Chapter 7 Audio music media Talk Across Media
Why does country music continue to be so popular?
"Country music is about lyric-oriented songs with adult themes," according to Lon Helton, a music journalist. "You've probably got to be 24 or 25 to even understand a country song. Life has to slap you around a little bit, and then you go, 'Now I get what they're singing about.'"80 Unlike the sex and drugs of rock 'n' roll, country deals with suburban issues like "love, heartache, family ties, and middle-aged renewa
Rock Radio
Another reason for rock 'n' roll's growing popularity was that DJs such as Alan Freed and Dewey Phillips were playing rock 'n' roll and R&B records on their radio shows. hen, even more incredible, the next night, it was closer to seven hundred."60 Although Phillips was white, he played music by black artists and had a substantial audience of black radio listeners in Memphis. This was unusual at a time when most stations appealed to either the white or the black community, but not to both.
Rob Cesternino
became reasonably well known as a two-time cast member of the hit CBS reality game show Survivor. But since competing on the show, he's gone from being a star of the short head to being a force in the long tail. He has created the popular site "Rob Has a Website" and a series of podcasts on reality TV under the brand "Rob Has a Podcast." He has a crowdfunding Patreon account that brings in more than $8,000 a month and even beat out Serial for a People's Choice Podcast Award in 2015
The British Invasion: A Rougher Rock
began in 1964 and brought a rougher edge to white rock 'n' roll with the music of the Beatles, Dusty Springfield, the Hollies, the Who, and, of course, the Rolling Stones. To appreciate the influence of these British bands, one need only look at the charts. In 1963, only one British band made it onto Billboard's charts; in 1964, thirty-four did so.
David Sarnoff
born in 1891, was a good student, but the need to help support his Russian-immigrant family led him to leave school after the eighth grade to work full-time. In a story that seems almost too good to be true, the fifteen-year-old Sarnoff went to the New York Herald to try to get a job as a journalist.
Spanish-Language Broadcasting.
. As the Hispanic population in the United States, especially in the Southwest and Florida, continues its rapid growth, Spanish-language stations have been an important part of the market. But the recession of 2009 hit Spanish-language stations hard. Audience data are not available for Spanish-language news radio, but revenue for these stations has remained steady, according to a report from the Pew Research Center.83Spanish-language formats include multiple styles of music, news/talk/information, and religious programming.84The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team has two sets of play-by-play announcers, one for English broadcasts, and the other for the team's Spanish-language network. And ESPN has a Spanish-language, all-sports radio network based out of Miami that focuses heavily on soccer games and news.85 While Spanish-language stations have traditionally gotten substantial listenership from the immigrant community, the fact that an increasing proportion of the American Hispanic population was born in the United States means that larger proportions of the population are either English speakers or bilingual.86
Amos 'n' Andy.
. Despite the popularity of soap operas, no radio show attracted a bigger audience than Amos 'n' Andy, the first nationally broadcast daily drama.28 Amos 'n' Andy began in January 1926 on Chicago radio station WGN as Sam 'n' Henry. The show was a fixture on the radio, in one form or another, for nearly thirty-five years. Starring on the show were two white actors—Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden—who played the roles of two African Americans, Sam and Henry, who owned the Fresh Air Taxi Company. Correll and Gosden wrote all the scripts themselves and furnished the voices for the title characters and the members of their fraternal lodge, the Mystic Knights of the Sea. Their names were later changed to Amos and Andy when Correll and Gosden syndicated the show nationally, since WGN owned the characters of Sam and Henry. At the peak of its popularity, Amos 'n' Andy was played in restaurants and in movie theaters between shows so that people wouldn't have to stay home to listen.
The Importance of Pop Music.
. Popular music today goes well beyond just the composition; it is an entire social statement. Besides the music, there are the photos on the cover of the album, the text within the electronic booklet that comes with the download, the music video, the gossip on TMZ, the posters, the mobile app, and the fashion. It is through popular music that young people often have their first contact with much of our culture. It provides young people not just with music, but with an entire identity.107 Our identification with the music of our youth is something that sticks with us throughout adulthood. Alternative rocker Liz Phair points out:
In 2017, Rolling Stone magazine published a list of the top hundred country artists of the modern era. The top five were these:
5. The Carter Family of A. P. Carter, his wife Sara, and his sister-in-law Maybelle created modern country music in the late 1920s with their folk vocals over guitar, autoharp, and banjo. 4. Loretta Lynn, who was proud to be a coal miner's daughter, brought a whole new world of scorned wives and "women who weren't in the mood for lovin'." 3. Johnny Cash, the man in black, really had multiple careers in music, being rediscovered by many young people with his Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings series. Cash was also connected to the Carter family by way of his second wife, June Carter Cash. 2. Hank Williams died at age twenty-nine from alcohol and pills, but he left behind a legacy of songs and musical style that lives on today. 1. Merle Haggard's electric-tinged music helped country for generations of rock bands from the Beatles to the Eagles.79
Radio Networks
A type of radio that delivers programming via satellite to affiliate stations across the United States. By 1923, more than six hundred radio transmitters were broadcasting in the United States. These stations were limited to the programming they could produce locally. How did these stations fill their broadcast day? In big cities, this was no problem because there were plenty of concerts, lectures, and sporting events to put on the air, but rural areas or small towns were limited in their selection of locally produced culture and entertainment. In another of his famous memos, Sarnoff suggested that RCA form a new company, a network, to provide programming to a large group of broadcast stations, thus making a wider selection of programming available to smaller stations.
Storing Musical Performances: The Development of the Recording Industry
A variety of stories have been told about Edison and his invention of an early sound-recording machine, the phonograph, in 1877. One version has him giving a sketch of the phonograph to employee John Kruesi with the instruction, "the machine must talk."10 Another has him sketching the phonograph, with a note at the bottom telling his assistant to "build this."11
Golden Age Radio Programming.
A wide range of programming was available on the radio during the golden age. Live music, both popular and classical, was a staple. NBC even had its own orchestra that performed on a regular basis. There were also dramas and action programs, including Little Orphan Annie, The Lone Ranger, and The Shadow.
Hip-Hop Brings Together DJing, Dancing, Rapping, and Art
According to English professor Mickey Hess, the hip-hop sound got started in the 1970s, when DJs began name-checking where they were from, including their cities, streets, or even neighborhoods. Although the music went national, it was still local in its orientation and was a statement of pride about the rapper's home. As Mr. Cheeks from the Lost Boyz put it, "It's only right to represent where I'm from."71
Akio Morita's "Personal Soundtrack."
Akio Morita is not a household name, but the Japanese engineer who invented the Sony Walkman has influenced how people listen to music as much as anyone since Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner. When the Walkman was introduced in 1979, it was available in two versions—either as a tiny tape player or as a stereo FM radio. They were relatively expensive, with the tape player version costing upwards of $200, but they allowed each person to live in his or her own "personal musical cocoon."110 Until 1979, the only way to take music away from home was with either a poor-quality pocket AM radio or a giant boom box. Writer RiShawn Biddle points out that the Walkman was more than just a way to protect your fellow bus passengers from your choice of music: "It's also been a coach, concert hall, and personal reader for millions of workout warriors, housewives, and retirees. For travelers, it is a trusty companion, something to ward off talkative salesmen and grandmothers loaded with wallet-size photos."111 Media scholar Michael Marsden notes that the Walkman gives people privacy in public areas: "It's your personal space that you've created, in a world in which we don't have a lot of personal space. It's a totally private world."112 Not everyone is so enthralled with the effects of the Walkman, however. Critic John Zerzan argues that the Walkman is one of a number of technologies that lead to a "sort of withdrawal from social connections."113 One thing the Walkman has clearly done, however, is contribute greatly to the trend of personalized media use characterized by downloads, podcasts, and streaming audio.
Radio Advertising.
Although KDKA was the first commercial radio station, it was not the first station to run a commercial. KDKA existed to provide programming with the goal of getting people to buy radio sets. But WEAF, broadcasting in New York City, was the first station to sell airtime to advertisers. The modest success of these commercials soon led to radio advertising by oil companies, department stores, and American Express.
Transmitting Music and Talk: The Birth of Radio
Around the time the recording industry was getting started, radio was under development as one of the first media to break through the barrier of space. With print media such as books, magazines, and newspapers, the message being transmitted was always on a piece of paper that had to be carried from one place to another. Thus, the fastest form of transportation at the time was also the fastest channel of communication. This meant that it could take weeks for a message to cross the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, or even to get from New York to California or from London to Moscow. But in the nineteenth century, several inventions separated communication and transportation, starting with the wired media of the telegraph and telephone and moving on to the wireless technology of radio.
Talk Radio: Politics, News, Shock Jocks, and Sports
As mentioned earlier, news and talk is among the top radio format. Talk radio has exploded during the past three decades. In 1985, only 200 stations carried the format; in 1995, that number had grown to approximately 1,900. By 2018, news/talk was available on 1,315 stations, compared with 1,882 stations carrying country music.87 Marvin Kalb, formerly with CBS News, credits talk radio with providing a sense of community that people don't find anywhere else: "If we still gathered at town meetings, if our churches were still community centers, we wouldn't need talk radio. People feel increasingly disconnected, and talk radio gives them a sense of connection.
Emile Berliner: Mass-Produced Music.
As with so many media inventions, no one was quite sure what to do with Edison's phonograph. Edison envisioned it as a dictation machine. Reproducing music was only the fourth on his list of possible uses.13The biggest flaw with his invention was that Edison's foil cylinders did not hold up to repeated playing and could not be reproduced. It took the work of a young German immigrant to make the phonograph a truly practical device.
History of sound recording and Transmission
Before there could be mass consumption of popular music, there had to be a means of recording and distributing it. Those means evolved through the decades via Thomas Edison's early efforts with the phonograph, the development of the gramophone, and the creation of the long-playing record (LP) and the compact disc (CD). The recording industry changed the way people consumed music. Before the phonograph and gramophone, the only way to experience music was to perform it yourself or go to a concert. The invention of the record meant that recordings of professional musicians became the standard way to listen to music.
WHEN IS A RADIO SHOW RACIST?
But Amos 'n' Andy may not have been as racist as it seemed. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll were guests of honor at an annual picnic hosted by the Defender, Chicago's leading weekly black newspaper in 1931. In addition, several members of the black press had good things to say about the show in its early days. It was also one of the few programs that showed African Americans (even if played by whites) in everyday life. The supporting characters in the fictional lodge were middle-class blacks, a social phenomenon many whites at that time didn't even know existed.27
The RCA Radio Monopoly.
But civilian government officials in the United States, in keeping with the U.S. tradition of independent media, rejected the idea of all-government control. In an attempt to avoid anarchy in the new medium, the navy advocated creating a private monopoly to control radio development.
New way of publishing music
By 1935, the term high fidelity (hi-fi) was being used to refer to a combination of technologies that allowed recordings that reproduced music more accurately, with higher high notes and deeper bass, than previous forms of recording had allowed. One of the developments that helped pave the way for hi-fi was the electric phonograph (along with the amplifier and loudspeakers), which began replacing the all-mechanical gramophone. By 1949, magnetic tape recorders were commonplace in recording studios. Musicians no longer had to record directly onto discs.
Rock 'n' roll legend
Chuck Berry performs in Germany in November 2008. Berry (and others like Elvis Presley) combined elements of hillbilly and R&B into their music, which ultimately led to the creation of a brand new genre. Just as hillbilly singer Elvis Presley borrowed from R&B, so blues guitarist Chuck Berry borrowed from the white hillbilly singers. The song "Maybellene" was based on an old fiddle tune called "Ida Red" and supposedly got its name from a mascara box. Others claim that Maybellene was the name of a cow in a third-grade reading book. Either way, the song combined a hot guitar, a hot car, and a hot woman.
Country: Pop Music for Adults
Country music was born in the late nineteenth century, evolving out of a range of musical forms that included Irish and Scottish folk music, Mississippi blues, and Christian gospel music.77 It was originally called "old-timey" or hillbilly music. Country grew in the 1950s and 1960s with the so-called Nashville sound that was popularized by musicians such as Jim Reeves, Eddy Arnold, and Patsy Cline. It was at about this time that Elvis Presley took the hillbilly sound in another direction with early rock 'n' roll, but country never disappeared.
British Broadcasting Corporation
Developed in the Collective Consensus era, this was the TV and Radio Network in England, It was meant to be more educational and was generally kind to government officials. Company was created in 1922. It was initially a privately run company owned by the manufacturers of broadcasting equipment, and its first station was licensed in 1923. In 1927, the company became the British Broadcasting Corporation, a public, noncommercial monopoly for broadcasting in the United Kingdom.22
Edison's First Recordings
Edison's First Recordings. These stories do not do justice to Edison's true genius or to the difficulties of creating a machine that could record and play back the voice. Running through these myths is the mistaken notion that Edison came up with an idea for sound recording that worked perfectly the first time it was tried. In reality, Edison and his assistants probably worked as long as ten months on the problem of the phonograph before they finally succeeded in recording Sarah Josepha Hale's children's rhyme, "Mary Had a Little Lamb." This famous first recording lasted no more than ten seconds.12
Why does disco matter today?
First and foremost, it was an entire genre of music that depended on technology and the producer, building on trends started by bands such as Pink Floyd and the Beatles. It also made black and Latino music more important commercially and led the movement toward the splintering of pop music into a range of genres.70
From Singles to Digital Downloads: Making Money in the Recording Industry
For as long as there have been methods for recording and playing back sounds, there have been debates over how to make money selling music. Berliner's 78-rpm discs were fragile, held only three and a half minutes of music, and had only marginal sound quality by today's standards. So while there was no question that 78s needed to be replaced, there was no consensus on what the new format should be.
The Future of Sound
For the past hundred years or so, the recording industry has been making money off the sale of little packages, either discs or cartridges of some sort. The coming of radio created the first blip in the market, leaving sellers wondering why people would buy records when they could get the music for free on the radio. The record companies soon learned that they could earn revenue from licensing the music to the radio stations and from promoting their records by having them played on the radio. Then came computers and the internet, which allowed people to burn copies of CDs on blank media or transmit them to other people as MP3 files.
PODCASTING FROM THE LONG TAIL
Ibbott was inspired by a program that aired several years ago on the XM Satellite Radio channel Special X. "And every day for two hours they had a show that was all covers with no announcing. The only problem was that Ibbott didn't have a radio station to use to broadcast his program. But then he heard about former MTV VJ Adam Curry's work on software to distribute audio files over the internet—essentially some of the earliest podcasting software.
Radio Mass Communication
In 1901, physicist Reginald Fessenden started sending voice signals over a radio in his laboratory. On Christmas Eve in 1905, he broadcast poetry and Christmas carols. Since his continuously modulated voice signals could be received by the same equipment that received Morse code, wireless operators up and down the Atlantic coast heard Fessenden's amazing broadcast. Though it would be years before regularly scheduled commercial broadcasts would begin, Fessenden had set the stage for broadcasting something more than just Morse code.
Sarnoff Also
In 1915, Sarnoff addressed to the director of American Marconi a document that he considered the most important of his career. The so-called Radio Music Box memo outlined radio's potential as a popular mass medium. While Sarnoff did not invent the technology of radio and was not the first person to send out entertainment over the radio, he did summarize what radio could, and indeed did, become. Sarnoff's insight was that radio could be more than a point-to-point medium, a one-on-one form of communication. As Sarnoff saw it, what was then perceived as the great disadvantage of radio as a telegraph tool—that everyone who listened could hear the message—could be turned into an enormous advantage if one wanted to send out messages that everyone was supposed to listen to. In his memo, Sarnoff wrote,
Where did hip-hop begin?
Many sources point to a block party in the Bronx, New York, on August 11, 1973, at which DJ Kool Herc is credited with inventing the breakbeat, "using two turntables and two copies of the same record to loop the same instrumental break over and over."72 But Hess argues that it wasn't so neat and clear-cut of a start. He claims instead that credit goes to a series of DJs working in Harlem nightclubs using similar techniques along with doing "call-and-response" from the audience. Hess lists four main elements of hip-hop culture:
Why is Motown so important to American culture
Motown with establishing a black popular culture at a time when jazz—especially the improvisational work of Miles Davis and John Coltrane—was becoming highbrow culture. One of the big accomplishments of Motown was that it no longer published songs by black artists for white artists to cover, as was common practice in the 1950s and early 1960s. Instead, the African American Motown artists themselves turned out the hits The move of soul music and artists out of just the African American community and into more predominantly white areas mirrored larger changes in society. In May 1961, African American Freedom Riders staged sit-ins to desegregate restrooms and lunch counters in bus stations in the South. In October 1962, the Motown Revue was doing its part to promote desegregation with such established acts as the Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye, and the Supremes.
More Receivers Than Transmitters.
One of the biggest surprises of the radio business was that so many more receivers were sold than transmitters. Manufacturers had assumed at the start that there would be almost as many people sending as receiving messages.20In reality, however, electronic communication was following in the footsteps of print. The earliest books had been copied by hand and passed from one person to another. But just as the printing press provided books, magazines, and newspapers to the masses, radio was now becoming a mass medium.
RCA
Radio Corporation of America: not only became a major producer of radio equipment, but it also founded NBC, the first of the major broadcasting networks.21 Westinghouse employee and self-educated engineer Frank Conrad started making Sarnoff's dream of the Radio Music Box come true
Shock Jocks
Radio personalities who make lewd and tasteless comments to drive up ratings for their programs. Not all talk radio is political; some is just plain rude. The shock jocks, including Opie and Anthony (whose real names are Gregg Hughes and Anthony Cumia) and Todd Clem (known as "Bubba the Love Sponge"), have been described by critics as "disgusting," "racist," and "repulsive."93 Nationally syndicated Opie and Anthony were fired after airing the sounds of two people having sex in a New York cathedral, but Clem was kept on the air after slaughtering and barbecuing a wild boar during his show. Opie and Anthony are apparently off the air for good as a team following repeated firings by radio services and fights between the two hosts. Howard Stern, the most controversial of the shock jocks, left terrestrial radio in 2006 for satellite broadcasting, where he had a multiyear contract worth $500 million. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, while Stern can still be outrageous on SiriusXM satellite radio, he has focused more in recent years on high-quality in-depth interviews. In 2015, Stern signed a new five-year contract with SiriusXM reportedly worth $80 million a year for him and his staff.94
Who invented the telegraph
Samuel Morse: the telegraph in 1844 allowed messages to be sent electrically, so they didn't have to be carried from place to place. No longer did transportation set limits on communication. Messages could travel at the same speed as electrons traveling along a wire.16 By 1866, a telegraph cable extended across the Atlantic Ocean, so even that giant barrier had been conquered. But the wire itself was a serious limitation. Telegraph wires could break (or be cut, as they frequently were during the U.S. Civil War). To communicate with ships at sea, a wireless telegraph was necessary.
Satellite radio also provides...
Satellite radio also provides news and public affairs channels, such as CNN, Fox News, BBC World Service, and NPR. One advantage of satellite over regular radio is that travelers are able to tune in to a channel in New York and listen to it all the way to California. The disadvantage, other than the cost, is that these services can't provide the depth of local content, such as traffic reports, local news, or weather forecasts—the staples of car radio
Sgt. Pepper Album
Sgt. Pepper gave rise to albums that were designed to be played from beginning to end, though these two-sided vinyl records had to be turned over at the twenty-three-minute mark. The seamless presentation of seventy minutes of music would have to wait for the 1980s and the advent of the CD. Sgt. Pepper highlights a change that was starting to take place in the music business: The LP was replacing the single as rock music's main format. Moore notes that in 1967 bands still relied primarily on singles to promote themselves and albums were of secondary importance. But that was changing with groups such as Cream and Led Zeppelin focusing on albums. Led Zeppelin's greatest hit, "Stairway to Heaven," was never released as a single, probably because it wouldn't fit the short format of the 45.67
Concerns About Effects of Music on Young People
Since rock's inception, parents and other concerned adults have wondered about the effects of its lyrics on impressionable listeners. This questioning has led to product liability trials, congressional hearings, and movements to label and/or ban certain albums for objectionable content. Few music formats have engendered as much controversy as rap and hip-hop. Rap can be partially understood as an outgrowth of several trends, dating back to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. With the advent of multitrack recording, producers were adding layers of talk and ambient sound to the music created by band members. Rap simply extended this process, making the DJ part of the music and sampling from a range of already completed musical recordings. There was no longer a single "correct" mix of the various tracks; instead, the final version was constructed by whoever wanted to work with it. Among the controversies surrounding rap is the complaint that it is misogynistic and violent. Rappers defend the violence in their recordings by noting that we live in a violent world; the violence in the recordings is simply "keeping it real." Michael Fuchs, a former executive of media giant Time Warner, says that he sees some of the criticism of rap as racist: It's a fact that white kids are buying black music and are being influenced by it, and that frightens their parents. It's not very different than the feeling my parents had thirty years ago when rock and roll came out—about the influence of black music.106
Adult Contemporary (AC) and Soft AC consist
Soft AC consist of light and soft rock and are designed to appeal to listeners aged twenty-five to forty, especially women; this format draws about 8.1 percent of the audience. Pop Contemporary Hits format radio is what used to be known as Top 40 and is made up of a range of current hits; while it would seem to be primarily a teen format, more than half of its audience is older than twenty-five. While audience members might call lots of what they listen to oldies, the radio business breaks it down into a variety of categories, including Classic Hits, Classic Rock, and Oldies. Rhythmic Contemporary Hits Radio was a format developed to appeal to the United States' changing ethnic makeup, with listeners spread fairly evenly among black, Hispanic, and "other."82 ▼ TABLE 7.1
The Changing Face of Popular Music
The 1950s were a period of transition for popular music, with tastes shifting from the Tin Pan Alley songs of an Irving Berlin or Cole Porter to the songs of a Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly that were rooted in R&B. Already firmly established through concerts and radio airplay, rock 'n' roll now took center stage with records produced by artists ranging from girl groups to the Rolling Stones.
Music and the Long Tail: Alternatives to Broadcasting
Terrestrial radio is also facing competition from the new audio media that are redefining how we view radio. The Project for Excellence in Journalism (now known as the Pew Research Center Journalism Project), which has been discussing the state of American media since 2005, replaced its chapter on "radio" with one on "audio" in 2009. Pew said at the time that radio can handle the transition to the digital world better than other media because "voice and music are mobile and move easily among new platforms. And audio has done better as a medium of holding its audience than some other sectors."129 It would be a mistake, though, to just look at the Big Media alternatives such as HD radio and satellite radio. Individual audience members can now become message providers by setting up their own webcasts or podcasts with nothing more than a computer, a microphone, and a connection to the internet. With these technologies, even programming that extends deep into the long tail of media content can be distributed easily.
Radio's New Look: HD and Satellite
Terrestrial radio isn't just sitting still as digital technology takes over the sound business. In many markets, HD radio provides listeners with CD-quality sound and the choice of multiple channels of programming. But HD radio has not really taken off as a new medium. As of 2017, no more than 8 percent of Americans ever expressed an interest in HD radio, and beyond that, a high percentage of people don't even know what HD radio is, confusing it with satellite radio. While increasing numbers of cars are offering HD radios either as options or as standard equipment, buyers now have the option of adding streaming internet audio, such as Pandora or Spotify, to their vehicles. And even without dedicated streaming players in cars, as of 2017, 40 percent of cell phone-owning adults report using their mobile devices to stream music in their vehicles
From the Golden Age to the Television Age
The 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s came to be known as the golden age of radio, an era in which radio played the same role that television does today. Radio was the mass medium that served as the primary form of entertainment in the household. This was a big change. It meant that people were getting most of their entertainment from outside the home rather than from within. Instead of being entertained by Aunt Martha and Cousin Sue's piano duets, they were listening to Bing Crosby's crooning or Bob Hope's comedy on the radio.
LPs Versus 45s
The LP was developed by Columbia Records and introduced in 1948. The discs were labeled unbreakable; this was not quite true, but the vinyl LPs were much less delicate than the 78-rpm discs. More importantly, an LP could reproduce twenty-three minutes of high-quality music on each side. CBS demonstrated the system to RCA president David Sarnoff and offered to let RCA, its competitor, use the system. But RCA declined the offer and put out its own format, the 45-rpm disc. It had high-quality sound, but the 45 could play only about four minutes of music at a time.114 Eventually, record players were sold that could play both 45s and LPs, and both formats existed side by side, with the LP used for longer compositions and the 45 for single popular songs.
United Fruit Company
The United Fruit Company was an American corporation that traded tropical fruit, they also grew on Central and South American plantations, and sold in Europe and the United States. had used radios to connect its boats to banana plantations in South America and while doing so had developed improved technology that the monopoly needed. These four companies brought together the two thousand or so patents that were needed to make the radio business work.
how do listeners benefit from Pandora and Spotify how do these services impact record labels and musicians
The driving force for this growth were from paid music subscription services such as Spotify, Amazon, Tidal, Apple Music, and Pandora. The RIAA says that streaming accounted for almost `two-thirds of recorded music revenue for 2017. Physical sales of media accounted for 17 percent, and digital downloads from services such as Amazon or Apple accounted for 15 percent. Music synchronization services accounted for the remaining 3 percent. As music lovers, we now have many more choices for how we can get our music fix. We can listen to the radio, to satellite radio, to Internet radio, to streaming services, or hear new music on TV shows like The Voice or on commercials. We can download free music from file-sharing networks [though that can be illegal]. We can hear music straight from the websites of artists, buy their money from iTunes, or listen to them on Spotify. We can buy physical albums from the dwindling number of retail music stores or Wal-Mart and Target.It can be argued that piracy and file sharing hurt the record labels more than they do the musicians. File sharing may even help musicians. Classical and jazz banjo player Béla Fleck, of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, makes the majority of his income touring across the United States in the summer.
Streaming/Downloads: Online and Mobile Audio
The original online alternative to radio was streaming audio. This can take a wide range of forms. Some content is tied to a terrestrial station; others are internet only, such as Pandora, Spotify, and Apple Music. Pandora, for example, was started in 2005, and according to a survey conducted in early 2018, 31 percent of Americans age twelve or older listened to Pandora in the last month, and 20 percent listened to Spotify.36 In essence, smartphones and other mobile devices are becoming the new portable radio, as well as being players for your personal collection of recorded music.
why was the phonograph really good back then
The phonograph changed the face of music. Previously, there were only two ways to store music. The first, and oldest, was for parents to teach their children the traditional songs of their culture. The alternative was written music, or musical scores, that contained symbols for the musical notes to be played. The phonograph provided a revolutionary way of storing the actual music, not just the symbols written down by the composer. It also made possible the storage of non-notated music, such as folk songs or jazz solos, which did not necessarily exist in written form. Music scholar Charles Hamm has compared the phonograph to a musical time machine that allows listeners to go back and hear the actual sounds
Why did R&B emerge when it did?
There are a number of reasons. One is that the big bands that played jazz and swing (popular in the 1930s and 1940s) were expensive because there were so many musicians. An amplified blues band with a singer, an electric guitar, an electric bass, and a drummer could make a lot of sound, and great dance music could be built around the strong bass beat.52 Also, African American musicians gained respect when white artists recorded cover versions of black songs.
New Economic Models for the Music Industry
There can be no question that the many sectors of the sound industry are currently facing a massively changing media world. The issues of file sharing, user-generated content, and music videos (topics also covered in Chapters 9 and 10) are forcing changes in how radio and the recording industries can make money. The debate over how to make people pay for music has changed to how to make people want to pay for music. Young people are listening to music streaming over their computers or phones rather than buying discs or downloads. And yet . . . according to the 2017 Recording Industry Association of America, revenue from recorded music has been increasing in recent years instead of declining as it had for years.134 Recorded music revenue for 2017 increased 16.5 percent to a retail value of $8.7 billion. This follows an increase of 11.4 percent for 2016. According to the RIAA, this is the first time since 1999 that the recorded music revenue grew substantially for two years in a row. This puts the industry back to the same level it was back in 2008.
music, youth culture, and society
Though recorded music was on the market long before there was rock 'n' roll, rock 'n' roll was born alongside modern recording technology and flourished on the radio. It was amplified from the start, featured new instruments such as the solid-body electric guitar, and brought together a host of traditions from white hillbilly music to black rhythm and blues. World War II spurred the development of rock 'n' roll as a cross-cultural phenomenon because blacks and whites mixed socially during the war more often than they had before and because the Armed Forces Radio played a range of white and black musical styles.
Why didn't people like the word rock
We were restricted with our possibilities of promoting this song because it was considered filth. . . . They had a definition in those days of the word "rock," meaning the sex act, rather than having it known as "a good time," as they did later.
Blending Black and White Musical Traditions.
While Harris and numerous other R&B singers were performing rock 'n' roll in the late 1940s and early 1950s, two stars—one white, the other black—would put rock 'n' roll on the national and international map. Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry demonstrated what could be done with the blending of hillbilly (or country) and R&B.
Finding a Niche: Popular Radio Formats
With the coming of television, radio was forced to change and no longer tried to be all things to all people. Instead, each station now appeals to a particular audience. Teenagers don't have to listen to the same programs as store clerks; stockbrokers don't have to listen to the same programs as college students. Want rock 'n' roll? There's a station for it. Oldies? Another choice or two. News? Talk? Classical music? Soul? If you live in an urban area, chances are you can find stations providing all these different radio formats. Over the past decade, radio has continued to change, undergoing a massive change of ownership and seeing the growth of numerous new competitors.
William Paley and the Power of Radio Advertising.
With the growing demand for radio programming, the two NBC networks soon faced new competition, none more significant than William Paley's Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). Although Paley was born in the United States, his parents were Russian immigrants. He grew up in a wealthy household, and his family owned a successful cigar company. William Paley's father, Sam, had been approached about advertising his cigars on the fledgling United Independent Broadcasters (UIB) network. Sam Paley was not interested, but William was.
CDs and Digital Recording
Work on the CD was started by Philips Electronics physicist Klaas Compaan as early as 1969. Compaan had the idea of photographically recording music or video on discs that could be read with a laser. Not wanting to get into the kind of format war that raged between the 45 and the LP in the 1940s, Philips joined with Sony to create a standard for the compact disc. The CD was launched in Europe in 1982 and in the United States in 1983.
Podcasting software
a collection of programs used to create, broadcast, and receive podcasts . They open up distribution of audio programming to anyone with a basic computer and an online connection. An example of a popular podcast would be NPR's morning news program Up First, which is available for downloading about the time you get up. It has a couple of popular NPR hosts presenting a ten- to twelve-minute newscast with a bit of depth and analysis.41
Streaming audio also greatly extends the reach...
especially small ones with low-powered transmitters. A 3,800-watt student station that can barely cover fifteen miles over the air can reach an entire city, not to mention the world, through streaming. In essence, streaming can do for a small radio station what cable did for Ted Turner's local Atlanta television station, WTBS—turn it into a radio superstation that anyone in the world can receive.
"National Public Radio.
hat's because in 2010 the network changed its name from National Public Radio to just NPR to reflect the fact that much of its programming is delivered over the web or via apps for mobile devices and tablets. So to understand the full reach of NPR, it should be noted that in addition to its 37.7 million radio listeners, it has 41 million average monthly unique visitors to its website, and 6.8 million weekly unique downloaders of NPR podcasts, the majority of which are being listened to using mobile devices. It has also launched the NPR One app in partnership with Apple—which simply goes to show that online media are mobile media.104
What device did Emile Berliner make ?
mile Berliner arrived in the United States in 1870 at the age of nineteen. By 1888, he had developed a method for recording sound on flat discs rather than on cylinders. Berliner's disc recordings (or records) were louder and more lifelike than the cylinder recordings of Edison or Alexander Graham Bell. Berliner called his device the gramophone. Eventually, however, all record players were called phonographs.
Satellite Radio
proprietary, subscription-based method of broadcasting digital audio programs via satellite . In 2008, the two competing satellite radio services, Sirius and XM, merged to become SiriusXM. The two services still offer separate programming but have overlap between them. They've also united their efforts to promote the idea of subscription radio. As of 2017, SiriusXM had nearly thirty-three million subscribers.31Neither of the two companies turned a profit as independents, and the newly merged company came close to filing for bankruptcy in February 2009, saved only by an infusion of cash provided by Liberty Media, the owner of major pay TV services.32However as of 2017, the service was making close to $650 million of income on $5.4 billion of revenue.
soap operas
serialized daytime dramas targeted primarily at women , a key audience for advertisers. It wasn't until the advent of television in the 1950s that soaps ceased to be a major part of radio programming.25 CBS's Guiding Light started on the radio in 1937, moved over to television in 1952, and finished its seventy-two-year run on September 18, 2009. In February 2014, ABC's General Hospital officially became the longest-running soap opera still in production, having had its thirteen-thousand-episode spread over fifty years of both radio and television.
AT&T
was the world leader in wired communication, and Westinghouse owned many critical patents. But why was United Fruit Company a part of RCA?
radcial barriers
weaken racial barriers. When it came to music, segregation didn't mean a thing in some of those towns, and if it did, black and white fans would ignore the local customs to attend the shows. To see crowds that were integrated—sometimes for the first time in a community—made me realize that Motown truly was the sound of young America