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MUSIC INDUSTRY, MEDIA, AND TECHNOLOGY

Rock and R&B are thoroughly enmeshed in a legal, economic, media, and technological network that is called the music industry. How did rock, or any kind of music for that matter, get commodified in the form of a sound recording and distributed in the first place? What legal and economic mechanisms were put in place so that musical artists would be able to reap the benefits of their creations—their intellectual property—and thereby devote their lives to making music? How did technological developments in sound recording and storage media transform the production, distribution, and consumption of rock? What role did radio, television, and print media have in the explosion and sustained presence of rock, making it an essential part of U.S. culture? And how were technological advances in musical instruments, including synthesizers and samplers, catalysts for new musical sounds, ideas, and styles? We will explore the answers to these questions and more in this chapter.

COPYRIGHT

The foundation of the U.S. music industry is based in copyright law, which gives the exclusive right to the composer and recording artist to reproduce and sell music; they may then assign that right to a publisher or record label in return for payment called royalties. Every sound recording has two sets of rights associated with it: (1) the musical composition (the abstract melody, chords, and lyrics) and (2) the recorded performance, that is, the sound captured in a vinyl single or album, cassette, compact disc, or other digital format (see figures 1 and 2).

If the Beatles record the Chuck Berry composition “Roll over Beethoven,” then Chuck Berry should receive a royalty payment for each copy of the Beatles record that is sold (two cents until 1978; 9.1 cents in 2019). Berry, the composer, would typically split his royalty payment with his publishing company, the organization that registers his composition with the U.S. Copyright Office and looks after collecting the royalties. The Beatles version is called a cover. Chuck Berry does not have to give his permission—the Beatles can use a “compulsory license,” which still requires that Berry receive royalty payments (called mechanical royalties).

If Jay-Z records his composition “Can I Live,” consisting of him rapping over short looped excerpts (called samples) of Isaac Hayes’s recording of “The Look of Love,” then Jay-Z must get permission from Hayes (or more probably his record label) and negotiate payment, either a flat fee or a royalty per record sold. Hayes (or his label) has the right to refuse. (The owners of the rights to Beatles recordings—Sony/ATV, eventually reverting to Paul McCartney—do not allow samples.) Additionally, because Isaac Hayes’s recording was a cover version of a composition by Burt Bacharach (composer) and Hal David (lyricist), Jay-Z must also share composer credits and royalties with them.

Bacharach and David registered “The Look of Love” with ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), one of the two major music performance rights organizations (the other is BMI [Broadcast Music, Inc.]), which licenses compositions for public performance, which is protected by copyright law. These performance rights organizations collect fees when works by their composers are played on the radio and TV, or at bars and other live music venues, and they distribute those fees as royalties to their artists. ASCAP lists four writers for “Can I Live” who would capture those royalties: Jay-Z (Shawn Carter); his producer, Irv Gotti (Irving Lorenzo); Burt Bacharach; and Hal David. ASCAP also lists three publishing companies, meaning that the various writers registered their songs (“The Look of Love” and “Can I Live”) with different publishers to look after the benefits of copyright.¹ Separate from composer’s royalties, record labels negotiate with their recording artists for the royalty percentage that they will earn as performers per recording sold, and they also control permissions to sample the recordings of their artists.

A musical arrangement—the style in which an abstract composition is rendered in performance by instrumentalists and vocalists—is not copyrightable. A federal court decision in May 1950 set the precedent for the rock and roll era, ruling that Evelyn Knight’s nearly identical cover version of “A Little Bird Told Me” (on Decca Records) did not violate the copyright of the original version recorded by Paula Watson (on Supreme Records). The composer Harvey Brooks received the usual royalties from the cover version, but nothing else was due to him or anyone else involved in the original recording, including vocalist Watson, the arranger, or Supreme Records (Billboard 1950).

There is an important distinction between musicians reproducing or imitating a musical arrangement (or vocal style), on the one hand, and sampling a recording, on the other hand. (The original reference is to a process of digitally sampling an analog electronic signal.) The former (reproducing), as in the guitar introduction on the Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun,” which was a close reproduction of Chuck Berry’s introduction on “Johnny B. Goode,” did not require permission or royalty payment; Berry’s solo would be considered as part of the arrangement and not the composition. If reproducing a guitar solo were a matter of copyright, then Berry would in turn owe something to Louis Jordan’s guitarist Carl Hogan, whom Berry has credited as his influence (e.g., the introduction to Jordan’s “Ain’t That Just Like a Woman”). Sampling, on the other hand, requires explicit permission from the copyright holder of the recorded performance and negotiated payment.

Because composers (and their publishers) control the right to broadcast and publicly perform their music, and because they do not have the time or means to monitor such usage themselves, they register their compositions with ASCAP (formed in 1914) or BMI (formed in 1939). Typically, ASCAP and BMI would offer blanket licenses to the various businesses (radio stations, concert venues) so that the outlet would pay a single fee for the right to play music by any composer registered with ASCAP or BMI. Based on radio playlists and concert lists, ASCAP and BMI would distribute parts of their licensing fees to the various artist copyright holders.

Article 1, section 8, clause 8, of the U.S. Constitution (1789) gives Congress the power “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” The Copyright Act of 1790 was the first law of its kind enacted in the United States, granting protection to authors of books, maps, and charts for fourteen years, with the possibility of renewal for another fourteen years. The act has gone through many revisions to keep up with the times. The first general revision (1831) added printed sheet music and extended the protection period to twenty-eight years. The second general revision (1870) added artworks and centralized registration at the Library of Congress. Composers gained limited protection for the public performance of their music (primarily in music theater) in 1897. The third general revision (1909) extended the renewal period to twenty-eight years and added two provisions that would have a major impact on the industry: public performance for profit, which would become a major source of income for composers of copyrighted music; and compulsory licensing, which allowed anyone to make a new recording of a copyrighted composition (at two-cents royalty per item sold). Up until 1972 musical works had to be registered in the form of printed sheet music. In 1972 sound recordings became eligible for submission.²

THE RECORDING INDUSTRY

All sound-recording devices are based on the principle of capturing sound waves. In the acoustic era (until 1925), sound traveled into the wide end of a horn and set a stretched membrane at the narrow end of the horn into motion, transmitting the vibrations to a small needle (called stylus) attached to it, which drew traces into a malleable form (at first tin foil, then wax coating on a cylinder or disc) in concentric circles. This is analog recording: a continuous direct trace of the sound waves. For playback the captured traces were tracked by the needle, which set the membrane in motion, which in turn sent out sound waves through the wide end of the horn. Initially, cylinders, and then discs (in the 1890s), were the storage media sold by record companies, which also sold the machines to play them back.

Before sound recording, music was sold as a material commodity in the form of sheet music (containing music notation and lyrics).³ Consumers would purchase and play the music on their pianos at home, singing along. In the mid-nineteenth century hit songs by songwriter Stephen Foster were selling between 50,000 and 130,000 copies. By the late nineteenth century a hit could sell a million or more copies; Charles K. Harris’s “After the Ball” (1892) sold over 5 million copies. Annual production of pianos and player pianos in the United States peaked in 1899 at 365,000 and averaged 300,000 per year in the first two decades of the twentieth century.⁴

The first device to record sound was a phonautograph, patented in France in 1857 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, which traced sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by soot (see figure 3). The traces were meant only to be seen and analyzed, as there was no means to play them back.⁵ In 1877 Thomas Edison first demonstrated his phonograph, which recorded sound onto a rotating cylinder wrapped in tin foil, which could play back the sound. He received a patent the following year, and his investors formed the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company in 1878. The tin-foil recordings were not very durable, and the sound quality was poor, and so Edison moved on to the incandescent bulb. In 1887 Charles Tainter and Chichester Bell (Alexander’s cousin) demonstrated their graphophone (reversing phon-o-graph), which used more durable wax-coated cylinders, and the American Graphophone Company was formed. Edison responded and released his new gramophone later that year, and the Edison Phonograph Company was formed. Businessman Jesse Lippincott purchased interests in Edison’s two phonograph companies and American Graphophone and formed the North American Phonograph Company to corner the market. Lippincott leased rights to sell the machines, and the Delaware, Maryland, and DC franchise would eventually become the first of the major record labels that we know today: Columbia Phonograph Company.

In 1889 recorded cylinders were used in coin-operated phonographs (activated for a nickel), the precursors to jukeboxes. By 1892 a downsized U.S. Marine Band had recorded over a hundred selections for Columbia, sold for two dollars a cylinder (prices would drop over the decade). The cylinder shape prohibited them from being mass produced, and so artists typically recorded in front of five to ten machines, each recording one cylinder. Additional machines could be connected to each of the master machines, and so a single two-minute recording session could yield up to fifty copies. Artists would have to perform the piece over and over again to produce more copies.

Emile Berliner’s gramophone (patented in 1887) used a flat disc, which solved the problem of mass production. The wax master disc recording was electroplated and could then stamp out rubber (and later shellac) copies. In 1894 Berliner opened a factory in Baltimore and sold a thousand machines and twenty-five thousand records. With the help of inventor Eldridge Reeve Johnson, who developed an improved stable motor, the gramophone successfully competed with Edison’s phonograph, and in 1901 Berliner and Johnson formed the Victor Talking Machine Company, the second of the major record labels that is still around (later RCA Victor, now RCA). In the first decade of the twentieth century, three major record companies dominated: Edison (cylinders), Victor (discs), and Columbia (cylinders and discs). Annual production of recordings increased tenfold: from 2.75 million in 1899 to 27.5 million in 1909. Cylinders outsold discs at the beginning of the decade by two to one; by 1914 discs outsold cylinders by nine to one.⁶

In 1902 Victor made a portable recording machine, allowing them to record music around the world. That year Enrico Caruso, star of Milan’s opera house La Scala, made his debut recordings, the popularity of which prompted his move in 1903 to join the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York. Contracted to record exclusively with Victor from 1904 to 1920, he was initially paid $4,000 for the first ten sides and a royalty of forty cents for every disc sold. Caruso made over 250 recordings with Victor, earning several million dollars from them, making him one of the first international stars of the early recording industry. In 1903 the first royalty payments for performers were negotiated in a contract with Italian tenor Francesco Tamagno, at 20 percent of the retail price of each disc sold.

Until 1908 discs were recorded on just one side. Annual retail record sales peaked at $106.5 million in 1921. Retail record sales then dropped dramatically (in part because of the rise of commercial radio broadcasting in 1922); they began to recover after the advent of electrical recording (1926–29) and then sank to a low during the Depression of $6 million in 1933. Sales would not recover to its 1921 high until 1947 (Sanjek 1996: 62, 117, 120).

In the 1920s record companies discovered latent markets, including southern whites and African Americans, labeling the categories hillbilly (or folk) and race. The hillbilly market was later renamed country and western (or just country). The race category, which included spirituals, gospel, blues, and sermons, underwent many name changes: rhythm and blues (late 1940s), soul (1960s), black music (1960s–70s), and finally R&B. At first, race records were not impacted by declining sales in the 1920s: new releases went from about fifty (1922) to a high of five hundred (1929), at which point the bottom dropped out as the Depression kicked in (Dixon and Godrich 1970: 104–5). The new hillbilly category of records initially survived, on the back of Jimmie Rodgers, who was signed to Victor in 1927 and was tallying 350,000 copies sold for new releases between 1928 and 1930, but they eventually succumbed too.

The age of electrical recording began in 1925, using a microphone, vacuum tube amplifier, and electromagnetic recording and playback head and stylus. The recording studio then split into two distinct spaces: the studio itself, where the sounds of the musicians were picked up on microphones; and the control room, where the engineers ran the recording equipment that etched the electrical signals onto a master disc (later magnetic tape).⁷ Victor’s Orthophonic Victrola (1925) was the first commercial phonograph to take advantage of the expanded fidelity. The difference between acoustic and electrical recording can be heard by comparing Bessie Smith’s approximately seventy acoustic recordings made for Columbia between 1923 and January 1925 (e.g., “St. Louis Blues,” recorded January 1925) with her first electrical recordings, which began in May 1925: “Cake Walking Babies” and “The Yellow Dog Blues” (B. Smith 1991-d).⁸

In 1929 Radio Corporation of America (RCA) purchased Victor, and Edison stopped manufacturing phonographs and recordings. Coin-operated jukeboxes expanded in the 1930s, reaching 150,000 by 1936, accounting for 40 percent of record sales. After World War II retail record sales surpassed the 1921 high, reaching $224 million in 1947. Independent record labels began expanding, breaking even with a record selling 10,000 copies, helped along with jukeboxes. Hit records in the R&B market in the early 1950s typically sold more than 150,000 copies. The new vinyl record technology gave a boost to sales in the early 1950s, and then sales exploded with the advent of rock and roll: from $277 million (1955) to $600 million (1960). The industry hit its high in retail sales of recordings in 1999 at $14.58 billion and then drastically declined because of internet file sharing to $8.48 billion by 2008.⁹

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) was formed in 1951 to look after the interests of the record manufacturers. At the time about eight hundred record labels were officially registered, with fewer than forty-five of them doing annual business of more than $20,000. In 1958 the RIAA began certifying gold records (one million singles sold or one million dollars in wholesale album sales); in 1975 half a million albums sold earned a gold record and in 1976 platinum was introduced at one million for albums. In 1989 the new gold benchmark for singles was lowered to half a million copies sold (A. White 1990: viii, 3–4).

Recording-artist guarantees hit a turning point in 1967, after the Beatles renegotiated their contract with EMI. Some San Francisco bands, coming off of Monterey Pop Festival, got $250,000 to sign with a record label. A new high was set by Elton John when he renewed his contract with MCA in the 1970s, guaranteeing him over $8 million for six albums over a five-year period, including a $1.40 royalty on albums (selling for $6.98). The industry was expanding, reaching $2.2 billion in retail sales in 1974. After receiving nine Grammy Awards and his six most recent albums selling over five hundred thousand copies each, Stevie Wonder received a seven-year contract from Motown worth $14 million, the highest up to that point, beginning with Songs in the Key of Life in 1976 (Sanjek 1996: 536–39).

The three earliest record companies, Edison, Columbia, and Victor, set the model for major labels, so-called because of their economic power and national distribution networks. Since the 1930s there have typically been four to six major record labels at any one point. Many smaller local independent record labels filled the voids, sometimes acting as farm teams, only to see their artists picked up by a major.¹⁰

RADIO AND TELEVISION

The sudden explosion of nationally broadcast radio beginning in 1922 would have a major impact on the music industry and how people consume music. Musicians’ unions, composers’ rights organizations, record companies, and radio broadcasters were at odds with one another for decades, trying to figure out how to compensate artists from this new medium.

Radio transmission dates to Guglielmo Marconi transmitting Morse code signals several miles through the air via electromagnetic (radio) waves in 1896, building on Heinrich Hertz’s earlier experiments (see figure 4).¹¹ In 1899 Marconi demonstrated his invention in the United States and established the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. By 1907 Lee De Forest, who was patenting versions of his audion, a vacuum tube that could amplify an electrical signal (a crucial step in radio broadcasting), was transmitting sound (music recordings) from the top floor of a building in New York City, and in 1910 a live broadcast of Caruso from the Metropolitan Opera House, using the new microphone technology, was locally transmitted. Telephones, connected by wire, were in use since 1876; the ability to transmit sound without wires was revolutionary. After the government passed its first licensing law in 1912, the number of licensed amateur radio operators jumped from 322 in 1913 to over 10,000 in 1916. By 1916 American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) bought out De Forest’s patents and began to move into radio.

The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed in 1919, taking hold of American Marconi’s assets and operations. The following year General Electric (GE) and RCA pooled their patents with AT&T and its subsidiary Western Electric. The November 1920 Westinghouse Corporation broadcast of returns of the presidential election from their newly licensed station KDKA at their Pittsburgh plant was a milestone. They soon made daily broadcasts and began selling home receivers to a curious public. Westinghouse joined GE, RCA, and AT&T in 1921, pooling about two thousand patents and controlling the radio industry in a monopoly. GE and Westinghouse would manufacture receivers and parts, RCA would market them under their trademark, and AT&T would sell the transmitters and control telephone service. Each of these corporations would soon begin operating their own radio stations.

Smulyan (1994: 1) opens her book on commercial radio broadcasting as follows: “When the first radio station began in 1920, no one knew how to make money from broadcasting.” That would change in 1921, when the U.S. Department of Commerce began issuing licenses in a new class of station, called broadcasting, to twenty-eight stations that year. In the initial boom year of 1922, over five hundred new broadcasting stations were licensed. Sales of radio sets and parts went from $60 million in 1922 to $640 in 1928.

In 1922 ASCAP began a fight with broadcasters to be paid royalties, in the form of an annual licensing fee, for the public performance (radio broadcast) of music composed by its members. Fees were negotiated station by station, ranging from a few hundred dollars up to $5,000 within several years. The radio boom had a devastating impact on the sales of recordings, excepting race records—African Americans had not abandoned records to purchase radio sets for programming that was excluding black musical genres (Smulyan 1994: 25). The sales of Bessie Smith’s blues records may have kept Columbia Records in business at this time (Barnouw 1966: 129).

Stations in the South and Midwest offered country music programs, including WSB in Atlanta in 1922, WLS in Chicago in 1924 (National Barn Dance), and WSM in Nashville in 1925 (which would become the Grand Ole Opry). National networks date to 1926, when AT&T left the broadcasting business and sold its New York station WEAF to RCA, which formed its subsidiary National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to operate the growing web of independent stations. At that point about five million homes in the United States had radios. By 1927 RCA had two networks: Red (WEAF) and Blue (WJZ, which became WABC).

Network radio and then television would provide a new model for the dispersion of U.S. culture. Music of a single artist or group could be instantly disseminated across the nation for the first time. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took advantage of the new medium with his first “fireside chats” in 1933, the intimacy of which helped push through his New Deal agenda.

The Radio Act of 1927 established the Federal Radio Commission, which would become the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1934. All radio licenses were to be voided, impacting the 732 stations broadcasting at the time (including about 90 operated by educational institutions), and new applications would provide a fresh start. In 1927 six hundred sponsors had supported the programming of a quarter of the NBC network’s hours, providing revenue to support noncommercial programming such as religious programs, talks, classical music concerts, and music-appreciation broadcasts.

United Independent Broadcasters was formed in 1927, which that year joined with Columbia Phonograph Record Company to form the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System, the birth of the second national network. CPRC soon pulled out, and their name was shortened to Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1928. In the late 1930s a major dispute between ASCAP, which was planning to significantly raise the rates of their blanket licenses to radio stations, and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) led to the NAB founding the second performing rights organization, Broadcast Music, Inc. BMI attracted younger composers and especially those in nonmainstream styles not served by ASCAP.

As a result of an FCC monopoly probe, NBC’s red and blue networks split in 1943, and so NBC sold its blue network to American Broadcasting System, soon to be renamed American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Three major radio networks were now in place: CBS, NBC, and ABC. All three began commercial broadcasting on television in the 1940s, and to this day they remain the three major television networks (joined by Fox as the fourth in the 1990s).

In 1946 RCA put its black-and-white television sets on the market. By 1954, 354 television stations were broadcasting to more than half of U.S. households (twenty-six million). Contrary to fears of television putting them out of business, AM radio stations went from 948 in 1946 to 2,824 in 1954 (Douglas 1999: 219, 223). Popular music got a major boost in 1948, when CBS launched Toast of the Town, hosted by Ed Sullivan, soon renamed the Ed Sullivan Show, the most important single venue for launching national music acts from the mid-1950s through the 1960s (see figure 5). American Bandstand, hosted by Dick Clark in Philadelphia, became the first major show exclusively devoted to teen music. In 1957 it went on the air for ninety minutes every day. Within two years it was being broadcast to 101 affiliates to an audience of twenty million. Television began to be broadcast in color in 1965. A series of short-lived shows in the 1960s featured musical performances, and in the 1980s new cable networks, such as MTV and VH1, came on the air to broadcast music full-time, aimed at teens.¹²

As television initially expanded, taking advertisers with them, radio began to specialize in response. The immediate post–World War II era saw the rise of the disc jockey, who introduced and played records on the air. Radio stations playing R&B and jazz significantly expanded during this time, catering to an African American audience unable to afford the new TV sets and finding little interest in white middle-class television programming (Smulyan 1994: 159).

FM radio, with a better overall sound quality than AM, took off in 1965, when the FCC required that all AM/FM stations in markets of more than a hundred thousand people broadcast different material at least half of their airtime; this impacted more than half of the almost thousand FM stations. Some AM stations devoted FM to noncommercial programming. Tom Donahue (1967), a disc jockey and program director in San Francisco, was a pioneer in playing a wide variety of music on his eight-to-midnight FM show, including longer cuts with less chatter. It became known as free form, underground, or progressive radio, an alternative to AM. By 1972 about 400 of the 2,700 FM stations on the air were programming this format (Sanjek 1996: 543).

In the mid-1960s African Americans, long excluded from starring roles in television (with few exceptions such at Nat King Cole), began starring in a limited number of ongoing TV network prime-time series (see figure 6). In the early 1970s a flurry of Hollywood films with predominantly black casts and directors appeared, with several of them featuring strong musical soundtracks, including Shaft (music by Isaac Hayes) and Super Fly (music by Curtis Mayfield). This coincided with the rise of the style called funk. A similarly remarkable flurry occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s, coinciding with increasing public attention to rap, this time including rap artists such as Ice Cube and Tupac Shakur as stars (see figure 42).

MAGAZINES, CHARTS, AND INDUSTRY AWARDS

Billboard magazine has long been the standard weekly publication for news about the music industry. In the latter half of the 1960s, magazines devoted to rock began to be published, with journalists treating the music as a serious cultural phenomenon for the first time. The monthly Rolling Stone magazine, established in 1967 with a countercultural aura about it, is the longest-lasting magazine of this type (see figure 7).

Commercial success in the music industry can be measured by sales figures and popularity charts, although this should not be confused with artistic merit, which is a matter of subjective critical debate. Record sales figures are registered with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which certifies gold (half a million) and platinum (one million) awards.¹³

Popularity charts are published weekly by Billboard magazine, which is the standard measure for the industry (see figure 8). When new markets opened in the 1920s, record companies advertised and distributed them to specific demographics, and so the categories of hillbilly and race records were born. In the early twentieth century the term race had some positive connotations: “She was what is termed a ‘race woman,’ and desired to work for her own people” (Lilian Wald 1915, qtd. in OED 2019c). “A ‘Race Man’ was somebody who always kept the glory and honor of his race before him…. It was a mark of shame if somebody accused: ‘Why you are not a Race Man (or woman).’ … They were champions of the race” (Zore Neale Hurston 1942, qtd. in OED 2019c).¹⁴ The category was definitively relabeled in 1949 as rhythm and blues (or R&B). Hillbilly, a pejorative term, was relabeled as country.

In the 1950s separate charts tracked record sales, radio airplay, and jukebox plays. Since the 1960s sales figures and radio airplay were combined into a single chart. Billboard published separate charts for the three primary markets: pop; rhythm and blues; and country (or country and western, C&W). In recent decades many new markets have been added, including dance, Latin, world, and Christian/gospel. Popularity charts matter for several reasons. They are the clearest measure of the exposure that a record is receiving. Reaching the Top 40 indicates a significant degree of national airplay and sales and consequently public attention. The Top 10 in any chart signifies a more elite status of getting massive national exposure.

Two significant industry awards are decided by vote of industry personnel. The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) has offered Grammy (originally Gramophone) Awards in a wide assortment of categories since 1959 (see figure 9). The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation has inducted honorees since 1986, and a dedicated physical space, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, opened in 1995 in Cleveland, Ohio (home of disc jockey Alan Freed’s radio show in the early 1950s).¹⁵

A series of reference books compiled by Joel Whitburn (1990–2013b) provides quick and easy access to an artist’s or group’s various Billboard chart rankings, with one series reproducing the actual Hot 100 singles charts. AllMusic (2019) lists Grammy Awards for artists, and Wikipedia typically includes artist discographies that provide Billboard chart rankings.

TECHNOLOGY

Technological innovations have been a driving force in the music industry (e.g., recording devices and audio-storage formats) and in musical performance. New solid body electric guitars and basses, guitar amplifiers, keyboard synthesizers, drum machines, and samplers would all contribute to significant, sometimes revolutionary, musical change (see figure 10).

Commercial recording onto magnetic tape dates to 1948, when Ampex released its first model (200A), with the new medium improving audio fidelity and adding the ability to edit, erase, and reuse tape. By 1950 magnetic tape recording became the professional standard. In 1956 guitarist Les Paul began experimenting with an eight-track tape recorder, and in 1958 Atlantic Records engineer Tom Dowd was using an Ampex eight-track recorder. Multitrack recording enabled individual instruments or voices to have their own unique track of tape to be mixed with the other tracks down to two-track stereo in a separate mixing session. It also allowed some tracks to be recorded in one session and additional tracks to be added at later sessions (called overdubbing). This kind of flexibility opened up the recording studio to new creative possibilities. The industry in general did not move to eight-track recording until 1968 (Horning 2013: 174–80, 203).¹⁶

For decades the primary audio-storage format was a disc made of thick fragile shellac, ten inches in diameter, spinning at 78 rpm (revolutions per minute), and holding about three minutes of music. In 1948 Columbia introduced a ten-inch (soon to be twelve-inch) 33% rpm long play (LP) record made of lightweight unbreakable vinyl, which could hold twenty-plus minutes of music. RCA responded in 1949 with its seven-inch 45 rpm single vinyl record holding three minutes. By 1952 their patents were pooled, and jazz and classical music drifted toward LPs and 45s became the format for pop. Stereo record releases date from the mid-1950s, and by 1961 seven million of the thirty million phonographs in U.S. homes could play stereo discs (Sanjek 1996: 363). Vinyl discs remained the standard until the 1970s, when prerecorded cassette tapes (introduced in the early 1960s) started gaining popularity. In 1983 cassette sales ($237 million) passed those of vinyl ($209 million), and digitally recorded compact discs (CD) hit the U.S. market. By 1988 CDs outsold vinyl and by 1992 outsold cassettes. Emotional attachment to the format that birthed and nurtured rock and roll kept vinyl alive (barely), and it has been making a comeback since the early 2000s, hitting its highest point since 1991 again in 2017 at 8.5 percent of all album sales (physical and downloads).¹⁷

The first electric guitars hit the market in the early 1930s. Gibson Guitar Corporation’s ES (Electric Spanish) series debuted in 1936 with the ES-150, a favorite of jazz guitarist Charlie Christian. The ES series were hollow (later semihollow) body guitars, essentially acoustic jazz guitars with one or more electromagnetic pickups to amplify the strings. T-Bone Walker played an ES-250; B. B. King played a variety of ES models, eventually settling on the ES-335 (issued in 1958), the first semihollow body or thinline model; and Chuck Berry played an ES-350T and later 335.¹⁸

In the early 1950s a new type of electric guitar, with a completely solid body, came on the market, eliminating the resonance of the hollow sound box and amplifying the strings with pickups that had electromagnetic coils embedded in them (one for each string). The solid body allowed the instrument to be played at a louder volume with more even response and longer sustain. The early guitars became classics and have maintained their reputation to this day.

Leo Fender’s company issued its first solid-body guitar, with a single pickup in 1950 (the Esquire), adding a second pickup in 1951, which came to be called the Telecaster.¹⁹ In 1954 Fender released the three-pickup Stratocaster, with a different body design. The Telecaster had its proponents in country (Buck Owens), rockabilly (James Burton), and blues (Muddy Waters, Albert Collins).²⁰ The Stratocaster was a favorite in blues and rock, played by Buddy Holly, Buddy Guy, Dick Dale, and, most famously, Jimi Hendrix. The Fender Precision bass, issued in 1951 became the standard model for most bass players. Gibson introduced its first solid-body model in 1952, the Les Paul, which became a favorite of Jimmy Page and Duane Allman. Eric Clapton played a Les Paul in the mid-1960s and switched to a Stratocaster by the early 1970s. As a result of the rise of rock and roll, surf music (Dick Dale, the Beach Boys), and the Beatles, guitar sales jumped in the first half of the 1960s to 1.5 million in 1965. Guitar Player magazine began publishing two years later.²¹

Fender led the pack in guitar amplifiers with its Twin model, issued in 1952, with twenty-five watts of power and two twelve-inch speakers. By 1963 it had developed into the eighty-watt Twin Reverb model, which Hendrix had used before he left for England in 1966. The main competition was British Marshall amps, which debuted in 1962, developing into the hundred-watt Marshall Super Lead model 1959 in 1965. Marshall was marked by a separate amplifier head and cabinet holding four twelve-inch speakers, which could be stacked on top of one another to provide a massive wall of sound. Both Marshall and Fender amps rely on vacuum-tube amplification, which, when overdriven at full volume, create an electronic distortion that is one of the most prized and sought-after sounds. By placing the guitar’s pickups close to the speakers, a feedback loop occurs and guitarists in the 1960s discovered how to sustain tones as long as they wanted. This power to control an electrified sound that at any moment could leap above the threshold of pain has given the electric guitar, and those who play it, a special status.

The first major commercial analog synthesizer, named after its inventor Robert Moog (pronounced mohg), hit the public consciousness in 1968 with keyboardist Wendy Carlos’s Switched on Bach, an album of works by J. S. Bach played exclusively on the Moog.²² Released on Columbia, it reached #10 on the pop album chart, an unlikely development for a classical or electronic album. Rock groups picked up on it right away, in the studio and in concert with the portable Minimoog (launched in 1969). The Beatles used the Moog on Abbey Road (1969), at the ends of “Because” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” and it became a staple of progressive rock bands, such as Emerson, Lake, and Palmer (“Lucky Man,” 1970) and Yes (“Excerpts from ‘The Six Wives of Henry VIII,’” 1973). Stevie Wonder embraced the new technology from his first album once he renegotiated his contract when he turned twenty-one (“Superwoman,” “Evil,” 1972).²³

Analog synthesizers utilize voltage-controlled oscillators, filters, and amplifiers to create and shape waveforms based on the overtone series. At first they were monophonic, with the Moog and Arp 2600 (1971) dominating the field. Duophonic (two tones at a time) synthesizers soon came (Arp Odyssey, 1972) followed by polyphonic, which could play up to five tones (Prophet 5, 1978) or eight tones (Yamaha CS-80, 1976) at once. The Casio VL-1, a children’s toy (at $70), was one of the first digital synthesizers to hit the market, in 1979. The Casiotone MT-40, released in 1981 (at $ 150) had a similar low-tech sound, although in 1985 it was used for Jamaican Wayne Smith’s “Under Me Sleng Teng,” moving Jamaican music from reggae to a new electronic dancehall era; its instrumental track was used in many subsequent recordings (called versions in Jamaica).

The Roland TR-808 drum machine, which hit the market in 1980 (at $1,000), used synthesized drums sounds, which could be programmed in a sequence and endlessly looped. This led to revolutionary changes in the way in which music was conceived and produced (A. Dunn 2015-v). Early examples include Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “1,000 Knives” (1981), Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing (1982), Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” (1982), Run-D.M.C.’s “It’s Like That” (1983), and Cybotron’s “Clear” (1983). Boss, a division of Roland, had come out with the DR-55 in 1979 (at $200), making it an easily affordable unit. Depeche Mode used the DR-55 in live performance.²⁴

Professional quality digital synthesizers used frequency modulation (FM), in which a sound carrier (generally a sine wave, a pure tone with no overtones) is operated on by a modulator (another sine wave), creating a complex waveform, enlivening the sonic spectrum, which can change over time. Adding more carriers and modulators to the mix can create an extraordinary variety of sounds. The first digital FM synthesizer was the Synclavier, which went public in 1978 (at $13,000). Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” (1981) helped put the Synclavier onto the 1980s soundscape. Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” (1982) opens with sounds created on the Synclavier II (released 1980). Prices soon dropped dramatically, and the Yamaha DX7 digital FM synthesizer released in 1983 (at $2,000) was widely embraced; its sound was pervasive in the 1980s (e.g., the bass line to Kenny Loggins’s 1985 hit “Danger Zone,” which also uses a LinnDrum).²⁵

Whereas synthesizers create new sounds (whether by analog or digital means), samplers record existing sounds digitally (e.g., a snare drum hit, a one-bar drum pattern, a vocal grunt, a bird chirp), play them (or prerecorded presets) back using a keyboard or programming interface, and can loop the recorded sounds. Samplers were initially marketed either as drum machines or keyboard instruments that could play melodies (monophonic) and soon chords (polyphonic). In 1979 both types went on the market.²⁶

The first drum machine to use digital samples hit the commercial market in 1979: the Linn LM-1 (at $5,000). It had a store of sampled drums sounds but could not record new ones. Prince used it extensively, including on The Time’s “777–9311” (1982) and his own “1999” (1982) and “When Doves Cry” (1984). The next generation LinnDrum hit the market in 1982 (at $3,000) adding crash and ride cymbal sounds. E-Mu’s Drumulator (also just playing prerecorded samples) debuted in 1983 (at $1,000). The E-Mu SP-12 (for twelve-bit sampling) debuted in 1985, as the first drum machine that could record its own samples (though at half the rate of CD quality), an extraordinary innovation. The first generation of sample-based hip hop producers used it, including Marley Marl (for MC Shan) and Rick Rubin (for the Beastie Boys). The SP-1200, which debuted in 1987, greatly expanded the capability to record samples, which was exactly what hip hop producers were searching for; it quickly became a staple of the genre. Although it was designed to sample (record) short drum sounds, Hank Shocklee of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad hacked it to record and loop longer segments of 1970s vinyl records on their second album (It Takes a Nation of Millions, 1988), which put the machine on the map. Its low-tech twelve-bit, 26 kilobyte sampling rate was a plus in this world, adding some noise in its reproduction, and it remained a vital tool into the 1990s, even after new technology (e.g., sixteen-bit sampling) surpassed it.²⁷

The Fairlight CMI (computer musical instrument), released in 1979 (at $25,000), had a keyboard and monitor interface and could record and play back any sound. One prepackaged sample, an orchestral chord from Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite, has gained some unlikely dispersion: a Fairlight was in the studio where Arthur Baker and Afrika Bambaataa recorded the early hip hop classic “Planet Rock” (1982), and they used that sample in the opening and throughout the whole piece (Fink 2005b). The cost of commercial samplers would quickly drop. The E-Mu Emulator digital sampler debuted in 1981 (at $10,000), with Stevie Wonder as one of the first customers. It was on an Emulator in 1984 that Marley Marl made his history-making discovery that a drum sound could be isolated, sampled, and combined with other sampled sounds. Polyphonic sampling (multiple keys triggering samples) arrived in 1984 with up to eight simultaneous voices in the Emulator II (at $8,000). The Ensoniq Mirage debuted in 1984 as the first keyboard sampler that sold for under $2,000.

Questlove points to Stevie Wonder sampling voices on the Cosby Show (aired February 20, 1986) with his Synclavier (a later model that sampled) as “the first time that 99 percent of us who went on to be hip-hop producers saw what a sampler was.” Soon after (in his midteens) he got a Casio SK-1, a toy keyboard sampler, synthesizer, and sequencer released in 1985 (for under $100), on which he learned the fundamentals of isolating and combining sounds, setting him on his path that would bear fruit with the Roots, one of the most innovative groups of the 1990s (Questlove and Greenman 2013: 66–69).

The Akai series of samplers designed by Roger Linn would eventually displace the E-Mu SP-1200, starting with the MPC 60 in 1988, with sixteen-voice polyphony, an upgraded 40 kHz stereo sample rate, Linn’s trademark quantize and swing rhythm correction, and the ability to play and record sequences in real time, combining a drum machine, sampler, and sequencer into one. The MPC 3000 (1994), which defined the sound of hip hop in the 1990s, featured CD quality sixteen-bit, 44.1 kHz sampling, and much more memory. Wu-Tang Clan cofounder and producer RZA has effectively summarized the role of technology in the development of hip hop with reference to the Akai MPC 3000: “If there’s ever a hip hop hall of fame Roger Linn has to be inducted within the first year…. He’s like the motherfucker who made the piano. He’s a genius that should never stop getting props. It’s like how Grandmaster Flash came with the [turntable] scratch—these guys are the true foundation of our culture. Even to this day 80 percent of hip hop is produced on that machine” (qtd. in Noakes 2014).²⁸

The sound of 1980s rock and pop was deeply imbued with synthesized and sampled sounds. While British synthpop bands were overtly exploiting the potentials of the new technology, even guitar, bass, and drums-oriented bands were being enhanced. The massive snare drum, electronically enhanced by engineer and producer Bob Clearmountain, on dance-oriented music like David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” (1983) and Hall and Oates’s album Big Bam Boom (1984) was pervasive in the decade. In 1984 Clearmountain produced Bruce Springsteen’s highest-ever charting single, “Dancing in the Dark” (pop #2), which, along with “Born in the USA” (pop #9), left Springsteen’s trademark electric guitar by the wayside in favor of that 1980s ubiquitous snare drum sound (Milner 2009: 326–27).

Personal computers came on the market in the late 1970s, using a keyboard interface. In 1984 the Apple Macintosh debuted as the first to use a mouse that could manipulate a graphic cursor in the monitor, a major development that opened up the possibilities for new music-related software, such as Soundtools, which came out in 1989. Pro Tools software (still an industry standard), allowing four tracks of digital recording, came on the market in 1991 (at $4,000); by 1997 digital audio workstations (DAW) with forty-eight tracks came on the market. The instant easy editing capabilities of DAWs may have had some unintended consequences for musicianship: “The most common charge is that DAWs have dealt a fatal blow to the idea of musical spontaneity. Why get it right the first time when you can always fix it through plug-ins or judicious editing?” (Milner 2009: 299). That jury is still out, although it may be related to plummeting electric guitar sales in the past decade, from 1.5 million sold annually (the same amount sold in the mid-1960s) to just over 1 million in 2017 (Edgers 2017).

See figure 1. Copyright in the United States

See figure 2. Copyright timeline

See figure 3. Growth of the recording industry in the United States to the 1930s

See figure 4. Growth of radio in the United States

See figure 5. Music on television, 1940s–1980s

See figure 6. African Americans in starring roles in television

See figure 42. Blaxploitation films and the next generation

See figure 7. Magazines

See figure 8. Industry popularity charts (Billboard)

See figure 9. Grammy categories

See figure 10. Innovations in sound and musical instrument technology, 1948–2001

1 Both ASCAP (2019) and BMI (2019) have online searchable databases.

2 For more on copyright, see U.S. Copyright Office (2015, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c); for an in-depth history of U.S. copyright law and its implications see Vaidhyanathan (2001).

3 The standard text on the history of the music industry is Sanjek (1988, 1996), from which I draw extensively here.

4 Player pianos (or pianolas), dating to the 1870s, were automatically played when air pumped through perforations in a scrolling roll of paper caused piano keys to strike the strings. Coin-operated player pianos were introduced by the Wurlitzer Company in 1898. Figures cited are from Sanjek (1988, 2: 77, 296, 321–22).

5 Recently, computer analysis has allowed those traces to be heard (First Sounds 2008).

6 For more on the inventions of Edison and Berliner, see Library of Congress (2019a, 2019b) and UCSB Cylinder Archive (2019).

7 Zak (2001) and Horning (2013) offer rich explorations into the world of recording studios.

8 Digital enhancement of the acoustic recordings may downplay the contrast.

9 Figures for 1947 and 1955–60 are from Gillett (1996: 492) and those from 1999 to 2008 are from Hutchinson, Macy, and Allen (2010: 43). Sanjek (1996: 285, 333) gives both $214.4 and $204 million for 1947.

10 See the recent nine-part BBC radio series (Mason 2019) for an expansive history of the music industry and technology. For online histories of recording technology, see Beardsley and Leech-Wilkinson (2009) and Schoenherr (2005). For an online narrative of the record industry, see Medium (2014). For diverse studies of the music and recording industry, see Chapple and Garofalo (1977), Denisoff (1986), Goodman (1997), and Katz (2010).

11 The standard text on the history of broadcast radio is Barnouw (1966–70), from which I draw extensively here. More recent interpretive work includes Douglas (1987, 1999) and Smulyan (1994). Barnouw (1975) covers the history of television broadcasting.

12 For information on Dick Clark and American Bandstand, see Jackson (1997); for MTV, see Tannenbaum and Marks (2012).

13 RIAA (2019a) has a searchable database for gold and platinum records.

14 The references are to Wald’s House on Henry Street and Hurston’s Dust Tracks on the Road.

15 See Recording Academy (2019) for listings of Grammy Award winners and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2019) for inductees.

16 Mayfair Recording, the second New York studio (after Atlantic) to go eight-track (in 1965), was used by the Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa in 1966–67. Motown went eight-track in 1964.

17 Plasketes (1992: 117–18); Christman (1999, 2007); Caulfield (2018); RIAA (2019b). See also Osborne (2012).

18 Berry’s ES-350T from 1959 is on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. This section on electric guitars and amplifiers draws from Hunter (2005) and Tolinski and di Perna (2016).

19 The Telecaster was briefly called the Broadcaster, but they had to change the name, as Gretsch had their own Broadkaster.

20 Jeff Beck played an Esquire in the Yardbirds, and later a Les Paul on his solo debut LP Truth (1968).

21 A 1993 New York Apollo Theater all-star blues concert (B. B. King and others 1993-v) showcases three guitar models: Gibson ES-335 (B. B. King); Fender Stratocaster (Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck); and Fender Telecaster (Albert Collins).

22 The following paragraphs on synthesizers and samplers draw from Pinch and Trocco (2002), Jenkins (2007), Russ (2008), Milner (2009: 308–46), Fintoni (2016), Twells (2016), S. Wilson (2016), and Linn (2019).

23 The iconic bass line to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” was played on two Minimoogs (Keyboard 2009: 25).

24 For a detailed history of Roland and its products, see Reid (2004–5).

25 See Twells (2016). Synth Britannia (Whalley 2009-v) covers the synthesizer in the 1970s–80s in the United Kingdom.

26 For an explanation of the science of digital sampling, see Audacity (2019). At the May 1980 Audio Engineering Society meeting the Synclavier II, Linn LM-1, and Fairlight CMI all had official debuts (Milner 2009: 317).

27 See Milner (2009: 330–34), J Dilla (2014-d), Fintoni (2016), and E-MU Systems (2019).

28 The original print version (Noakes 2006: 215) edits one of RZA’s terms for a general audience.