
Messaggio << Topic precedente   Topic successivo >>
Bellissimo articolo sull' editoria musicale! 2/3 - 2003-07-04 3:09:22   
Taym


Messaggi: 5400
Primo ingresso in Numenor: 2002-07-07
Da: Valimar
Status: offline
----------- Part 2 --------------

While a number of countries adopted copyright provisions similar to Great Britain' s, others--such as France and the United States--did not acknowledge a copyright in records as such.(19) Performance rights were hotly debated in the 1976 revision to the U.S. Copyright Law, but even at that late date Congress decided that the issue required further study. Consequently, no provision was included in the final legislation; indeed, Section 114 (a) states explicitly that the owner' s rights " do not include any right of performance," effectively killing the measure. The failure to adopt a performance right has serious consequences, particularly for recording artists with a signature sound, which were made clear in the report of the House Judiciary Committee on the 1976 legislation. " Mere imitation of a recorded performance would not constitute a copyright infringement," said the committee, " even where one performer deliberately sets out to simulate another' s performance as exactly as possible." (20)

In addition to the complexity of performing rights, performance rights, and mechanicals, the 1928 Rome revision to the Berne Convention introduced the concept of " moral rights," which granted an author the right to be properly identified and guarded against any editing or other alteration of a work that would compromise its integrity. As with other provisions of Berne, however, the moral rights provision was optional. Again, the United States was significant among the countries that opted out of this provision, even after it signed on to Berne.

Amid the growing complexity of the music industry, it appeared as though the market for recorded music was virtually unlimited. Gross revenues in the United States hit an all-time high of $106 million in 1921, with comparable growth being reported elsewhere in the industrialized world. The expiration of the original talking-machine patents in the mid-teens enabled a number of new companies to enter the record business. Unsated consumer demand in the areas of blues and country music--known at the time as race and hillbilly--even allowed for the formation of some Black-owned indies such as Black Swan, Sunshine, Merritt, and Black Patti. Pathe opened a branch in New York and Lindstrom started OKeh Records. At this point, however, the U.S. record market stalled--even as record sales were still climbing in other countries. Two years after the advent of commercial radio broadcasting in 1920, annual record revenues in the United States declined immediately and then plummeted to an all-time low of $6 million in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression. By this time the depression had adversely affected all record-producing nations. To avoid bankruptcy, British Gramophone merged with the Columbia Graphophone Company (the European arm of U.S.-based Columbia) to form Electric and Musical Industries (EMI). In the United States, the major radio networks acquired their first record divisions; RCA merged with Victor in 1929 and CBS bought Columbia Records in the mid-thirties. As is often the case in the music business, technological advances have a way of changing existing power relationships and influencing cultural choices. The introduction of. radio--a new medium that not only delivered live music with better sound quality than records, but did so free of charge--initially lessened the appeal of records.




Radio Broadcasting: Empires of the Air

Radio was one of those developments that clearly resulted from an international process of shared knowledge, beginning with the discovery of electromagnetic waves by the German scientist Heinrich Hertz in the early 1890s. Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi developed the first practical applications of " Hertzian waves" in the field of telegraphy and set up shop in Britain and the United States by the beginning of the twentieth century. Canadian Reginald Fessenden led the way from telegraphic to telephonic transmissions, but could not compete with the dramatic broadcasts of phonograph music from the Eiffel Tower (1908) or Caruso from the Metropolitan Opera in New York (1910), engineered by Lee de Forest, an American whose country was determined to dominate the new technology.

Owing to the ascending economic power and military might of the United States following World War I, it disproportionately reaped the benefits of commercial broadcasting (as well as the major technical advances of the next thirty years). During World War I the commercial development of radio was temporarily halted by the Allies in order to devote all further research and application to the war effort. Since this pooling of resources effectively meant a moratorium on patent suits, the war years encouraged technical advances at a crucial period in the development of radio which might not otherwise have been possible. Once the war was over, it was clear that there was a future for radio, and Marconi, headquartered in Britain, set his sights on nothing less than a worldwide monopoly on wireless communication. But the U.S. government felt otherwise.

Because President Woodrow Wilson saw mass communication as a key element in the balance of world power, he found the prospect of a British-dominated monopoly on radio unacceptable. Once the president of American Marconi understood his position, he dryly told his stockholders in 1919, " We have found that there exists on the part of the officials of the [U.S.] Government a very strong and irremovable objection to [American Marconi] because of the stock interest held therein by the British Company." (21) When all was said and done, the operations and assets of American Marconi had been transferred to a new entity--the Radio Corporation of America (RCA)--a holding company for American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), who manufactured transmitters, General Electric (GE) and Westinghouse, who made receivers, and the former stockholders of American Marconi.

With future developments in radio firmly in U.S. hands, the advent of broadcasting internationally proceeded according to a number of different models. In their pathbreaking study of the international music industry, Roger Wallis and Krister Maim identified three main types--public service, purely commercial, and government controlled--which are derived from archetypes of the historical development of radio.(22) In practice none of these ideal types exist in pure form, and many systems were hybrids from the start or changed over time. In France, for example, some early radio stations were operated by the government, while others were owned by schools or private companies. In Germany, a somewhat independent system of educational and entertainment programs was nationalized by the Nazis in 1933 so as to better exploit the value of radio as a unifying political force.




Britain' s BBC is generally considered the archetypal public-service system. According to the BBC website, " John Reith, the BBC' s founding father, looked westwards in the 1920s to America' s unregulated, commercial radio, and then east to the fledgling Soviet Union' s rigidly controlled state system. Reith' s vision was of an independent British broadcaster able to `educate, inform and entertain' the whole nation, free from political interference and commercial pressure." (23) By the time a schedule of daily broadcasts that included drama, news, and children' s programs, as well as classical and popular music, went " on the air" over London' s 2LO station, more than one million tenshilling listening licenses had been issued to help insure the independence of the enterprise. Still, BBC radio has hardly been free from government intervention in the censorship of popular music.

Telephonic broadcasting began earlier in both the United States and the Soviet Union. During the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, radio stations were considered important assets for the new society. Because of the sheer size of the new federation, the lack of infrastructure, high levels of illiteracy, and the diversity of nationalities, Lenin reasoned quite correctly that radio would provide the most effective means of communicating with the masses. " Every village should have radio," opined Lenin. " Every government office, as well as every club in our factories should be aware that at a certain hour they will hear political news and major events of the day. This way our country will lead a life of highest political awareness, constantly knowing actions of the government and views of the people." (24) Control of Soviet radio was placed in the hands of the People' s Commissariat for Posts and Telegraphs and, in 1921, the agency began a series of daily broadcasts called the " Spoken Newspaper of the Russian Telegraph Agency." Because individual receivers were too expensive for private use, loudspeakers were installed in public areas for reception.

Although broadcasting in the United States was conceived as a commercial enterprise from the start, it began with the same lofty rhetoric as the BBC regarding education and raising the general level of culture. In the United States, the tension between such elite notions of culture and the dictates of popular taste played itself out in a pivotal debate between the more dignified old guard programmers and a new breed of unabashedly commercial advertisers.

A regular schedule of broadcasting began in the United States in November of 1920 when the Westinghouse station KDKA went live from the roof of their Pittsburgh factory, reporting the results of the Harding/Cox presidential election. Within two to three years, nearly 600 stations were licensed to operate, with few precedents to guide their development. The existing legislation, designed primarily to govern maritime telegraphy, did not anticipate the impact of commercialized telephonic broadcasting. Issues such as programming, financing, organization, ownership, networking, interference, and advertising were worked out in practice and over time as they arose.




Though U.S. legislation was premised on a system of independent stations, radio quickly became concentrated in the hands of two giant corporations, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and National Broadcasting Company (NBC), a subsidiary of RCA that operated the Red and Blue networks. By the 1930s coast-to-coast network broadcasting was a reality and NBC and CBS already owned 50 of the 52 clear channels--stations with large transmitters positioned to broadcast over great distances with minimal interference--as well as 75 percent of the most powerful regional stations. In terms of ownership patterns, U.S. radio developed as a very private enterprise. Programming, however, was a different matter.

Consistent with radio' s educational mission, news and dramatic series had been staples of broadcasting from the beginning, but the bulk of radio programming consisted of music.(25) While the old-line programmers favored concerts of classical or semi-classical music to nourish the cultural sensibilities of the middle-class audience, the advertisers paid more attention to popular tastes. They tended more toward " dialect" comedy and popular song. In this, they were closer to the inclinations of Tin Pan Alley than those of the programmers, and the popular publishing houses, acting through ASCAP, were quick to reap the benefits.

The advent of commercial advertising placed musical broadcasts within the public-performance-for-profit provision of the 1909 Copyright Act. By the end of 1924 " ASCAP income from 199 radio licenses was $130,000, up from the previous year' s $35,000 but far from the million' predicted when the drive to collect from broadcasters began in the summer of 1922." (26) By 1937 ASCAP' s take from radio had jumped to $5.9 million. Considering ASCAP' s demands excessive, the broadcasters began an adversarial relationship with the publishers, which led to the formation of a rival performing-rights organization in 1939--Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI)--and which continued well into the 1960s.

No sooner had the broadcasters come to terms with ASCAP than they ran afoul of the American Federation of Musicians, who went to war over the use of " canned music" on radio. Training their sights on the record companies, the AFM struck the recording studios, a strategy intended to hurt record production and, at the same time, keep musicians working on radio. The AFM scored a short-term victory, as the demand for new releases outstripped the supply that the record companies had stockpiled. The strike ended when the record companies agreed to pay a royalty on record sales which was used to finance the Performance Trust Fund for out-of-work musicians. Still, it was inevitable that records would one day replace live musicians on radio.

If the political economy of radio seemed far removed from the average listener, its social functions often touched people deeply. During the Depression, wrote Erik Barnouw, radio won " a loyalty that seemed almost irrational. Destitute families that had to give up an icebox or furniture or bedding still clung to the radio as to a last link with humanity." (27) This reality was hardly wasted on President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the first " radio president," whose popular " Fireside Chats" provided him with a national following throughout his tenure in office.




Not unlike the Bolsheviks or the Nazis, Roosevelt immediately grasped the ideological potential of radio; in 1942 he authorized the Armed Forces Radio Service to keep U.S. troops stationed abroad informed and entertained, and to mount a direct challenge to the opposing ideology promoted by the likes of Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose. By 1945 the AFRS had expanded to a network of 150 outlets that crisscrossed the globe, with weekly shipments of news and music programming being distributed from its Los Angeles Broadcast Center. In this way a steady diet of U.S. military reportage as well as a sizable dose of U.S. popular culture were broadcast around the world.(28)

On the homefront, the tension between high and popular culture in music programming had taken a turn toward the popular in one of the most interesting national prime-time experiments of the period--Your Hit Parade on NBC. Tapping into audience responses for programming decisions, the sponsor directed B. A. Rolfe and his thirty-five-piece orchestra to play only popular dance music with " no extravagant, bizarre, involved arrangements," so as to insure the " foxtrotability" of every selection programmed.(29) In focusing solely on musical selections that were popular among the listening audience, Your Hit Parade was the first show to confer power in determining public taste on the consumer. Their " listener preference" letters foreshadowed the more " scientific" methods of rating that would eventually determine official popularity charts and format radio programming.

The tension between the " elevated" cultural tendencies of radio' s old guard programmers and the straight commercial entertainment favored by the advertisers continued for years. Ultimately, the balance of power in programming favored the advertisers. As a result, radio has tended to follow the popular tastes of consumers, a tendency that had unanticipated consequences as rock and roll emerged in the early 1950s.

Technological Advances and Structural Change

A number of advances in audio technology that came into widespread usage in the 1940s set the stage for the emergence of rock and roll and major structural changes ill the music industry. Among these were the inventions of magnetic tape and the transistor, and the advent of microgroove recording.

The concept and equipment for magnetic recording were first patented by the Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen in 1898, but it was the Germans who perfected it. The German magnetophone developed by Telefunken and BASF used plastic tape coated with iron oxide, which could be magnetized by amplified electrical impulses to encode a signal on the material. Playback simply reversed the process. Aside from the obvious technical advantages of editing, splicing, and better sound reproduction, magnetic tape recording was also more durable, more portable, and less expensive than the existing technologies. The Nazis used the new technology to increase propaganda broadcasts during World War II, but there was no immediate application to the music industry, as the studios and manufacturing plants of Deutsche Grammophon (now owned by Seimens) in Berlin and Hanover had been destroyed by saturation bombing. As Germany rebuilt after the war, Deutsche Grammophon became the first company to use magnetic tape exclusively.




Among the spoils of the war, magnetic tape was one of the items that was " liberated" from the Nazis. In the United States, the main beneficiary was the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M), who came up with a tape that surpassed the sound quality of the German product and marketed it under their Scotch Tape trademark. Simultaneously, tape-recorder manufacturers were able to reduce recording speeds from thirty inches per second (ips) to fifteen ips and then to seven-and-a-half ips, without seriously compromising sound quality. The amount of material that could be recorded on a standard tape thus quadrupled. The advantages of tape were immediately apparent to recording companies and radio stations, who invested in the technology as soon as it became available.

A welcome companion to the new recording technology was the transistor, introduced by U.S.-based Bell Telephone in 1948. Until the transistor, the amplification needed for radio broadcasting and electronic recording was tied to cumbersome and fragile vacuum tubes--a component based on Lee de Forest' s audion, capable of generating, modulating, amplifying, and detecting radio energy. The transistor was capable of performing all the functions of the vacuum tube but in a solid environment. As such, it could be made smaller, required less power, and was more durable than the vacuum tube, which was soon replaced. This advance encouraged decentralization in broadcasting and recording, which aided independent production. On the consumption side, the transistor made possible truly portable radio receivers. Teenagers, who were soon to become an identifiable consumer group, could now explore their developing musical tastes in complete privacy.

The same year that the transistor was unveiled, a team of scientists working at CBS labs under the leadership of Dr. Peter Goldmark and William Bachman invented " high fidelity." Developed out of their interest in classical music, this breakthrough yielded the " microgroove" or " long-playing" 33-rpm record (the LP), which increased the number of grooves per inch on a standard record from eighty-five to three hundred. Not to be outdone, RCA responded with a similar product that played at 45 rpm. In what became known as the " battle of the speeds," the competition between the two giant firms produced vinylite discs of excellent sound quality and maximum durability. The 45, whose size caught the fancy of jukebox manufacturers, soon became the preferred configuration for singles. The LP became the industry standard for albums. Because these records were lighter and less breakable than shellac-based 78s, they could be shipped faster and more cheaply. Particularly because of these technological advances, records emerged as a relatively inexpensive medium, which held out the very real possibility of decentralization in the recording industry.

Two policy decisions in the United States also had implications for the further development of popular music and the music industry. Owing to a shellac shortage during the war, which caused a cutback on the number of records that could be produced, the major U.S. labels made a strategic decision to abandon the production of African American music. This decision, coupled with technological advances favoring decentralization, created the conditions in the 1940s under which literally hundreds of small independent labels--among them Atlantic, Chess, Sun, King, Modern, Specialty, and Imperial--came into existence in the United States.




Another important policy decision--leading to the development of television--enabled these fledgling labels to gain a permanent foothold in the industry. The concept of transmitting images over distances had been around since the nineteenth century. As early as 1926 John Logie Baird experimented with a mechanical television system that became the basis for the BBC' s first televisual transmissions. The current system of electronic television was first proposed by Scottish inventor A. A. Campbell-Swinton in 1908. It was developed in earnest in the United States at Westinghouse by Vladimir K. Zworykin, a refugee from the Bolshevik Revolution, using a cathode-ray tube invented by Karl Ferdinand Braun in Germany in 1897. In 1935 RCA decided to sink $1 million into the development of the new medium. One year later the BBC began its first regular public television broadcasts.

Television became a viable consumer item in the United States in the late 1940s. By 1951 there were nearly 16 million television sets in operation and RCA had already recovered its initial investment. Television signaled the death knell for network radio, as the new visual medium quickly attracted most of the national advertising. Interestingly, this had the effect of strengthening local independent radio, which emerged as the most effective vehicle for local advertisers--at a time when the number of radio stations in the United States had doubled from about 1,000 in 1946 to about 2,000 in 1948.

Local radio in the late forties and early fifties was a very loosely structured scene. Independent deejays--or " personality jocks" as they were called--were in control. As they replaced the live-entertainment personalities who dominated radio in the thirties and early forties, they became, for a time, the pivotal figures in the music industry. Relying on their own inventiveness for popularity, independent deejays often experimented with alternatives to the standard pop fare of network radio. In most cases the key to their musical success turned out to be rhythm and blues--the direct precursor of rock and roll-produced by independent labels.

The relationship between local radio and record companies also contributed to a major structural change in the music business. In the era of network radio, music was performed live by studio orchestras. In its search for cheaper forms of programming, however, independent radio turned to recorded music. The dawn of a new age was apparent when WINS in New York announced in 1950, over the strong objection of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), that it would be programming records exclusively from then on. Since recorded music was now the rule for radio, record companies routinely supplied free copies of new releases to deejays in the hope that they could turn them into hits. Eventually, this practice cemented the reciprocal arrangement between radio and record companies that has defined the music industry ever since: inexpensive programming in return for free promotion.




Records became not only the staple of all radio programming but also the dominant product of the music industry as a whole, eclipsing sheet music as the dominant medium for music. Record companies thus displaced publishing houses as the power center of the music industry. Further, with technological advances favoring decentralization in recording and a climate of experimentation in radio, it became possible for small independent labels to challenge the few giant corporations that had monopolized the music business until this time. The stage was set for the emergence of rock and roll.

Cultural Transformation and Structural Change

The eruption of rock and roll in the 1950s changed the popular music landscape permanently and irrevocably, signaling the advent of broader social change to come. It was a pivotal moment for a number of reasons. Economically, the music enhanced the fortunes of " untutored" artists, upstart independent record companies, and wildly eccentric deejays, turning the structure of the music business on its head. The vintage rock-and-roll years coincided with a period when the fortunes of the U.S. music industry nearly tripled; revenues from record sales climbed from $213 million in 1954 to $603 million in 1959. In this expansion, rock and roll jumped from a 15.7 percent share of the pop market in 1955 to a 42.7 percent share in 1959. During the same time period, independent record companies went from a 21.6 percent share of the pop market in 1955 to a 66.3 percent share of a pop market that was roughly three times larger in 1959. Rock and roll was clearly a threat to established music business interests economically. But it was a threat to the whole society culturally and politically.

As a rhythm-dominant music that placed a high aesthetic value on repetition and improvisation, rock and roll represented a hybrid form that favored African ways of making music over European. As such, it created a space for African American artists in mainstream culture that had not previously existed. Further, as a music steeped in regional accents, slurred syllables, and urban slang, it foregrounded working-class sensibilities in opposition to elite notions of culture and Tin Pan Alley' s white, middle-class orientation. Finally, it was the first music marketed directly to youth; its performers were roughly the same age as its audience. This, coupled with the rebellious tone of the music, created the first publicly identified generation gap in society at large.

Despite various efforts to tame the music in the late fifties, rock and roll became even more highly politicized in the 1960s, as baby boomers came of age and the music became identified with radical youth movements throughout the world. By this time the music associated with the " British Invasion," its name now shortened to " rock," had made a major contribution, elevating the music to the status of art, even as it became more closely linked with alternative and oppositional tendencies. A whole new broadcast medium--FM rock radio--and a burgeoning rock press opened up to accommodate these new sounds. But, just as the radical movements of the sixties depended in part on the affluence provided by imperialist practices, popular music was inextricably bound to the capitalist interests that produced it. " From the start," said Michael Lydon in 1970, " rock has been commercial in its very essence.... [I]t was never an art form that just happened to make money, nor a commercial undertaking that sometimes became art. Its art was synonymous with its business." (30)




The 1960s may have been experienced by artists and audiences as a period of political awakening and cultural development, but for the music industry it was a period of commercial expansion and corporate consolidation. Far from disappearing, as the activists of the 1960s would have had it, capitalism simply became hipper. There was a new wisdom among corporate executives in the music industry. As it became clear that the key to profitability lay in manufacturing and distribution, record companies began contracting out most of the creative functions of music making. Far from resisting the creative impulses of offbeat artists or upstart independent labels, the major companies now signed acts directly, made label deals, entered into joint ventures, or contracted for distribution.

There ensued a period of unprecedented merger mania. Steve Chapple and I identified three types of mergers: horizontal, vertical, and conglomerate.(31) In reality, of course, such ideal types were often hybrids as in the amalgamation of Warner-Reprise, Elektra-Asylum, and Atlantic in the creation of the Warner Communications empire. By the early 1970s a couple of dozen associated labels--in addition to extensive holdings in film and television, Mad magazine, sixty-three comic books, and a piece of Ms. magazine--were operating under the new corporate umbrella. CBS integrated vertically to control production and marketing from recording to retail sales. In addition to its own labels, recording studios, pressing plants, national distribution, and a publishing division, CBS, Inc. owned the Columbia Record and Tape Club, Pacific Stereo and the Discount Records chain, Fender Guitars, Leslie Speakers, Rhodes Pianos, and Rogers Drums. In Britain EMI had acquired an analogous set of holdings.

RCA, CBS, and EMI, which had purchased Capitol in 1955, had long been divisions of multinational electronics conglomerates. In the early 1970s they were joined by another electronics-related multinational corporation. Seimens and the Dutch conglomerate Philips had begun to merge their recording interests in the early sixties. In 1971 they combined to form PolyGram, which included MGM and Mercury. In 1980 they added British Decca. The structure of this multinational " Big Five" --four electrics giants plus Warner Communications--formed the basis for the new international music industry in the 1980s, as the business of music became an increasingly global phenomenon.

Meanwhile, the predominance of electronics firms in the music field created an issue, which seemed particularly antithetical to the prevailing ideology of popular music--namely, the connection between music and the military. Advances in electronic communication had always developed according to their military applications. It was no different in the sixties and seventies. The connection became apparent to the Rolling Stones when they discovered that their label had channeled profits from their records into precisely this kind of research and development. Said Keith Richard: " We found out ... that all the bread we made for Decca was going into making little black boxes that go into American Air Force bombers to bomb fucking North Vietnam.... That was it. Goddamn, you find you' ve helped to kill God knows how many thousands of people without even knowing it. I' d rather the Mafia than Decca." (32)




While popular music maintained a strong connection to the women' s movement and the antinuclear movement throughout the 1970s, it was a time when the idealism of the sixties began to fade. Adding to the loss of innocence, it was here that the popular David and Goliath tale of small independent labels successfully challenging the majors for market share ended. While the indies may still have entered the business to fill a void in the market, their larger function became providing research and development for the majors. When Robert Stigwood' s RSO label and Neil Bogart' s Casablanca demonstrated from the bottom up that a fortune could be made in disco, PolyGram simply stepped in and acquired a controlling interest in both labels. Warner engineered a similar acquisition when Seymour Stein' s Sire demonstrated the commercial potential of new wave. Far from being in competition with the majors, the independents had now become part of the same corporate web.

Rock and Its Effects on National Cultures

As early as 1969, with only eleven countries providing data, IFPI reported that the revenues from the international sale of recorded music had surpassed $2 billion. By 1978 the figure had jumped to more than $10 billion, with twenty-two countries reporting.(33) The fact that three of the five international firms that shared more than 70 percent of this windfall--through subsidiaries, licensing, and/or distribution--were U.S.-owned (and a fourth, British) was cause for concern among many smaller nations around the world, who feared that their national cultures might be overrun.

Earlier in the century, Great Britain itself had experienced the problem. In 1949 Tin Pan Alley had made such an impact on Britain that only 19 percent of the music on the BBC was British. By 1958, at the height of early rock and roll, that figure had declined to 14.8 percent.(34) In the rock explosion of the fifties and sixties, British and U.S. popular music were exported to every corner of the globe. As early as 1977 both CBS and RCA were reporting that more than 50 percent of their sales came from their international divisions.(35) Even in developing countries, the British and U.S. popularity charts provided guidance for local licensees and radio stations regarding which international selections were worth releasing locally.

In this connection, Wallis and Malm noted that the 1970s were characterized by " the almost simultaneous emergence of what could be termed `national pop and rock music' " in countries throughout the world.(36) This included the adoption of electric instruments and related sound-amplification equipment. In this context, a general debate about culture dating from the sixties turned toward the question of cultural imperialism, particularly on the part of the United States, and to some extent Great Britain, a s many nations became more involved in popular music. In Puerto Rico, for example, the rivalry between salseros and rockeros became so intense that it was often discussed as a referendum on national identity. Socialist countries, with a few notable exceptions such as the German Democratic Republic, tended toward the active suppression of Western popular music and rock-related styles in particular. In these instances rock was perceived as " the music of the enemy," consistent with the cultural imperialism thesis.




_____________________________



Messaggio #: 1
Pagina:   [1]
Home >> [Mittalmar] >> Aula delle Arti di Arandor ~ Arte ~ >> Aula della Musica ~ Musica ~ >> Bellissimo articolo sull' editoria musicale! 2/3 Pagina: [1]
Trasferimento rapido:





Nuovi Messaggi Nessun Nuovo Messaggio
Hot Topic con nuovi messaggi Hot Topic senza nuovi messaggi
Chiuso con Nuovi Messaggi Chiuso senza nuovi messaggi
 Inizia Thread
 Risposta
 Effettua Un Sondaggio
 Partecipa al Sondaggio
 Cancella propri messaggi
 Cancella propri threads
 Assegna voti ai messaggi


2003

Ilquelin che utilizzano IE: Zoom 120% | Zoom 100%

Forum Software © ASPPlayground.NET Advanced Edition 2.5.5 Unicode