(no title)
mechanical_fish | 10 years ago
The pop single was a great product in its day. The recording industry invented pop singles and then spent fifty years perfecting the machine to market them.
To focus the marketing, singles were released a few at a time, and radio stations were encouraged [1] to play the same small playlists relentlessly, over and over, day and night. We all got used to the fact that there were only a few hundred songs on the radio and that they weren't merely free, but inescapable.
To further focus the marketing, the audience was relentlessly diced into genres, and high walls were built between the genres. Sorry, no hip-hop here, this is a rock station; Sorry, no zydeco here, this is a country station. We all got used to the fact that each of our local radio stations had a sound that never changed, and that you could name the songs that would be playing in a bar before you walked in. (Hint: Hotel California.)
For a while there, bands would release carefully-crafted albums that were designed to be listened to in a sitting, but the radio would never play whole albums except on very special occasions. Also, long songs would generally be abridged or avoided. We all got used to the fact that music came in randomly-shuffled three-minute chunks, which just happen to be really quick to download and easy to stuff onto USB sticks.
Then Mephistopheles appeared, holding the first compact disc, and the industry's doom was sealed as it realized that it could make an easy fortune by selling the baby boomers' music to them over again in a new format. And, indeed, that fortune was made. The industry's focus shifted to the past, and parked there. They made a lot of money selling copies of Rumours and Dark Side of the Moon to multiple generations of listeners, and they invested in branding juggernauts like Madonna and Michael Jackson that promised to sell albums for the next fifty years, and we all got used to the fact that one could pick up a copy of Rolling Stone and have difficulty figuring out which year it was from.
Plenty of people complained about this system at the time, but it did make money. Until Napster and Apple came along and said "Hey, your entire musical universe fits inside a small box like this, would you like one? It won't take more than a week to build a collection that is better than the radio." And then, whoops, the meteor hit the dinosaur right between the eyes.
---
[1] This kind of encouragement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola .
tptacek|10 years ago
mechanical_fish|10 years ago
Don't get me wrong, I own and rather like Rumours, though I cannot spell it. It helps that, after spending a decade mostly not listening to classic-rock radio, I can hear the thing with fresher ears.