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Sheet Music to Napster: Music Distribution Tech
I'm going to focus on distribution technology, and by "distribution," I mean everything between the artist and my ear. The company that puts CDs on the shelf at Best Buy is an important part, but I'm looking at the whole journey: from the moment the song is done to the moment it's heard (including, notably, audio reproduction).
There have been many examinations of how technology has affected the creative process, from Bach's popularization of the well-tempered scale (exchanging a small harmonic sweetness for huge harmonic flexibility) to Les Paul's electric guitar pickup. But I want to look at how music spreads after its creation.
And of course the whole point of this is to build up to tomorrow's discussion of Napster and peer-to-peer digital music trading in general. Stay tuned :)
My utopian/dystopian personal vision of the not-so-distant future is of two kids on the playground at recess, MP3 players built into wristwatches, trading the latest cool songs via geosynchronous satellite. There are a thousand reasons that might never happen, but technology is not one of them. The tech to make that happen will exist in my lifetime. The questions are whether the law, and the economic structure it creates, will allow it, and also whether our musical culture evolves to the point where such trading is desirable or even relevant.
Let's start off with a cursory look at the last 200 years, and then pick a few examples to check out in more detail. So what was the American music scene like in the 1800s?
Two words for the century's prevailing trend: women, and keyboards. Imported pianos were coming into the States in the years after the Revolutionary War, and in the decades to follow, the pianomaking industry moved onto American soil. One Frenchman wrote in 1788 of the growing American love affair with pianos, "God grant that the Bostonian women may never, like those of France, acquire the malady of perfection in this art! It is never attained but at the expense of the domestic virtues." (Loesser 445; see end for bibliography.)
Not much changed over the next century. Skill at the piano became entrenched as a domestic virtue of its own. By 1820 the music-news periodical Euterpeiad was founded, with its supplementary sheet music being almost entirely for the piano -- and when circulation began to fail it appealed more directly to its target audience by adding the subtitle "Ladies' Gazette" and adding essays like "Scheme for Getting a Husband" and "An Illustrious Female." (467)
The tone of early American composition was set by precisely this fact: that the piano was an instrument played by genteel young girls, who of course were always in search of a husband, and later by proper fiancées, wives, homemakers, mothers -- all the delightful niches that women of the time were expected to fill.
Typical early American compositions intended for the home player were devotional ("Nothing True But Heaven," "Arrayed in Clouds," "Home of My Soul," "Last Hope"), languid and emotional ("The Dying Poet"), puppy-lovey ("Youth, Love and Folly Polka"), and always, always the sentimental ("The Maiden's Prayer"). "Death and religion were frequently the subjects." (468, 500, 505, 506, 544)
In fact, the sappy sentimentalism of the songs crammed down the pianists' throats is almost impossible to overstate. "In ladies' mythology, poets are sweet, gentle creatures -- a little like children or possibly canary birds -- and it is delightfully heart-rending to think of them dying."
The tragic death of the innocent was a daily occurence; Loesser is too funny not to quote in full:
"An average song of the period began by extolling the beloved creature in the first verse, then killing him or her ruthlessly by unspecified disease in the second or third. Sometimes the last stanza was a graveside lament...
"To be so full of feeling that you lose control of yourself, that you tremble or weep or faint or drop dead, was wonderful, was a blessing, a thing to live for, to boast about, to pretend to. Now, nothing is an easier incentive to strong feeling than death, especially the premature death of a loved person. Thus, the cheapest way for an author to arouse 'feeling' was to kill off a child or sweetheart." (499)
Nothing like that ever happens in modern pop music, of course.
"By the middle of the nineteenth century," writes Loesser (419), "the piano infatuation had passed its peak" in Europe, but certainly not in the States. Was it universal? No, only perhaps "eight percent of the nation's youth" (540) played the piano, but this was by far the most common way that popular music spread. Its popularity continued well into the 20th century.
That is the key here -- popular music, music of the people, most of whom did not bother to attend concerts. The CD player of the 1800s was the piano, its CDs were sheet music mailed directly to the home, and its sound system was the mother's or daughter's fingers. That latter fact, that the "digital" reproduction was almost exclusively through female digits, stamped much of an entire century of American pop music with an impossibly sentimental, shallow, sticky, and often maudlin character.
(I hope I don't have to point out that this was surely no fault of the women in question; society crams people into roles and demands that they perform.)
But by the end of the century, for the first time in the history of humanity it was possible to reproduce music without a human being. First came the player piano (which had actually been invented over 50 years before, but never perfected). At the same time came a rapid succession of technologies which could (poorly) reproduce any sound. The CD was no longer sheet music which had to be interpreted; the CD had become the player piano roll and the phonograph record.
As before, reproduction tech influenced the character of the music. Could a player piano reproduce a slow, soft Beethoven movement? It could try, but because the paper rolls allowed for no dynamic subtlety, every key would have been banged out exactly as loud as the next. If anyone tried selling a Beethoven piano roll, they lost their shirts -- evolution in action.
Instead what we got was ragtime -- fast and raucous, danceable, driven by rhythm. Perfect for mechanical reproduction on an out-of-tune upright. The player piano grew in popular from 1905 to 1925, when it reached the pinnacle and, over the next decade, died off.
The early disks brought in their own genre, too. For a brief period in the first decade of the 20th century, opera staged a comeback -- because without electrical microphones, there was almost no other type of music which could be recorded well. In 1902:
"[Italian tenor Enrico Caruso's] voice was perfectly suited to the talking machine; it emerged from the horn with such clarity and power that it seemed to fill the room with music. Unlike sopranos and bass voices, the full range of the tenor fell within the narrow band of sound frequencies picked up by the recording horn..."Caruso recorded ten songs for his $400. ... As his son recalled later, the sale of records made a small fortune for his father (about $5 million)..." (Millard, 59-60)
But the big change in musical genre came with an even bigger musical reproduction technology, one that slammed into the American consciousness right on the heels of World War One: radio.
The medium of radio was formed (like the internet, but more directly) through the intervention of the government. It's a complex story, but here's the short reason why radio took off so quickly:
"There were too many small companies competing with one another. Experienced businessmen like Edison saw no commercial future in the technology. For once, Eldridge Johnson of Victor agreed with him: 'The radio industry is going to be fighting over patents for years. We are not going to put out a radio.'
"Nobody could have expected the intervention of the United States government, which stepped into the business in the aftermath of World War I and negotiated a peace treaty. The formation of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in 1919 pooled the important patents, which were largely in the hands of General Electric, American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), and Westinghouse..." (137)
The consolidation of technology created an open standard, and radio took off like no technology before it. In three years the country went from almost no broadcast stations to 200, and 700,000 receivers, and its growth continued to accelerate.
The history of American music in the 1920s is the history of black music coming into the mainstream. Until and through the war, white America's perception of blacks in music was limited to atrocious songs supposedly representing black culture, typically by white performers (who didn't need the blackface to make records, only an exaggerated accent). Typical humorous songs were "I'd Rather Be a Nigger Than a Poor White Man" and "No Coons Can Come Too Black for Me." (98) Some black artists participated in making these, and less offensive, records (but of course got no royalties; Scott Joplin died poor). But mostly, the black America that was sold to white America was a sick parody, performed by and enriching white singers and musicians.
All that began to change in the years 1920-25, and in my opinion, the real success story of radio is this, its role in jazz, the first original American art form.
Erik Barnouw describes the effect of the radio -- a distribution channel which gave away music for free, remind you of anything? -- on the record industry:
"Within months of the start of the broadcasting boom, the bottom dropped out of the phonograph business..."
(Don't worry, there's a happy ending -- apparently the record industry managed to struggle through somehow.)
"...But 'race' records held their own. Millions of people were turning to the radio music box, but evidently the buyers of 'race' records were scarce among them." (129)
Either that, or the radio was stimulating sales of real(ish) black music at the same time it crushed other genres. Were black Americans the only consumers of black music? Not for long. The alternative to radio's "potted palm" music (Muzak) lay in artists like Paul Whiteman, a white man who crowned himself the "king of jazz" and brought black music to white audiences:
"Paul Whiteman was winning wide bookings and beginning to make a fortune, and others followed; now and then they were heard on the air. The radio audience would begin slowly to become familiar with this music, especially through late-evening broadcasts from night clubs. The infiltration was progressing. In due time, in the wake of their music, Negroes would follow.
"But not yet. In 1922, 1923, 1924, 1925, the potted palm ruled supreme." (131)
Here is the key -- and it's something I haven't seen written about. This may be an original theory or it may be completely obvious to everyone else. Radio, by allowing for the first time anonymous distribution of music, crossed color lines. The racist pre-war record companies refused to allow black musicians to sell an honest version of their music. But once that music was on the radio, in the palatable and infectious style brought by Bessie Smith and Earl Hines, even if the intended audience was black, any white listener could tune it in, in the privacy of their home.
Few respectable white people would have the courage to flout public opinion by walking across the tracks to a black record store. But black music was, quite simply, better than the sentimental crap being pushed on white America. And it was the distribution medium, radio, that smashed the color barrier. Over the course of just half a decade, it was the distribution that raised an entire genre of music from absolute obscurity in America to the country's, even the world's, hot new style.
That's my theory. I freely admit I don't have a lot to back it up. If you have a lead on something to help prove or disprove it, please let me know.
Radio and records remained the twin music distribution technologies for half the century. Improved recording tech -- the electrical microphone in the 1920s, ever-more-sensitive mikes and higher-fidelity phonographs, longer-playing records -- made the crooners and the harmonically complex jazz possible. Big bands ruled until Les Paul made it possible for four teenagers with part-time jobs to make the same "bigness" of sound as thirty professional musicians. The in-car radio took music out of the living room and with it some of the forced aura of serious listening.
The latest refinements in distribution tech -- the reproduction portion of the chain -- include the cheap subwoofer, which for the first time make it possible for music with phat bass to be properly heard (by yourself and all your neighbors). And we all know about Napster, Gnutella, and the plain old FTP site, whose effects on musical genre are yet to be felt. More on that tomorrow.
But for a last example of distribution tech, I've got to mention a little-known technology invasion, one described in Peter Manuel's book Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India.
Until 1978, protectionist economic policies kept India from absorbing many of the gadgets the West took for granted, including the cassette tape. Once imports were opened up and the middle class began to grow:
"The real cassette boom has happened mostly since 1984 or '85... because the costs of these raw materials has become dirt cheap." (62)
The dominant musical culture into which cassettes were suddenly introduced was that of film music...
"...which has been generated by a handful of corporate cinema directors and superimposed on a mass listening audience. And it is precisely this aspect of Indian popular music that has changed so dramatically with the advent of cassettes, which has allowed diverse smaller producers to usurp the dominance formerly enjoyed by multinationals... and the corporate film industry." (14)
And the result?
"The homogeneity of Indian film music is most evident in the uniform vocal style, as perpetuated by ... especially by Kishore Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar. Lata, as claimed, may indeed have sung in eighteen different languages, but she cannot really be said to have sung in more than one style. ... a film-music critic could recently write, 'Today it is difficult to imagine a female voice that is not Lata Mangeshkar's'" (52-53)
Once again, when a new distribution medium is suddenly introduced to an entrenched system, the short-term effect is lost sales, but the long-term effect is the opposite:
"Piracy has been the nemesis of the cassette industry from its inception. Indeed, the same factor that fueled the advent of cassettes -- particularly, the ease of duplication -- have ... bled many legitimate producers to bankruptcy." (78)
"...cassettes led Hindi film music to suffer an even greater proportionate decline in India, while its sales expanded in real terms due to the growth of the market as a whole." (32)
The song form of the ghazal is described as "an Urdu poetic form sung in light-classical style." The distinction between the film ghazal which was popular through the 1970s and the modern ghazal which began to replace it is the subject of much of Manuel's book. And he notes that the technology is responsible for not only that musical form's transformation, but its eventual replacement:
"'Pop' Goes the Ghazal
"The modern ghazal, as we have seen, has emerged and, to some extent, was deliberately created by the cassette industry in order to appeal to a large sector of the pan-regional, Hindi-speaking North Indian bourgeoisie." (96)
"The extent to which the ghazal vogue has been declining since the mid-1980s reflects less a shrinking of its potential or real audience than the emergence of rival cassette-based musical genres." (103)
And what has been the overall effect of small-time musicians and producers, using an easily-copyable medium, usurping the dominance of the corporate film industry?
Answers vary depending on musical form. Parody, for example, has become very popular, assisted by Indian copyright law which is much more tolerant than the U.S.
For religious music, the answer is mixed: devotional cassettes have led to a decline in live performances and "depersonalization." On the other hand,
"Cassettes have become the first and in many cases the only mass medium to represent the extraordinary diversity and richness of India's myriad forms of local religious song and discourse." (129)
But if we look specifically at the growth of "regional music" -- or what I usually hear called "local artists"...
"Cassettes have also greatly diversified and increased the number of performing artists." (157)
Good changes or bad changes, it's indisputable that the introduction of a redistributable music technology dramatically changed the North Indian music scene in just a few years.
I'm going to propose something radical. I'm going to claim that the current system of pop music, funded by centralized capital which loses money on 100 bands to make it all back on one megahit, distributed through relatively closed channels, promoted mainly through essentially-free mass-market play on commercial monopoly airwaves, and fueled by the dollars of 10-to-24 year-olds' disposable income, colors our popular music just as much and just as fundamentally as the social structure of the female pianist colored the pop of the 19th century.
Not only am I unsure of what changes are coming down the road, I don't think I dare predict whether they're going to be changes for the better or worse. But whatever happens over the next decade or two -- unless Microsoft succeeds in converting the Turing machines on our desktops into rented Play-Skool gadgets -- peer-to-peer music trading, legal or otherwise, is going to shake things up big-time.
Those kids on the playground at recess, decades from now -- what kind of music will they have available to trade? If there are no major labels to underwrite recording and promotion costs, will there be any more big, slick, impressive bands touring nationwide? Or will acoustic folk make a comeback? Will local bands be all there is? Will big expensive stadium rock be underwritten by beer and cigarette companies? By Citicorp?
Will the Street Performer Protocol be the only way for the Backstreet Boys' next incarnation to make any money? ("Give us $50,000,000 and we'll release our next album." "Can I pay you not to release it?")
If there's less money in the system, will that mean worse music because there are fewer choices? Or better music, because the people who still do it are those who perform for the love of it?
Will production costs plummet because nobody is able to pay them without centralized capital? (Studio time is a huge cost in making an album, and it all has to be paid before release.) What will that do to production values as the price of the computer portion of studio recording goes to zero? Will pop, in a future without major labels, still be the crunchy, glitzy ear candy that it is today? Or will the glitz have to be replaced by, say, oh, I don't know, lyric, melody, and harmony?
I'd like to say I have answers to any of those questions. But we'll just have to wait and see.
Tomorrow: part three, a criticism of current peer-to-peer music trading and a humble suggestion for a grassroots open standard that could change the face of music for decades to come.
Bibliography:
Loesser, Arthur. Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History. 1954. The definitive story of the piano and its players, from 1654 to 1954. Slightly more anecdotal and entertaining than you'd expect a history book to be. Might be good beach or airplane reading if you really, really love the piano.
Millard, Andre. America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound. 1995. From wax cylinder to vinyl LP to CD. Approachable, often geekily technical, for example, giving Edison props for trying to invent a home movie machine -- a VCR, essentially.
Barlow, William. Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio. 1999. Picks up at WWI; I only read the part about the transition from records to radio and skimmed the rest, but hope to get back to it soon. For the record, Barlow disagrees with me about the role of radio in promoting black artists in the 1920s; see his pp. 22ff. But one of his footnotes led me to...
Barnouw, Erik. A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States, Volume I -- to 1933. 1966. Includes a thorough look at the spread of black music pre- and post-WWI which I found enlightening.
Manuel, Peter. Cassette Culture. 1993. Cassette-tape technology only hits northern India in the 1980s, and it changes musical culture.
OK, you got me.
The first player piano -- which was, actually, more like a piano player -- was invented in 1825 by a Mr. Courcell, who called it the "Cylindrichord." You actually wheeled it up to a piano and it hit the keys. And a pneumatic device called the "pianista" appeared at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, too.
I didn't count them either because, well, they weren't popular.
Good call on the music box, though.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
Actually, the players did have dynamic variation. As before, reproduction tech influenced the character of the music. Could a player piano reproduce a slow, soft Beethoven movement? It could try, but because the paper rolls allowed for no dynamic subtlety, every key would have been banged out exactly as loud as the next. If anyone tried selling a Beethoven piano roll, they lost their shirts -- evolution in action.
Actually, player pianos did have dynamic variation.
Originally, rolls came from player organs. These were simple to make, the air was blown at the roll, and where a hole occured, the air blew through, and into the pipes to make the sound. This mechanism was carried into the player pianos, so that the width of the hole indicated how hard the hammers should strike, while the length indicated the sustain. Here is a good article on how it all works, and if you want to order some Beethoven for your player piano, here are some, including the Moonlight sonata, my personal favourite Beethoven piece.