Collapse of the golden age of music recording

The golden age of recorded music: Going back to 1945, by the end of the war, there was a “golden age” of music, the big band era, the beginnings of bebop, the great songwriting partnerships, Broadway musicals, and even the early stirrings of rock n’ roll. It was also the populist height of the music borne of the Depression, the music that came out of the hobo camps, the dust bowl farmers, Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Tennessee Valley Act and so on. It was the music of Woody Guthrie, Jimmy Rodgers, Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, and the Carter Family. Quickly told, the English built great speakers and listening consoles so they could hear what the Germans were saying. The Americans in turn created excellent platforms (tape recorders) to record what they heard. Though they developed this technology separately and quite secretly, the apex of these technologies would find themselves together in the recording studios around the world soon after the war. The British and Americans found out how good the German microphones were and how they could be used with British speakers and American tape decks. The Germans were quick to listen through British sound systems. Bebop, Jazz, and the everpopular Jitterbug (also known as the lindy hop) dance, were banned by the Nazi's as being American influences. Members of the French Underground would meet at basement dance clubs (normally underground) or Discotheques. Here they would dance to swing music.

It took the next ten years to tweak the technology, but by the mid 50s and the height of the bebop era, the engineers had become artists of this technology, and the results were some of the best recordings ever. With the addition of multi-track recording, invented by jazz guitarist Les Paul, another golden age of recording began. As a side note, it has been said that the best live recording of the bebop era was recorded at Massey Hall with Charlie Parker – on a plastic saxophone he borrowed for the gig – Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Mingus, Max Roach and Bud Powell. The album Quintet marked the only time these giants of the era played live together. It was also the period when Deutsche Grammophon began its run as the premier recorder of classical music. Time moves on and into the 60s, a period you all know well, and you can run through your own favourites.


There were great recordings like the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, The Beatles’ Revolver and Sergeant Pepper’s, Who’s Next – jazz recordings, particularly on the ECM label, emerged, and then in the 70s along with 48 track recorders, Supertramp’s Crime of the Century and Roxy Music’s Avalon. The producers and engineers were experts in the studio, and their names were almost as famous as the artists: George Martin, Phil Spector, Glyn Johns, and Phil Ramone to name a few. It is amusing now to see assistant engineers at Abbey Road in lab coats now, but that is how they saw themselves. The accommodation or payment for musicians, creators and works was also well-established in the post-war period through a series of royalties paid by the recording companies to the artists – as well as royalties paid to the artists for radio and television airplay that were monitored by BMI and ASCAP and in Canada by CAPAC and PROCAN, which later became SOCAN. The record companies were notorious for not paying these royalties, but there was a system, and there were lawyers who were there to both secure music contracts and ensure that royalties were paid to recording artists. There was also a formidable force in the musician’s union, which held tight control over negotiating gigs and contracts. 

By the 70s, the music industry was a huge force in our lives. It was the number one entertainment industry in North America, making far more money than movies or television. However there were chinks in the system and changes in technology that indicated further bigger changes to come. In 1969, The Whole Earth Catalogue was published, and the subtitle was “Access to Tools.” In the book, it revealed the first home four-track recording deck put out by Tascam. It was a revolution in the making. No longer did one have to go through the check and balance system of the record companies and their artists and repertoire staff. You didn’t need to secure a record contract. You didn’t need to incur huge costs at a recording studio that would be then set against future royalties. You could do the album yourself without arbiters from the record company. This independent release movement was no threat to the mainstream industry, but as this technology progressed, more would be attracted to the indie movement, and it would seriously threaten the mainstream industry by the 1990s.

Was punk rock the beginning of the end? By the late 70s, the industry was increasingly complacent. It was also very expensive to make a recording in the beautiful studios. It was about to blow apart – It is dizzying what happened in a very short period of time. First the punks came along and called the bloat on the musicians and the industry. Groups like the Ramones, The Clash and The Cure ridiculed this sate of the business with rough, loud records reminiscent of the garage bands of early rock n’ roll. The local punk rockers opened and played at clubs that were not associated with the musician’s union; they said, “fuck the union” and basically broke the grip the union had on clubs. I would have to say they were misguided in their disregard for the musician’s union and undermined a support system that had worked to protect musicians. After the punk era, it would never be the same again. We were actually entering an age of missing information. What they told us was the CD was a compact unit with a clearer, cleaner sound. However, with a sampling rate of 44,000 samples per second, there were overtones of sound now missing. There were reverbs that collapsed as they tailed out because the sampling rate was not sufficient to hold them. The sound was cleaner because there was less of it. This new format also did not work with the microphones that had worked so well during the analog tape saturation age. The engineers were now scrambling to figure out how they could make this new cold sounding digital age warmer. 

This was a far cry from the “golden age” of the 1950’s. The analog sound was better. It was fuller and warmer, and it held all the sonic information. The technological changes of the 80s did not stop there. The home recording units in the early 70s developed and blossomed, as musicians and studios realized that a $200,000 Studer tape deck or $100,000 Neve console could be replaced by a much cheaper series of ADATS and less expensive boards. CDs made it costly for indies to stay in the mainstream. Record companies made fortunes during this period reissuing everything that had been on vinyl. Elvis was The King again. He had not left the building. Along with the new digital age came the introduction of video games and home entertainment systems. In 1982 MTV arrived, and in 1984 Much Music hit the airwaves, and another development took place that was to affect music and musicians to this day and beyond. AutoTune and Pro Tools were widely used in record production. Oddly, Pro Tools is missing the one tool The Beatles used on almost every song - Varispeed. That's because computer software is linked to a system clock, and is limited to running on even divisions of that clock. That highly processed sound that Millenials are accustomed to hear barely registers as sounding real.

MTV videos were seen as advertisements for the artists and record companies and, therefore, were non-royalty-bearing. In fact, the musicians had to pay for these videos, and these payments were set against the royalties owed to the artists by the record companies. It was an interesting dilemma because, while one could see the attraction of the music video, it set a precedent about the value of the music, how music might be perceived, and it potentially undermined royalty payments that radio and television had been paying to musicians. The most fateful chapter in this story arrived with the introduction of the home computer, followed by the Internet around 1995. During this dizzying time, cyberspace opened up, and the world truly became the global village that Marshall McLuhan envisaged. Music was now available universally at your fingertips. The age of downloading began, and with it, the notion that music was not only available, but most importantly, free. In quick succession came downloading networks like Napster, cementing this music-should-be-free notion for a generation. The royalty-collecting agencies were caught behind the times, and any litigation against illegal downloading would be years to come. Needless to say, the majority of musicians barely made a taxable income.

Now everybody can make a record – and maybe that’s not a good thing. Studio software like GarageBand was available, thus completing the story that anyone could make music at home. While this democratization of the process was laudable, it led to a glut of dubious releases on the market. While this was going on, big studios were going bankrupt, the musicians union was growing impotent, and in the background, baffling engineers trying to stay on top of their game. The top musicians continued to use analog studios, but they were getting harder to find. At the same time, home video games were improving and threatening to overtake the music industry. CDs continued to sell, though, and with the introduction of new microphones and warming buffers, digital recordings improved. Even this tumultuous period was short-lived as the MP3 format was introduced in 1997 and popularized by Apple’s iPod in 2001. The sample rate of an MP3 is 23,000 compressed samples per second, half the sample rate of a commercial CD and a quarter of the sample rate of a studio quality digital recording. When the audio quality reduced to that of an MP3, music’s value is also reduced. The introduction of the MP3 made record collections obsolete. You could store your entire CD collection on your iPod and later iPad. Free downloading became the way to obtain music as music stores began to disappear across North America. Though musicians continued to release CDs, it became clear that the notion of a recording that had existed for 100 years was in serious trouble.

This trend was symbolically addressed when it was ruled that companies like Napster should be shut down – but really, the horses had been let out of the barn. YouTube arrived and was, until recently, royalty free. In 2010, CD sales dropped 50 per cent and video games had replaced music in homes. In fact, music purchases had dropped to fifth place in the North American entertainment market. Record companies disappeared, and by 2012, Starbucks had become the leading distributor of CDs in North America. In 2010, before his world tour, Prince released his new album free. Radiohead did the same, stating they would make up the difference in t-shirt sales. Music, they said in effect, was free. But only the musical two per cent could afford to say that. Quoting Nikola Tesla: "I don't care that they stole my idea. I care that they don't have any of their own." Between 2010 and 2014, the sale of digital downloads doubled sales of CDs. CD sales peaked in 1999 in the US with $18.9 billion in revenue on an inflation adjusted basis and 938.9M units sold. By 2010 those numbers had fallen to $3.8 billion -- a revenue decline of nearly 80% -- and unit sales had fallen to 253M, down 73%. That's a titanic collapse, and it's a collapse which left little to replace it (as opposed what happened in prior cycles when one format replaced another): Overall inflation adjusted industry revenue in the period fell from from $21.9 billion to $7.9 billion, a 64% decline in the industry as a whole.  Yes, it's harder than ever to make a living off of selling a piece of recorded music. The times have changed, as Robert Harris spoke of on his CBC radio series Twilight of the Gods about the hundred-year rise and fall of recorded music.

If we look back on this conversation, this is exactly the reverse: where the technology was serving the art form. It would appear at this moment that the art form is being dictated by the technology. Young musicians no longer see music as a career choice. And so what of the future? There are signs that the royalty-collecting agencies are beginning to catch up to the myriad array of digital offspring ranging from the internet to satellite television and radio. Some would say that there is more music available now than ever before. And yet, when students in the music faculty at Carleton University were surveyed, not one of them thought they would make a living as a musician in the 21st century; the negative response was 100 per cent. The value of the work is the key phrase here. It is so easy now to create and distribute one’s music, people believe it can’t be worth much, so it must be free. What is lost in this equation is the years of craft it might take to get to a professional level of musicianship and songwriting craft: years in the field, a lifetime spent in the trenches. The future of music? It could happen the same as the theatre confronting the advent of film industry. Yet, since theatre’s re-emergence, it has become a sponsored and often threatened art form, supported by public funds, similar to classical music orchestras. There is considerable evidence that live music will continue to be supported. The future continues to look supportive for music in film, theatre and television. Indeed, many musicians have focused their work on getting their music on television shows, where the economy of scale is huge, and royalties can be bountiful. I think at some point many so-called “non-commercial” musicians will leave the public marketplace and, given their value, elect or hope to be sponsored artists. This has already happened in the jazz world. I think in the future, we must return to valuing the art form. If this conundrum cannot be addressed, I suspect music will be generated by computers programmed by robots in the future, and that will be a very dark future. Music is an art. Social media is not. Source: www.rootmusic.ca

Buddy Holly ‎– Memorial Collection (2009): Buddy Holly was one of the half dozen geniuses the '50s propelled out of the American boondocks--in his case, Lubbock, Texas. Delicate yet explosive, nerdy yet masculine, melodic yet skronky, Holly became the early rock'n'roll cynosure and wrote a phenomenal number of excellent songs in the 18 months of his career. The selling point of this 3 CD Collection is 11 "undubbed" early and late recordings. Stripped of bass and drums, his early songs sound more like old-time country music. Buddy Holly rebelled, yes, he really freed himself, but sometimes he was content to just sit there holdin' hands with his girl. Shortly before he died, Buddy Holly got himself a place in the Greenwich Village. Holly wed a Puerto Rican girl--Peggy Sue had gotten married too--and I imagine Holly there, holdin' hands with Maria Elena, while conjuring up rock 'n' strings and thinking ahead of the rest. Nerds loved Buddy Holly for a reason: he played by the rules without letting them stop him. And Buddy Holly lives. Don't let anybody tell you different. Source: www.robertchristgau.com