Ch. 7: Radio, Recording, and Popular Music

*deregulation* *duopoly*

Deregulation and Ownership: The business of radio is being altered by deregulation and changes in ownership rules. To ensure that there were many different perspectives in the cultural forum, the FCC had long limited the number of radio stations one person or company could own to one AM and one FM locally and seven AMs and seven FMs nationally. These numbers were revised upward in the late 1980s, and controls were almost totally eliminated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Now, due to this *_____________________*, there are no national ownership limits, and one person or company can own as many as eight stations in one area, depending on the size of the market. This situation has allowed *___________*— one person or company owning and managing multiple radio stations in a single market— to explode. Since the passage of the 1996 act, more than 10,000 radio stations have been sold, and there are now 1,100 fewer station owners, a 30% decline. The vast majority of these sales have been to already-large radio groups such as iHeart Media and Cumulus, with 850 and 459 stations, respectively. As a result, in 25 of the 50 largest radio markets, 3 companies claim 80% of all listeners. In over 40 cities, 1/3 of the radio stations are owned by a single company, leading insiders to identify the industry's 2 biggest problems not as competition from new digital technologies, but first, "control of the industry in the hands of a few giants" and a close second, "decline of local radio with its deep communities ties". The concern over these issues runs deep. Local public affairs shows now make up less than 1 1/2 of 1% of all commercial broadcast time in the United States. "There is a crisis," said FCC Commissioner Michael Copps (2011), "when more than 1/3 of our commercial broadcasters offer little to no news whatsoever to their communities of license. America's news and information resources keep shrinking and hundreds of stories that could inform our citizens go untold and, indeed, undiscovered." As for the music, a few years ago, when Clear Channel (now iHeart Media) and Cumulus collectively laid off hundreds of DJs in a move toward automated (no live DJ) and nationally syndicated programming, veteran Los Angeles rock DJ Jim Ladd said, "It's really bad news. It was people in my profession that first played Tom Petty, first played the Doors. But the people programming stations now are not music people— they're business people". LPFM, 10- to 100-watt nonprofit community radio stations with a reach of only a few miles, are one response to "the homogenization of the FM band." As a result of the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which enjoyed wide bipartisan support in Congress, 1,069 LPFM stations, serving all 50 states, now offer opportunities for additional radio voices to serve their local listenerships. The FCC encourages the growth of LPFM with regular online webinars explaining the application process to potential operators of this local medium designed, in the words of the FCC, "to empower community voices, promote media diversity, and enhance local programming".

*Format* *secondary services*

Radio Is Specialized: When radio became a local medium, it could no longer program the expensive, star-filled genres of its golden age. The problem now was how to program a station with interesting content and do so economically. A disc jockey (DJ) playing records was the best solution. Stations soon learned that a highly specialized, specific audience of particular interest to certain advertisers could be attracted with specific types of music. *________* radio was born. Of course, choosing a specific format means accepting that many potential listeners will not tune in. But in format radio, the size of the audience is secondary to its composition. American radio is home to about 60 different formats, from the most common, which include Country, Top 40, Album-Oriented Rock, and All Talk, to the somewhat uncommon, for example, World Ethnic. Many stations, especially those in rural areas, offer *__________________* (formats). For example, a country station may broadcast a religious format for 10 hours on Saturday and Sunday. A more precise number and listing is difficult because radio's specialization allows for an infinite variety of formats, for example Houston's B92, whose format changed from News to All-Beyoncé in 2014 (although that experiment lasted only one week). Format radio offers stations many advantages beyond low-cost operations and specialized audiences that appeal to advertisers. Faced with falling listenership or loss of advertising, a station can simply change DJs and music. Neither television nor the print media have this content flexibility. When confronted with competition from a station with a similar format, a station can further narrow its audience by specializing its formula even more. Music format radio requires a disc jockey. Someone has to play the music and provide the talk. The modern DJ is the invention of Todd Storz, who bought KOWH in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1949. He turned the radio personality/ music formula on its head. Before Storz, radio announcers would talk most of the time and occasionally play music to rest their voices. Storz wanted more music, less talk. He thought radio should sound like a jukebox— the same few songs people wanted to hear played over and over again. His Top 40 format, which demanded strict adherence to a playlist (a predetermined sequence of selected records) of popular music for young people, up-tempo pacing, and catchy production gimmicks, became the standard for the posttelevision popular music station. Gordon McClendon of KLIF in Dallas refined the Top 40 format and developed others, such as Beautiful Music, and is therefore often considered, along with Storz, one of the two pioneers of format radio.

*Web radio* *podcasting* *Bitcasters*

Web Radio and Podcasting: Radio's convergence with digital technologies is nowhere more pronounced and potentially profound than in *____________*, the delivery of "radio" directly to individual listeners over the Internet, and in *_________________*, streaming or downloading of audio files recorded and stored on distant servers. First, we'll discuss Web radio. Tens of thousands of "radio stations" exist on the Web in one of 2 forms: radio simulcasts and bitcasters. "Radio simulcasts" are traditional, over-the-air stations transmitting their signals online. -Some simply re-create their original broadcasts, but more often, the simulcast includes additional information, such as song lyrics or artists' biographical information and concert dates. *_______________*, Web-only radio stations, can be accessed only online. -There are narrowly targeted bitcasts, such as Indie 103.1, a Los Angeles alternative rock station, and allworship.com, a Christian station webcasting from Birmingham, Alabama. -But the most dramatic evidence of the popularity of bitcasting exists in the success of the scores of streaming services that allow the simultaneous downloading and accessing of music. The most successful streaming service, Pandora, is platform agnostic, available on virtually every new digital device, not only the obvious ones like smartphones, televisions, and car radios, but also the less obvious devices, for example WiFi-enabled refrigerators. Listeners, who collectively log more than 1.9 billion hours a month, can pay a small monthly fee to hear the service without commercials, but the vast majority of its 250 million subscribers (78 million active monthly users) tune in for free and hear demographic- and taste-specific commercials. Pandora accomplishes this ad specificity by coupling it with its Music Genome Project. After listeners tell Pandora what artists they like, the Genome Project, according to the company, "will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings— new and old, well known and completely obscure— to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice." Listeners can create up to 100 unique "stations," personally refining them even more if they wish, and at any time, they can purchase the tune they are hearing with a simple click. With 50 million paying subscribers worldwide (100 million overall), Spotify came to the United States in 2011. Using a "freemium model," it offers listeners more than 30 million songs. They can listen for free, hearing commercials and living with limits on how much music they can stream, or they can pay a small monthly fee for premium limitless, commercial-free listening. Including other streaming services such as Slacker, Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, Napster, Deezer, and Tidal, half of U.S. Internet users stream music, and this on-demand radio is the country's fastest-growing way to listen to music, as the number of individual songs streamed increased more than 76% from 2015 to 2016, to 251 billion. Podcasts can also be streamed, but because they are posted online, they do not necessarily require streaming software. They can be downloaded, either on demand or automatically (typically by subscription), to any digital device that has an MP3 player, including PCs, laptops, and smartphones. There are tens of thousands of active podcasters online, and they cover every conceivable topic on which an individual or organization cares to comment, with Christian, Music, Comedy, TV/ Film, and News/ Politics being the most popular genres. And while podcasting was begun in earnest in 2004 by individual techies, audio bloggers, and DJ-wannabes, within a year they were joined by "professional" podcasters such as record companies, commercial and public radio stations, and big media companies like ESPN, CNN, Bravo, and Disney. Listenership has also exploded as smartphones and Bluetooth-enabled cars have become ubiquitous and as more people have broadband Internet access. 57 million Americans listen to podcasts every month. They tend to be younger, loyal to their chosen podcast, and comfortable with advertising, ensuring the financial future of the form.

*liquid barretter*

Early Radio: Because both applied for patents within months of one another in the late 1890s, there remains disagreement over who "invented" radio, Eastern European immigrant Nikola Tesla or Guglielmo Marconi, son of a wealthy Italian businessman and his Irish wife. Marconi, however, is considered the "Father of Radio" because not only was he among the first to send signals through the air, but he was also adroit at gaining maximum publicity for his every success. His improvements over earlier experimental designs allowed him to send and receive telegraph code over distances as great as two miles by 1896. His native Italy was not interested in his invention, so he used his mother's contacts in Great Britain to find support and financing there. England, with a global empire and the world's largest navy and merchant fleets, was naturally interested in long-distance wireless communication. With the financial and technical help of the British, Marconi successfully transmitted wireless signals across the English Channel in 1899 and across the Atlantic in 1901. Wireless was now a reality. Marconi was satisfied with his advance, but other scientists saw the transmission of voices by wireless as the next hurdle, a challenge that was soon surmounted. In 1903 Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian, invented the *_____________________*, the first audio device permitting the reception of wireless voice transmissions. His 1906 Christmas Eve broadcast from Brant Rock, a small New England coastal village, was the first public broadcast of voices and music. His listeners were in ships at sea and a few newspaper offices equipped to receive the transmission.

*billings* *ratings*

Radio as an Advertising Medium: Advertisers enjoy the specialization of radio because it gives them access to homogeneous groups of listeners to whom products can be pitched. Income earned from the sale of airtime is called *____________*. Local time and national spots (for example, Prestone Antifreeze buys time on several thousand stations in winter areas) account for 97% of all billings; network time makes up the rest (Sass, 2015). The cost of time is based on the *_______________*, the percentage of the total available audience reached. Radio is an attractive advertising medium for reasons other than its delivery of a homogeneous audience. Radio ads are inexpensive to produce and therefore can be changed, updated, and specialized to meet specific audience demands. Ads can also be specialized to different times of the day. -For example, a hamburger restaurant may have one version of its commercial for the morning audience, in which its breakfast menu is touted, and a different version for the evening audience driving home, dreading the thought of cooking dinner. Radio time is inexpensive to buy, especially when compared with television. An audience loyal to a specific format station is presumably loyal to those who advertise on it. Radio is the listeners' friend; it travels with them and talks to them personally.

*low power FM (LPFM)*

Scope and Nature of the Radio Industry: There are 15,508 broadcast radio stations operating in the United States today: 4,671 commercial AM stations, 6,737 commercial FM stations, and 4,100 noncommercial FM stations. These are joined on the dial by 1,609 *________________________* stations. There are more than 2 radios for every person in the United States. The industry as a whole sells more than $17 billion a year of ad time, and radio remains people's primary means of consuming audio content.

*terrestrial*; *digital radio* *in-band-on-channel (IBOC)*

Terrestrial Digital Radio: Since late 2002, thousands of radio stations have begun broadcasting *___________________* (land-based) *___________________*. Relying on digital compression technology called *________________________*, terrestrial digital radio allows broadcasters to transmit not only their usual analog signal but one or more digital signals using their existing spectrum space. And although IBOC also improves sound fidelity, making possible high-definition radio, many stations using the technology see its greatest value in pay services— for example, subscription data delivery. IBOC has yet to completely replace analog radio, as many stations today continue to air both digital and analog services.

*digital recording* *MP3* *modems* *open source software* *piracy* *P2P*

The Internet and the Future of the Recording Industry: In the 1970s the basis of the recording industry changed from analog to *___________________*. That is, sound went from being preserved as waves, whether physically on a disc or tape, to conversion into 1s and 0s logged in millisecond intervals in a computerized translation process. When replayed at the proper speed, the resulting sound was not only continuous but pristine— no hum, no hiss. The CD, or compact disc, was introduced in 1983 using digital coding on a 4.7-inch disc read by a laser beam. In 1986 "Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits became the first million-selling CD. In 1988 the sale of CDs surpassed that of vinyl discs for the first time; by 1999 they accounted for 88% of industry revenues; today, CDs account for only 22% of that income. Convergence with computers and the Internet offers other challenges and opportunities to the recording industry. The way the recording industry operates has been dramatically altered by the Internet. Traditionally, a record company signed an artist, produced the artist's music, and promoted the artist and music through a variety of outlets but primarily through the distribution of music to radio stations. Then listeners, learning about the artist and music through radio, went to a record store and bought the music. But this has changed. Music fans now have access to more music from a greater variety of artists than ever before. And while it is true that the top 1% of all bands and solo artists collects more than 3/4 of all the revenue from recorded music, more artists than ever are building profitable musical careers by finding new ways of interacting with their fans and the music industry. The Internet music revolution began with the development of *__________*, compression software that shrinks audio files to less than a 1/10 of their original size. Originally developed in 1987 in Germany, it began to take off in the early 1990s as more users began to hook up to the Internet with increasingly faster *_____________*. This *________________________*, or freely downloaded software, permits users to download recorded music. Today, given the near-universal presence of computers, smartphones, and tablets, rare is the American— especially young American— who cannot access online music. The crux of the digital problem for recording companies was that they sold music "in its physical form," whereas MP3 permitted music's distribution in a nonphysical form. First discussed as "merely" a means of allowing independent bands and musicians to post their music online where it might attract a following, MP3 became a headache for the recording industry when music from the name artists they controlled began appearing on MP3 sites, making *___________*, the illegal recording and sale of copyrighted material and high-quality recordings, a relatively simple task. Not only could users listen to their downloaded music from their hard drives, but they could make their own CDs from MP3 files and play those discs wherever and whenever they wished. Rather than embrace MP3, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing all of the United States's major labels, responded to the threat by developing their own "secure" Internet technology, but by the time it was available for release it was too late: MP3, driven by its availability and ease of use, had become the technology of choice for music fans already unhappy with the high cost of CDs and the necessity of paying for tracks they didn't want in order to get the ones they did. "The industry thought it was selling music," industry analyst James McQuivey explains. "It was really selling physical objects containing music— CDs— and it wasn't prepared for people buying fewer of them". The CD is quickly going the way of the audio tape and 8-track cartridge. It has been replaced by the download. Downloading occurs in 2 forms: industry-approved and *________* (peer-to-peer).

*mathematical songwriting* *catalog albums*

The Major Recording Companies: 3 major recording companies control 63% of the global recorded music market. 2 (Sony and Universal) control nearly half of the world's $15 billion global music sales. 2 of the 3 are foreign-owned: -Sony, controlling about 21% of the world music market, is a Japanese-owned corporate group. -Its labels include Columbia, Epic, RCA, and Arista. -New York- based Warner Music Group, controlling about 15%, is owned by billionaire Len Blavatnik's Access Industries and several private investors. -Its labels include Atlantic, Asylum, and Warner Brothers. -Universal Music Group, controlling about 27%, is owned by French conglomerate Vivendi Universal and controls labels such as EMI, MCA, Capitol, and Def Jam Records. Critics have long voiced concern over conglomeration in the music business, a concern that centers on the traditional cultural value of music, especially for young people. Multibillion-dollar conglomerates typically are not rebellious in their cultural tastes, nor are they usually willing to take risks on new ideas. These duties have fallen primarily to the independent labels, companies such as Real World Records and Epitaph. Still, problems with the music industry- audience relationship remain. Cultural homogenization is the worrisome outcome of virtually all the world's influential recording being controlled by a few profit-oriented giants. If bands or artists cannot immediately deliver the goods, they aren't signed. So derivative artists and manufactured groups dominate— for example, Miley Cyrus and One Direction. Moreover, popular music is increasingly the product not of individual genius or artistry but of *_______________________*, songs written specifically to be commercial hits. They are "written to track, which means a producer makes a beat. Then a songwriter listens to it and attempts to generate words that fit that beat, sometimes singing nonsense until the language begins to take shape. It's more about how lyrics sound than what they mean. This has become a bedrock part of the industry". The "dominance of profit over artistry" worries many music fans. When a major label must spend millions to sign a bankable artist such as Michael Jackson ($250 million to his estate) or Jay Z ($150 million) or Adele ($130 million), it typically pares lesser-known, potentially more innovative artists from its roster. The chase for profit has also produced an increase in the number of product placements in songs and the use of computer algorithms to determine which songs are sufficiently similar to existing hits to warrant production. Critics and industry people alike see these practices as problems for the industry, as well as for the music and its listeners. Record industry sales have dropped consistently over the past 2 decades, with small gains in 2015 for both the U.S. (0.09%) and global (3.2%) markets finally halting the decline. The reason for this state of affairs, say many music critics, is not Internet piracy, as is often asserted by the recording industry, but the industry itself. As the industry relies more heavily on superficial, disposable pop stars, it tells people that the music is superficial and disposable. As they increasingly rely on the same big stars, there is little new music for fans to discover and buy. In 1981, for example, 31 songs from 29 different artists hit Billboard's Number 1; in 2016, only 11 songs from 10 different artists reached Number 1 (Justin Bieber appeared twice, and Drake, with others, 3 times). What helps keep the industry afloat is continued strength in sales of *__________________*, albums more than 18 months old. In fact, catalog albums outsold new releases for the first time in 2015. But new releases cannot become catalog albums unless the artists and their music are worthy of fans' devotion and money. How many current artists and albums do you think will ever join these ranks? Critics of the ascendance of profits over artistry argue that the industry simply lacks the patience to develop new sounds and careers.

*networks* *affiliates* *O& Os*

Advertising and the Networks: While the regulatory structure of the medium was evolving, so were its financial bases. The formation of RCA had ensured that radio would be a commercial, profit-based medium. The industry supported itself through the sale of receivers; that is, it operated radio stations in order to sell radios. The problem was that once everybody had a radio, people would stop buying them. The solution was advertising. On August 22, 1922, New York station WEAF accepted the first radio commercial, a 10-minute spot for Long Island brownstone apartments. The cost of the ad was $50. The sale of advertising led to the establishment of national radio *____________*. Groups of stations, or *____________*, all broadcasting identical content from a single distributor, could deliver larger audiences, realizing greater advertising revenues, which would allow them to hire bigger stars and produce better programming, which would attract larger audiences, which could be sold for even greater fees to advertisers. RCA set up a 24-station network, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), in 1926. A year later it bought AT& T's stations and launched a second network, NBC Blue (the original NBC was renamed NBC Red). The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) was also founded in 1927, but it struggled until 26-year-old millionaire cigar maker William S. Paley bought it in 1928, making it a worthy competitor to NBC. The 4th network, Mutual, was established in 1934 largely on the strength of its hit Western "The Lone Ranger". 4 midwestern and eastern stations came together to sell advertising on it and other shows; soon Mutual had 60 affiliates. Mutual differed from the other major national networks in that it did not own and operate its own flagship stations (called *____________*, for owned and operated). By 1938 the 4 national networks had affiliated virtually all the large U.S. stations and the majority of smaller operations as well. These corporations grew so powerful that in 1943 the government forced NBC to divest itself of one of its networks. It sold NBC Blue to Life Saver candy maker Edward Noble, who renamed it the American Broadcasting Company (ABC). The fundamental basis of broadcasting in the United States was now set: -Radio broadcasters were private, commercially owned enterprises rather than government operations. -Governmental regulation was based on the public interest. -Stations were licensed to serve specific localities, but national networks programmed the most lucrative hours with the largest audiences. -Entertainment and information (news, weather, and sports) were the basic broadcast content. -Advertising formed the basis of financial support for broadcasting.

*audion tube* *broadcasting*

Later that same year American Lee DeForest invented the *______________*, a vacuum tube that improved and amplified wireless signals. Now the reliable transmission of clear voices and music was a reality. But DeForest's second important contribution was that he saw radio as a means of *_________________________*. The early pioneers, Marconi included, had viewed radio as a device for point-to-point communication— for example, from ship to ship or ship to shore. But in the 1907 prospectus for his radio company DeForest wrote, "It will soon be possible to distribute grand opera music from transmitters placed on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House by a Radio Telephone station on the roof to almost any dwelling in Greater New York and vicinity.... The same applies to large cities. Church music, lectures, etc., can be spread abroad by the Radio Telephone". Soon, countless "broadcasters" went on the air. Some were giant corporations, looking to dominate the medium for profit; some were hobbyists and hams, playing with the medium for sheer joy. There were so many "stations" that havoc reigned. Yet the promise of radio was such that the medium continued to mature until World War I, when the U.S. government ordered "the immediate closing of all stations for radio communications, both transmitting and receiving."

*BitTorrent* *stream ripping* *copyright*

P2P Downloading: Despite the availability of industry-approved music downloads, illegal downloading still occurs. The 53 million U.S. Internet users who admit to piracy annually download as much as $20 billion worth of digitally pirated recorded music Sites such as Gnutella and Freenet use P2P technologies, that is, peer-to-peer software that permits direct Internet-based communication or collaboration between two or more personal computers while bypassing centralized servers. P2P allows users to visit a constantly and infinitely changing network of machines through which file sharing can occur. The record companies (and movie studios) challenged P2P by suing the makers of its software. In 2005, the Supreme Court, in MGM v. Grokster, unanimously supported industry arguments that P2P software, because it "encouraged" copyright infringement, rendered its makers liable for that illegal act. The industry's next challenge, then, is *__________________*, file-sharing software that allows anonymous users to create "swarms" of data as they simultaneously download and upload "bits" of a given piece of content from countless untraceable servers. And while these P2P sharing sites account for the large majority of music theft, their share, once as high as 99%, is being eroded by another form of piracy, *___________________*— saving streamed media to a file on a personal device to be accessed locally— from sites like YouTube and music streaming sites. Half of 16- to 24-year-olds admit to regularly stream ripping. No matter what model of music production and distribution eventually results from this technological and financial tumult, serious questions about the Internet's impact on *_________________* (protecting content creators' financial interest in their product) will remain.

*syndication* *digital audio radio service (DARS)*

Satellite and Cable: The convergence of radio and satellite has aided the rebirth of the radio networks. Music and other forms of radio content can be distributed quite inexpensively to thousands of stations. As a result, one "network" can provide very different services to its very different affiliates. Sports broadcaster ESPN, for example, maintains its own radio network, and Westwood One distributes the Rick Dees Weekly Top 40. In addition, Westwood One, through its *______________________* operations, delivers thousands of varied network and program syndication services to almost every commercial station in the country. The low cost of producing radio programming, however, makes the establishment of other, even more specialized networks possible. Satellites, and sometimes now fiber optic Internet, make access to syndicated content and formats affordable for many stations. Syndicators can deliver news, top 10 shows, and other content to stations on a market-by-market basis. They can also provide entire formats, requiring local stations, if they wish, to do little more than insert commercials into what sounds to listeners to be a local broadcast. Satellite has another application as well. Many listeners now receive "radio" through their cable televisions in the form of satellite-delivered services such as DMX (Digital Music Express) and Music Choice. Direct satellite home, office, and automobile delivery of audio by *_____________________* brings Sirius XM Radio to more than 30 million American subscribers by offering hundreds of commercial channels— primarily talk, sports, and traffic— and commercial-free channels— primarily music. Those numbers will likely continue to grow because the company has arrangements with every major carmaker in the country to offer its receivers as a factory-installed option. DARS has proven to be sufficiently inexpensive, reliable, and technologically sophisticated that Norway, in 2017, ceased all terrestrial broadcasting, making DARS its standard radio-delivery technology. Several other European countries are considering the same move.

*covered*

Scope and Nature of the Recording Industry: When the DJs and Top 40 format saved radio in the 1950s, they also changed for all time popular music and, by extension, the recording industry. Disc jockeys were color-deaf in their selection of records. They introduced record buyers to rhythm 'n' blues in the music of African American artists such as Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Until the mid-1950s, the work of these performers had to be *__________*— rerecorded by white artists such as Perry Como— before it was aired. Teens loved the new sound, however, and it became the foundation of their own subculture, as well as the basis for the explosion in recorded music. Today more than 5,000 U.S. companies annually release around 100,000 new albums on thousands of different labels. American music buyers purchased 1.3 billion pieces of music— digital (70%) and physical (30%)— in 2015.