Chapter 4: Sound Recording and Popular Music

Many people did not appreciate the blurred boundaries between God and sexuality portrayed through Rock 'n' Roll music

Although many rock and roll lyrics from the 1950s are tame by today's standards, this new musical development represented a threat to many parents and adults at that time. Why?

-UK was origin of global impact of the trade of pop music -rock and roll unofficially became rock -Rolling Stones would influence generations of musicians emphasizing gritty, chord-driven, high-volume rock -The Beatles would influence countless artists interested in a more accessible, melodic, and softer sound -most pop music was produced by songwriting teams hired by major labels and matched with selected performers showed the recording industry how older -American musical forms could be repackaged as rock and exported around the world

Explain the British invasion. What was its impact on the recording industry?

Sound Recording and Radio set the stage for how music is produced, distributed and performed today. many social, political, and economic factors contributed to the growth of Rock 'n' Roll. No new style of music has had such a widespread impact on so many forms of cultures

How did rock and roll significantly influence two mass media industries?

In the early 40s, shellac was needed for WWII munitions production, so the record industry turned to manufacturing plastic records instead. The vinyl recordings turned out to be more durable than shellac records and less noisy, paving the way for a renewed consumer desire to buy recorded music.

How did sound recording survive the advent of radio?

lawsuits aimed at file-sharing companies and at individual downloaders requiring users to log into a centralized system fining by US federal courts shift of owning music to access of music

How did the music industry attempt to curb illegal downloading and file-sharing?

Mechanical royalties are a royalty paid to a songwriter whenever a copy of one of their songs is made. BMI royalties are performing right royalties, which are earned when a musical work is performed publicly.

How is a mechanical royalty different from a performance royalty?

Berliner's flat disk was durable, compared to the wax cylinder. He also developed a technique that enabled him to mass-produce his round records, bringing sound recording to its mass medium stage. Labels could be stamped to his recordings CDs to MP3s made a difference in mass media

The technological configuration of a particular medium sometimes elevates it to mass market status. Why did Emile Berliner's flat disk replace the wax cylinder, and why did this reconfiguration of records matter in the history of the mass media? Can you think of other mass media examples in which the size and shape of the technology have made a differences?

Universal Music Group, Sony music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group

What companies control the bulk to worldwide music production and distribution?

high and low culture, masculinity and femininity, the country and the city, the North and the South, the sacred and the secular

What moral and cultural boundaries were blurred by rock and roll in the 1950s?

Wholesale - Walmart, Best Buy combined 18% Music label gets majority of profit, then the retailer, then artist, then songwriter.

Which major parties receive profits when a digital download, music stream, or physical CD is sold?

The covering of black artists' songs by white musicians was almost always an attempt to capitalize on popular songs from the R&B "race" charts by transforming them into hits on the white pop charts. White producers gave co-writing credit to white performers for tunes they merely covered Producers would buy the rights to potential hits from black songwriters who seldom saw a penny in royalties or received songwriting credit.

Why did cover music figure so prominently in the development of rock and roll and the record industry in the 1950s?

punk rock rose in the late 70s to challenge the orthodoxy and commercialism of the record business hip hop stood in direct opposition of the polished, professional, and often less political world of soul They both work to challenge commercial rock. Ironically Hip-hop succeeded commercially whereas punk rock did not.

Why did hip-hop and punk rock emerge as significant musical forms in the late 1970s and 1980s? What do their developments have in common, and how are they different?

Advent of iTunes the dominance of singles

Why does pop music continue to remain powerful today?

Less commercially viable music. Independent labels can be more risky with unproven artists. Music industry relies on trends from indie artists.

Why have independent labels grown to have a significantly larger market share in the 2010s?

Independent artists can profit after roughly selling 25,000 copies of an album. Major labels must sell roughly 500,000 copies to make a profit. Ironic because they can make money sooner, when people think that major labels make so much more money quicker.

Why is it ironic that so many forms of alternative music become commercially successful?

analog recording

a recording that is made by capturing the fluctuations of the original sound waves and storing those signals on records or cassettes as a continuous stream of magnetism-analogous to the actual sound

gangster rap

a style of rap music that depicts the hardships of urban life and sometimes glorifies the violent style of street gangs

folk-rock

amplified folk music, often featuring politically overt lyrics; influenced by rock and roll

jazz

an improvisational and mostly instrumental musical form that absorbs and integrates a diverse body of musical styles, including African rhythms, blues, big ban, and gospel

oligopoly

in media economics, an organizational structure in which a few firms control most of an industry's production and distribution resources

indies

independent music and film production houses that work outside industry oligopolies; they often produce less mainstream music and film

audiotape

lightweight magnetized strands of ribbon that make possible sound editing and multiple-track mixing; instrumentals or vocals can be recorded at one location and later mixed onto a master recording in another studio

folk music

music performed by untrained musicians and passed down through oral traditions; it encompasses a wide range of music

digital recording

music recorded and played back by laser beam rather than by needle or magnetic tape

hip-hop

music that combines spoken street dialect with cuts (or samples) from older records and bears the influences of social politics, male boasting, and comic lyrics carried forward from blues, R&B, soul and rock and roll

rock and roll

music that merges the African American influences of urban blues, gospel, and R&B with the white influences of country, folk, and pop vocals

rhythm and blues (R&B)

music that merges urban blues with big-band sounds

rockabilly

music that mixes bluegrass and country influences with those of black folk music and early amplified blues

soul

music that mixes gospel, blues, and urban and southern black styles with slower, more emotional, and melancholic lyrics

alternative rock

nonmainstream rock music, which includes many types of experimental music and some forms of punk and grunge

blues

originally a kind of black folk music, this music emerged as a distinct category in the early 1990s;; it was influenced by African American spirituals, ballads, and work songs in the rural South, and by urban guitar and vocal solos from the 1930s and 1940s.

compact discs (CDs)

playback-only storage discs for music that incorporate pure and very precise digital techniques, thus eliminating noise during recording and editing sessions

pop music

popular music that appeals either to a wide cross section of the public or to sizeable subdivisions within the larger public based on age, region, or ethnic background; the word pop has also been used as a label to distinguish popular music from classical music

punk rock

rock music that challenges the orthodoxy and commercials of the recording business; it is characterized by loud, unpolished qualities, a jackhammer beat, primal vocal screams, crude aggression, and defiant or comic lyrics

grunge

rock music that takes the spirit of punk and infuses it with more attention to melody

MP3

short for MPEG-1 Layer 3, an advanced type of audio compression that reduces file size, enabling audio to be easily distributed over the internet and to be digitally transmitted in real time

cover music

songs recorded or performed by musicians who did not originally write or perform the music; in the 1950s, some white producers and artists capitalized on popular songs by black artists by covering" them

A&R (artist & repertoire) agents

talent scouts of the music business who discover, develop, and sometimes manage performers

online piracy

the illegal uploading, downloading, or streaming of copyrighted material, such as music or movies

stereo

the recording of two separate channels or tracks of sound

folk music was the sound of social activism inspired artists including Bob Dylan "folkies" saw amplified music as a sellout to the commercial recording industry

what were the major influences of folk music on the recording industry?