Playback

PRAISE FOR PLAYBACK

"Playback is a breezy, informative history of the continuing dal-

liance between music and machines."
-New York Times

"Comprehensive, well-researched and thoroughly engaging ...

Playback traces the development of musical technology from wax
cylinders to iPods and revealingly illustrates how, with each new
innovation, reactionary forces in the business panicked, cried wolf
and tried to shut it all down."
-Chicago Sun- Times

"Dissecting 126 years of recorded music through the prism of

technology is no easy task, but Coleman manages it admirably
. . . Playback is full of fascinating riffs on sound machines, from
Edison's phonograph to Apple's iPod."
-Rolling Stone

"A sharp, static-free overview of the evolution of audio technology.'"

-Boston Herald

"Short and sweet ... consistently excellent and authoritative."

-Publishers Weekly

"[Coleman's] expertise in the area of popular music shines

through ... may well be indispensable."
-Library Journal
From the Victrola to MP3,
100 Years of Music,
Machines, and Money

DA CAPO PRESS
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Copyright © 2003 by Mark Coleman
Aftermath copyright © 2005 by Mark Coleman

Excerpts in Chapter 3 from "An Interview with the Father of Hi-Fi: Dr. Peter
Goldmark" by Edward Zwick from Rolling Stone, ©1973 Rolling Stone LLC. All
rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechani-
cal, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of
the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Coleman, Mark, 1957-

Playback: from the Victrola to MP3, 100 years of music, machines, and
money / Mark Coleman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-306-80984-2 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. Sound recording industry-History. 2. Music and technology. I. Title.
ML3790.C65 2004
621.389'3'09-<lc22
2003024998

First Da Capo Press edition 2003

First Da Capo Press paperback edition 2005

ISBN-I0 0-306-81390-4 (pbk.)

ISBN-13 978-0-306-81390-0 (pbk.)

Published by Da Capo Press

A Member of the Perseus Books Group
www.dacapopress.com

Da Capo Press books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S.
by corporations, institu~ions, and other organizations. For more information, please
contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 11 Cambridge
Center, Cambridge, MA 02142, or call (800) 255-1514 or (617) 252-5298, or e-mail
special.markets@perseusbooks.com.

Text design by Jeff Williams

Set in 1O.5-point Sabon MT by the Perseus Books Group
8an and Miles
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii

Magic in a Tin Can

2 War on Canned Music 29

3 Low Road to High Fidelity 51

4 Ponytail Ribbons, Popsicles, and

Peanut Brittle 71

5 Dreaming in Stereo 93

6 Last Dance 115

7 Adventures on Wheels of Steel 135

8 Sudden Death of the Record 155

9 Canned Music's Last Stand 177

Aftermath 209
Select Bibliography 221
Index 235

vii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My DEBT TO THE WRITERS, editors, engineers, producers, scien-

tists, and academics credited in the bibliography is gigantic. Their
visionary body of work forms the core of Playback.
Tribute must be paid to the tireless staff of the the New York
Public Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. At the
library's temporary home on West Forty-third Street, I was
afforded space to plug in my laptop day after day with no ques-
tions asked, and everyone of my arcane and convoluted queries
was answered. The story of popular culture in America resides in
this amazing collection.
Exhibiting the patience of a saint, Leonard de Graf at the Edi-
son National Historic Site let me examine rare documents and
unearthed precisely the vintage photographs I needed.
My debt to my editor, Ben Schafer, is incalculable. Without his
questions and guidance, musical sense, and literary sensitivity,
Playback would be tangled up in my head somewhere. Thanks for
all your hard work.
Thanks to Andrea Schulz for taking that first leap of faith, and
to Jane Snyder for reading my first draft.

ix
 Acknowledgments

Counting accomplished writers among your friends certainly

doesn't hurt when you're writing a book. Still, nothing could have
prepared me for the generous response of my colleagues and con-
fidants. David Fricke provided a staggering flow of source mate-
rial, finding crucial texts for several chapters. And special thanks
to Susan Klimley for steering me to Ray Kurzweil's "Life Cycle of
a Technology." Chapter 8 wouldn't exist without David Browne.
David donated voluminous notes and files on the subject: a trea-
sure chest of facts, anecdotes, leads, tip-offs, and juicy tidbits.
Betsy Israel graciously came to my aid with a model for my bibli-
ography. Thanks for the photo tips, too.
I wouldn't be able to write a word without the support and
guidance of my family. Larry and Lee Ramer, my second parents,
offered tons of emotional support along with a clean, well-lit
space to work. Your generosity truly knows no bounds. The inter-
est and encouragement of the rest of my immediate family kept
me going for four long years. Thank you to John, Nancy and
Gary, Stephanie, Doug and Michelle for never tiring of asking the
question, How's the book going?
Simply put, Playback would not exist without Susan Ramer.
As my literary agent, Susan has every quality a writer needs: tact,
insight, integrity, and determination. She fought for this project
every step of the way, offering solid editorial and commercial
advice and maintaining enthusiasm when the going got tough.
And as my wife, Susan was obliged to live and breathe my book
even when she wasn't at the office. Throughout this incredible
balancing act, she never faltered. Susan helped me formulate my
book while keeping the focus on our family life. I couldn't ask for
more loving inspiration.

x
 Acknowledgments

Sadly, my most loyal and least critical readers won't get to see
this book. My parents, James and Mary Louise Coleman, left me
a great legacy: a love of literature, boundless intellectual curios-
ity, the courage to question conventional wisdom. And my uncle,
Thomas Coleman, paved the way by being the first writer in our
family. My only regret is that you all didn't live to read this
acknowledgment.

xi
INTRODUCTION

SUDDENLY, POPULAR MUSIC RESEMBLES an alien landscape. The

great common ground of the last fifty years or so now looks
strange and forbidding, perhaps even treacherous. Of course, the
music constantly changes. Take the most obvious example: To
ears raised on rock-that is, attuned to melody and alert to mes-
sage-the rhythm-defined sound and defiant stance of current
hip-hop registers as a grim and impenetrable throb. This is part of
a time-honored tradition; parents aren't expected to understand
their children's enthusiasms. But the current crisis isn't about
evolving musical tastes, abrupt stylistic shifts, or even the long-
delayed graying of the Pepsi Generation. Rather, today's genera-
tions divide over how they listen to music, not what kind of music
they enjoy. In the twenty-first century, radical advances in music
technology threaten to overshadow the music itself.
The changes have been rapid and unsettling, pervasive and
somewhat perverse. Prerecorded music no longer arrives enclosed
(or embalmed) in a prepaid plastic disc. The iconic album format
is obsolescent, if not already obsolete. Compact discs, the solid
gold standard of music delivery, suddenly seem clunky and redun-

xiii
 Introduction

dant (not to mention obscenely overpriced). That sacred shrine,

the stereo system, has been dismantled if not defiled, its function
consumed by the all-conquering home computer. For a new gen-
eration of listeners, pop songs represent yet another choice on a
limitless entertainment menu: more eye-reddening text aglow on
the monitor screen.
Controlled by conglomerates and corrupted by payola, radio
stations stifle consumption of the very commodity they once stim-
ulated: new music. The Top 40, never exactly a democratic model,
is now a crushing totalitarian state run by the self-fulfilling
prophecies of focus-group surveys. Meanwhile, the once-mighty
music business suffers through a painful, involuntary, and pro-
longed makeover. Now weird scenes occur inside the record com-
pany diamond mine, and the light at the tunnel's end is distant
and growing dimmer by the minute.
What happened, exactly?
By summer 2002, the music business was in turmoil. A dip in
CD sales set off tremors of dread about the future. USA Today
delivered the initial shock wave on June 5. "For the first time in
Sound Scan's 10 years of tabulating album sales, 2001 represents
a year-to-year decline." Three months later, the Wall Street Jour-
nal echoed the full resonance of the downturn. "World-wide
music sales totaled $39.8 billion in 1996, but were down to $33.6
billion last year [2001]." The same Journal report, on September
6, cited another ominous statistic. "For the first time since 1966,
no album sold 5 million copies in the U.S. last year." Perhaps the
record moguls' worst fear really was coming to pass. Their young
customers were losing interest in prerecorded pop music. And
they were growing more bored, restless, and distracted by the
minute.

xiv
 Introduction

Toward the back of the chorus, the New York Times reported
that sales of blank CDs outnumbered recorded CDs during 2001.
That statistic is telling. Don't forget that until 1998 or so, blank
CDs were a useless commodity to music consumers. Even the
most high-end CD players lacked a record button. For the· first
time ever, consumers now take the lead in deploying new enter-
tainment technology. They're circumventing corporations and
redefining copyright law in one huge digital group grope known
as file sharing.

CD Equals Compact Disc,

Controlled Delivery, Certain Death

Prerecorded CDs have been compromised, devalued. Album sales

sag because the album format is exhausted. People are tired of the
package. The commercial appeal of packaged music itself is in
question. Home computers have liberated recorded music from
the record. No longer dependent on a single enforced software
format, consumers are free to choose.
With crystal-clear 20/20 hindsight, we can see that the end
result of the CD boom was an inevitable bust. The abrupt transi-
tion from vinyl LPs to compact discs stimulated the music busi-
ness like nothing before or since. After 1991, vinyl virtually dis-
appeared. So consumers bought lots of replacement CDs for their
old LPs and cassettes, along with the latest releases. The compact
discs did sound better, or different; they cost a few dollars more,
too. In the end it was self-defeating. This forced upgrade
demeaned the intrinsic value of recorded music while increasing
its sticker price. Short-term profits preceded long-term losses.

xv
 Introduction

Notice how the digital music technology isn't driven by some

elusive notion of better sound. The quest for sonic perfection-
high fidelity-is a definite nonstarter in the Internet age. The very
term hi-fi survives only as nostalgic kitsch, a dated remnant from
the era when cars sported aerodynamic tail fins. Perhaps the search
for the Holy Grail of high fidelity ended with the CD. One truism
of digital music already seems obvious, that people will settle for
decent sound-something less than state of the art-as long as the
price is right and musical selections are vast and unfettered. Free-
dom of choice is the engine powering the Internet music revolution.
Music downloading thrives on the Internet, and not only
because it's free. (File sharing also requires vast reserves of
patience, perseverance, and a high-speed connection.) The main
attraction is unlimited scope, endless selection-a musical buffet
for growing appetites. The diverse, far-flung, and data-saturated
nature of the Internet stokes this feeding frenzy. If CD equals con-.
trolled delivery, then sheer amplitude defines Net music. Eclectic
tastes are stimulated by an endlessly shifting menu, and vice versa.
The tight, narrow-cast focus of traditional music marketers and
the so-called broadcasting industry increasingly misses the point.
Napster and other file-sharing schemes aren't just about stealing
music; file sharing encourages listeners to pursue hunches, check
out tips, indulge whims, and develop new enthusiasms.
In the digital age, no single style or "sound" can dominate and
define pop music as it once did. Indeed, the logical conclusion of
this digital adage troubles most middle-aged rockers. While per-
haps hard to accept, pop music is no longer the cultural focus of
adolescence and young adulthood, an emerging person's picture
window on the world. It's simply one choice among many. Popular
music-rock included-is in the process of conceding its primacy.

xvi
 Introduction

Threatening as it appears, however, this turn-of-the-century

digital coup represents a necessary shake-up of the music busi-
ness. What looks to be the end of something is rather a new
beginning. Yet none of this happened overnight. The download-
ing boom, the Napster debacle, the CD sales crash, and the
authoritarian monotony of radio are fully anticipated by events in
the not-so-distant past.
Meet Public Enemy Number One: James Caesar Petrillo, head
of the musicians' union, the American Federation of Musicians
(AFM), during the 1930s and 1940s. During the birth of radio in
the late twenties, Petrillo emerged in Chicago as the working
musicians' advocate. From the start, he loudly labored as the
sworn opponent of records-canned music was his pejorative tag.
Playing records on radio put live musicians out of work, end of
story. James Caesar earned his middle name. Petrillo battled for
retribution: he demanded high royalty rates and threatened
strikes, and finally pulled off a big one in the mid forties. It was
self-defeating in the end. Petrillo's crusade yielded short-term
gains, at least in the hectic postwar period; but the wave of tech-
nological innovations such as stereo, tape recording, and LPs
washed his power base aside. James Petrillo died in 1984. It's a
pity he didn't live to hear the record industry unload on Napster
and file sharing in much the same way he denounced canned
music. The echoes are pitch-perfect.

The Big Playback

Initially, the whole idea behind recorded sound was to imitate live
music, to reproduce "natural sound." Beginning with Thomas

xvii
 Introduction

Edison, however, the act of recording profoundly affected the

resulting sound of music. Those "natural sounds" were gradually
transformed, absorbed, or abandoned. Today the distinction is
meaningless. Recorded sound is utilized in concert halls and the-
aters; even orchestras and opera singers indulge in electronic
amplification. More important, recordings are assembled, or
mixed, from other recordings. Pop music is continually feasting
on itself.
From the very beginning, the power of certain voices was actu-
ally enhanced by the peculiarities and distortions of the recording
process. The great tenor Enrico Caruso offers the most spectacu-
lar example. At the turn of the twentieth century, Caruso sold
millions of records around the world. "I Pagliacci Vestila Giubba
(On With the Play)" from 1907 is a leading candidate for the elu-
sive title of the first million-selling disc. While the figure may
never be verified, it seems accurate: the Caruso phenomenon also
sold lots of record players. According to the historians Oliver
Read and Walter Welch, "he was the best salesman [the Victor
Co.] ever had."
Bass and soprano voices, though, were too much for the early
recording process: the highs were too high, the lows too low.
Tenors fared better; the full shape of their voices could fit into the
narrow range of the horn. And Caruso's supple tenor came roar-
ing back out. He communicated absolute mastery and
telegraphed overwhelming emotions. His sonic impact was such
that he stood six feet from the horn when recording. He belted,
but sensitively. Caruso also projected the seductive power of
charisma-his voice radiates warmth in tones that are personal,
intimate. His popular four-minute arias established the prowess
of grand, slightly melodramatic singing on record.

xviii
 Introduction

Technology has always shaped popular music. Physically

shaped, that is-duration of recording is a defining factor. The
design or format is dictated by technology, yet the format can also
dictate musical form in a thousand subtle ways. Popular music
today might be liberated from the strictures of one physical for-
mat, but it remains shackled by listeners' similarly shaped expec-
tations. The three- or four-minute pop song isn't going anywhere
(and the big bands are coming back).
For the music industry and customers alike, the central issue
today is playback. Music machines that don't record are playback-
only, from the classic phonograph to your quickly aging CD
player. Music machines that can record or copy sound as well as
play it back-tape decks, home computers, various digital play-
ers-have always been perceived as a financial threat by the
recording industry. This is nor an ungrounded fear.
The back and forth over playback-only is a traditional, time-
honored feud that goes back further than one might think. Con-
ventional wisdom decrees that Thomas Edison invented the phono-
graph in 1877. In fact, Edison's pioneering sound-reproduction
machine didn't spin a turntable, as there was no disc. Instead, Edi-
son's phonograph played a can-sized object called a cylinder, later-
ally turning it like a rotisserie, pulling a needle through tinfoil
grooves. More important, Edison designed his phonograph to make
recordings as well as play them back. It was primarily intended to
be an office dictation machine, not a music player.
The modern disc-spinning turntable can be traced to Emil
Berliner, who patented his first playback-only gramophone in
1887. After a decade of trial-and-error competition with Edison
and others, Berliner's failing business was absorbed by the Victor
Company. By 1906, his gramophone morphed into the Victrola,

xix
 Introduction

the first successful mass-market record player. Though Berliner

never saw much money for his effort, in many ways he bested Edi-
son in terms of future influence and impact. Edison didn't quit the
music business until 1929, and by then he was a beaten man in
many respects. Edison no doubt was the superior inventor, but he
lacked the marketing skills then required to make it in the shark-
infested waters of the record business.
In the nineteenth century, recording technology struggled with
format (discs versus cylinders) and function (music versus dicta-
tion). Now people demand music discs that will take dictation. In
the twenty-first century, music businessmen have ceded control of
the forward technological rush and relinquished it to their (for-
mer) customers. After 100 years or so, a century-plus of runaway
profits, the big playback is played out.

The Rise of the Nonmusician:

Dick Clark Is the Father of Puff Daddy

During the early 1940s, American phonograph record plants actu-

ally shut down for a couple of years. One problem, along with the
AFM strike, was a wartime shortage of shellac, the basic material
in 78 rpm records. Derived from secretions of tree insects, shellac
had to be imported from India. World War II thus got in the way
of record production.
Once the war ended, it was a different story. Wartime research
in surveillance and communications yielded ground breaking
peacetime applications in recording and radio. The age of high
fidelity began with a visionary Hungarian-born scientist toiling
away in the CBS electronics laboratory. Not only did Dr. Peter

xx
 Introduction

Goldmark find a synthetic replacement for shellac (he employed

synthetic vinylite, or vinyl, to make lighter, better-sounding
records), but he also invented the 33 1/3 rpm long-playing album,
known as the LP. A classical music buff, Goldmark always
claimed his driving inspiration was the desire to hear major works
without interruption. (Similarly, compact discs were designed to
run seventy-five minutes because a Japanese engineer loved
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.)
In today's light, Goldmark might be best described as an engi-
neer rather than inventor-or maybe inventor-for-hire; at any
rate, he was a corporate employee. Goldmark worked for CBS for
thirty-six years, much of that spent running the lab. And as a cor-
porate inventor, he naturally had to satisfy a mercurial boss, in
this case, the legendary William Paley. So Goldmark wasn't
required to be a self-starting entrepreneur in the sense of multi-
taskers such as Edison or Alexander Graham Bell. He didn't need
to seek funding for his ventures, though he did have to shepherd
his projects through the corridors of company power. Perhaps he
didn't have to sweat the bottom line quite as much. He could
afford to see himself as a purist, a man of science above the com-
mercial fray.
With the massive CBS support system behind him, Goldmark
applied a laserlike focus to his work. Inevitably, corporate priori-
ties collided with scientific vision. Goldmark developed competi-
tive technology for color TV and videotape early in the game (or
so he claimed), only to be squelched by CBS. Yet there's no doubt
that Paley marshaled the full weight of the company behind the
LP. There was no other choice.
The LP also inspired a competing format. RCA, headed by
Paley's rival, David Sarnoff, responded with 7-inch 45 rpm

xxi
 Introduction

records. By the early 1950s, the fight was on. The ensuing tug-of-
war rocked the music business. Think VHS versus Betamax, with
a different outcome. After several years of combative ads and con-
fused consumers, the infamous Battle of the Speeds resulted in a
truce: the peaceful coexistence of both vinyl formats set the stage
for the coming rock 'n' roll explosion.
At the same time that technology shaped music, it spawned the
music business. A so-called major label had to manufacture and
distribute records as well as produce music on them. During the
rock 'n' roll era, businessmen started to influence music as much as
did musicians and machines. The music business had always fur-
thered the ambitions of nonmusicians. By the fifties, they were
asserting-or assuming-a creative role. Take Dick Clark, the age-
less TV presence who built a financial empire behind the long-gone
American Bandstand dance show. Before the payola scandal, the
young Clark owned stakes in everything from music publishing and
production to record manufacturing. He had it all covered. And of
course, Dick Clark began as disc jockey.
Here was the job where businessman and technician merged
with artist: a little entrepreneur, a little engineer, a lot of enter-
tainer. Actual musical knowledge or ability was a plus, but not
usually necessary. Disc jockeys (or D]s) are the key players in our
story, as they are the instigators. DJs were the first non musicians
empowered to make music, thanks to the miracle of recorded
sound and the mendacity of the music business. The influence of
the DJ s can be charted in three successive waves.
The commercial innovators ruled between 1948 and 1965; they
were radio D]s who wielded the seductive clout of the Top 40.
They influenced (and exploited) musical tastes while encouraging
sustained consumption of records and record players. The musi-

xxii
 Introduction

cal innovators labored from 1965 to 1979 or so; the original disco
DJs mastered the art of selection-that is, anticipating and stim-
ulating the club crowd's tastes. Eventually, they created a mass
audience. Disco DJ s changed how records were played and how
they were made. The technological innovators emerged in 1973
and persevere today: With two or more turntables, they treat
recorded music as raw material and redefine the notion of a
record player. Hip-hop DJ s employ the turntable itself as musical
instrument.
The tide turned in 1979. Disco sounded the death knell of the
record business, not the music business (not yet, anyway). The
earth trembled when Donna Summer released "Love to Love You
Baby" in 1975. The extended 12-inch single of this sexy chant
echoed the rhythmic repetitions of a club DJ. Disco tested the lim-
its of acceptable sexual content and the recording format itself.
Incredibly, the disco craze ultimately backfired on once-cunning
record company moguls. Their business was never the same
again. Compact discs offered only brief respite from the techno-
logical upheaval. The early 1980s battle over home cassette taping
neatly portends the file-sharing revolution some twenty years
later. What goes around comes around.

WHY WRITE A BOOK about music and technology? Because I took

tech for granted; I didn't think twice about it. Then the Internet
phenomenon caught me, a music maven, completely unawares.
Look away and eventually, inevitably, the next generation-of
both people and machines-leaves you in the dust.
Oddly enough, I was part of the machine, a cog in the pop cul-
ture trash compactor. Covering pop music as a journalist, I
reviewed hundreds of albums and wrote about hundreds more in

xxiii
 Introduction

various formats. For fifteen years I processed-listened to-thou-

sands of LPs and CDs. Yet for all that time and study, all the
divining of musical influences and invention of journalistic
angles, the impact of technology barely registered. I assumed it
was dull. It turns out I was wrong.
Music technology asks us to take it for granted. The intoxicat-
ing magic of sound reproduction springs from the transparency of
the mechanical process. Means of delivery fades as the music
plays. It's so sleek and efficient that you don't notice the technical
marvel on display, by design.
This book was born as a biography of the turntable, an
attempt to identify the phonograph as the driving engine behind
a century of popular music. The more I delved, the more the his-
tory of a single machine became the story of machine-made
music and those who made it possible, from the Victrola to the
Internet.
For more than a century, beginning with Edison's 1877 demon-
stration to the editors of Scientific American, trade publications
and specialty journals such as Billboard and High Fidelity have doc-
umented events and innovations typically glazed over by general-
interest magazines. Read past the scandal mongering and legal the-
orizing in the business section of the newspaper and you'll find
some devastating accounts of the decision making that shapes tech-
nological formats. Study it long enough and the systematic mar-
keting of recorded music-what Joni Mitchell branded "the star-
making machinery behind the popular song"-looks like a
triumphant human extension of technology.
Consider the following divination published by the late Lillian
Roxon in 1968. An Australian journalist based in New York,
Roxon combined the sensibility of a gushing teenage fan with the

xxiv
 Introduction

instincts of a seasoned tabloid reporter. This eerie reverie comes

from her book, Rock Encyclopedia.

Some people believe that by 2001 rock will be entirely machine-

made. Machines will be programmed so that combinations of
different sounds will be left to chance. At-home listeners will
have controls that will make it possible for them to "produce"
a record-speed it up, slow it down, make it louder and softer,
and separate the tracks, adding, subtracting, overdubbing-to
create their own version of a hit. There will be no live per-
formances, no stages. Music will be heard with a small circle of
friends, not a group of strangers.

Understandably, technological change is often viewed as a

threat; but that perception can change, too. Technology is only
intimidating until you learn how to use it. In the end, I believe that
technology enhances music. It begins with a human touch and
ends with the human ear. Machines don't make music unassisted.
Somebody-a person-still must program, produce, perform,
and play the stuff. We haven't written ourselves out of the equa-
tion yet-and we still hold the ultimate power over recorded
music in our own hands. We can always turn it off.

xxv
 chapter 1

GGIC IN A TIN CAN

BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, listening to music was a tem-

poral, fleeting experience-and a rare treat. In America, most
often it was heard in church and perhaps at home, if someone had
talent, not to mention a piano. Marching bands would strut down
Main Street on national holidays; enjoyment was a civic duty.
Symphony and opera concerts were the preserve of urban high-
brows. Burlesque and wildly popular, the comic songs in vaude-
ville and minstrel shows thrilled the nineteenth century's popular
culture-the lowest common denominator. The invention of
recording, the phonograph, brought them home.
Sound reproduction didn't instantly change the nature of
music, but the invention of the phonograph and the introduction
of phonograph records gradually transformed our basic relation-
ship to music. Technology to a large extent determines what we
hear and how we hear it. The compact (three or four minutes) du-
ration of the popular song is the enduring result of technology
devised by Thomas Edison and others. Since playback is brief,
popular songs must be instantly recognizable. Then as now, faced
 PLAYBACK

with the novelty of new technology, listeners crave the comforts of

familiar music.
The phonograph domesticated the public spectacle of amuse-
ment in the early 1900s. From the beginning, technology turned
popular culture into a moneymaking proposition. Penny arcades,
or amusement halls, were the first place most people attended the
miracle of sound reproduction, via coin-operated machines that
presaged the jukebox. By the early twentieth century, the home
phonograph was being marketed as an affordable miracle, a poor
man's luxury. The existence of leisure time itself was a novelty at
this point, a by-product of the Industrial Revolution. The subse-
quent rise of tech-generated entertainment marks the beginning
of the Information Revolution.
Music machines have always led the charge in information
technology. For all its technical beauty and smarts, the phono-
graph conveys something deeper, a magical power; music cuts to
the emotions, communicating on a profound human level. Still, a
little perspective is in order regarding music and machines. How-
ever miraculous it seems, the act of making music is but one ap-
plication of technology. It's easy to be myopic about this; just as
there's more to life than music, there's also more to technology
than music. Especially today, in what seems like the too much in-
formation age, it's easy to get swept away by hype. Take the com-
puter. With its vast capacity and lightning-quick speed, it's capa-
ble of a great deal more than reproducing sound or providing a
communication network. In the twenty-first century, music isn't
driving technology, it's domesticating innovation, just as it did
with another wondrous contrivance, the phonograph, 100 years
earlier.

2
 Magic in a Tin Can

Technology evolves. It regenerates and improves, much as we

do. Modern-day inventor Ray Kurzweil builds machines that
bridge the gap between technology and music. Kurzweil sets flex-
ible criteria for measuring this progress. His "Life Cycle of a
Technology" lists seven stages. Precursor is the pie-in-the-sky
phase of daydreams and plans. Invention means the moment of
creation-actual birth. Development marks growth and refine-
ment, including some additional creation. Maturity is when a
technology appears dominant-and indomitable. Pretenders sig-
nal the emergence of a rebel technology, a challenge that is ulti-
mately repressed. Obsolescence is when the successful coup takes
place, toppling a sleeping giant. Antiquity is the end of utility-
when technology enters retirement.
Technology and music too have merged in Kurzweil's life his-
tory, to great effect. As a high school student, he appeared as a
contestant on the TV quiz show I've Got a Secret; he played a
piece of piano music that was actually composed by computer-
one that the young man had built and programmed. In the 1970s,
Kurzweil invented a reading device for the blind, print-to-speech
via computer. Stevie Wonder bought one of the first Kurzweil
Reading Machines, and he consulted with the inventor when
Kurzweil turned to making synthesizers in the 1980s. Kurzweil
claims his synthesizers emulate the complex sound response of
the grand piano: a resonant acoustic sound, not the tinny
processed sound of an electronic organ. When it comes to music,
technology also presents limitations-or at least they sound like
limitations to older ears.
The life cycle of the phonograph closely follows Kurzweil's
criteria, with a few novel twists. Record players reached matu-

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rity during the hi-fi fifties and stereo sixties. Tape players and
prerecorded tapes-remember 8 tracks?-represented the pre-
tenders challenge during the seventies. Obsolescence took hold
in the eighties. The popularity of cassettes-prerecorded and
blank, for portable players and home taping-consistently
chipped away at the dominion of the disc. The compact disc
coup caught us by surprise in the early nineties, nearly
overnight, or so it seemed.
Most important, the turntable found a new purpose in its twi-
light years. Antiquity has been postponed: the good old phono-
•
graph did not go quietly. Turntables are now widely recognized a~
a musical instrument, the driving force behind dance music and
hip-hop.
This refurbished position stands in stark contrast to the rusty
status of the typewriter, for instance. A rough contemporary of
the phonograph, the typewriter emerged in the late nineteenth
century. Replaced by computerized word processing in the mid
1980s, typewriting became an early casualty of the digital era.
The mechanical rain of clanking keys is long gone, replaced by a
steady, subliminal tap tap tap. The concept of a keyboard sur-
vives, however. Unsurprisingly, it began on the piano.
The invention of the player piano, or pianola-an automated
instrument-runs roughly parallel to the phonograph. The player
piano essentially played itself. It was powered by suction, pumped
by foot pedals, programmed by tiny perforations on interchange-
able rolls of paper, and played by felt-tipped wooden fingers press-
ing the keys. The pianola was patented by Edwin Votey of Detroit
in 1902. Votey's first model stood in front of a standard piano;
later versions (and competing designs) enclosed the playing mech-
anism within the piano. The Wurlitzer Company of Cincinnati

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 Magic in a Tin Can

introduced a coin-operated "nickel-in-the-slot" player piano in

1898, capitalizing on the phenomenon of public amusement.
Player pianos remained popular until 1930 or so--right around
the time that radio threatened to eclipse phonograph records. Yet
the phonograph survived, while the player piano didn't. Why?
Singing to the accompaniment of a player piano couldn't compete
with listening to sophisticated sound recordings. Still, player pi-
anos filled a niche. According to the historian Russell Sanjek,
"eventually 75,000 player pianos and a million music rolls were
sold." And the player piano crudely prefigures the sampling key-
boards of the 1980s. Feed 'em the right program and a recogniz-
able sequence of sounds will emerge. Thanks to technology, you
don't need to be a musician to playa musical instrument.

Patent Wars

The history of technology is full of instances of similar in-

ventions being made simultaneously by two or more dif-
ferent groups.
-Bob Johnstone, We Were Burning

Inventors rely on patents. Granted by the U.S. government,

patents insure ownership and right to profit from an invention.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) grants
patents for protection of inventions; a patent for an invention is a
grant of property rights to inventor. Today, a patent holds for
twenty years from date of application. According to the USPTO,
a patent guarantees "the right to exclude others from making,
using, offering for sale, selling the invention or importing the in-
vention into United States." Patents thus do not protect the right

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to make, use, sell, or import an invention. Patents extend the right

to exclude others from doing so. This distinction is crucial, as is
the following caveat. Patents are granted for a demonstrably
working machine or process-you can't patent an idea or sugges-
tion, a design or outline.
Patents began in England under the reign of the Tudors. Queen
Elizabeth I (1561-1590) awarded monopoly status to key traders
and manufacturers, a corrupt system that was scrapped and re-
vamped during the next century. Starting in 1718, "specification,"
or proof, was required of patented inventions. Watt's 1796 patent
for steam engines set an important precedent: patents would be
granted for improvements on an already-existing invention. As
the Industrial Revolution spread from Europe to America, the
competition for patents went through the roof. Anybody, it
seemed, could aspire to be an inventor.
The competition in information technology was especially
fierce, even at the very beginning, when patents provided potent
legal ammunition for battling pesky competitors. The telegraph
battle matched American and British scientists. A U.S. patent was
granted to Samuel F. B. Morse in 1840. Britain declared the patent
invalid, instead recognizing the electric telegraph of locals
William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone. The tele-
phone, of course, is synonymous with Alexander Graham Bell.
He was granted a patent for it in 1876. Bell, however, and com-
petitor Elisha Gray filed on the same day-February 14. Bell got
the nod and walked home with (possibly) the most lucrative
patent of all time.
Without question, Guglielmo Marconi is considered the father
of radio. In 1897, he was granted u.s. patent number 586,193. But
he continually faced stiff competition from Edwin Armstrong and

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 Magic in a Tin Can

Lee De Forest; in the years to come, Marconi's u.s. rivals both

won key patents.
Philo T. Farnsworth, though, ought to be known as the father
of television. He was granted a patent way back in 1930. Thanks
to an industry boycott of Farnsworth's technology, enforced by
RCA's David Sarnoff, that early television patent expired in 1947.
The ascendance of commercial TV networks quickly followed.
Patents still provide legal ammunition in the technology struggles
of the twenty-first century. Jeffrey Bezos, CEO of online retailer
Amazon.com, was recently granted patent 6,029,141 (along with
three other people) for single-click Internet shopping.
When young Thomas Edison applied for his early patents in
the 1860s he relied on the services of a patent lawyer. Negotiating
the bureaucracy has always been arcane, demanding labor. Ob-
taining a patent was expensive in those halcyon days: total fees ex-
ceeded $35, and you had to submit a working model and detailed
blueprint of your brainstorm. Any dispute with another inventor
or "infringer" incurred additional fees. Decades later, Edison
threatened to work around the whole process by holding his own
"trade secrets." By 1888, he could get away with it.
The age of invention and inventors properly begins in nineteenth-
century Europe. Michael Faraday and Bernard Ohm laid the
groundwork for electricity; Henrich Helmholtz and Jules Antoine
Lissajous pioneered the science of acoustics. There were others.
Many of these visionaries constructed their inventions as theoret-
ical abstractions-"pure" scientific research. Yes, some of them
were wealthy amateurs, glorified dilettantes. Characteristically,
American inventors pursued a more pragmatic path. They were
interested in applications-business applications. Their inven-
tions tended to work.

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Inventors were the technology entrepreneurs of the late 1800s;

successfully promoting your invention required equal parts engi-
neering skills, business acumen, and all-American showmanship.
The go-go years, those heady days of runaway innovation and
warring inventors, roughly extend from 1880 to 1910. The phono-
graph epitomizes this era, the age of invention. Competition was
key. Edison reached his sonic breakthrough by expanding on the
experiments of his peers and predecessors. In the wake of Edi-
son's first patent, the phonograph was further refined and im-
proved on by competing inventors.
Unlike many European geniuses, Thomas Edison understood
that marketing and manufacturing skills were central to the pub-
lic success of his products. And he backed up his boastful predic-
tions and publicity with solid workmanship. According to Oliver
Read and Walter Welch, the phonograph was a simpler, more ef-
ficient invention than the telephone. "From the start, [the phono-
graph] worked much better." The phonograph merged cutting-
edge technology with mass-market salesmanship, paving the way
for twentieth-century pop culture.
Just as several inventors (or businessmen) can lay claim to a
single invention, more than one format can serve the same tech-
nological purpose. Size, form, and shape-the overall style or
presentation--determine the format. The dimensions of a book
jacket, the length of a television program, the arrangement of
data on a computer disc are all defined by format. Within a de-
veloping technology, when one format challenges another for
dominance, it's a fight to the finish. Heated competition arises,
human passions ignite, and commercial pressure fans the flames.
Invariably, the fire sets off a format war.

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 Magic in a Tin Can

Magic in a Can

There are, of course, many people who will buy a dis-

torted, ill-recorded and scratchy record if the singer has
a great reputation, but there are infinitely more who will
buy for the beauty of the recording with fine voices, well-
instrumented with no scratch.
-Thomas Edison, 1915

It wasn't always there. The multimedia monolith we call the en-

tertainment industry began as a simple machine: the phonograph,
or record player or turntable. Originally, the phonograph was a
crude device with a profound purpose: a rudimentary mechanical
rendering of a sophisticated idea. That crackpot dream-repro-
ducing the human voice-inspired too the invention of the tele-
phone and telegraph; but the phonograph quickly became more
than a means of communication.
Music made the phonograph a revolutionary medium, the
spinning machine that drove pop culture to its current position of
dominance. And American popular music, the sonic outpouring
of immigrants, vulgar and vernacular, provided the phonograph
power to change the world.
The success and evolution of the phonograph wasn't the result
of one man's singular genius or vision. And it was hardly a group
effort. The phonograph was the product of intense competition
between many individuals: inventors and investors, fakes and
flukes, hucksters, hopefuls and hacks, scientists and artists and
businessmen. Even the wizard himself, Thomas Edison, didn't an-
ticipate or appreciate the full impact and influence of his inven-
tion. When the phonograph failed as a stenographer's tool, Edi-

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son turned to music reproduction with mixed results. According

to his biographer, Paul Israel, Edison consistently valued techni-
cal advances over artistic quality. He concentrated his business on
phonograph manufacture rather than record production. "But as
the novelty of hearing recorded music wore off and customers
began to pay more attention to the artists and their music," writes
Israel, "Edison began to face considerable competition because he
failed to recognize that music recordings involved art as well as
technology. "
Edison underestimated or misread the phonograph's potential,
though he pursued the business well into the 1920s. By that time,
the phonograph was no longer his "baby," if it ever had been. A
master inventor and a genius self-promoter, Edison managed to
permanently attach his name to a machine he didn't create single-
handedly.
Edison publicly demonstrated his first working phonograph in
1877. Adeptly courting the media, Edison unveiled his machine at
the New York offices of Scientific American magazine. One year
later, with patent in hand, he incorporated the Edison Speaking
Phonograph Company. Note the whole name. When he started
selling his phonographs in 1877, Edison viewed them as dictation
devices for the business market, a quick and efficient means of
transcri bing correspondence.
Edison wasn't the first inventor with that notion, either.
Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville, proud Frenchman and ama-
teur scientist, invented the phonoautograph in 1857. It was a
recording device based on the flexibility of the diaphragm, though
it didn't reproduce sound. The phonoautograph used a stylus to
trace sound vibrations-on paper. Also in France, the poet
Charles Cros proposed a protophonograph of sorts: his invention

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 Magic in a Tin Can

could record and reproduce sound on disc. Cros presented a paper

to the Paris Academie de Sciences in 1877-the same year of Edi-
son's miracle invention. Since Cros didn't construct a model, we'll
never know if his dream machine worked.

The Bell Connection

The vibrating action of the diaphragm is central; Edison first con-

ceived the idea of sound reproduction while playing a jew's harp.
Around the same time that Edison unveiled his first phonograph,
Alexander Graham Bell developed the telephone. Where Edison
worked on a machine that would transcribe sound waves onto a
pliable surface and then reproduce them, Bell devised a means of
transmitting sound waves across wires. Friendly competitors they
weren't, though their efforts were complimentary. After Edison
patented his first phonograph in 1877, Bell and his associates
sought to improve on it.
Teaming with his cousin, Chichester Bell, and the engineer
Charles Sumner Tainter, Alexander Graham Bell wanted to de-
velop a user-friendly-and commercially viable-version of the
early record player. Flipping the word phonograph, they came up
with graphophone. It was patented in 1886. They felt it offered
consumers an easier-to-handle machine. Edison, who'd busied
himself inventing the electric light for several years, returned to
the fray around the same time. Bell and company tried to recruit
him into their camp around 1887 and were rebuffed. They were
willing to share their technical improvements, their financing, and
patents-in exchange for a piece of the profits. But this early
media conglomerate was a nonstarter. Unlike the computer

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mogul Bill Gates 100 years later, Edison was not interested in ab-
sorbing his competitors; he wanted to erase them. Edison de-
clined any and all offers to merge or join forces with other inven-
tors. "Let the best one win" was his unwavering philosophy.
Accusations and patent-infringement suits flew back and forth
like crossfire. Bell's financial backers went on to establish the Co-
lumbia Phonograph Company in 1888. Actually, neither device-
the Edison phonograph or the Bell graphophone-caught on with
consumers in exactly the manner intended. As dictation devices in
the workplace they were disasters, clumsy and impractical.

Penny Arcades and Playback

Like many pioneers, Edison and Bell were blind to the full signif-
icance of their discovery. Perhaps their considerable attentions
were divided; multitasking can't be easy when you're busy invent-
ing the future. Astonishingly, Edison defined the vanguard in a
dozen varied fields, from electricity to cement manufacture.
But Edison was also partially deaf, figuratively and in fact; he
consistently underplayed and misread the musical potential of the
phonograph. He strove mightily to improve his "favorite inven-
tion," but much to his chagrin, others would perfect and profit
from the phonograph.
One reason lies in the recording format: the software, in mod-
ern parlance. Until the 1920s, Edison staked his reputation on the
cylinder phonograph. A German-American engineer named Emil
Berliner invented the disc phonograph, later called the gramo-
phone. Berliner is the true father of the turntable, what we recog-
nize as a record player. Born in 1851, Emil came to Washington,

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 Magic in a Tin Can

D.C., from Hanover, Germany, at age nineteen. He studied

physics at the Cooper Institute (now Cooper Union) college in
New York City. During a subsequent period of employment in
fledgling Bell Labs, at one point Berliner saved Alexander Gra-
ham's bacon. The up-and-comer invented a telephone micro-
phone, putting Bell ahead of his arch rival, Western Union. (The
telegraph company was considering entry into the phone market,
with Thomas Edison supplying the tech.) Berliner applied for a
patent for his laterally recorded disc gramophone in 1887, a full
decade after Edison's phonograph had appeared. The basic patent
for the gramophone (no. 564,586) was issued to Berliner in 1896.
The turntable was born.
The Edison phonographs utilized cardboard cylinders
wrapped in tinfoil and turned on a hand crank; the stylus etched
vertical grooves into the foil. The graphophones used vertically
etched wax cylinders instead of tinfoil, which made for better fi-
delity. Eventually, Edison switched to wax cylinders. More impor-
tant, both the Edison phonographs and Bell graphophones could
record and play back cylinders; how could they take dictation
otherwise? Berliner's system, however, couldn't take dictation.
The gramophone was a playback-only machine--and that made
a big difference.
Another crucial distinction between cylinder and disc rests in
the recording process. Berliner's process allowed for the creation
of a master recording. Eventually, this practice led to the mass
production of records: an unlimited number of gramophone discs
could be stamped from a single master recording. Manufacturing
an equal number of Edison cylinders required a bank of recorders
and many repeated takes in the studio. It soon became apparent
that musicians and consumers clearly preferred discs.

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What finally captured the public's attention were phonograph

demonstrations at carnivals, in amusement halls, and penny ar-
cades. If not for its novelty appeal, its entertainment value, this
celebrated scientific advance would have disappeared from public
view before the turn of the century. In 1889, a San Franciscan
named Leon Glass invented an attachment that allowed the
phonograph to be coin-operated. Around the same time, Glass
obtained display space in the Palais Royal Saloon; he set up a
coin-operated phonograph with prerecorded cylinders. Music
supplied the main draw.
People lined up by coin-operated record players, donned a pair
of stethoscopelike earphones and listened. These primitive juke-
boxes carried a menu of sheer entertainment: popular songs and
opera arias, comic routines and dramatic recitations, marching
band music and sentimental ballads. Suddenly, a legitimate de-
mand for phonographs-and prerecorded cylinders-material-
ized. By 1891, one thousand of these nickel-in-the-slot machines
were emptying America's pockets. After the Chicago Exposition
(World's Fair) in 1893, coin-operated phonographs exploded into
a full-on fad.
Before that, the phonograph field was stagnant. Early in the
decade, Edison assumed control of the North American Phono-
graph Company. But this venture with investor Jesse Lippincott
quickly went south in the souring economy. His New Jersey
plant-Edison Phonograph Works, if you please-was soon re-
duced to making voltage meters and voting machines. By 1894,
North American Phonograph slid into bankruptcy. Edison took a
powder, and his patents. Two years later, he wheeled out the new
and improved National Phonograph Company.

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 Magic in a Tin Can

At the same time, Berliner worked to improve his gramophone.

At first, the flat metal discs were coated with rubber. Improving
durability and sound, Berliner switched to a shiny mix of shellac
and limestone. Finally, he settled on a hard plastic called Dura-
nite. A spring motor powered the gramophone, as in a sewing ma-
chine. Edison's early machines used a crank. The gramophone
discs measured 7 inches wide, played on one side, and ran two
minutes in duration. The sound quality, according to contempo-
rary popular opinion, was inconsistent at best: discs ran a distant
second to cylinders. Truthfully, neither format caught on as a con-
sumer item.
The 1890s posed a challenge. Edison delivered on his "trade se-
crets" threat, selectively applying for patents and keeping every-
thing he could under wraps. Infringement suits were hurled in
every direction throughout the fledgling industry. Berliner got
caught up in a patent fight with American Graphophone, charg-
ing that its so-called vitaphone was a blatant gramophone knock-
off.
During this troubled infancy, an eccentric figure named Gianni
Bettini emerged on the phonograph scene. He contributed some-
thing more than comic relief, however. Born in Novara, Italy, in
1860, Bettini wound up marrying a wealthy American socialite
named Daisy Abbott. Subsequently, the couple made a splash on
the New York City social circuit. A former cavalry officer in the
Italian Army, "The Lieutenant" was a sharp-dressed man who
sported his old uniform on special occasions. He also indulged an
unlikely scientific streak: Bettini bought an Edison phonograph in
1888 and set about "improving" its sound quality. As an inventor,
he's strictly the Don Quixote of the phonograph. He developed

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and marketed the micro-phonograph, a stylus attachment for the

cylinder machine. Alleged to improve sound quality, his super-
charged needle enhancement never amounted to much, commer-
cially or technically. Rather, Gianni Bettini's fame (or notoriety)
stems from his boundless enthusiasm for music-and his relent-
less pursuit of recording. He literally recorded anyone passing
through the family who seemed "interesting." At a Bettini bash,
apparently, every other guest was an opera singer. He amassed a
magnificent catalogue this way, including soprano Nellie Melba
and other great names of the day. From all reports the sound qual-
ity was inconsistent. (Very few of the Bettini cylinders survived
World War I.) By selling his cylinders of famous opera singers,
Bettini forged the three-pronged connection between creativity,
technology, and commerce. He was the first music mogul.

Format War One: Cylinder Versus Disc

America's urban population was growing, and it represented the

ideal audience for this music machine. The u.s. population al-
most doubled between 1880 and 1910: immigration and urban-
ization thus combined to create a vast and varied market for
recorded music.
Of course, there were plenty of diversions to fill this void; the
advertising industry grew right alongside the phonograph busi-
ness. A later version of the disc-spinning gramophone, the Vic-
trola, became the popular industry standard because it was more
aggressively marketed than the Edison phonograph. That classic
illustration of a terrier listening to a phonograph horn-"His
Master's Voice"-became one of the first unforgettable ad hooks.

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 Magic in a Tin Can

Ironically, the dog logo began life back in 1894 as a painting of

Nipper and an Edison cylinder phonograph! Five years later,
faced with a new patron and a new recording format, artist Fran-
cis Barraud brushed in a disc-spinning gramophone next to the
hound.
The Victor Talking Machine Company was formed in 1901,
uniting Emil Berliner with the engineers Eldridge Johnson and F.
w. Gaisberg. Johnson was a New Jersey machinist who had been
supplying the clockwork motors for Berliner's gramophones.
Wisely, Johnson sat out the patent wars. He snapped up the trade-
mark for "His Master's Voice" in 1899, and then bided his time
until the Victor deal. "One of the very early types of talking ma-
chines was brought to the shop for alterations," he recalled years
later. "It sounded like a partially educated parrot with a sore
throat and a cold in the head, but the little wheezy instrument
caught my attention and held it fast and hard."
Though the sound quality of its Victrola was arguably inferior
to the Edison cylinder phonograph, the disc player had some dis-
tinct advantages: it was self-contained and easier to operate. The
speaker horn was totally enclosed within the cabinet. Handily, the
Victrola also featured internal storage space for discs. Now the
phonograph would be designed, decorated, and marketed as if it
were a piece of furniture. Compared to the can-shaped cylinders,
the flat discs were easier to store, package, and handle. From this
point forward, the phonograph settled down in the living rooms
and parlors of America. At 5200, in 1906, it was a serious invest-
ment, though not out of reach for many. The Victrola played at a
slightly louder volume than the cylinder machines, and its discs
were easier to store. At first, all discs were 7 inches wide and ran
for two minutes. After 1903, Victor began releasing selections on

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multiple formats: 8, 10, and 12 inches. Playing speed-rpm, or

revolutions per minute-was adjustable, varying according to
recording speed. Larger discs meant longer duration and better'
•
durability. In time, more discs were available. In the marketplace,
the sheer quantity of discs trumped the superior sound quality of
cylinders.
The most prominent champion of the disc format was the
opera tenor, Enrico Caruso. In 1902, he declared that he would
record only on discs, and subsequently became the first superstar
of recorded music-the original platinum artist. Caruso was also
the first musician to pull in a royalty for each record sold. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, the popularity of Caruso and
other opera singers helped to elevate the phonograph from its sta-
tus as a novelty or toy. After the sewing machine, the phonograph
(Edison or Victrola) was the most complex mechanical device ever
sold for home use.
Fred Gaisberg, a tireless and innovative worker in the recording
studio, serves as a role model for the modern record producer. He
was the pianist accompanying many of the early sessions. He also
handled the recording artists themselves, stroking egos and sooth-
ing nerves when necessary. Recalling his early career, Gaisberg
wrote of a common condition he called "Gramo-fright." Even the
most stentorian operatic singers could be intimidated by the
recording horn.
Victor's Red Seal classical catalogue, headed by Caruso and
largely assembled by Gaisberg, was quickly established as a
higher-priced status item; the other major companies, Edison and
Columbia, had to play catch-up in developing their own musical
stables.

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 Magic in a Tin Can

Technology couldn't compensate for lackluster music choices.

Columbia introduced a two-sided disc in 1904, retailing for $1.50.
Four years later, Edison introduced a souped-up cylinder: the Am-
berol (featuring four-minute duration) and later, Blue Amberol.
Composed of tough blue celluloid, the upgraded cylinder lasted
longer and sounded better. "The sweet tone that has always
marked Edison Amberol Records ... will be enhanced by Blue
Amberol." So read the ad copy, anyway.
Despite the highbrow hype, vaudeville and marching band ti-
tles outsold classical from the start. Fred Gaisberg, high-tech tal-
ent scout, toured Europe and recorded scores of classical virtu-
osos. Yet at home he (and his peers at the other companies) also
recorded anything that would sell: dance music, ethnic specialties,
folk songs, ma~ches, sentimental ballads, hymns, coon songs, ser-
mons, comic monologues, recitations, sound reenactments of his-
toric events.
Still, the Red Seal label maintained the mark of class; these
records cost more but they were indeed popular. Red Seal records
made celebrities of the musicians, and the musicians made discs
their medium. Caruso's voice was perfectly suited to the talking
machine; he injected an ecstatic degree of palpable drama and
emotion into his performances. His voice emerged from the horn
with clarity and power, drowning out some of the surface noise.
Caruso's success marked the beginning of the celebrity cult or
star system in the music business-a trend resisted by Thomas
Edison, who preferred to see his own name and image embla-
zoned on his record releases. Despite Edison's wishes, recording
artists were replacing inventors as the personalities associated
with the phonograph. Enrico Caruso became synonymous with

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the Victrola; one phenomenon couldn't have become so popular

without the other.
Half a century later, the Caruso of his time-a guy named
Elvis Presley-toiled for the direct corporate descendant of the
Victor Company, RCA Victor. In 1960, "It's Now or Never" be-
came something more than the latest Elvis single to reach number
one on the pop charts. Its lilting melody comes directly from
"There's No Tomorrow" by Tony Martin. That song, a number
one for Martin in 1949, simply retools the traditional Italian folk
tune "0 Sole Mio." Indeed, the singer who originally immortal-
ized "0 Sole Mio" on a 1916 Victor recording was Enrico Caruso.
Completing the musical circle, Elvis always said he could remem-
ber listening to Caruso's records as a child.

The First Dance Craze

Despite Caruso's success, the future of the phonograph rested in

pop. Music hall ballads, Broadway show tunes, folk songs, ersatz
ethnic ditties: the popular styles of the early twentieth century
were perfectly suited to records owing to their brief duration. At
any rate, they were easier to squeeze into the arbitrary three-
minute format than an opera aria or symphony movement. Even
popular songs had to be edited or shortened. The sound of mili-
tary or marching band music was one of the first popular trends;
John Philip Sousa and his Marine Band, exclusively signed to the
fledgling Columbia label, were leaders in this field. Marching
bands had been a live-performance mainstay of nineteenth-
century culture, when every small town or neighborhood could
assemble one at holiday time. The strident, brassy intonation of

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 Magic in a Tin Can

the marching bands easily lent itself to the limited range of the
early recording horns.
As the century progressed, sound reproduction grew more so-
phisticated, and more phonographs and Victrolas were sold. The
demand for recordings increased, and the amazing breadth of
America's polyglot culture became apparent. African-American
music, with its emphasis on syncopated rhythms and unbridled
emotional expression, became the definitive sound of the new
machine and the new era. Perhaps Andre Millard says it best in his
landmark survey America on Record-"The single most impor-
tant cultural accomplishment of the industry of recorded sound
in the twentieth century was to make black u.s. music the popu-
lar music of the world."
Decades before Dick Clark and American Bandstand, the
measure of a hit record was rhythm and movement. "It's got a
good beat and you can dance to it." Syncopation seduced Ameri-
can ears and feet. Black music provided a break from staid Victo-
rian conventions, the genteel heart songs and the tuneful deluge
of Tin Pan Alley hackwork. Coon songs, with their crude stereo-
typing of black speech and culture, set the stage. Hokey, racially
insensitive minstrel characters such as Jim Dandy and J immy-
crack-corn-and-I-don't-care were already staples on the vaude-
ville circuit, having predated the recording era. Grossly offensive
by current standards, these blackface routines-and their im-
mense popularity on record-signal the hidden riches and twisted
allure of black culture in America. African music mutated into
something rich and mysterious in the New World: a buried trea-
sure waiting to be plumbed by the nascent recording industry.
Records crossed racial and social boundaries from the start.
Early spoken-word recordings satirized and celebrated the experi-

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ence of recent immigrants; but their ethnic humor wasn't mutually

exclusive. My late grandfather, a stereotypical first-generation
Irish American born in 1893, could recite the Eastern-European
spoof "Cohen at the Telephone" from memory; it received pride
of placement alongside his favorite self-deprecating Paddy and
Mike routines. He'd learned them all from records in his teens,
and remembered them well into his seventies. The editor of
Phonoscope magazine, Russell Hunting, recorded his prized
recitation of "Cohen" in the 1890s. His cylinders became so pop-
ular that second-generation duplicates were made without his
knowledge--an early example of pirate, or bootleg, recordings.
And at the turn of the last century, ragtime triggered a musical
fad with lasting repercussions. Ragtime laid down the rhythms
that would revolutionize popular tastes in America. Also known
as barrelhouse, boogie, and honky-tonk, this syncopated piano
sound created a pattern that would repeat throughout the next
100 years: A new style of black music inspires a new dance craze,
and the phonograph (or record player or turntable) becomes its
natural carrier. Technology is the prime mover behind pop music.
Ragtime was not only black music, it was proudly self-identified
black music. There could be no mistaking ragtime as a parody or
appropriation; it was the real thing. Ragtime defined a rhythm
and sound, representing an attitude and a social force. Ragtime
ruled as did rock 'n' roll sixty years later.
Scott Joplin is rightly hailed as the champion and originator of
ragtime; though the style was born in the saloons and brothels of
big cities, he nailed it down. Joplin transcribed its serpentine beat
onto paper, a Herculean feat. And it was Irving Berlin, a Jewish-
American product of New York City's Lower East Side, who
wrote the standard, ''Alexander's Ragtime Band." Democracy in

22
 Magic in a Tin Can

action: the lines of race and class get blurred once the records
start spinning. "Syncopation," said Berlin, "is the soul of every
true American."
The first recording of ''Alexander's Ragtime Band," by the
minstrel show duo Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan, helped to
spread the new beat. Estimates are unreliable, but let's just say
that Collins and Harlan sold a lot of discs and cylinders in the
years before World War 1. The comedy duo specialized in coon
songs and dialect humor. "Bake Dat Chicken Pie" and ''Alabama
Jubilee" were balanced by "Down Where the Wurzburger Flows"
and "Under the Anheuser Bush." Collins and Harlan were clever
businessmen, as well as clowns. They'd latch onto a suitable mu-
sical vehicle such as "Alexander" and record subsequent versions
for each of the Big Three record companies: Edison, Victor, Co-
lumbia. Next came the European Pathe label and smaller outfits
such as Emerson. For years, it worked: Arthur Collins recorded
his solo hit "The Preacher and the Bear" for six labels alone. (This
venerable routine has been recorded as recently as 1970, when
soul veteran Rufus Thomas added it to his string of comic R&B
singles on the Stax label.) In retrospect, the reliable Billboard
chart compiler Joel Whitburn reckons that "The Preacher and the
Bear" by Arthur Collins became the "first generally recognized
million seller" in 1905. Some suspect Len Spencer may have done
it around 1902, with his ''Arkansaw [sic] Traveller."
By the time they recorded "Darktown Strutters' Ball" in 1918,
however, the appeal of Collins and Harlan had waned. They
couldn't match the energy and strut of the Original Dixieland
Jazz Band-white guys who didn't wear blackface, literally or fig-
uratively. Faced by the Jazz Age, minstrels and coon songs finally
began to fade by the 1920s.

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 PLAYBACK

While ragtime came from the dark side of the city, the blues
crept out of the backcountry and seeped into the public con-
sciousness around the same time. W. C. Handy published his "St.
Louis Blues" in 1914; like Joplin with ragtime, Handy was the
first to take the oral tradition of the blues, translate it into nota-
tion, and transcribe it on paper so it could be recorded. Soon the
melancholy magic. of the blues-moaning voices and slurred
notes-popped up on the vaudeville circuit and on records.
By this time, records meant round objects with a hole in the
middle: Twenty-three million discs were manufactured in 1914,
as opposed to just three million cylinders. Edison stood fast by
his format, almost alone. Consumers bought both 10- and 12-
inch discs, often selecting the 10-inch records for popular and 12-
inch for classical. Overall, the record business was booming. In
1914, there were eighteen companies in the business of recorded
sound; by 1918, there were 166. During the same time frame, the
value of the industry's products rose from $27 million in 1914 to
$158 million in 1918. In 1914, Americans purchased half a mil-
lion phonographs or talking machines, and twenty-seven million
records.

Edison: The Long Goodbye

In 1913, Edison caved. True, he continued making cylinders, but

he felt compelled to bring out a disc phonograph. Columbia dis-
continued cylinders in 1912. As the sales of Victor discs soared,
the Edison cylinders were demoted to office dictation, their orig-
inal purpose. The Edison Disc Phonograph was a high-end item.
It wasn't a rousing success.

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 Magic in a Tin Can

The Edison Diamond Discs took their name from the pointed
tip of the phonograph's stylus. The diamond needles never
needed to be replaced, or so said the ad copy. According to own-
ers, the metal needle on Victor or Columbia machines had to go
after two plays or they'd start to scratch the record. On the down-
side, Edison Diamond Discs were 10 inches wide and weighed 10
ounces; the top-of-the-line Victor records measured 12 inches
wide and weighed just 8 ounces. Diamond discs needed to be
heavy to withstand the steady pressure of that big needle riding in
the grooves.
Edison wielded an intuitive, seat-of-his-pants understanding of
the physics of music. This may have blinded him to certain limi-
tations. Take the so-called hill and dale method Edison relied
on-vertical modulation-to cut the grooves in his recordings;
Berliner used lateral modulation. This arcane terminology refers
to the way the sound waves are carved or etched into the individ-
ual grooves on the recording surface. The cut of the groove shapes
the path of the stylus. On vertically cut records, the stylus moved
up (hill) and down (dale); on laterally cut records, it moved side
to side. Vertical modulation seemed to work well on Edison cylin-
ders, but some people thought the hill and dale-style discs were
extra vulnerable to distortion and noise. And the Edison Disc
Phonograph's cabinet was "deemed less attractive than the Vic-
trola" by Edison himself. Even more unattractive, those vertical-
cut discs were incompatible with other disc phonographs.
Edison made at least one mistake that doesn't come as a sur-
prise. In his wisdom, he decided that Edison Diamond Discs
would not carry the artists' names on the disc itself. The record
sleeve contained that vital information, though you couldn't al-
ways read it.

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 PLAYBACK

Beginning in 1913, Edison introduced his disc phonograph

with a series of "Edison Tone-Test Recitals." These contests
matched phonograph against a live singer in (virtual) blindfold
comparison for the audience. Underneath the bravado, we can
sense the scope and urgency of Edison's mission. Discs (or cylin-
ders) should recreate musical performance, not merely record
them. As he wrote in "Edison's Dream of New Music" (Cos-
mopolitan, May 1913),

I shall yet put before the world a phonograph that will render
whole operas better than the singers themselves could sing
them in a theater. I shall do this by virtue of the fact that with
a phonograph I can record the voices better than any person in
a theater can hear them.

Unfortunately, Edison failed to follow up the tone-test public-

ity. A paucity of advertising further hampered the Diamond Disc
campaign.

Cakewalk and Kangaroo Dip

Classical music retained a small, devoted following, but for the

most part, record consumers were not inclined to sit still while
they listened. Blues and ragtime triggered a dance mania in Amer-
ica; this first bout of boogie fever lasted roughly from 1911 to
1917. African-American folk dances started showing up in society
balls: the cakewalk, bunny hug, turkey trot, grizzly bear, monkey
glide, kangaroo dip. Based on animal movements, as the names
suggest, these steps made room for individual variation and im-

26
 Magic in a Tin Can

provisation. Naturally, their reliance on movements originating

from the pelvic region (thrust) and physical contact between part-
ners ("neck holding") scandalized the moral guardians of the pe-
riod. Even in socially acceptable, somewhat softened form, these
new rhythms and dances jostled the social order and jump-started
a pop tradition. Jazz, swing, R&B, rock 'n' roll, soul, disco, hip-
hop, techno, you name it: the bodies and the turntables still go
round and round.
Vernon and Irene Castle ruled as the original king and queen
of dance crossover: the cakewalk's upper-crust ambassadors.
They civilized black dance steps, transporting the funky strut to
society ballrooms and, via their best-selling recordings, middle-
class living rooms. Some would compare their influence to that of
Pat Boone's whitened and lightened R&B cover versions. But the
Castles didn't just benefit from ragtime and the blues, they helped
promote and spread the word. They may have smoothed over
some of the earthy origins of their grooves, but not entirely. Black
musicians usually backed them. The dance craze of the teens
called for special accompaniment, and dance bands and dance
records soon filled the air with syncopated sounds. Of course, an
older generation (and "serious" music lovers) considered all this a
threat to the social order and called it noise. That started another
venerable pop tradition.
The Castles' secret weapon was a Harlem-based bandleader
named James Reese Europe. His smooth arrangements and syn-
copated beat, achieved with unusual instrumentation, captivated
the dancing couple at a swank Manhattan party. The Castles
teamed up with Europe, performing with his Exclusive Society
Orchestra around the country. The musicians also found work at
the Castle House, Vernon and Irene's dance school. Previously,

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 PLAYBACK

Europe had organized the Clef Club, an informal union and

booking agency for local black musicians. In 1912, he played New
York's prestigious Carnegie Hall with a group of Clef Club play-
ers. At the time, Clef's working band lineup might include banjo,
mandolin, violin, clarinet, cornet, and drums.
The first dance craze demanded specialized accompaniment,
small groups such as Europe's who could play syncopated riffs. It
sounded easier than it was. Though accompaniments at dance
halls and performances were usually live, dance mania fueled
rather than impeded phonograph and record sales. These smaller
groups, with their percussive melodies and pronounced beat, were
tailor-made for the primitive recording studio. In fact, their syn-
copated sound was more easily duplicated by phonograph than
by local musicians. A volatile substance, ragtime changed as it
grew in popularity. By the late teens, the sound had morphed into
something eventually called jazz. Louder, looser, more improvised
and more exciting than ragtime, jazz brought drums and percus-
sion to the fo're. The instrumental emphasis switched from solo
piano to saxophone and trumpet breaks, played with "hot"
flashes of sexual urgency. And yes, you could still dance to it.

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chapter 2

GR ON CANNED MUSIC

JAZZ AND ITS COUNTRY COUSIN, the blues, continued the dance
boom after World War I. Reaching its peak during the late twen-
ties, the jazz and blues craze coincided with the adolescent phase
of the record industry.
Pressure from another growing technology put the phono-
graph to its first external test. The rise of radio nearly submerged
the record player. In the second half of the 1920s, electrical
recording salvaged the situation with vastly improved sound qual-
ity. Microphones and amplifiers replaced horns and recording
phonographs; the job description for a musician profoundly
changed as a result. The purpose of making records shifted away
from audio documentation and moved toward aural creation.
The increased volume and heavy bass provided by radio's elec-
tronic amplification-as opposed to the speaker horns of early
phonographs-was perfectly suited to pop tastes of the period.
Radios were smartly marketed as pieces of furniture in a variety
of styles, a fine addition to any living room. Phonographs, espe-
cially the ever-popular Victrola, were utilitarian by comparison.
The Christmas shopping season of 1924 signaled a showdown be-

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 PLAYBACK

tween the fledgling home entertainment systems, and phono-

graphs came up short. In the following year, the once-booming
Victor Talking Machine Company lost $6.5 million. (Tellingly,
the Radio Corporation of America would buy Victor in 1929.) As
much as the music, the sound of radio-loud, clear, smooth, bass
heavy, not "tinny"-became the next craze.
Then came 1929. Another economic boom bites the dust. The
Great Depression set the scene for the second format war.
Through thick and thin, music technology served as America's
engine of cultural integration, decades before the civil rights
movement. In the days before the advent of commercial radio, a
blues singer named Mamie Smith inaugurated the pop tradition
of crossover. Her 1920 recording "Crazy Blues" caught fire with a
broad audience. Cut for the tiny Okeh label, "Crazy Blues" by
Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds appealed to black and white
listeners alike. This catchy twelve-bar plaint sold more than
70,000 copies, paving the way for the blues stars Ma Rainey, Bessie
Smith, Ida Cox, and Alberta Hunter. Smith's "Crazy Blues" ses-
sion employed all black musicians, another significant precedent.
The first black blues singer to be commercially recorded, Smith
was recruited and recorded by talent scout Ralph Peer. He was a
pioneer, too. Peer identified the markets for "race" and "hillbilly"
music, and coined those terms for the record industry.
Some things remained the same. Later in 1920, the Original
Dixieland Jazz Band enjoyed equal or better success with an in-
strumental reading of "Crazy Blues." The white group's version
benefited (if that's the word) from a kazoo solo. The jazz and
blues fad fueled and funded a wave of independent record com-
panies in the twenties: Black Swan, Brunswick, Paramount, Vo-

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 War on Canned Music

calion, and dozens more. Despite their broad-based appeal, re-

leases from these labels were largely absent from the airwaves.
Images of F. Scott Fitzgerald, flappers, and flaming youth cloud
the rearview mirror. In musical terms, the Jazz Age was more a
cultural phenomenon than a commercial revolution. Bear in
mind, however, that most blues recordings of the 1920s repre-
sented urbanized versions of the southern backwoods sound-
not folk music, but pop records. The acoustic blues of the Missis-
sippi Delta begins its crossover journey decades later.
Jazz was urbanized music by definition: born in New Orleans,
exported to Chicago when Kid Ory and Louis Armstrong hopped
a northbound train. Just like Enrico Caruso twenty years earlier,
Armstrong was a "natural" in the studio. Their performances
didn't have to be adjusted or adapted to technology; amplifier and
microphone magically captured their full effect. The electrical
recording process played to Armstrong's strengths. The melodic
exuberance of his trumpet solos advertised the expanded dynamic
range of the new technology. Powered by snappy syncopation,
driven by percussive beats, Louis Armstrong's virtuosity flows in
up-tempo three-minute bursts. "West End Blues" makes you want
to move when heard in anachronistic CD crystal clarity; back in
the day, jazz records were dance records by definition. On the
dance floor, the Charleston ruled over all. Among the smart set,
the earthy, grinding black bottom was all the rage.
The pop crossover phenomenon, however, wasn't always a
two-way street. The initial success of the blues legend Bessie
Smith signals the underlying reality of segregation. Her "Down
Hearted Blues" sold more than a million copies in 1923, pur-
chased by a largely black audience. The so-called race market of-

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 PLAYBACK

fered a robust and lucrative niche for the record companies-and

so begins another venerable tradition.
Yet Ralph Peer's early "hillbilly" discoveries such as Fiddlin'
John Carson and Vernon Dalhart were regional successes limited
to white audiences. Born in Texas, Marion Try Slaughter improb-
ably developed an interest in opera singing. He moved east and
became a trained tenor. He assumed his professional name by
merging two adjacent towns (Vernon and Dalhart) of his native
Texas. In 1916, he focused his vocal talents on truly esoteric fare,
commercialized folk music. Following the time-honored tradi-
tion, Dalhart serially recorded "The Prisoner's Song." Nearly one
million copies shipped in 1925 alone, yet Dalhart remained
mostly unknown-and unheard-in the major cities. Ultimately,
he cut close to thirty versions for more than ten labels, including
Victor and the fading Edison. In fact, Dalhart remained loyal to
Edison through the 1920s-he hit the road for some public tone-
test demonstrations. The opera snob inventor originally signed
Dalhart as a classical artist, of course; yet he gladly released Dal-
hart's hillbilly discs and cylinders right up to 1929, when he closed
shop. Dalhart wisely followed his nationwide success with a
reworked traditional. His hit rendition of "The Wreck of the Old
'97" along with "The Prisoner's Song" laid the foundation of the
modern country music business. Other record and phonograph
companies quickly woke up and fed the new hillbilly market.
Vernon Dalhart had spawned an ungainly youth with a healthy
appetite.
In 1926, Variety sketched out a scenario for its inside-dopester
show business audience by proclaiming, "The talking machine to
the hillbilly is more practical than his bible." Special note was

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 War on Canned Music

taken of the rubes' penchant for purchasing successive copies of a

single song-six or more. They literally played the records until
they wore them out. Of course, a handful of plays with a cheap
stylus could demolish the grooves on any disc; still, it was a mar-
keter's dream. Hillbilly music-later country and western-per-
manently settled into a profitable niche in the pop marketplace.

The Rise of Radio

The phonograph opens the cramped urban cell into as

many worlds as there are records ... radio makes the
whole world a domestic scene.
-Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel

Thanks to its vacuum tubes and amplified speakers, radio was

a sonic revelation for listeners. Music on radio sounded better
than on a phonograph. And once you owned a radio, it didn't cost
a thing.
KDKA, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sent forth the first com-
mercial radio broadcast, announcing the election of Warren G.
Harding as President of the United States. The date was Novem-
ber 6, 1920. Owned by Westinghouse Electric, KDKA was actu-
ally conceived in amateur broadcasts around the Pittsburgh area.
A Westinghouse engineer named Frank Conrad assembled a crude
transmitter and hit the airwaves: playing records was his specialty,
and he attracted plenty of attention. A local department store
sold radio receivers specifically for accessing Conrad's show. After
that, Westinghouse higher-ups latched onto the idea in a hurry. It
didn't take long to realize that radio stations can help sell radios.

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 PLAYBACK

In New York City, a little more than one year later, the first
paid radio commercial aired on WEAF. (Owned by American
Telephone & Telegraph, this station later became WNBC.) The
Radio Corporation of America, better known as RCA, had been
formed in 1919. Using World War I as an excuse, the US. govern-
ment had taken control of 6,000 existing radio stations in 1916.
They were either turned over to the navy for the duration or shut-
tered outright. And their patents too were appropriated, so ex-
perimentation also ground to a halt until the war ended two years
later. After that, the government worked to support the RCA ven-
ture by relaxing antitrust objections. Also aligned in RCA's sup-
port were the corporate heavy hitters of the day. General Electric,
Westinghouse, AT&T, and United Fruit all handed over patents as
a form of investment, with the result that the British-owned
American Marconi Company stepped out of the peacetime radio
scene soon after.
By winter 1922, a definite chill was felt in the phonograph busi-
ness. That same year, the Department of Commerce set an ag-
gressive precedent. Broadcast licenses were granted only to sta-
tions that promised not to play records. Practically speaking,
however, most stations never really stopped playing them.

The Sound of Electricity

After 1924, the formative phase of the phonograph-the acoustic

era-quickly passed into history. Behind the scenes, the phono-
graph industry played catch-up while radio still ruled. The big
three companies-Victor, Columbia, and Edison-gradually
adapted electrical recording technology. H. C. Harrison, an engi-

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 War on Canned Music

neer employed by Western Electric, captured the patent in May

1924. This marked a major breakthrough. Just a few months later,
however, the commercial phonograph industry stumbled into a
major slump.
By the 1920s, Thomas Edison was a sideshow; he catered to
specialists and the so-called carriage trade. His Diamond Discs
were considered technically perfect, though Edison's highfalutin
taste in music-mostly classical-severely limited his commercial
impact on the Jazz Age. He was also the last of the big three to
"go electric."
One gigantic disadvantage of acoustic phonographs was vol-
ume control. There wasn't any. The vacuum tubes in radios re-
ceived broadcast signals and amplified them through dynamic
speakers, translating sound waves into electrical currents, like the
telephone. Crude in comparison, acoustic phonographs tran-
scribed the shape and pattern of sound waves directly into discs
for playback through a horn.
Dynamic speakers liberated radio listeners from earphones.
You could not only annoy your neighbors, you could also con-
trol the din. And that was a definite advantage over the old
speaker horns. While radio's amplified sound permitted loud-
ness to be raised and lowered, the volume of acoustic phono-
graphs could only be dampened. The Victrola's cabinet featured
doors that could be opened or shut in front of the speaker horn;
the Edison Diamond Disc player achieved this effect with a ball
of soft cloth that fit into the speaker horn, hence the expression
put a sock in it.
By the time Mamie Smith returned to Columbia's New York
studio in 1925, a Western Electric microphone instead of the old-
fashioned recording horn confronted her. Musicians no longer

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 PLAYBACK

needed to position themselves around the horn since the dynam-

ics of a large orchestra wouldn't jostle the recording needle. In-
struments that were inaudible in the acoustic recording era-
drum, violin, bass-would now register loud and clear.
In 1925, Victor introduced the Othophonic Victrola-an
acoustic machine that played electrically recorded discs-and
quickly rebounded from its sales slump. The tone of the Otho-
phonic Victrola was billed as "radio timbre." One year later, Vic-
tor pulled in an estimated $7 million profit. Also in 1925,
Brunswick brought out the first all-electric machine, the Pana-
trope, with dynamic loudspeakers and magnetic stylus. A year
later, Columbia tested the waters with its electric Vitaphone. Two
years later, Victor debuted a phonograph with a record changer.
Edison tentatively unveiled a forty-minute long-playing disc. A
new era was under way, but the phonograph industry wasn't out
of the woods yet.
For all their impact on the zeitgeist, hopping jazz records were
never as popular with the mainstream as sentimental ballads and
sweet, slow, band instrumentals. Sometimes technological mile-
stones are marked by novelty hits. The success of "Whispering"
Jack Smith, for instance, neatly demonstrated the transforming
power of the microphone; his breathy speak-sing delivery-the
result of a World War I injury-wouldn't have flown without the
propelling force of electric amplification. Microphones could
turn even a timid voice into a vocal presence. Also in the late
1920s, Rudy Vallee gained fame by purring into a megaphone. Ut-
terly dependent on then crude technology, he made that crutch his
gimmick.
In the case of blues and jazz, recording imposed structure and
discipline-three minutes' worth anyway-on a semi-improvised

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 War on Canned Music

approach to playing. The loss of energy and spontaneity must be

mourned, but electrically recorded discs captured something new
as well: the musicians' audible sense of freedom, all their twists
and turns and quirks and flourishes. Now the stuff that couldn't
be written down-the aura or underlying vibe-was preserved
forever in crackling black plastic.

Edison: The End

Ironically, by the 1920s, deafness was the defining force behind

Edison's decisions in the phonograph business. His musical
taste-always suspect-was now grossly distorted by hearing
problems. Many singers who auditioned for Edison got the
thumbs-down, professionals and amateurs alike. They all
sounded shrill and painful to his ears, drenched in tremolo and
stinging vibrato. Stubbornly, he always insisted the problem was
with the singers. With its meticulous accuracy and bell-like clar-
ity, the Edison phonograph indeed magnified any singer's short-
comings.
When his sons suggested that he branch into radio mid-decade,
for the first time Edison hesitated and got left behind. When he fi-
nally delivered a combination radio-phonograph in 1928, it was
too late. Thomas Edison, self-styled patriarch of the recording in-
dustry, discontinued record and phonograph production one year
later. It happened soon after the 1929 stock market crash, but Edi-
son's fate was already sealed. By 1930, Edison discontinued his
struggling radio operation and began winding down his career; he
deserved a rest. But at that point, the future of the phonograph it-
self was in grave doubt.

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Radio Versus Records

The killer competition between radio and records had settled into
a symbiotic relationship by the time the stock market crashed in
1929. All those shiny new Othophonics, Panatones, and Vita-
phones were spinning discs, and many of them were recordings by
radio stars. Both mediums suffered during the ensuing Depres-
sion, but the phonograph industry was hit harder. After all, radio
was still free.
The manufacture of record players had all but ceased by 1930.
Disc sales had dropped by half. Record sales hit 110 million in
1922; ten years later, the figure had fallen to six million. Phono-
graphs and records were no longer advertised. Radio suffered,
since many stations secretly relied on recorded music, which infu-
riated recording musicians and their unions. The decline in disc
sales ultimately meant fewer records to choose from, and the
broadcast selection had always been spotty. All of a sudden, it got
worse: you heard the same popular song nine or ten times a day.
Repetition ruled the airwaves. By 1932, the u.s. music industry
touched rock bottom.
The use of records on the radio turned into a major battle dur-
ing the format wars. But radio's reliance on live performers ulti-
mately petered out for economic reasons as well as technological
and musical ones. In the end, it was always cheaper to play
recorded music than pay and maintain live musicians.
With their studio orchestras and musical guest stars, the major
radio networks (NBC, CBS, and Mutual) created a national stan-
dard of entertainment: in effect, they raised the bar on musician-
ship. Audiences came to expect more because they'd heard the
best big bands and pop vocalists (especially Bing Crosby) on a

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 War on Canned Music

regular basis. Suddenly, the local dance band sawing away on the
hits of the day, a staple of most radio stations, didn't sound so
good. They didn't sound like records on the phonograph.
In 1926, the National Broadcasting Company debuted with a
twenty-four-station radio network. (NBC was backed by RCA.)
One year later, Columbia Phonograph bought United Independent
Network, and the independent Columbia Broadcasting System
(CBS) was born. At the same time, the U.S. bureaucracy-in the
form of the Federal Radio Commission, precursor of the Federal
Communications Commission-reared its head for the first time.
Broadcasting endured much government regulation from here on.
The NBC and CBS radio networks actually banned record
playing in 1930, under pressure from Tin Pan Alley music pub-
lishers and the new pugnacious musicians union. By all accounts,
the ban was selectively enforced at best, so many stations kept on
spinning. The networks incorporated records in their program-
ming only gradually, grudgingly. Behind the scenes, however, the
very concept of a radio network quietly came to depend on discs.
Custom-made records-transcription discs-provided a crucial
technological fix in the transmission of live programs on radio.
Invented by the Vitaphone Company's Harold C. Smith, tran-
scription discs were oversize (16 inch), slow turning (33 1/3 rpm),
and long (fifteen minutes per side). The discs were originally in-
tended for the film industry, but they lent themselves to the role of
transcribing (recording) and storing content for future broadcast.
These bulky platters carried music, drama, comedy, and adver-
tisements. Often spaces were left silent for local advertising in-
serts. Transcription discs could be used all along the network,
courtesy of the U.S. mail. Time zone problems and scheduling dif-
ficulties could be easily averted.

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 PLAYBACK

Just a couple of years after their introduction, in 1932, tran-

scription discs were used on 75 percent of all radio stations. By
1939, many smaller stations relied on these prerecorded broad-
casts for the bulk of their programming. Network radio could ef-
fectively ban record playing, but they needed record technology in
order to broadcast "live" music. Despite the efforts of the musi-
cians union, record technology thoroughly infiltrated radio.

"Canned Music"

Enter the dragon. James Caesar Petrillo acted as an open foe of

records and recording. He crusaded for the musicians union. He
was a man on a mission, leading a twenty-year campaign against
the record and phonograph (later jukebox) industry. Rising in the
1930s, Petrillo distinguished himself as a media-savvy master: he
wielded lawsuits and press releases with equal aplomb. Eventu-
ally, he was elected national president of the American Federation
of Musicians.
In Joseph P. Kraft's labor history From Stage to Studio, Petrillo
emerges as a compelling leader and complex human being. He's
not so easy to dismiss as either Luddite or publicity hound. "Dis-
affected musicians did not stand passively by while the revolution
capsized their lives," writes Kraft. "On the contrary, in myriad
and clever ways, and largely through their union, they sought to
control the forces of change."
Petrillo first caught the public eye in Chicago, where he served
as the firebrand president of the musicians' local. In 1927, he de-
nounced local radio stations for the heinous crime of playing

40
 War on Canned Music

records. One of the stations he sued, WCRW, was owned and op-
erated by Clinton R. White, who was also an old-school inventor;
all the discs aired on WCRW spun on White's own patented
turntable, the vibraphone.
By 1928, Petrillo regularly hurled thunderbolts at the phono-
graph and radio interests. At one point, he considered "waging
open war against mechanical devices in general." He branded
records with the derogatory description canned music, and end-
less repetition made it stick. Petrillo was persistent and inge-
nious. Perhaps his most infamous and lasting action occurred in
1929, when he issued an ultimatum that affected all Chicago
radio stations. The requirement was simple. If you use a record
player in your studios, then you must hire a union musician to
operate the turntables. Before the disc jockey, stations were com-
pelled to acquire a flunky: the lowly pancake turner. His job was
a joke. This borderline-corrupt practice persisted for more than
a decade.
Petrillo saw himself, of course, as champion of the working
stiff. In his own defense, he'd invoke his noble quest for musicians'
basic right to employment. The use of "canned music" cost lots
of musicians their jobs, no question about it. Looking back,
Petrillo's zeal seems understandable, though severely misguided.
He tried to protect musicians and shield them from the impact of
recording technology, but by doing so he ensured their ultimate
replacement by machines. Perhaps he could have served them bet-
ter by helping them absorb the change, but in any case, his reac-
tionary campaign was finally repelled after a protracted fight.
In 1933, Petrillo and the AFM asked for a ban on all broadcasts
of recordings. He didn't get it, but he wasn't about to go away.

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Jukebox Music

The fate of the phonograph ultimately was determined by a hun-

gry public eager for music, just as it had been in the 1890s. Just
because people couldn't afford record players or records didn't
mean they were tired of listening-or dancing. A coin-op ma-
chine came to the rescue.
The jukebox transported the phonograph to public space and
bested radio by featuring choices. On radio, selection is always
made for the listener. Listeners may choose who selects by chang-
ing stations; you can't select the songs, but you can switch for-
mats.
In the days of the penny arcade, the mass appeal of the origi-
nal coin-op amusements was sheer novelty, the miracle of hearing
recorded music, and the penny-pleasure machines soon became
widespread. In 1888, Thomas Adams installed the first Tutti
Frutti confection dispenser in a New York train station. Even the
great Lieutenant Bettini tested the coin-op field when his opera
activities waned; the wannabe inventor obtained a patent for his
own gumball machine in 1914. While he may have been eccentric,
he was nobody's fool. All those pennies and nickels frittered away
for the sake of amusement eventually add up, and without ques-
tion this contributed to the survival of the phonograph.
By the 1920s, mechanical instruments-namely, the player
piano-dominated the field of automated music. Attempts at
making a coin-op phonograph yielded impractical and sometimes
comic results. Mills Novelty Company of Chicago concocted a
somewhat convoluted solution. Their machine was called the
Dance Master, a jukebox prototype that offered twelve selec-
tions-and used twelve turntables rotating like a Ferris wheel.

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 War on Canned Music

Practically speaking, the first coin-slot machine with electric

amplification and a multirecord changer was built by American
Music Industries (AMI) in 1927. The Wurlitzer, Seeburg, and
Rockola Companies all followed suit. Outside of movie theaters,
jukeboxes, as they came to be known, delivered the best sound re-
production available at the time. Since jukeboxes were often situ-
ated in bars and restaurants, the repeal of Prohibition in 1933
greatly enhanced their appeal. Loud music for dancing and sug-
gestive novelties fared best on the new machines. The rise of hill-
billy and race records in the 1920s continued apace in jukeboxes
in the 1930s: the hillbilly market tripled during the years
1930-1932 alone. Half of all records produced in 1936 were des-
tined for jukeboxes, and half of these machines were in the South.
By 1939, 225,000 jukeboxes consumed thirteen million discs per
year.
The jukebox success story springs from two sources. One is
that unique feature of the phonograph that is selection, or user
choice. Swing is the second reason. Those syncopated rhythms
sucked up a lot of jukebox nickels.
The advent of swing-danceable big-band jazz-started on
jukeboxes and gradually spread to a new generation of home
phonographs. In general, jukeboxes pushed swing to young peo-
ple while radio provided classical music for their parents. Eventu-
ally, the record industry found an economic way to serve these
evolving tastes.
Victor, now aligned with RCA, made the most of its new posi-
tion. Victor's Duo Jr., introduced in 1934, was simple genius: an
electrically powered phonograph that attached to a radio set.
Priced at a reasonable $16.50, the Duo Jr. consisted of a turntable,
cartridge, and tonearm tucked away in a plastic case. The Duo Jr.

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caught on just as Columbia's similar radiograph attachment

(overpriced at $55) did not.
Similarly, a move to discount the price of pop records jump-
started the swing phenomenon. Jack Kapp of the British-owned
Decca Company dropped the price of lO-inch 78 rpm dance
records from 75¢ to 35¢.
There were other, competing budget labels at the time: Colum-
bia now owned Okeh (and later Brunswick). Victor had its Blue-
bird (25¢) line. Decca was different, because its budget line offered
first-tier "name" artists such as Bing Crosby, the Dorsey Brothers,
Guy Lombardo, the Mills Brothers, and Fletcher Henderson's big
band. Kapp also insisted on high-quality discs for the budget
line--anything to compete with radio.
Thanks to electrical recording and amplification, smooth-voiced
male singers came across more effectively on record than they
ever had in the acoustic era. The trend began with megaphone-
enhanced Rudy Vallee. Soon the crooning style dominated Amer-
ican pop vocals, no small thanks to the uberconfident recordings
of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. A new generation of youth
adopted these sounds, embracing the singers of big bands as
idols. As World War II loomed, popular music began to wield a
bewitching power over young Americans that even movies
couldn't match.

Dancing Machine

When I joined Fred Waring [in 1937] he was anti-recording.

He had a whole scene going with [Paul] Whiteman, the
Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman, to ban recording.

44
 War on Canned Music

Fred was the leader of it. And he had musicians signing

up, pledging not to make a phonograph record.
-Les Paul

As the popularity of the jukebox helped revive the record busi-

ness, there was, of course, organized resistance from the AFM,
not to mention a propaganda campaign. Petrillo cashed in some
of his chits with prominent musicians. Bandleader Fred Waring
emerged as the official AFM spokesman; as well as handling pub-
lic relations, he proselytized for the recording ban. The conductor
of a pop choir called the Pennsylvanians, Waring was known for
his radio "glee club" programs. His recording career didn't suffer
because of his AFM support, it ceased to exist. Waring backed up
his protest with deeds: he actually quit making records for more
than a decade, starting in 1932. Reportedly, Waring also pro-
moted the recording ban efforts by donating a hefty sum of his
own money.
Arguments among working musicians revolved around the art
of hype, or overplugging. Their fear was overzealous marketing,
too much hard sell on too few records. Unfortunately, there was a
deeper problem: music quality lagged behind the improved tech-
nology. Most of the secondhand Tin Pan Alley material flooding
the thirties pop market was a washout. Swing was the new craze.
Swing didn't start to really move records (and record players) until
about 1937. Melody, not rhythm, ruled the radio.
Petrillo and the AFM openly longed for an equivalent to the
(relatively small) radio royalty received by the American Society
of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). Established in
1914, ASCAP protected the copyright interests of songwriters and

45
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publishers, the connected denizens of New York's famed Tin Pan

Alley. ASCAP had claimed a piece of the radio pie in 1922, but its
share fell off during the Depression.
Predictably, ASCAP turned a deaf ear to the jukebox music ex-
plosion in the thirties. That's when Broadcast Music Interna-
tional (BMI) stepped in. Formed in 1939, BMI emerged as
ASCAP's eager sibling, younger and hungrier. BMI existed to
service the needs of local radio stations and at the same time pro-
mote regional music. BMI also lifted the bar on song publishing:
the list opened up to small-label performers-that is, "hillbilly"
and black-who'd been excluded by ASCAP.
With Petrilloesque defiance, ASCAP overplayed its hand dur-
ing a radio royalty dispute. After two years of tense negotiations,
ASCAP finally pulled its songs from the radio. This strike lasted
ten long months in 1941, but ASCAP's supposed show of strength
wound up crippling the venerable publishers' group in the long
run. ASCAP was forced to settle with the radio networks for a
lower royalty rate. Meanwhile, in the absence of any ASCAP
songs on the air, BMI had picked up the slack.
By the tail end of the 1930s, recorded sound was on the re-
bound. Loudspeaker research conducted by the film industry (in
order to fill giant theaters with sound) was positively affecting the
phonograph field. Record players became smaller and more effi-
cient; records sounded better and lasted longer. Shellac, the main
ingredient in records, became extremely limited due to wartime
shortages and would eventually be replaced by vinyl, which was
lighter, more durable, and less expensive. But as the physical ma-
terial for recordings temporarily dried up with the onset of World
War II, so did America's musical resources.

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 War on Canned Music

After years of threats, in 1942 the impossible happened. James

Petrillo and American Federation of Musicians went on strike,
and recording virtually stopped for more than a year. The dispute,
over royalties, was eventually settled to the satisfaction of AFM's
tenacious leader. But Petrillo's long-range dreams were doomed:
financial restitution for jobs sacrificed to technology is a lost
cause. The postwar AFM recording boycott (in 1948) now seemed
a Pyrrhic victory at best. For most working musicians, some sort
of collaboration with technology was the only available means of
survival.
In 1942, while Petrillo raged, the FCC conducted a study and
concluded that music filled the airwaves three-quarters of the
time overall. At the same time, nearly half of all u.s. radio sta-
tions exclusively relied on music for their programming needs.
Then the impossible happened again. Record sales were
healthy in 1943, despite the shortage of material (shellac) and
labor (musicians). The industry stockpiled just enough records to
maintain the flow and stoke the fierce wartime need for enter-
tainment. Further diversion was provided by a danceable new
sound, complete with salty, sexy lyrics. Jukebox music increas-
ingly made itself known on the radio and pop charts.
Al Dexter, born Clarence Albert Poindexter, recorded a so-
called hillbilly novelty song called "Pistol Packin' Mama" in 1942.
Falling between World War II and the AFM ban, his shot at the
top of the pops looks like a textbook case of bad timing, yet once
again, appearances deceive. A supple tune and a swaying beat
made "Pistol Packin' Mama" the first country record to reach
number one on the charts. Dexter's humorous plaint sold more
than one million copies for the Okeh label. (Bing Crosby covered

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 PLAYBACK

"Mama" and walked away with his own million-seller on Decca.}

Dexter was an exponent of the western swing sound, a hip-
swaying mix of hillbilly twang and virtuoso jazz rhythm. He
freely admitted to borrowing from western swing icon Bob Wills;
in fact, "Pistol Packin' Mama" bears a close, almost fraternal re-
semblance to Wills's "Take Me Back to Tulsa." More important,
Dexter had also fronted an all-black band at one point, because
they were the best musicians available to him.
Improbably, a young record company arose in the midst of for-
mat war and confusion. Capitol Records, formed by the song-
writer Johnny Mercer and others, established a beachhead during
the wartime blitz. From the start, country- and blues-flavored ma-
terial sustained the Hollywood-based label. "Cow Cow Boogie"
by the singer Ella Mae Morse and pianist Freddie Slack-Capitol
102, its second release---climbed to the pop Top Ten in 1942. The
funky aura of the roadhouse and honky-tonk rattled the decorum
of Tin Pan Alley. Left-field flashes of brilliance such as "Cow
Cow Boogie" and "Pistol Packin' Mama" illuminated the path to-
ward a fresh music future. In the meantime, the world went to war
and even records became part of the American campaign.
Victory Disc Records, manufacturer of V-discs, was a
government-created company that existed for seven years in the
1940s. All told, Victory Disc issued around 900 of the 12-inch 78
rpm V-discs, and more than 2,700 songs were released in this for-
mat. Every style was represented: Louis Armstrong and Benny
Goodman, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and
Billie Holiday, the combined big bands of Jimmy and Tommy
Dorsey, Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony Or-
chestra. Even the musicians union and its strike on recording

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 War on Canned Music

couldn~t impede the war effort. Petrillo lifted the ban and let his
union's members record V-discs-just as long as they weren't re-
leased commercially. For this reason, few V-discs survived. Petrillo
had insisted that the discs be confiscated and destroyed after the
war. He never backed down.

49
chapter 3

GW ROAD TO HIGH FIDELITY

ONE AUTUMN NIGHT IN 1945, a dinner party is winding down in

Westport, Connecticut. We're eavesdropping at the home of
Mack and Helen Morgan. Musical accompaniment is Brahms's
Second Piano Concerto. Vladimir Horowitz tickles the ivories,
while Arturo Toscanini swings the baton. The only problem is
that one of the Morgans' guests (and good friend) happens to be
Dr. Peter Goldmark.

In the midst of listening to the first movement of this record, a

terrible thing happened. There was a click, silence, and strange
noises and then the movement continued. This happened again
and again. I counted twelve sides for the four movements and
eleven interruptions, of which eight were unplanned by
Brahms. So eight abominable times during the rendition I was
in turn enthralled and jarred, like having the phone ring at in-
tervals while you are making love. Gritting my teeth, I asked
my friends to play the concerto a second time only to relive the
horror.

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My initial interest in the LP arose out of my sincere hatred

of the phonograph. I am sure Thomas Edison never thought of
it just this way, but to me the phonograph was a machine that
learned how to talk but never learned how to make music.

Turning his attention to any engineering problem, Goldmark

employed the "systems" approach: a complex relationship is al-
ways viewed as a whole. If one element changes, then everything
else must change in order to maintain the overall integrity of the
system. "In the case of the LP I proposed to change a number of
things: amplifier, record material, shape of the groove, cartridge
and stylus, method of recording, the turntable drive and, I re-
motely hoped, the musical taste of the nation."
Speed was not the only determining factor in perfecting the
long-playing record. Needed to control and coordinate a combi-
nation of forces were wavelength of sound on record, cause of
distortion, speed of record, and length of playing time. The
length or duration of a record depends on three factors: disc di-
ameter, rpm, and the number of grooves per inch in the area tra-
versed by the needle. Writing in his autobiography Maverick In-
ventor, Goldmark implies that rpm is purely arbitrary. According
to his study, 90 percent of all classical works would fit into forty-
five minutes of playing time on a record, and 12 inches looked like
an eminently practical size, considering that it fit all the turnta-
bles of the time.

First of all, to provide more playing time, it was necessary to

change the number of grooves-which then necessitated
changing the speed, which, in turn, required offsetting the lim-
itation of frequency response which would have occurred. But

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 Low Road to High Fidelity

we wanted just the opposite: a record with better frequency re-

sponse, less distortion, and less noise.

When Goldmark presented his LP project to the president of

Columbia Records, Ed Wallerstein, he was politely told to stick to
television. Ever industrious, Goldmark was busy developing a
color TV simultaneously with his record work. Wallerstein's con-
descending remark touched off the chief engineer's "Hungarian
single-mindedness." He'd show this corporate lackey exactly
what his CBS labs were capable of doing. Logically enough, those
bulky radio transcription discs made a good starting point from
which to build a long-playing record.

The styli available were maybe cactus, or something else rea-

sonably sharp. So we had to miniaturize the groove in order to
avoid distortion, because when you slow a record down, that
means the linear speed toward the inside of the record would
have created unbearable distortion. So we had to change the ra-
dius of the stylus. We went from sapphire to diamond. But in
order for the tiny radii not to chew up the record, we had to re-
duce the pressure ... but then the stylus wouldn't stay in the
groove. So we had to introduce the old concept of compliance,
which meant that the stylus had to have a certain vertical elas-
ticity.
In other words, we had to develop a whole new science .. .
we had to design new motors and drives, new pick up arm .. .
we really had to tackle everything. Even microphones. So much
was hidden in the shellac. People didn't realize why the record
was noisy. So what we had to do was come up with a new ma-
terial.

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 PLAYBACK

In those days vinyl was used experimentally for records, but

it wasn't good enough, because the vinyl was expensive. But
when we decided that you could put the whole [musical] work
on a single record, then the cost of extra vinyl would be more
or less offset. To use less vinyl we had to make the records thin-
ner. But when the records were made thinner, you had trouble
with warping and you had to find ways of stabilizing the vinyl,
and that means different kinds of pressures.
Then you had a wonderful sound quality, but you didn't
have a microphone capable of creating wonderful sounds. We
found that the microphones were unable to reproduce what we
called the buzz of the violin. So we started a whole study in mi-
crophones-using pistol shots to create sharp sound waves. We
had to discover how to develop a new microphone, which
turned out to be the condenser microphone. We found out
what the Germans had already invented.
Then we turned to the loudspeaker, and had to develop an
instrument. I'm not sure it's known, but we came up with the
first so-called table hi-fi equipment; it was called a 360. We had
to show that you didn't need a tremendous instrument to pro-
duce outstanding quality. So we found out how you can pro-
duce loud speakers and good low frequencies in a small enclo-
sure by air venting and elastic suspension-out of which came
the hi-fi industry.

When it finally emerged from the labs, CBS held a company-

wide contest to name the new recording format. The entries nar-
rowed down to a short list of twenty-five, all rejected. After that,
Goldmark named his own invention, by accident. Offhandedly, he
spoke the acronym for long player, LP, in the presence of Col um-

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 Low Road to High Fidelity

bia Records' president. "That's it!" shouted Wallerstein. "That's

your name!"

World War II and

Full Frequency Range Recording

After the war, there was another turntable revolution. The disc it-
self was about to undergo a technological reinvention, sparking an
all-out format war between the corporate dynasties CBS and RCA.
Until 1948, records played at 78 rpm. Then the LP arrived.
Overall, wartime accelerates the pace of technological devel-
opment; the turbulent 1940s saw the rise of jet propulsion, atomic
power, the first computers, radar, and sound recording on mag-
netic tape. Tape recorders and superior microphones developed
during the war paved the way for high fidelity and stereo. Better-
sounding equipment and a new generation of music software--
the 33 1/3 rpm long-playing record (LP) and the 45 rpm single-
spread a new style of music to a new generation of listeners and
consumers, but the transition wasn't easy.
FM radio broadcasts had begun in the late thirties, stimulating
the appetite for high-quality sound reproduction among classical
music fans. Immediately after World War II, the hi-fi bug bit the
British, and wartime technology provided ample means to scratch
that itch.
As the war effort accelerated in 1940, English Decca developed
full frequency range recording (FFRR). An engineer named
Arthur Haddy devised the process, used to train sensor operators
to distinguish between British subs and German U-boats. Subma-
rine noises were recorded and stored on discs. These records

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needed to reproduce a far broader range of sound waves than the

standard 78s or transcription discs. Haddy and his squad of
British scientists achieved this result through a host of microim-
provements, such as cutting smaller grooves into a more durable
surface, using a better stylus for playback, and studying and re-
fining the record-duplication process. This multitiered or systems
approach relied on teamwork and consistency, as opposed to a
lone inventor pursuing the transcendent big breakthrough.
A number of British manufacturers-notably, Garrard-
turned to audio products when the demand for war goods dried
up. In the United States, a few companies followed suit. Fisher, for
example, marketed the first component receivers in 1945. Trading
on its wartime research and expertise, English Decca introduced
the Piccadilly model phonograph during the 1944 holiday shop-
ping season. For its time, this affordable player delivered great
sound and high-tech features: lightweight tonearm, magnetic
pickup, and a sapphire stylus. It sounded especially strong with
Decca's new high-quality FFRR discs.
The Piccadilly never caught on here, interestingly, because it
wasn't sold in the States. But FFRR records did, and as imports
they caught on with high-end classical fans known as the carriage
trade. Even at a premium price, however, the Piccadilly turntables
were never imported.
"Some deal must have been made," speculate British authors
Read and Welch in From Tinfoil to Stereo.

It was expedient to deny Americans superior equipment at

lower prices because they were willing to pay more for less ef-
ficient equipment. The introduction of the LP record by Co-
lumbia and others in 1948 may well have been a calculated ma-

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 Low Road to High Fidelity

neuver to dispose of the threat of the European invasion, rather

than just a logical step forward in the domestic competition for
business.

While the nefarious details of this "deal" will never be known,

the precedent set here is obvious. Manipulation of the market-
place, by stopping or staggering the commercial acceptance of
new technology, became the game plan followed by the entertain-
ment industry ever since. The fact that this strategy usually back-
fires or often achieves an unintended result makes no difference.
Success in this business means figuring out how to harness the
force of technological change rather than offering passive resis-
tance--and this doesn't occur without a struggle.
The crucial technological development of the World War II era
that would shape the phonograph's future was tape recording,
and it began in Germany. Overall, Germany outpaced the Allies
in sound research and its military application. Two German busi-
nesses, the electrical manufacturer AEG and chemical concern I.
G. Farben, joined to produce the first high-quality tape recorder,
the Magnetophon.
The Nazi regime relied on information technology and propa-
ganda; Hitler controlled and seduced the populace with a con-
stantly broadcast barrage of hate speech. High-quality tape
recorders helped get the message across. Throughout the war,
Hitler's omnipresence on German airwaves vexed Allied radio
monitors who listened in; at times he seemed to be in two places
at once: maybe working with a sound-alike double? Speeches
broadcast from two distant cities-Vienna and Munich, say-
would occur almost back to back, and both would sound live.
The answer came at the end of the war, when u.s. troops raided

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several German military radio stations and found the secret

weapon: several Magnetophon recorders. These machines were
brought back and their vacuum tubes and electric motors closely
examined. When fed through two tape heads, a simple strip of
paper tape coated with a fine layer of brown iron oxide repro-
duces sound nearly as well as the most advanced disc phonograph
system.
By the late 1940s magnetic tape recording caught on with u.s
record companies. Tape was quickly adopted as the initial step in
the recording process. In the studio, recording on magnetic tape
superseded direct recording on blank acetate discs. The advan-
tages were dramatic: tape could run uninterrupted for thirty min-
utes, it could be played back immediately and, most important, it
could be edited. Various segments of tape could be spliced to-
gether in perfect continuity, mistakes could be erased and effects
(such as echo chamber) could be added. Music on tape could be
meticulously worked over before being transferred to disc. At the
same time, the flexibility and speed of using magnetic tape made
the recording process cheaper and more accessible.

Enter the LP

The gauntlet was thrown at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New

York City. On a summer day in 1948, Columbia Records launched
its new record format with a press conference. The long-playing
microgroove record, or LP, was pitched as a technological break-
through, an advance on all fronts. The diameter of this disc-12
inches-was the only nod to convention. Spinning at 33 1/3 rpm,
the plastic disc could fit twenty-five minutes of sound per side.

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 Low Road to High Fidelity

The long player lived up to its name. This was merely five or six
times the duration of a standard 78. Columbia's advertisements
guaranteed the LP as "nonbreakable." These thin discs were made
of black plastic, and vinylite or vinyl replaced the traditional shel-
lac mix. (Union Carbide Corporation introduced vinyl resins in
the 1930s.) Since the vinyl disc required a more sensitive stylus
with a lighter tracking weight, it wouldn't wear out as fast as the
earlier model.
Before Columbia and Goldmark, there had been attempts at
extending the length of the record. Edison had offered, in limited
quantities, a long-playing version of his Diamond Disc in the
1920s. And RCA Victor briefly floated a 3Y/3 rpm disc in 1931.
Around the same time, Bell developed an experimental 10-inch
LP, intended for use on film sound tracks. Victor too released a
limited number of long-playing 78 recordings, mostly classical of-
ferings headed by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Or-
chestra. The cardboard package containing these multiple-disc
sets became known as an album. The name stuck, but the sound
quality stunk. It was a setback, inferior to the appalling cackle of
the 78.
But 33 1/3 is no magic number. "There is nothing holy about this
speed," wrote Goldmark. The old transcription discs for film
soundtracks ran at 33 1/3 rpm, because that speed enabled the
background music in theaters to run as long as the standard
movie reel. "I thought the transcription disc was a good starting
point from which to build a long-playing record," continued Gold-
mark, "though I want to clear up an erroneous impression ... that
the speed is the essential fact in long playing. It isn't."
Columbia Records hyped Goldmark's microgroove LP as the
new industry standard. For classical music fans, it no doubt repre-

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sented a great leap forward. An entire symphony could now be con-

tained on one disc, a full movement heard without interruption.
The advent of the LP unleashed an avalanche of classical releases.
Shrewdly anticipating the long player, Columbia had been
recording duplicate masters of each session on large acetate
blanks. By 1948, they had a backlog of noise-free recordings that
were readily transferable to the longer format. Columbia issued a
list of 101 LP titles at the Waldorf-Astoria event: the initial cata-
logue included three entire operas (Hansel and Gretel, La Travi-
ata, La Boheme), authoritative recordings of seven out of nine
Beethoven symphonies, and so on.
Though classical dominated the early LP market, pop collec-
tions from Frank Sinatra, Dinah Shore, Harry James, Xavier
Cugat, and others were also dropped into the mix. With an eye to-
ward hardware compatibility, Columbia struck a clever deal with
the Phi1co Company. The new long-playing records could spin on
any phonograph fitted with a Phi1co adapter for just $29.95! The
"adapter" plugged into existing home phonographs. It consisted
of a turntable with cartridge and stylus, all set to accommodate
the new format. Enclosed in curved plastic, the units earned the
name clamshell. No wonder the LP caught on. In the first year of
release, sales of "long-playing microgroove recordings" topped $3
million. Columbia's new format was up and running.

Groove Theory

What was so great about these microgrooves anyway?

First, consider the recording process at that time. It all begins
with a microphone. The microphone collects sound vibrations,

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then converts them into electric currents. Next, the amplifier

magnifies those electrical currents and transfers them to the
recording head. There the electric currents are converted into me-
chanical movements: the vibrations of a recording stylus. The
wiggling stylus cuts a wavy pattern or groove into a rotating disc.
This lacquer or wax plate becomes the template or master disc.
The grooves cut in the master disc accurately follow the shape
of the sound waves, visible under a microscope. The high-pitched
waves are bunched together and low-pitched waves are spread
apart. (As his hearing deteriorated, Edison would issue forth mu-
sical evaluations after inspecting his finished cylinder or disc with
a microscope.)
Sound is reproduced when a phonograph needle drags through
the grooves. Riding across the grooves produces vibrations in the
needle, duplicating the pitch and amplitude of the original. The
cartridge picks up those vibrations, converting them back into
electric signals. The signals are transferred to an amplifier and
then liberated via a loudspeaker. Voila!
Before Goldmark, the physical means of recreating sound
hadn't been fundamentally altered since the Jazz Age. And the 78
rpm record itself had barely progressed from the format of the
1920s. The opportunity for invention beckoned. Technology was
about to catch up with music.

The Long View

It's a classic American success story: the immigrant made good.

Peter Goldmark was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1906. Edu-
cated in Berlin and Vienna, he earned his doctorate in physics

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from the University of Vienna. (His mother, significantly, was an

avid musician.) Entering the United States in 1933, he quickly
made his name as an engineer. Initially turned down by RCA,
Goldmark was hired by CBS in 1936. Before he masterminded the
LP record, Goldmark conducted pioneering work in color televi-
sion, and several years after, he developed one of the first video-
cassette systems, Electronic Video Recording (EVR). In the course
of his career, Goldmark held over 160 patents.
Yet he never collected royalties on his most profitable inven-
tion. The LP patents accrued to the corporation, not the inventor.
Speaking in interviews, Dr. Goldmark never comes across as bit-
ter or envious. He always corrects the assumption that he must've
struck it rich with the LP, as somebody surely did. He always
claimed to relish the complimentary LPs he received in lieu of a
royalty check from CBS every month. Perhaps he was being sar-
donic while at the same time acknowledging the price of corpo-
rate support.
Goldmark enjoyed a great run at CBS, thirty-six years. He
quickly assumed command of the research labs and embarked on
his quest. Until the end of that term, Goldmark was given a wide
berth, not to mention financial backing, for his experimentation.
He had the luxury to pursue dead ends and learn from mistakes.
In 1954, the maverick inventor even installed a custom-designed
portable phonograph in the glove compartment of a spanking-
new Ford Thunderbird. Yet the microgroove LP stands as Gold-
mark's masterpiece. He referred to it as a piece of pure technol-
ogy: invention and development combined.
Peter Goldmark retired from CBS in the late 1960s and set up
shop on his own. After years of off-and-on sparring with CEO
William Paley, he became bitterly disappointed by the company's

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lack of support for his EVR videocassette. Clearly, CBS Television

felt threatened by the nascent format. Paley ultimately squelched
the project. This vote of no confidence convinced the headstrong
inventor once and for all that his boss utterly lacked vision. Gold-
mark maintained the long view on technology to the end of his
days.
"The disc and tape will exist side by side," he predicted in
1973.

Neither one of them seems to be replacing the other one. The

disc is convenient for choosing a certain selection-which a lot
of people prefer. There are ways you could put a whole library
on laser disk ... laser beams. The only problem is, it wouldn't
be profitable. People will expect to pay the same for a laser disc
that they do for a single piece of music.

Mixing sixties idealism with his pragmatic engineer's outlook,

Goldmark presented himself as a futurist in his post-CBS years.
His brave new world was both plugged-in and bucolic. He pitched
a technological utopian community of his design. This New
Rural Society, as he billed it, in many respects foretells the ex-
urban upper-middle-class neighborhood of the twenty-first cen-
tury. Strangely enough, Goldmark's dream world closely resem-
bles our nation today: satellite communities united by
communications technology. According to Goldmark's plan, most
people would live and work in the same place, a not-so-far-out re-
sponse to sixties urban blight, as it turns out.
"One communications satellite in orbit over the United States
could take in all of the important sports, cultural and entertain-
ment events of the cities and make them available to every rural

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center in the country," declared Goldmark. (At that point, cable

TV was only a rumor.) "Ninety-nine percent of people never see
a concert, or a live performance of a play or a ballet ... isn't this
much better than not seeing it at all?"
Peter Goldmark died in an automobile accident in December
1977. His passing came exactly 100 years after the invention of
the phonograph, the same month that Edison applied for his
patents. In terms of music, the magnificence of Goldmark's
legacy cannot be overstated. The birth and development of the LP
matched the astonishing ascent of the baby boomers step by step.
Originally aimed at Broadway and opera lovers, the album format
connected with successive generations of young pop listeners.
The LP-and the technology that made it possible-stands as the
most enduring cultural legacy bequeathed to baby boomers by
their parents.

Battle of the Speeds

William Paley of CBS engaged in an eternal tug-of-war with his

crosstown nemesis, David Sarnoff of RCA. In the twenty-first
century, what remains of Columbia belongs to Sony (japan),
while Nipper (the dog of Victor fame) now answers to Bertels-
mann (Germany). Back in 1948, CBS executives were sweating the
competition before they introduced the vaunted LP record. How
would their sworn foes at RCA respond? Shrewdly, Paley extended
a preemptive invitation to Sarnoff. Why not join forces? Surely, a
joint venture between CBS and RCA would enhance-if not en-
sure-the new format's success.

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Once Peter Goldmark had ironed out the technical bugs, the
head of RCA was respectfully summoned to CBS headquarters.
Sarnoff dutifully attended the LP demonstration along with a
team of RCA engineers. Paley and his entourage of suits looked
on as Dr. Goldmark conducted a theatrical comparison between
a 78 rpm record and the new long-playing format. The scene re-
sembled one of Edison's tone-tests, only this time without the
human participant. It was a command performance for the mas-
ter inventor, and his revolutionary record lived up to its advance
billing. The imperious top man at RCA, CBS's biggest competitor,
was duly impressed. "Sarnoff was out of his chair," wrote Gold-
mark. "The effect was electrifying."
When Sarnoff called back in a few days, however, the unthink-
able happened again. He turned the deal down flat.
Why? Perhaps that failed attempt in 1931 explains it. In retro-
spect, RCA Victor's response to the LP qualifies as perverse.
Rather than jump on the bandwagon, in January 1949, RCA
brought out its own innovation: the 45 rpm microgroove record.
The RCA engineers assigned a code name to the 45 rpm proj-
ect: Madame X. The sound quality was equal to the LP. Unfor-
tunately, the duration of the 45 rpm disc ran just as long as a con-
ventional 78, four minutes, tops. Measuring only 7 inches in
diameter, 45 rpm discs used a large center hole, so playing 45s on
a regular turntable required a larger spindle. This was intended
to accelerate the record-changing time--"instantaneous," ac-
cording to the hype. Yet by Goldmark's stopwatch measure, ex-
acting to be sure, the music-to-music pause on RCA's new mini-
discs lasted for eight agonizing seconds. Classical music was
doomed on 45s.

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Despite this failing, RCA soldiered on. In the 45 rpm format,

longer works (such as symphonies) came packaged in multidisc
albums that supposedly "fit on your shelf." These 45 rpm records
played on a special unit, much like the Philco clamshell. Offered
at $12.95, these plug-in turntables came fitted with "the world's
fastest record changer." A larger center space, of course, made
45s impossible to play on the same turntable as a 33 1/3 record, and
this may well be the real story behind the donut hole.
Yet even faster record changing was probably cold comfort to
a music-crazed public suddenly faced with a confusing, contra-
dictory array of choices. This format war was a maddening free-
for-all. Lasting only a year, it caused not only havoc with con-
sumers but considerable damage to the industry. In the short run,
everybody lost something in the battle of the speeds. In 1947, the
value of the retail record business was estimated at $204 million.
By 1949, that figure had slipped to $157,875,000. Confusion over
competing formats had to have had something to do with it. An-
archy reigned over the recording industry, at least for awhile.
"One speed is all you need!" Columbia's hype proclaimed, fur-
ther fanning the flames. During one CBS-sponsored promotion,
Sam Goody stores in New York City "gave away" the adapters-
with a $25 purchase of LPs. Even today, it doesn't sound like such
a bad deal.
RCA spent $5 million on their ad campaign. But by 1950, they
were already making 331J3 rpm LPs as well as 45s. According to
legend, Arturo Toscanini pressured Sarnoff and RCA to adapt the
LP format. Apparently, the great conductor didn't appreciate the
interruptions any more than Peter Goldmark did.
One year after RCA caved on the LP, Columbia began produc-
ing 45s.

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Decca and Mercury gravitated toward the LP format. Capitol

hedged its bets by making records in all three formats: In 1950,
the Los Angeles-based upstart sent forth a Hollywood String
Quartet release on 33 1/3, 45, and 78.
At the same time, London's EMI Records were repulsed by the
battle across the sea. The British firm vowed to stick with the 78
format, at least until affairs proceeded in more seemly fashion. In
the event that it did switch formats, EMI promised to alert the
British buying public and even give six months' notice. Two years
later, this is precisely what happened. Predictably, the rest of Eu-
rope fell like dominoes: France, Spain, Germany. Long-playing
records became the dominant format. Even the USSR State Music
Trust issued an LP catalogue, in 1953. Though other record com-
panies adopted the LP format, one by one they picked up the 45
format too and applied it to nonclassical releases-that is, popu-
lar music.
Rebuilt at two speeds, the phonograph industry thus turned
into a pop music machine during the second half of the 1950s.
Writing in The American Popular Music Business in the 20th Cen-
tury, Russell Sanjek summarizes the situation with biblical wis-
dom. "The manufacturers of phonographs ... made a Solomon-
like decision, and used both [speeds]."
As the battle of the speeds wound down, Goldmark and his as-
sociates developed a turnaround stylus with dual speed. This gave
CBS the advantage of marketing a universal instrument: a
turntable that played at either speed. Hardware compatability al-
lows for coexistence between rival software formats, once the for-
mat wars are over.
And coexistence was indeed possible. By 1953, RCA had sold
ten million 45 rpm phonographs. The shorter duration and higher

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quality of the 45 rpm record was perfectly suited to pop songs.

That market had grown somewhat stagnant in the late forties; as
the swing generation grew up, musical tastes changed, and the
cost of maintaining a big band grew prohibitive. This downturn
wouldn't last long. The payoff would come a few years later with
the rise of rock 'n' roll and RCA's recording superstar, Elvis Pres-
ley.
The 45 rpm format turned out to be a wise short-term invest-
ment. Phonograph sales grew exponentially from 1952 to 1954,
though they still lagged below the highs of 1947. Perhaps the bat-
tle of the speeds represents a healthy bout of competition, the
technological version of an adolescent rite of passage. It was
surely a bumpy transition.

Hi-Fi at Home

The first LP to reach one million sales was the original-cast

recording of Oklahoma! Decca released its hit version of this
Rodgers and Hammerstein musical in 1949. Sales had reached fif-
teen million by 1958. The advent of the LP format touched off a
craze for albums of Broadway and movie music. Kiss Me Kate and
South Pacific followed Oklahoma. The South Pacific movie
soundtrack from 1958 became the highest-selling LP of the
decade.
Broadway soundtracks offered continuity in addition to a
catered menu of catchy songcraft. That consistent quality lifted
those fifties original-cast LPs above their pop competition. Most
early long players barely deserve the term album; these LPs are

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motley grab bags featuring a couple of hits tucked away in moth-

balls. When Frank Sinatra switched from Columbia to Capitol in
the mid 1950s, all that changed in a hurry. Working with such
arrangers as Nelson Riddle and Billy May, Sinatra issued a golden
thread of thematic LPs: In the Wee Small Hours, Songs for
Swingin' Lovers, and the masterpiece Frank Sinatra Sings for
Only the Lonely.
Freedom from the 78 format meant more room for improvisa-
tion. Jazz musicians thrived on LPs. Comedy records-later
called stand-up, or spoken-word albums-enjoyed a commercial
vogue at the end of the 1950s. The wry and buttoned-down Bob
Newhart watched no doubt bemused as his album releases
climbed to the top of the pop charts in 1960. Even the scathing
Lenny Bruce was able to record a (non obscene) series of LPs.
The acceptance of the LP format also spurred the rapid growth
of the hi-fi component industry. As more sound was crammed
into a record's grooves, more electronic equipment was required
to coax it out. Audiophiles began to multiply. Special records had
to be manufactured to fulfill their peculiar needs. Mercury an-
nounced its line of Living Presence LPs. London (American
Decca) rightfully boasted of its FFRR (Full Frequency Range
Recording) LPs. Columbia featured its own futuristic-sounding
360 Sound, while RCA dipped into the history books for New Or-
thophonic High Fidelity. An LP bearing one of these imprints is
likely to contain a bombastic performance of "Also Sprach
Zarathustra" or the "1812 Overture."
In the long run, everybody gained something from the battle of
the speeds as well. The rapidly growing number of phonographs
in American homes created a solid technological base for another

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musical revolution. Before ambitious long-playing records and

elaborate stereo phonographs ushered in the golden age of the
rock album, however, something more elemental had to occur. A
confluence of catchy 45 rpm singles and cheap transistor radios
gave birth to rock 'n' roll.

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 chapter 4

r;;-NYTAIL RIBBONS, POPSICLES,

~ND PEANUT BRIDLE

High school is where the middle-aged businessman hap-

pened. He was a manager, agent, producer, disc jockey
or general hustler.
-Nik Cohn, Rock from the Beginning

THIS IS A TALE OF TWO DJs. One couldn't have existed without

the other. Between them, they remade popular music and the busi-
ness surrounding it. One claimed to have invented rock 'n' roll,
the other discovered a gold mine. Spinning records on the
turntable led to bigger and (sometimes) better things for both.
Alan Freed pursued the standard spin-offs: promoting concerts
and portraying himself in movies. Ultimately felled by scandal, he
became a legend, a symbol of rock 'n' roll's rebel spirit, the man
who spread the word. What Dick Clark did with rock 'n' roll and
television on American Bandstand was to forge a natural connec-
tion by finding the right audience. It was absurd, simple beauty:
Clark played records while teenage couples danced. On that foun-
dation, he proceeded to construct an empire.

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Both men were called before Congress to testify on corrup-

tion-payola-in the record and radio business. In the end, one
man was ruined while the other emerged unscathed. The so-called
payola scandal was a sidetrack for Dick Clark, a temporary set-
back.
Payola equals pay plus Victrola. Actually, the practice-guar-
anteeing airplay for records with bribes and coveted favors-had
been around nearly as long as the Nipper logo. In the Tin Pan
Alley era, freelance salesmen known as song pluggers worked the
music publishers just like independent promoters service radio
stations today. Inevitably, in the bad old days, cash would change
hands. By the 1950s, the practice got out of hand. Indeed, what
happened was that the practice got organized: A few extra
records and maybe a hi-fi set on holidays for a DJ turned into
regular cash outlays. The pay-for-play racket ran regularly, like a
clock-or rather, like payoffs to the mob for protection. This
under-the-table bonanza erupted just as rock 'n' roll hit its free-
wheeling stride in the fifties. The double whammy of the devil's
music and dubious business practices triggered a congressional
investiga tion.
Today, Dick Clark is still around. So are his musical progeny,
the teen idols, still singing their disposable tunes and releasing
hour-long CDs of hit plus filler. Only music television, that glow-
ing cross-media contradiction, has changed beyond recognition
since the days of American Bandstand. Or has it?
The A side of this story has to be Dick Clark. His role is the
prospector, pitchman, master of ceremonies, survivor. His broad-
cast manner is calm and reassuring. He recognized rock 'n' roll as
a deep and previously untapped source of enrichment. Dick Clark
discovered the booming buying power of teenagers, and built a

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multimedia marketplace that still thrives today. The B side is Alan

Freed. His role is the unruly creative force, the musical innovator
and tragic hero. On the air, he's in your face, brash and stimulat-
ing. He mesmerized a young, white audience merely by spinning
records-those by black R&B groups. Alan Freed may not have
"invented" rock 'n' roll, but he nurtured and furthered it.
As myth has it, Freed visited Leo Mintz's record shop in Cleve-
land one day in 1951, while working at WJW. There Freed saw
white teenagers browsing the R&B racks and dancing. Clearly, he
fell in love with the new sounds: Red Prysock, Big Al Sears, and
Ivory Joe Hunter were his favorites. But those bin flippers were
most likely black, according to Freed's biographer, John A. Jack-
son. The white audience, and notoriety, came later.
To many ears, pioneering DJ Alan Freed went so far as to em-
ulate and flat-out imitate the fast-rapping style of the black R&B
DJ s. The barking Moondog wasn't alone. There were black-
sounding white DJ s on many R&B stations during the fifties, in-
cluding "Daddy" Gene Nobles and "John R" Richbourg in Mem-
phis, Hunter Hancock in Los Angeles, "Poppa Stoppa" (Clarence
Hayman) in New Orleans, and more. And they were popular with
blacks and a growing number of young whites.
During the rise of rock ,n' roll, even before Dick Clark, Amer-
ican Bandstand capitalized on teenage dance crazes, from the in-
nocuous bunny hop to the mild hip-shaking R&B-derived steps
such as bop and stroll. With laserlike precision, each Bandstand-
endorsed dance trend was tied to a custom-built song on 45, often
released by Philly-based labels such as Cameo-Parkway.
Overall, record sales quadrupled in the years following the
war, jumping from roughly $100 million in 1945 to $500 million
in 1958. After World War II, there was an explosion of R&B

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records on independent labels, so Alan Freed had much to be en-

thused about-and a great deal of records from which to choose.
The best sounding of these came from regional establishments
such as Atlantic in New York (R&B), Chess in Chicago (blues
and R&B), King in Cincinnati (both R&B and country), and
thousands of local one-shots. Thanks to the technological ad-
vances of the 1940s and the advent of tape recording, the studio
became accessible to all in the fifties. Producing a cheap record
was easy; getting it heard, however, was more complicated-but
not impossible.
Alan Freed hotly denied the payola charges in 1959. "If I've
helped somebody, I'll accept a nice gift, but I won't take a dime to
plug a record. I'd be a fool to; I'd be giving up control of my pro-
gram." That same year, Dick Clark offered a different line of de-
fense. He didn't need the money; the sly Bandstand host was
working every available angle. "I proceeded to get into talent
management, music publishing, record pressing, label making,
distribution, domestic and foreign rights, motion pictures, show
promotions and teenage merchandising."
One established way of paying gratitude was to give DJ s some
of the publishing rights to a song. It was a wheel of fortune that
successful DJ s-including Alan Freed-kept right on spinning
until the payola scandal forced them to stop (or at least be dis-
creet). In 1955, Freed "cowrote," or got a cut of, the rock 'n' roll
classic "Maybellene" by Chess artist Chuck Berry. Ironically, it
was a big hit in its original (black) version, eclipsing any cover at-
tempt. According to Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon, Band-
stand's Clark earned his cowriting credits with canny commer-
cial input. The guy knew how to not only bait a hook but also
reel it in.

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The scandal represented the last stand of Tin Pan Alley against
the rising tide of a new popular music. It was essentially a grudge
match: The American Society of Composers, Authors and Pub-
lishers against Broadcast Music International. ASCAP was a tra-
ditional publishing organization of old-time songwriters; BM!
was a postwar upstart publisher of rock 'n' roll, R&B, and coun-
try artists. (A DJ such as Freed would have relied on BMI-licensed
records almost exclusively.) ASCAP accused BMI of using payola
to achieve market dominance-and even worse, foisting inferior,
offensive music onto innocent ears.
In March 1958, a station owner named Todd Storz held a
weekend convention at a hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, for radio
and record people. Mitch Miller, then head of artists and reper-
toire for Columbia Records, gave a hectoring speech. The re-
spected record man lectured the radio men, claiming they'd "ab-
dicated" their birthright. According to Miller, the choice of
records they played were strictly for the rabble-"the eight to
fourteen year olds, the pre-shave crowd that makes up 12 % of the
population and zero percent of its buying power, once you elimi-
nate the ponytail ribbons, Popsicles and peanut brittle." Over
time, the music business would stop singing along with Mitch and
start milking that audience for all it was worth.
In the wake of the TV quiz show scandal and investigation,
Congress decided to dig in. A probe was announced on Novem-
ber 16, 1959. House Subcommittee Legislative Oversight Hear-
ings began in February 1958. Dozens of DJs testified; both Clark
and Freed appeared and faced the music.
Before the actual House hearings began, the payola investiga-
tions had already kicked up a lot of dirt. Alan Freed got fired
from WABC when he refused to sign a generic in-house disclaimer

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about taking payola. All the on-air employees that could possibly
be tainted had to sign-save one. Dick Clark cut his own deal.
Ultimately, Clark was required to divest many of his holdings.
As to whether he showed favoritism toward certain recordings
while programming Bandstand, none could be certain. During the
hearings, Clark acknowledged that he had partial copyright to
150 or more songs, including many that had been played on Band-
stand. Was it a conflict of interest, or more like a convergence of
interest?
Payola in its classic, crudest form-"bribes, booze and broads"
in addition to drugs-went underground. It even flourished again
for a time in the go-go, greed-is-good 1980s. But the lasting effect
of the payola scandal has been an insidious diminishing of the
DJ s musical role on the radio.

The 45 rpm Revolution

Victory in a format war doesn't eliminate the losing technology

completely; instead, the other way of doing things often settles
into a niche, where it can generate profits for a long time to come.
Gradually, the deadly competition mutated into a complex and
complimentary relationship. Radio and record players became in-
terdependent, and the rise of rock 'n' roll depended on both medi-
ums. Just as radio depended on records to fill airtime, the record
industry came to depend on radio for exposure and promotion.
The flip side of high fidelity was a 45 rpm revolution. Though
the 33 1/3 LP won the battle of the speeds, the losing 7-inch format
found its killer application in the aftermath. The teenage rock 'n'

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roll explosion was born of R&B and country & western delivered
on 7-inch 45 rpm records, nurtured by radio disc jockeys, and pro-
pelled by transistor radios and portable record players. The rise of
rock 'n' roll neatly coincided with a demographic growth spurt
now known as the baby boom; this mixed message of radio and
records and ubiquity of styles-a constant drumbeat-subtly
worked against the prevailing atmosphere of racial segregation,
subverting it from within.
The requirements of radio shaped the form of the rock 'n' roll
single, and as radio lost its mass audience to television during the
1950s, the booming sound of rock 'n' roll offered radio access to
a new demographic. Not just the new (white) youth market, but
ethnic listeners too.
By 1954, 700 radio stations were addressing the black audience.
Anyone could tune in, of course, and in a few years, it seemed like
everyone did-everyone under thirty, anyway. Independent sta-
tions were gradually replacing the big radio networks; they effi-
ciently serviced the R&B and country markets, spinning records
from a growing number of independent record companies. Fa-
mously, Atlantic Records made its name with genre-defining R&B
and soul out of New York City, nominally still with us today in
conglomerated form. Regional record companies specialized in
local delicacies from New Orleans (Minit), Houston (Duke), and
Los Angeles (Modern, Alladin). Chess pumped Chicago blues,
and Cincinnati's King covered the bases with Cowboy Copas and
Hank Ballard. Regional specialties reached broad audiences
through radio. So-called minority tastes became majority fare.
The major labels-RCA, Columbia, Decca, and Capitol-
didn't turn a deaf ear to this trend. They responded with cover

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versions; the act of white musicians rerecording successful songs

by blacks had been a tradition since the 1890s. Releasing main-
stream versions of specialty-market hits was a cheap and efficient
ploy for the big companies. This practice wasn't strictly racial, ei-
ther; as country (formerly hillbilly) music boomed alongside
R&B, the likes of Patti Page and Frankie Laine delivered de-
twanged covers of the originals. The proliferation of cheaper
recording technology led to a flood of copycat records. The act of
mechanical reproduction reinforced the art (and commerce) of
the cover versions.
One classic example is "Open the Door, Richard," a vaudeville
number identified with the performer "Dusty" Fletcher. Varia-
tions on this coming-horne-drunk routine had been in circulation
since at least the early 1930s. Dusty released his version of
"Richard" on National in 1947. He wasn't alone. One dozen com-
peting cover versions appeared during that year. Eventually, Count
Basie (on Columbia) and Louis Jordan (on Decca) both rode the
song onto the pop charts-another key crossover along the lines
of Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" back in the twenties. Bob Dylan
and the Band even alluded to "Richard" on The Basement Tapes.
The late forties cover version phenomenon reinforces the me-
chanical, repetitive nature of recording. Quantity begins to over-
rule quality. Popular singers now became interchangeable; surely
songs must be next.
By 1950, recorded music was a staple of radio broadcasts, but
it wasn't yet a purely automated process. A human being was re-
quired to play the records-and as soon as people began to pub-
licly manipulate the turntable, the far-flung jumble of American
popular music began its spectacular mutation into rock 'n' roll.

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 Ponytail Ribbons, Popsicles, and Peanut Brittle

The Pancake Flippers

At first, the turntable hands belonged to bland announcers or bla-

tant hacks: musicians union flunkies inserted in pseudo-jobs deri-
sively referred to as pancake flippers. Gradually these short-order
servers expanded their role and repertoire by not just changing
records but choosing them. The pancake flipper became the disc
jockey, a succulent handle spun by a Variety reporter in 1941
(record jockey had appeared in 1940). Soon thereafter, an anony-
mous shadow morphed into a man of power and influence in the
music industry.
Disc jockeys could even rise above their stations. On the way
up, the DJ functioned as tastemaker, trendsetter, gatekeeper, and
money grabber. The very best DJs elevated the act of selecting
and presenting records and turned pancake flipping into an art
form. When the radio Dj's job regressed to a semiautomated form
of announcing, by the late 1960s, a new breed of creative
turntable jockeys emerged in the discotheques and on the streets.
Radio was the genesis of mass communications; it also gave
birth to mass marketing. The commercial heyday of rock 'n' roll
DJs heralds the enduring reign of the Top 4D-and the develop-
ment of a vast, previously untapped commercial resource, the
teenage pop music market. Portable record players, 45 rpm sin-
gles, and transistor radios provide the driving technological forces
behind this commercial revolution. But the disc jockey's story
stretches back well before the late 1950s.
Martin Block must be declared the first true recognizable radio
DJ, as we know it today. He negotiated a tricky double role, that
of self-styled musical maven and master salesman. From February

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3, 1935, to 1950, his program The Make-Believe Ballroom en-

chanted listeners to New York's WNEW.
Simultaneously, The Lucky Strike Hit Parade (also known as
Your Hit Parade) aired every Saturday on the nationwide NBC
Red Network. Between the two, a new standard of pop music suc-
cess was set. It was an efficient little system, a way for radio to
program records and measure popular tastes at the same time.
The hit parade format may not exactly have been scientific, but it
certainly opened the new medium for selling pop music.
Block prided himself not just on musical knowledge but also
on the power of his pitch. He took credit for coining a couple of
the classic telegraphic tobacco pitches-LSMFT (Lucky Strike
Means Fine Tobacco) and ABC (Always Buy Chesterfields). One
year he even sold refrigerators, as self-generated legend has it,
during an upstate snowstorm. On the air, Block really would
make-believe. Rather than tally a Top 10, he pretended to be a
bandleader, addressing the listeners personally in his own
crooner's timbre.
Martin Block also pioneered the still-lucrative practice of
radio syndication. In 1948, he earned nearly $2 million for selling
Make-Believe Ballroom to thirty stations around the country. Six
years later, he signed a million-dollar contract with ABC. Even
though Block missed the boat on rock 'n' roll, his national success
with such a simple format set a precedent, one that still shapes
what we hear on the air today. Music sells the product, and the DJ
sells the sounds.
James Caesar Petrillo fought in vain. Canned music dominated
radio programming in the early fifties. Todd Storz distilled the
loose hit parade formula into a taut, foolproof format: the Top~

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40. Before that, radio offered a hodgepodge of musical styles and

programming. Storz owned a number of stations around the
country, including the first station to exclusively devote itself to
pop music, Omaha's KOWH in Nebraska, beginning in 1949.
With all the copycat and cover records floating around, the Top
40 programs performed a vital function: choosing the "best" ver-
sion and ignoring the others. The Top 40 stations didn't only play
the hits, they fostered an illusion of selectivity, in essence recreat-
ing the jukebox effect. Storz built the framework in the early
1950s during the dull reign of smooth pop singers such as Frankie
Laine and Kitty Kallen. The structure was in place.
When rock came along, the Top 40 rolled over. In 1955, the
Storz-owned WHB in Kansas City became the first station to play
all rock 'n' roll, and rock-dominated Top 40 programming spread
across the country.
More accessible than a jukebox, Top 40 radio subverted the
very notions of choice and musical taste. Top 40 radio stations
substituted the DJ's (in reality, the programmer's) assumption in
place of consumers' selection. The pancake flippers took over for
the coin droppers.
After the dust of the payola scandal settled, radio D Js returned
to merely flipping pancakes and running their mouths. Even as
they lost the power to pick and choose records, the DJs began to
wield a different brand of power: utter verbal anarchy. Taking a
page from the mad-rapping R&B jockeys of the fifties, your aver-
age Top 40 DJ of the mid sixties was a helium-voiced microphone
fiend. He sputtered away in rapid-fire volleys that crackled audi-
bly across the tinny, echo-laden frequencies of a transistor radio.
Breathless, hypnotizing, hysteria inducing, his between-song pat-

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ter must be considered an early form of rap. Unlike the synco-

pated flow of a late sixties jock, it seemed to exist in a separate
sphere from the music it accompanied.
The jocks used songs as a springboard into the ozone. Every
market had its exemplars, but the king of kamikaze Top 40 had
to be New York City's Murray Kaufmanns, a.k.a. Murray the K.
Like all disc jockeys, Murray hopped from station to station.
His peak was on WINS in the mid 1960s, when he famously in-
gratiated himself with the Beatles at their first U.S. press confer-
ence and proceeded to ride their coattails to something resem-
bling fame and fortune. Dubbing himself "the Fifth Beatie,"
Murray focused his radio show and amphetamine verbal shtick
almost exclusively on the Fab Four. Somewhat aghast, New
Journalist Tom Wolfe fired off a famous 1965 profile of Murray
the K.

The radio is now something people listen to while they're doing

something else ... [the kids] are outside, all over the place,
tooling around in automobiles, lollygagging around with tran-
sistors plugged into their skulls, listening to the radio. Listen-
ing is not exactly the word. They use the radio as a back-
ground, as an aural prop for whatever kind of life they want to
imagine they're leading. They don't want any messages at all,
they want an atmosphere. Half the time, as soon as they get a
message-namely a commercial or a news spot-they start
turning the dial, looking for the atmosphere they lost. So there
are all these kids out there somewhere, roaming all over the
dial, looking for something that will hook not the minds but
the psyche.

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Typically bizarre sixties footnote: When people finally tired of

the Beatie gimmick, Murray the K dropped it. Then he reap-
peared in love beads. Unbelievably, he helped to invent the ram-
bling "progressive rock" format at New York's WOR just months
later.
Overall, the heyday of hysterical DJs didn't last long. By 1966,
AM radio was turning into a lean, quiet purring machine thanks
to a man named Bill Drake. He began at KYA San Francisco and
started a syndicate, Boss Radio. In Drake's hands, the Top 40 for-
mat became an airtight system, elevating radio programming into
a social science. For all practical purposes, Drake eliminated
DJs-or at least recast them as robots.
A former DJ himself, beginning in Donaldsville, Georgia,
Drake was the first successful Top 4D-programming consultant.
He remade rock 'n' roll radio in a fast-paced, clean-cut mode,
eliminating its shrieking excesses-along with its personality.
Drake instituted many of the practices still in use today: a tighter
playlist, tightly reined-in disc jockeys, and continuous market re-
search conducted through listener surveys and focus groups.
"Much more music" (and less chatter) was a Drake tag line, yet he
cut back on the number of records a station could play. The Top
40 became the Boss 30, supplemented by a handful of "hit bound"
new releases and occasional oldies.
"We work a little in reverse," Drake told reporter Harry
Shearer in 1967,

trying to find out what the public wants, and then trying to cre-
ate that. For instance, by finding out why people tune out a sta-
tion. It's actually even a subliminal area that we try to go into,

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and precise attention is paid to the placement of everything.

There's a great amount of emphasis on keeping it CLEAN.

All the surveys and research created a vicious circle: If the re-
sults show that people don't like unfamiliar records, then stations
would play fewer records and play them as often as possible. The
systematic and relentless repetition of the Top 40 operates on the
assumption that people tune in for short stretches, while riding in
the car, for example. On the air, the DJs would function as an-
nouncer clones, stripped of even the pretense of tastemaking
power. By design, all those zippy station jingles, solid gold week-
ends, million-dollar contests, and "insane" promotions started to
sound the same.
While this spelled short-term success for many of Drake's
clients, he ignored the shifting currents in rock 'n' roll. Drake con-
centrated on hit singles, using sales figures as his main criteria,
just as album sales began to overtake singles in the later 1960s.
Aesthetically, the move toward complexity and ambition in rock
was about to render the Top 40 irrelevant; AM radio retreated to
the land of lowest common denominator, the province of preteens
and old fogies.
The Beatles became a new kind of celebrity, reinventing the
pop music scene in the process. Rather than be co-opted by Hol-
lywood like Elvis Presley, they nudged rock 'n' roll into its next
phase: serious, self-conscious, conceptual, and grand. Their audi-
ence and their peers gladly followed. FM radio-with its full
stereo sound and large number of underutilized stations-was the
natural outlet for this latest revolution. Murray the K, the Fifth
Beatle himself, was ahead of this curve. Moving to New York's

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WaR in late 1966, he led the station into uncharted waters: a ros-
ter of hip, knowledgeable DJ s playing not just singles but an
eclectic mix of album tracks. Barely a year later, the station's own-
ers hired Bill Drake and Murray's grand experiment was over. But
the die was cast.
Out on the West Coast, San Francisco's booming underground
heralded a new age in rock-and a disaffected DJ gave it a new
outlet. A dropout from the Top 40 station KYA, Tom Donahue
was hatching his own format in 1967: free-form, antiformula
radio for freaks and heads and anybody else burned out by sta-
tions where "the hits ... just keep on coming." First on KMPX
and later on KSAN, Donahue and his fellow DJs established an
anything-goes style that reflected the loosened strictures of the
hippie era. Instead of sounding like they'd been inhaling helium,
these jocks seemed to be exhaling pot smoke as they explored the
furthest reaches of their musical taste. This was the polar oppo-
site of Bill Drake and his tune-out phobia.
"Most people are button pushers," Donahue said in 1967.
"Man, I hear myoId lady or my kids create a whole show of
their own. When a record ends, they start pushing buttons till
they find something else they like." Instead of regurgitating the
listeners' preferences, the free-form DJs attempted to transport
listeners to a higher plane. For all that lofty ambition, however,
Donahue also offered a technological assessment of the new
rock's spreading popularity. "I knew that FM stereo would be
dominant in five years," he declared in that same interview, "be-
cause of everybody's interest in improving sound. Rock record
producers are the first people to realize the possibilities of
stereo."

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The heyday of true free-form FM was even shorter than that of

the hysterical Top 40 jocks. As albums came to dominate the mar-
ketplace and hippie music conquered the mainstream, the freak-
friendly FM stations adopted play lists, program directors, and
promotional campaigns of their own. The emergence of FM
radio and progressive rock neatly coincided with the widespread
accessibility of stereo record players and affordable hi-fi compo-
nents. By the late sixties, every dorm room had a decent sound
system. As the baby-boom generation grew up, their audio hard-
ware choices followed suit: the compact stereo set with FM radio
and detachable speakers replaced the quaint "kiddy player" and
transistor radio of days gone by. Only one problem lingered.
Great stereo sound was now accessible, but it wasn't really
portable.

Transistors

The Top 40 revolution was sparked by transistors, yet another

postwar technological innovation. Developed at Bell Labs in the
late forties, the transistor circuit eventually brought high fidelity
into millions of homes. Transistors (miniscule wire threads) re-
placed vacuum tubes; they were more reliable, less expensive,
smaller, and easier to mass-produce. Even more important, tran-
sistors rendered phonographs portable and radios mobile. They
also required less power; transistor radios could run on car bat-
teries. Crucially, transistor circuits didn't generate light and heat
or burn out the way vacuum tubes did.
Japanese engineers and entrepreneurs first recognized the vast
mass-market possibilities in these miniscule electronic devices.

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Miniaturization means mega-appeal: accessibility, affordability,

efficiency, simplicity, and yes, disposability. In 1957, the Sony
Company of Japan offered a transistor radio small enough to fit
in a pocket. Six million transistor radios were imported to the
United States in 1959, with more than twelve. million in use by
year's end. Mobile listening fit right into the adolescent lifestyle
and, many would say, enhanced it.
Yet radio only stoked the desire for music. It took a while, but
the phonograph-now the record player-was remade to accom-
modate the teenage lifestyle. The battle of the speeds had barely
ended when Columbia Records introduced a portable record
player in 1953. A boxlike compact, the Columbia 360 was in-
tended as a table model; it wasn't a portable per se because the lid
had no latch. High Fidelity magazine described it upon release as
an "inexpensive portable phonograph with some pretension to
high fidelity, good enough to serve as a 'second phonograph' for
audiophiles who wanted to take their music on vacation with
them or to equip their rumpus room for their youngsters." Ac-
cording to Columbia's own press release, the end result was
"high-fidelity in a hatbox." Presciently, the 360 featured two
speakers (years before stereo) and played records at all speeds.
The coming generation didn't inherit many pretensions to high
fidelity. Sound quality was a functional consideration, not an aes-
thetic one. Cheap, efficient portable players communicated the
rhythmic thump of rock 'n' roll records as well as the console in
the living room, if not better. By 1957, RCA Victor offered a
portable record player for $39.95; ironically, perhaps, this one-
speed 45 rpm machine was dubbed the Victrola. "Now more than
ever 45 is your best buy," crowed the accompanying ad copy. But
the audience for this revolutionary machine couldn't be audio-

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philes; they'd already rejected 7-inch extended-play (EP) classical

music, after all. The advent of rock 'n' roll created a seemingly
permanent niche for the 45 rpm format.
The commercial success of transistor radio led to the applica-
tion of the microtechnology to record players during the early
1960s. Transistors reduced both the size and cost of audio compo-
nents, making stereo sound accessible to all. Reduced size made
stacking possible. Rather than dominating a room, a stereo system
could now be contained on a bookshelf or in a corner. Stereos
soon would be even cheap enough for kids. Gathering around the
hulking wooden console in the family room was replaced by hav-
ing your own lightweight plastic model in the bedroom.
Radio assumed a supplemental role during the FM rock era,
seldom selected on the stereo, but a mainstay in the car. Mobility
and a semicaptive audience kept radio alive. As digital technology
rewired the music industry (again), radio faced its own transfor-
mation. The demand is still out there. In 1999, the average Amer-
ican listened to more than two hours of radio per day. In 2001,
more than 10,000 licensed radio stations shared the airwaves in
the United States alone.

Station to Station

Radio on the Internet sounded like a contradiction at first. Broad-

casting is all about mass appeal, seeking the lowest common de-
nominator. The web, though, has come to define narrowcasting-
that is, creating custom content for specialized interests. Net
radio is in place but not yet popular or profitable. In 2001, radio

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on the web accounted for only 4 percent of the u.s. market.

Tellingly, at the same time, one-third of all conventional stations
were also transmitting or streaming over the Internet. Naturally,
the World Wide Web offers maximum selection: myriad channels
streaming from exotic locales. So far, its allure may be limited to
the overzealous and underoccupied. But Net radio boasts the
proven draw of secondary use. You can listen while working on
your personal computer.
Then the clampdown was enforced. A familiar foe threatened
the future existence of Internet radio in 2002. Under a 1998 law,
record companies and recording artists were entitled to royalties
on every song played on Net radio, or web cast. The u.s. copy-
right office haggled over fees for months, while pro-Internet radio
protests were mounted. Record companies and certain artists
(such as Don Henley) lobbied for higher fees, of course, but the
eventual outcome seemed inevitable. Just paying the originally
proposed fee of 14¢ per song would effectively bankrupt most In-
ternet radio outlets because the web casters were strictly small-
time independent operators who created a niche and then filled it.
Adding insult to injury, the new law allowed traditional broadcast
stations to continue doing what they've always done, paying roy-
alties to composers only, not to musicians or record companies.
Soon, Internet stations will pay for something the broadcast sta-
tions get for free.
The broadcasting landscape has been forcibly remade by an-
other recent legal decision. The Telecommunications Act of 1996
upended the rules about single ownership of multiple stations.
The limit of forty stations was dropped, and the entire market
quickly clotted into chains held by four conglomerates. Incredibly,

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one company has come to dominate the entire field. Clear Chan-
nel Communications of San Antonio, Texas, owns about 1,200
stations around the country.
The overall effect on programming has been predictable, with
central control tightening the existing formats to the breaking
point. Consolidation means a handful of programmers decide
what more than a thousand stations will play. A practice called
voice tracking transmits big-city DJ voices to smaller markets;
with local references, news, and weather smoothly inserted at the
breaks, listeners are none the wiser. Uniformity of programming
gained further reinforcement from technological developments.
Like every other business in the late 1990s, radio stations con-
verted to digital.
Conventional radio stations increasingly rely on computers.
Their music is stored digitally on a hard drive while computer
software enacts the once-sacred ritual of song selection. The D]'s
job has progressed from pancake flipper to baby-sitter. Rather
than seduce the listeners, DJ s now serve as caretakers for their
computers. They exist to service the very machines that once
served them.
A day's worth of music and related content (that is, advertis-
ing) can be programmed in just three hours. The entire process is
automated: the computer spins the hits and picks the platters.
The station's hard drive contains not only a choice of songs but
commercials and promotions too. Hard copy printouts help the
DJ monitor the program. An override function of course is pro-
vided, in case of system failure. The DJ can take over manually
and revert to CDs if the computer fails.
DJs can also operate the system semiautomatically, jumping in
from time to time to deliver the news or heaven forbid, actually

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identify a song. Though aD] is nominally in charge of the music,

the computer never rests.

Satellites

Even at this nascent stage, the technological competition never

sleeps either. Satellite radio looms as a challenge to Internet
radio. Since mobility ensures radio's survival, the promise of
satellite radio is enhanced mobility. Not-so-bold prediction: Net
radio won't catch on until cars are truly Internet-accessible or a
mobile listening device is developed. Accessing the Internet still
isn't as easy as switching on a standard old-fashioned radio.
Satellite radio is another story. Actual satellites beam digital-
quality audio into your car, for a price. Multiple signals, it is
promised, will foil the interference of tunnels and mountains. No
doubt modeled on cable television, satellite radio offers a dizzy-
ing array of microprogrammed channels for a reasonable monthly
subscription fee (around $10). Digital broadcast technology also
enhances existing outlets, making AM sound like FM and FM
sound like a CD. Or so it is claimed.
As a business, satellite radio was closely attended at its birth.
Two companies-Sirius and XM-won a highly restricted federal
license. This tightly monitored market was tagged a duopoly in
the press. Sirius and XM both launched in early. The two services
are virtually identical, offering a wide range-l00 channels-of
narrow-cast stations for $10 to 513 a month. A constant flow of
distant and exotic sounds gets cut with talk, the traditional radio
filler. Oddly absent on satellite radio is local news, weather, traf-
fic information, and some popular public radio programs. This

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omission may prove ominous, because the automobile is the rai-

son d'etre of satellite radio.
Stationary use is an afterthought, though at least one company
planned to market a home computer receiver that looked like a
regular radio with dials. With 200 million cars on the road at any
given time in America and four million new ones added each year,
it's a sizable market. Wisely, the fledgling satellite providers
formed alliances with the automobile giants: Sirius with Ford and
Chrysler, XM with Honda and General Motors. Supposedly, a
"bi" unit-one that receives both services-will be manufactured
in 2003. Of course, compatibility is crucial. In 2002, satellite
radio was included only as a top-end option on new Cadillacs.
Meanwhile, major electronics manufacturers are pushing new
satellite units and add-on modules for older cars. By 2003, XM
enjoyed a commanding lead over Sirius in the satellite radio
stakes. XM boasted half a million subscribers, while Sirius could
claim only 30,000. Aiming for a mass market, XM placed its ra-
dios in Avis rental cars and Wal Mart stores. Even though XM
thrived in comparison with its twin competitor, neither service
was expected to turn a profit anytime soon.
One significant doubt remains. Will people pay for something
they've been getting for free? Satellite radio offers a great selection
of stations, but the selection of music is still made by somebody
else. The players in the satellite radio business are banking mil-
lions on yes to that question. Stay tuned, because this same ques-
tion resurfaces during the ultimate format war.
Digital radio in one format or another-via telephone lines or
communication satellites-will find its niche in a new century. In
the end, radio might even outlive the phonograph-albeit in a
form that its inventors couldn't have intended or imagined.

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 chapter 5

GAMING IN STEREO

I looked at the crank phonograph and I said, "Jesus, if

Edison can record on that thing, I must be able to, too."
-Les Paul

IN THE 19205, deep in the Midwest, a teenager tinkered with

every machine in the house. Born in 1915, the precocious Lester
Polsfuss (later Polfuss) already exhibited the intuitive skills of mu-
sician and engineer.
At first, his experiments were crude but apparently effective.
Young Lester amplified his guitar through the family Victrola, in-
serting the phonograph needle into the top of a guitar's body.
Turn that on instead of a record, and you get a hell of a noise. So
our junior inventor filled his guitar with rags and sealed it with
plaster of paris. Voila! He'd invented a solid-body electric guitar,
the first Les Paul. Later, he turned a phone receiver into a pickup
for the guitar strings. Believe it or not, the kid built his first
recording machine in 1929, with a gramophone pickup and, he re-
called many years later, the flywheel from a Cadillac. Nobody in
Waukesha, Wisconsin, had ever seen anything like it.

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As a teenager, in 1930, he turned pro musician and hit the road.

At one point, the wizard of Waukesha adopted the unlikely han-
dle Rhubarb Red. Whatever the gig, for the next fifteen years, he
nurtured his technical notions along with his guitar technique.
Adopting the name Les Paul, the young man carved out a multi-
faceted career as both itinerant guitar player and intuitive techno-
logical innovator.
Famously, he designed the instrument that bears his name. Be-
ginning in 1952, the Gibson Company's Les Paul model set a stan-
dard: these smartly designed, durable solid-body electric guitars
became a favorite among players. Alongside the Fender Strato-
caster, the Gibson Les Paul stands as the iconic instrument-the
hallowed "axe"-of the rock god era.
A singular creation, this guitar is by no means Les Paul's sole
contribution to popular music. Les Paul pioneered sound-on-
sound, or multitrack, recording. Before he double-tracked his gui-
tar lines around Mary Ford's voice on the number one pop hits
"How High the Moon" (1951) and "Vaya Con Dios" (1956), the
concept of overdubbing didn't exist. The now commonplace tech-
niques of multi tracking, tape delay, echo, phasing, and recording
at different speeds were conceived in a garage, specifically, at 1514
North Curson Avenue in Hollywood. ~
Working with Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanians in the years
1938 to 1940 and gigging with his Les Paul Trio on the side, Les
Paul meanwhile continued to tinker with his homemade
recorders. Hooking up with Bing Crosby turned out to be mutu-
ally beneficial. Les accompanied Crosby on his 1945 number one·
hit "It's Been a Long, Long Time." At that point, Les had already
converted his carport into a sonic laboratory. Here he perfected a
crude but effective form of overdubbing with two acetate

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recorders and a regulation-issue turntable. He'd lay down a

rhythm track on one disc, then play guitar along with it while the
second recorder ran. Switching back and forth, he could add
other instrumentation and even vocals. Sound quality of course
deteriorated slightly with each successive generation or dubbing,
but soon enough Capitol Records would sell the results of his ex-
periments.
Frustrated by the acetate method, Les openly coveted a con-
fiscated German tape recorder he'd seen that year, 1945. It was
the infamous Magnetophon, used for Nazi propaganda broad-
casts, a reel-to-reel-to-reel (three-head) machine. The first step
was to arrange a viewing for Bing Crosby. Paul's sometime boss
was a kindred tape enthusiast; he used tape recordings to facili-
tate the syndication of his radio shows. Indeed, Bing was so en-
thusiastic that he immediately commissioned fifty perfect knock-
offs of the German machine. The California-based Ampeg
Company built them to order, and a quiet revolution had begun.
Naturally, Les Paul obtained one of these machines and pro-
ceeded to fiddle with it.
Les eventually added a fourth tape head to his Ampeg 300
model, which enabled it to accommodate endless overdubbing.
Sound-on-sound recording left the experimental stage; Paul mar-
keted his multitracked records under the tag New Sound. Early
Les Paul sides made the most of his techniques. "Lover" and
"Brazil," his 1948 double A side breakout, boasted no less than
six overdubbed guitars.
Patti Page blazed a similar trail around the same time, perhaps
by accident. Legend has it that she overdubbed vocals on "Con-
fess" (1948) because the backing vocalists didn't show. In time-
honored fashion, Page's record company (Mercury) pitched the

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song as a high-tech gimmick. It worked. She seemed to be singing

a duet with herself.
The novelty appeal of multitracking would dog Les Paul as
well. The New Sound shtick never caught on, but the clean, lay-
ered sound of sound-on-sound recording became his trademark.
It was both a blessing and a curse. He and Mary Ford (Collen
Summers) enjoyed a series of hit duets in the first half of the
1950s, songs that paraded technical effects at every turn. Despite
the smash popularity of "How High the Moon"-nine weeks at
number one-multitracking didn't catch on until years later. Paul
labored on, inventing the Les Paulverizer-a recording device at-
tached to his guitar that allowed for a sort of live multi tracking.
At eighty-eight, he still plays a weekly trio gig at a Manhattan jazz
club.
His vintage hits were sold as novelties and perhaps that de-
scription fits. Les Paul's technological achievements are no gim-
mick, however. It took a while: multi tracking became widely
available in the wake of Les Paul's success, but nobody knew what
to do with it at first. By the end of the sixties, multitracking in
rock had raised pop record production to an art. The act of
recording became a vital part of the creative process.

Dreaming in Stereo

Stereo sound brought clarity, depth, and perspective to recorded

music. Two channels (sources) of recorded music simulated and
stimulated both human ears. Listening to mono records on the hi-
fi was like watching television with one eye closed.

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 Dreaming in Stereo

Minnesota's 3-M Company each test-marketed a primitive form of

tape cartridge in the late 1950s. Unsurprisingly, these paperback-
sized boxes didn't fly.
For the music industry, the sudden proliferation of stereo play-
ers brought an onslaught of new sounds-not all of them strictly
musical. That "easy listening" label turns out to be rather a mis-
nomer.

The Sound of Living Stereo

Mood music is perhaps the 20th century's most authentic

music, tailored exclusively for the electronic revolution.
These recordings fully exploit the intended use of the hi
fi and stereo as domestic appliances and with all of the
environmental controls of thermostats, air conditioners,
and security systems.
-Joseph Lanza

The extended length of the LP and improved sound quality of

hi-fi fostered the excesses of the easy listening format-including
kitschy "mood music." The presence of canned pop tunes piped
into offices and elevators by the Muzak Company and others cre-
ated a precedent of subliminal, lulling background music outside
the home. In the shopping centers and dentist offices of the six-
ties, background music seemed omnipresent.
Wall-to-wall fullness and sonic melodrama mark even the mel-
lowest examples. From Mantovani to Mancini, Kostelanetz to the
Ray Coniff Singers, these records utilized the full range of stereo
sound so that one could display one's expensive components
tastefully.

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For devotees, there existed a strange subgenre known as the

stereo-demonstration disc. Even the renowned audiophile and
historian Roland Gelatt had to acknowledge the underlying ab-
surdity. "Bizarre recordings of thunderstorms and screaming rail-
road trains were concocted for those to whom high-fidelity repro-
duction was an end in itself and not a means of musical
reproduction." Accordingly, the first Audio Fidelity stereo release
featured the Dukes of Dixieland on one side and "Railroad
Sounds" on the flip.
The fad eventually died down, but at its peak, an album tided
Persuasive Percussion by Enoch Light sat at number one on the
Billboard charts for thirteen weeks in 1960. Along with its follow-
up, Provocative Percussion, the album illustrated stereo sound
with ludicrous "Ping-Pong" effects ricocheting between the
speakers. According to the liner notes, "When you acquire a Com-
mand recording you will have the pleasure of hearing the ultimate
in true stereo recording and you can feel that your record library
has grown in stature."
Apart from the novelty appeal of such records, what really
spread the popularity of stereo was miniaturization. The shrink-
ing process began even before the introduction of transistor tech-
nology, and bookshelf speakers boomed out the full range of
sound in the early sixties. By the seventies, when audio compo-
nents were completely transistorized, stereo sound ruled the uni-
verse. In the boom times before the advent of home computers,
the audio market represented the cutting edge of high-tech
amusement.
Hardware development outpaced software. Music thus had to
play catch-up with technology, and musicians struggled to master

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the tools suddenly available to them. In stereo, the art and science
of recording became doubly complex and challenging.

Music for Heads

A physicist will tell you that space is allied to time, but a

record producer will argue that it is closely allied to
sound as well.
-George Martin

Another reason why multitrack recording was delayed in the

pop market is that musicians were used to playing with one an-
other. With overdubbing, each instrument performs a discrete job.
Group interplay is replaced by a method of recording with exact-
ing precision. The ability to perfect an individual performance
after the fact slowly eroded the need to have people playing to-
gether at all. No more repeated takes in the studio-mistakes
were taped over, new sounds dubbed in.
Vocals benefited (or suffered) the most, as they were easiest to
isolate and manipulate in the mix. By the early 1960s, a new gen-
eration of tape recorders that used three heads (compared to Les
Paul's Hydra four) enabled engineers to edit or cut and paste en-
tire sections of a song while remaining in synch with the overall
tempo and melody. Records would now be put together piece by
piece as well as part by part. Suddenly, recording a song from start
to finish seemed unnecessary.
How many tracks can fit on the head of a pin, or a single strip
of tape? The number multiplied slowly, from two to four to eight in

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the 1960s, then rapidly shot up to sixty-four and more today. For
the current generation of musicians, the recording studio has come
to be regarded as more than a resource or even the means to an end:
it is now the fundamental instrument for making popular music.
Who got here first? It was those omnipresent sixties idols, the
Beatles, who pioneered the use of the recording studio as musical
instrument. Producer George Martin mentored the Beatles, musi-
cally and technologically, without ever getting in their way. Their
historic collaboration with Martin-a young staff producer at
London's EMI Records-forever blurred the distinctions between
music and technology.
Before the Beatles and Martin arrived in the studio, the average
pop record producer functioned as a glorified bureaucrat or high-
tech baby-sitter. Empowered by the advent of stereo and multi-
track recording, the producer became a master craftsman--even a
musical contributor.
Immortalized by a later-period Beatles album title, the EMI
studio at 43 Abbey Road already possessed a distinguished repu-
tation; the Abbey Road studio had been a leader in recording
technology since Sir Edward Elgar and the London Philharmonic
inaugurated it in 1931. Classical music, alongside pop drawn
from the British music hall tradition, constituted the bulk of EMI
recordings until the late 19505. After the first wave of raucous
American sounds invaded England, the up-and-coming Martin
was deputized to find a homegrown rock 'n' roll band. When the
Liverpool-based impresario Brian Epstein brought around his
new quartet one day, George Martin took the meeting.
Martin pulled brilliant ideas from his background in recorded
comedy, an unlikely source of inspiration for John, Paul, George,
and Ringo (until you think about it). Recording physical comedi-

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ans such as Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, Martin tried to cre-
ate a picture in sound. The comedy sessions screamed for an ir-
reverent approach as well as unusual sound effects-tape run
backward, multispeed techniques, whatever came to mind. Mar-
tin would record, say, four Peter Sellers tracks in mono and then
mix them in stereo. The result sounded like a dialogue between a
cast of characters, all played by Sellers. This experimental spirit-
not to mention underlying sense of humor-obviously struck a
collective chord in the four Bearles. Martin was able to translate
their raw ideas into refined sounds. The fact that he read music
and they didn't is only part of their story. His technical fluency
lifted the Bearles' sonic ambitions into another realm.
Before the Beatles, pop records rarely received the four-track
treatment. Though we recall them as primitive stabs at what soon
would become legendary rock, some of the Fab Four's earliest hits
were missives from the cutting edge of recording. "I Want to Hold
Your Hand," with its ringing, exuberant clarity, absolutely prose-
lytized the new technology.
String sections and classical influences crept into the Bearles'
music with "Yesterday" and "Eleanor Rigby." Thanks to George
Martin and great melodies, they were able to pull off this sym-
phonic move. After the Bearles retired from live performing in
1966, their creative attention turned full time to making record al-
bums. The modern recording studio could now serve the Bearles
as a creative tool, a playground and a refuge from public glare.
The milestone that came next, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band, is more than a monumental "concept" album. The
Bearles' orchestrated psychedelic opus is also a towering techno-
logical feat. Sgt. Pepper's stretched the capabilities of the studio,
while unearthing rich new areas of exploration for rock. Unfor-

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tunately for the Beatles and George Martin, the next generation
in multitrack recording (eight tracks) arrived right after Sgt. Pep-
per's was released, in 1967.
Yet in many ways, they'd already worked around it. The Bea-
tles and George Martin expanded the capacity of four-track
recording with basic tricks like recording an instrumental, then
rerecording with three additional tracks on top of the initial
rhythm track. Guided by Martin's experience and discipline, the
Beatles indulged a childlike curiosity as they followed their col-
lective muse in the studio. Millions of people are convinced that
the result is recorded magic.
Eventually, inevitably, self-indulgence reared its head. Fittingly,
the Bearles employed one of the very first eight-track recorders on
The Beatles, the 1968 double-disc "White Album." A flood of
sound and music pours from the speakers, stylistically eclectic
and technically stunning; George Martin, however, thought it
wanted editing, badly. The Bearles next tried to cut a "live"
album, but Let It Be caught a band in its death throes. Abbey
Road, the Bearles' last work with Martin, now sounds like a con-
scious summation of their achievements, and a fond farewell.

"I Hear a New World"

The flip side of George Martin is Joe Meek. Martin's graceful as-
cendance overshadows Meek's tragic decline, and justly so. Born
in 1929, Robert George Meek displayed astounding talent and
drive during a brief and troubled life, making his way as a musi-
cian, engineer, producer, entrepreneur, and impresario. He also fit

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the profile of a misfit: (possibly) schizophrenic and (definitely)

homosexual.
Meek also stands as an innovator, perhaps a key figure, in the
field of sound recording. Simply put, Joe Meek made records that
sound like no others. In fact, no other recordings were made in
quite the same way. Joe Meek pioneered the DIY (do-it-yourself)
approach to recording-he achieved high-tech (for the time) ef-
fects through rock-bottom, low-budget means.
Long before it was fashionable, Joe Meek worked at home. Lo-
cated above a shop in a dreary London suburb, his apartment
contained a roomful of jury-rigged equipment. Here he con-
cocted science-fiction pop singles, corny and peculiar, perfect for
transistor radio. Joe Meek productions transmit an utterly alien
emotional sheen, an electronic noise that sounds somehow pre-
scient. Meek deployed the sonic potential of what was available at
the time: primitive electronics, cheesy echo effects, ear-drilling
compression, distortion, delay. He also favored all sorts of un-
orthodox instruments such as pots and pans, pocket combs, milk
bottles, and flushing toilets. Stomping feet in lieu of drums might
be called his signature.
An early Meek effort-penned for the British teen idol Billy
Fury-became a vehicle for Les Paul and Mary Ford. Talk about
serendipity. Their cover version of "Put a Ring on My Finger"
reached the U.S. Top 40 in 1958. Meek took the money and set up
shop, so to speak. Let Phil Spector have his Wall of Sound; Joe
Meek perfected the Curtain of Buzz.
Meek produced scores of records for various labels. He com-
~anded an eccentric retinue of performers and proteges and con-
tracted a sturdy backing band to supplement his studio gadgetry.

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But his budding pop empire couldn't last. The fortress was built
on sand.
For all its technical savvy and warped style, most of his work
is worthless as music per se; it's pure kitsch. Somehow, Meek
managed to run up a sizable handful of chart records in the U.K.
during the first half of the 1960s. "Johnny Remember Me" by
Anton Hollywood-death rock complete with ethereal voice
from beyond the grave-sat on top of the U.K. pop charts for a
mind-boggling fifteen weeks in 1961.
Believe it or not, two U.S. Top 10 hits of the time also bear
Meek's indelible mark. "Telstar" by the Tornados (1962) deploys
a cheap battery-powered keyboard in a quavering tribute to the
satellite. "Have I the Right?" by the Honeycombs is a bright, sim-
ple blast of vintage Brit pop; that hand-clap beat practically slaps
you in the face.
His moment was brief. Eclipsed by psychedelia, hounded by
public homophobia and personal demons, Meek spiraled down-
ward. He died in 1967 by his own hand after killing his landlady
in a long-brewing altercation. His madness and his odd-duck
music can be conflated into a campy joke all too easily. Joe
Meek's recording methods, however, have proven to be unusually
influential. The synth-pop sounds of the eighties, for example,
echoed the wired, tinny intensity of Joe Meek records with an
eerie precision.

Headphone Music

In the wake of Sgt. Pepper's, the rock concept album stood as the
prime example of technology's expansive effect on music. Convo-

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luted compositions and electronically enhanced ambitions de-

fined the field-or a significant patch of it-for years to come.
Rather than rely on the usual studio musicians, rock bands
reached out to new machines. The next technological milestone
after Sgt. Pepper's, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, owes
much of its perennial success to synthesizers (electronic key-
boards) and sound effects. Pink Floyd pioneered the use of prere-
corded "click tracks" and "loops," manipulating tape to achieve
metronome-perfect mechanized rhythms. And all of Dark Side of
the Moon's spoken interjections and haunting audio verite bits
(such as coins clinking and registers cashing on "Money") were
accomplished on tape. Interestingly, these techniques resemble the
very same hip-hop effects that so effectively spelled rock's doom a
few years later. Could the art of sampling have originated on the
classic rock album?
Multitracking reached its logical conclusion-or nadir-in the
mid seventies, specifically on a hit album called Tubular Bells.
The LP was one forty-nine-minute-Iong instrumental, stretching
across both sides. It reached number three on u.s. album charts
and supplied the creepy, catchy theme music for the film The Ex-
orcist. Credit Mike Oldfield as overall auteur of Tubular Bells. He
served as both musician and producer, playing all the instruments
and stacking all the tracks. Tubular Bells works as a brilliant ex-
ercise in this multilayering technique, but it's something less than
genius as music. Sir George Martin considered it a fluke, the work
of a lucky amateur. The human touch was lost, replaced by sci-
entific protocol. Production itself-the act of recording-now
formed the core creative experience.
Tubular Bells was strongly reminiscent of earlier breakthrough
novelty hits. The seductive allure of tech-generated music often

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begins and ends as a gimmick. The 1970s version of a ricocheting

hi-fi demonstration record is that multitracked rock operetta "Bo-
hemian Rhapsody" by Queen. Perhaps Dark Side of the Moon
did for headphones what Persuasive Percussion did for stereo
speakers.
By the mid seventies, for a sizable audience, enhanced sound
quality represented an end in itself, just like in the fifties. But
headphone music comes equipped with built-in limitations.
Sometimes, a comfortably equipped cocoon can turn into a high-
tech tomb.

Snap, Crackle, and Pop

The Beatles set the pace for the late sixties music scene. The com-~
petition followed their every move, in music and technology. On
some Abbey Road songs, for example, they used a spiffy new elec-
tronic instrument called a Moog synthesizer. Just a couple of
years later, Moogs and similar synthesizers became common-
place, another tool in the rock 'n' roll band's growing electronic
arsenal.
For the first half of the twentieth century, electronic music was
the province of inventors and fanatics, the futurists and mad pro-
fessors, the nerds and starving artists, the geeks and freaks. Elec-
tronic instruments were eminently impractical. Outside of an Al-
fred Hitchcock soundtrack, they just sounded weird.
Synthesize means to fuse or merge parts into a whole. A syn-
thesizer combines electronic (or digital) parts to form a complete
sound. The musical instruments we know as synthesizers produce
sounds from an electronic source. An opposing approach (typi-

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cally used by artists) uses electronics to manipulate or distort al-

ready existing sounds. After World War II and the development of
magnetic recording tape, musique concrete came into vogue. The
master of this form of avant-garde tape manipulation was the
French composer Pierre Schaeffer. However esoteric, his Sym-
phonie Pour un Homme Seul (1950) opened up sonic possibilities
within the new format. Musique concrete also fulfilled the great
fear of the twenties and thirties: A (tape) recording now played
the role of musician.
Ten years earlier, the vanguard American composer John Cage
dreamed up his Imaginary Landscape No.1. This piece consisted
of test-tone recordings played on variable-speed turntables. In ret-
rospect, it reads like an eerie prediction of things to come.
It was the radio pioneer Lee DeForest who truly planted the
seed of synthesizer development, when he invented the vacuum
tube in 1906. The vacuum tube, or triode, is a glass blub contain-
ing electrodes that generate sound through a process called het-
erodyning. DeForest added a third element to the existing two-
electrode tube used in early radio. The addition of another,
weaker signal amplified the currents bouncing between the two
electrodes. Vacuum tubes allowed for better radio transmission as
well as amplification of sound. Vacuum tube technology powered
the electronics, recording, and radio industries through half a
century. In the 1960s and 1970s, transistors and integrated circuits
gradually replaced tubes. Even today, vacuum tube-powered am-
plifiers for electric guitar are highly prized for a unique, low-tech
sound.
The vacuum tube also powered one of the earliest and most en-
during synthesizers-the theremin. The theremin wasn't the first
electronic instrument, but it was the first to work with control

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and consistency. The machine was named after Dr. Leon

Theremin, who was born Lev Sergeivitch Termen in pre-Soviet
Russia.
Dr. Theremin, a gifted young physicist, built his device on an
observation: The presence of a human body affected the sounds
emitted by vacuum tubes. Practically speaking, playing the
theremin meant waving your hands around a portable box-and-
antenna set. Theremin's grand idea was to empower would-be
musicians of the future. Cut loose from the constraints of finger-
ing a keyboard and staying in tune, now anyone could produce
joyful tones-or so the ads claimed. Theremin's great invention
had some constraints of its own, first and foremost of which is
that not anyone can playa theremin. Intonation is crucial, and
what looks like a lot of abstract hand waving actually takes a
great deal of practice.
Theremin came to America in 1927, not long after patenting
the theremin in Europe. The machine was displayed here on a se-
ries of concert tours, to great media attention and wondrous ac-
claim. He may have been a communist scientist, but Dr. Theremin
was also market savvy enough to hire a succession of attractive
young female accompanists. The novelty of this trailblazing de-
vice included a mystical element: A theremin concert embodied
the cosmic notion of music from the ether, sensitive souls pluck-
ing unearthly suspended sounds out of thin air. In reality, these
events quickly began to flummox audiences, and people never
knew quite what to make of the theremin's high-pitched, swoop-
ing tones. The theremin raised a question that nagged electronic
music practitioners for years: Must synthesizers merely echo or
mimic traditional instruments? Why not explore "indigenous"
electronic textures and colors?

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Ironically, Dr. Theremin wanted to make a popular instrument

out of his ethereal music machine. Ultimately, he couldn't sell
American consumers on the idea of a home theremin. (Sing
around the family synthesizer?) He returned to the Soviet Union
in the early thirties, and by 1939, he was a political prisoner.
Theremin spent three months in the Siberian Gulag before being
put to work on government research-as a slave laborer. When
he'd departed from the United States broke and in a hurry, he'd
also left his designs with RCA; so the theremin held onto its niche.
Listen for its ghostly ululations during Hitchcock's SpeLLbound
(1945) as well as a slew of classic sci-fi and fifties horror flicks.
RCA kept the machine on the market, introducing build-it-
yourself models for the home hobbyists. Dr. Theremin surely
would've approved.
Eccentric-sounding yet highly effective, the theremin resurfaced
in popular music during the late 1960s (of course), as an utter orig-
inal. Brian Wilson immortalized the machine on a peak-period
Beach Boys song, one that equals Sgt. Pepper's in recording-studio
technique alone. Even so, the mere mention of "Good Vibrations"
conjures up a sweet, familiar whine, that outer space humming.
That's how it sounds. Many baby boomers have the theremin
sound branded into their brains.
A contemporary of Theremin, the Frenchman Maurice
Martenot invented the Ondes Martenot in 1928. Like a sit-down
version of the theremin, the Ondes Martenot involved moving the
hands between string and fingerboard. More important, later
models incorporated a keyboard and knobs in the same configu-
ration as a modern synthesizer. Today, progressive rock bands
such as Radiohead use this vintage synthesizer both on studio
albums and in live concerts.

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Portability and practicality were not considerations for the ma-

jority of early synthesizers. Back when De Forest fiddled with the
first vacuum tubes, a Canadian, Thaddeus Cahill, invented some-
thing called the Telharmonium. It was 20 feet tall, 60 feet wide,
and weighed 200 pounds. By the technology-obsessed 1950s, the
state-of-the-art RCA synthesizer, Mark I and Mark II-first choice
among truly serious electronic composers----occupied an entire
room, as did its European counterpart, the Siemens Synthesizer, or
"Siemens Studio for Electronic Music." Like the early computers,
the RCA synthesizers were programmed with punch tape. Engi-
neers fed these hungry beasts with paper rolls of binary code.
Composer Raymond Scott provided the manic music behind
the classic Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s.
"Loony Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" were his specialties. Scott
also put together a succession of electronic instruments; in 1952,
he obtained a patent for the Clavivox. Instead of the theremin's
open oscillator, the tabletop-sized Clavivox used something more
familiar: a compact keyboard with a row of knobs and buttons on
the side. Deemed impractical for mass production, the Clavivox
nevertheless set the standard for future synthesizers: portable is
preferable, and easy to play is even better.
A young engineer named Robert Moog designed the Clavivox's
circuits. Growing up in Queens, New York, Moog displayed a pre-
cocious interest in electronic music. At age fifteen, poring over
Radio & Television News, he noticed an article that would shape
his life, a guide to building your own theremin. Moog clipped the
three-page guide and proceeded to do just that. His engineer fa-
ther had taught him well-it worked!
A couple of years later, in 1954, Moog published an article out-
lining his own theremin design in the same journal. Working out

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of his bedroom, with some help from Dad, the Bronx High
School of Science student built (and even sold) a line of
theremins. While a student at Queens College and then Cornell
University, Moog kept a hand in electronic music by continuing to
build theremins. In the January 1961 issue of Electronics World,
Robert Moog introduced his latest refinement of the theremin
concept: the Moog "Melodia." This model was eminently
portable and easy to play: the Melodia weighed 8 pounds and
mounted on a microphone stand. Moog sold around 1,000 units,
and his theremin business was off and running.
In 1967, he formed the R. A. Moog Company and started using
the term synthesizer to describe his post-theremin inventions:
voltage-controlled modular systems using keyboards and buttons.
Two years later, Moog Synthesizers could be heard on rock 'n' roll
records by the BeatIes, the Rolling Stones, the Byrds, and yes, the
Monkees.
It was a classical album, however, that delivered accessible elec-
tronic music to the masses. Switched-on Bach, an LP of classical
pieces demurely performed on the Moog by Walter (later Wendy)
Carlos, violated commercial convention and hit the pop Top 10 in
1969. Hearing these ultrafamiliar melodies makes the electronic
context sound less alien, more human. Immediately following the
success of Switched-on Bach came a flood of imitations and
Moog novelty records. The next generation of synthesizers thus
coincided with rock's growing sonic grandeur-or to some, its
subsequent grandiosity.
Companies such as ARP and Roland took some of Moog's
prototypes and turned them into affordable mass-market ma-
chines. He followed up with the popular Mini-Moog in the sev-
enties, but the onset of sampling and digital synthesizers later in

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the decade eventually overshadowed his efforts and by the 1980s,

the Moog went the way of the theremin.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Robert Moog resur-
faced with a new music machine-or rather, a new take on an-
other old music machine. The Van Koevering Interactive Piano,
developed by Moog and entrepreneur David Van Koevering, is
nothing less (or more) than a digitally enhanced player piano.
"There has been a very long trend away from music as a social ac-
tivity," Moog told the New York Times in 1999. "Before the radio
and electric phonograph, people made their own music, for them-
selves and each other. What I see now is that, more and more,
we're all in our own little boxes, using the fruits of technology to
make or listen to music in isolation."
When the inventor of the modern synthesizer declares that
"something basic and low-tech is missing" from music, well, he
speaks from experience.

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 chapter 6

GTDANCE

The new disco music is a highly contrived super-

sophisticated electronic artifact ... a triumph of art and
engineering ... the disco sound is its own and only star.
-Albert Goldman, Disco

THE TERM DISCO COMES FROM DISCOTHEQUE, a club where peo-

ple dance to records. Discotheque is derived from the French word
bibliotheque, or library-roughly, a record collection. The first
discotheques were founded in Vichy France during World War II
in response to the Nazi ban on jazz. This was an underground
phenomenon in a true, dangerous sense. The fad continued after
the war, in the open. Paris clubs such as Whisky a Go-Go and
Chez Regine catered to the in crowd, the ultrahip, chic jet set.
Here music provided a backdrop, or perhaps mild stimulus, for
jiggling, mingling, and drinking. But the discotheque would not
be an exclusive upper-crust phenomenon for long.
The roots of disco as we know it today can be traced to a seedy
former strip club in New York's Times Square district called the
Peppermint Lounge. Before the Bearles invaded, way back in

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sleepy 1960, a dance craze called the Twist came roaring out of
this unlikely venue and caught America's fancy for a year or so-
and then it was over, like the bunny hops and cakewalks of the
past. But the movement started another turntable revolution.
As the sixties dawned, a veteran R&B singer named Hank
Ballard wrote "The Twist" after witnessing the new moves being
performed by teen dancers on The Buddy Dean Show, Balti-
more's answer to American Bandstand. The original is a pleas-
antly rough bump and grind; the earthy, effective harmonies echo
the lusty choruses of previous Hank Ballard & the Midnighters
hits such as "Sexy Ways" and "Work With Me, Annie." Since he
practically did copies of his own songs, Ballard didn't complain
much when Philadelphia-based (and American Bandstand staple)
Chubby Checker took a cover version of "The Twist" to the top
of the charts in August 1960. As the rock chronicler Lillian
Roxon explains, "You put one foot out and you pretend you're
stubbing out a cigarette butt on the floor with the big toe. At the
same time, you move your hands and body as though you're dry-
ing every inch of your back with an invisible towel. That's the
Twist."
Record parties and "sock hops" were a high school ritual by
the end of the fifties, but the Twist was the first widespread case
of a teenage trend infecting adults. The Twist crossed over to high
society. Celebrities and suburbanites alike lined up to get into the
Peppermint Lounge. A group called Joey Dee & the Starlighters
signed on as the house band in September 1960. A little more than
a year later, they went to number one with-you guessed it-
"Peppermint Twist." A few weeks earlier, Chubby Checker
topped the charts again with "The Twist." (The only other song
to do that is Crosby's version of "White Christmas.") A total of

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twenty-three Twist-identified singles reached the Top 40 during

the early sixties: some were sublime ("Twist & Shout" was a hit
for both the Isley Brothers and the Bearles), most were ridiculous
("The Alvin Twist" by the Chipmunks).
When Beademania struck, in 1964, the general population
stopped buying cheesy Twist records and signing up for Twist in-
struction. Without doubt, the fad had legs. The Twist was also, as
more than one pundit noted at the time, the first popular dance
you did alone.

The Big 12-lnch Record

In the smoke and shadow of the night world lived an alternate

breed of disc jockey. Ironically, at the height of hippiedom, these
DJ s plugged into popular music's primal function-dancing. A
new breed of amusement palace had begun to emerge, a place
where dancing to records wasn't a sideshow but rather the main
event. And the DJ ruled as musical ringmaster. Leave your pre-
conceptions at the door and enter the disco era.
Disco is the pure musical expression of the phonograph. Gen-
erated by DJ s in response to dancers, it represents the first pop-
music style born and bred at the turntable. Disco began as an un-
derground cult in New York City and developed into a
definitive-and divisive-cultural phenomenon in the late seven-
ties. Though it can fairly be labeled a fad, disco permanently
changed popular music: not only how it sounds, but also how it's
recorded, marketed, and consumed.
Rhythm rose to rule over melody. The recording studio and its
producers and engineers came to dominate the creative process.

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Sonic manipulation in the studio became an end in itself, rather

than a means of reproducing the sound of a live performance. In
a discotheque, the reproduction of sound is a live performance.
The ongoing reign of electronically generated music-the end-
lessly repetitive programs, tape loops, synthesizers, and drum ma-
chines pulsing all around us-properly begins in the disco era.
Disco returned the turntable to the public sphere, and the result
was perhaps the ultimate dance craze. At discotheques from Stu-
dio 54 on down, the spotlight focus of celebrity shifted from per-
former to audience. The mode of enjoyment switched from pas-
sive to participatory, from sitting and listening to getting up and
dancin~. Disco represents the last stand of a certain kind of mass
hysteria.
The disco DJ s reinvented pop music by taking the existing
technology and stretching it a bit. The pitch-adjustment setting
on the Technics 12005L turntable-the D]'s choice-permitted
minute variations on the speed of a spinning record. This allowed
for smooth segues-the beat of one song merging into the next,
and so on. Still, juggling a batch of 45s in front of a dance floor
had to be a tightrope walk; dancers demanded longer songs and
losing momentum spelled DJ death. Eventually, a new record for-
mat arose to meet the DJ s' (and dancers') exacting requirements.
Cobbled together from existing 45 rpm and LP formats, the 12-
inch single, or disco mix, was their ungainly spawn. However in-
elegant, the new format worked like a charm for DJ s: 12-inch sin-
gles were not only longer, they sounded better-more
dynamic-thanks to the wider grooves. For consumers it would
be another story-a record format that fell flat.
Just as disco came to the forefront, the sixties rock revolution
flagged. The popularity of black music-the emergent disco

118
Thomas Edison with his first phonograph: 1877.
Phorograph by Matthew Brady
 The first Edison cylinder
phonograph: the Wizard 's
favorite in vention.
Edison National Historic Site

Edison Phonograph Company,

new releases card for
July 1903.
Edison National His toric Site

NAT IO NAL P H ONOGRAPH COMPANY.

IIItW ','OR'" ORANG£., N..... . SAN fRAN.::ISCC
6J C.1I","U or.! ST U.S.A. '33 M,. ... "l:r 5 '
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Emil Berliner with a model of his first gramophone: the
original turntable. Undated photo.
Library of Congress

Peter C. Goldmark (left), director of Engineering,

Research and Development for Columbia Broadcasting
System (CBS), at work in the lab. Undated photo.
BettmanniCORBIS
 A recording form at , and
re cord player, for every
me mber of the fa mil y:
33, 45, & 78, 1949.
Bertmann/CORBIS

American Bandst a nd , 1961 :

" It 's got a good beat and yo u can d ance t o it."
Library of Congress
 Eccentric producer Joe Meek at work in
his living-room recording studio, early 19605.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
 Chicago's Comiskey Park, July 12, 1979: "Disco Sucks! "
Bettmann/CORBIS

Grandmaster Flash: "so nice with his hands he don 't need no band."
Phoro by Laura Levine
Afrika Bambaataa: master DJ and founder of the mighty Zulu Nation.
Photo by laura Levine
 Rosemary Wilson loads an Elvis 8 track into her new
RCA 12P600FM combo player.
Bettmann/ CORBJS

February 13, 2001 : Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning

reacts to ruling by the 9'" District Court of Appeals
in San Francisco.
CORBIS
 Last Dance

sound and Philly soul-reasserted the pop single format as an air-

play medium and a unit of public consumption, if not a consumer
item. Albums still ruled in record stores: singles accounted for less
than 8 percent of the market in 1975. Musically, the next big thing
was bubbling under the surface; buyers were restless, clamoring
for something new. Eventually, the record companies would de-
duce a way to sell it-or would they? Unfortunately, a classic case
of overnight success clouded disco's long-term implications for
the music business.
Intoxicated by jackpot sales figures, record companies didn't
register the deeper impact and importance of disco. It was regarded
as a novelty, a flash-in-the-pan that should be exploited quickly.
That misperception soon became a gruesome self-fulfilling
prophecy. At first, the flush of success was contagious. People
suddenly "went disco." The movie Saturday Night Fever and its
accompanying soundtrack (featuring the Bee Gees) kicked off the
official fad, and the media attention paid to the famed New York
nightclub Studio 54 firmly planted disco in the national con-
sciousness. But its all-out promotional strategy and subsequent
profits were double-edged swords: the Saturday Night Fever phe-
nomenon also contributed to a postdisco backlash that nearly
sunk several record companies and led to a massive restructuring
of music business practices.
The anonymous nature of disco didn't make for recognizable
stars, apart from Donna Summer or the Village People. Disco
freaks asked for songs rather than singers when they perused a
record shop, and they couldn't always get what they wanted. The
problem was the recording format. Hungry for album sales-
where the profit margins were bigger-the big labels never pushed
12-inch singles in a major way. Dis~o mixes were hard to find. Re-

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 PLAYBACK

tailers accused big record companies of taking "hot" 12-inch sin-

gles off the market to juice album sales. But disco albums, which
contained shortened versions of the hits along with eight or nine
cuts of filler, supremely frustrated buyers, who wanted the long
versions they heard in clubs. To them, paying $3.98 for a great
full-length song was getting maximum value, while spending
$8.98 on a mediocre LP was a rip-off.
If today that argument sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Disco
was a premonition of things to come, a fad that foretold the future.
Disco didn't replace vinyl records and rock 'n' roll, but it did
expose their growing obsolescence. Spurred by the success of Sat-
urday Night Fever, the disco fad revived the flagging fortunes of
the music business. That flush period barely lasted a year, how-
ever, and by 1979, disco took the blame for the biggest record-
sales slump since the Great Depression. Still, records and record
players would never again sound the same.

Riding the Rhythm

During the mid 1960s, Beatlemania and the Top 40's glory days
distracted teenage attention from the dance club scene. (The
British invasion launched yet another wave of hit cover versions,
while the originals languished.) Then the psychedelic hippie era
moved rock's locus back to live performance; thousands of kids
would sit in stoned silence watching Eric Clapton's fingers trem-
ble. But as (white) rock soared into the stratosphere, black popu-
lar music never lost its earthbound footing or its syncopated beat.
James Brown brought rhythm to the foreground in his music, dis-
tilling the essence of soul and R&B into funk. When he declared

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"Papa's Got a Brand New Bag," in 1965, Brown outlined a bold

new approach: pulsating bass and drums led the beat, stabbing
horn charts punctuated gut-bucket vocals that exhorted the lis-
tener with grunts and groans, and scratchy guitar chords doubled
as extra percussion.
Funk turned the sixties into the seventies. Motown musicians
laid down diabolical grooves on their finest sides, and a former
radio DJ named Sylvester Stewart merged funk's unforgiving
rhythms with flowery psychedelic rock during the brief, brilliant
heyday of Sly and the Family Stone. But it was James Brown who
drew up a blueprint for the next decade of music. He was consis-
tent and prolific, to the point of being relentless. Brown created a
sound that was so technically precise and emotionally exacting
and demanded such drive and discipline from his musicians that
the next step had to be total mechanization.
A hero in the black community, James Brown also enjoyed a
fair amount of pop airplay and crossover sales in the early seven-
ties, but it was on the dance floor where his music made the most
sense. In big cities, particularly New York, the disco scene had
mutated into a new beast. While the Woodstock Nation joined
hands and chanted, a fervent cult audience was congregating in
New York City for a different type of communion. The true be-
lievers would gather-at small clubs, "juice bars," loft spaces, or
private parties-for a taste of real alternative culture. A mix of
blacks, whites, and Latinos, the mostly gay crowd would dance
the night away to the sounds-soul, mostly-provided by a DJ
spinning records. Perhaps the most infamous and influential spot
was a former Baptist church rechristened The Sanctuary in gamy
Hell's Kitchen. The name wasn't the only sacrilegious thing about
it; Sanctuary was one of the first unabashedly gay nightclubs.

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Egged on by the dancers, here the legendary DJ Francis Grasso-

"the only straight guy in the place"-would push the envelope,
testing the limits of the three-minute 45 rpm record and those of
the turntable itself (in fact, he had two). Grasso's improvised so-
lutions and innovations would help shape the next twenty-five
years of popular music.
Several years before Francis Grasso, in the mid to late 1960s, a
DJ named Terry Noel began exploring the possibilities of two
turntables and subliminal audience participation. Noel had been
a Twist dancer at the Peppermint Lounge, then became DJ at a
mid sixties hot spot called Arthur. Spinning records in between
live sets by a cover band, he would mix soul and rock hits with ob-
scure personal favorites. The goal was to reach a crescendo and
ride it home. "I felt up the audience/' Noel would recall years
later, in the disco seventies. "There's a feeling the crowd emanates
like an unconscious grapevine. They send you a signal and you
talk back to them through records. When 1 played a record, the
record that followed would make a comment on the record that
came before." Working two turntables with a quick hand on the
volume fader was the way to do it. Only a dexterous DJ could pull
it off.
Francis Grasso was the master. The Brooklyn-born DJ took
this spontaneous approach and turned it into a science. Actually,
the technique began in radio; Grasso perfected and patented slip-
cueing. While one disc was playing for the crowd, he would listen
to the next selection on headphones and find the best spot to
make a jump. Then he'd hold still the second disc with his thumb
while the turntable whirled beneath, insulated by a felt pad. At the
right moment, he'd release the next song precisely on the beat.
These perfect segues became a trademark, and once he got speed

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controls on his Thorens turntables, Grasso could alter the

records' tempos so they'd match perfectly. Reaching a fevered
crescendo, he'd even play two records simultaneously for two
minutes at a stretch-on the same beat. Or he'd spin two copies
of the same record at once, creating echo effects.
Musically, Francis Grasso's tastes were also on the cutting
edge, and custom-fit for the dance floor. He specialized in soul
and rock's pulsing, percussive wing, mixing Santana's steamy
"Soul Sacrifice" with such African-flavored exotica as "Drums of
Passion" by Babatunde Olatunji. Grasso was a maven-the origi-
nal DJ with challenging taste. He played what he liked and made
dancers love it.

The Mix

The mix starts at a certain placel builds l teases builds

l

again and picks up on the other side. The break is the

high point. Ifs like asking someone a question l repeating
and repeating itl waiting for an answer-and then giving
the answer. That is the great satisfying moment.
-OJ Danae 1979 l

The disco DJs fashioned a new sound and sensibility-a nascent

pop music style--that couldn't be heard on the radio; not yet, any-
way. Gradually, a few "breakout" songs from the disco scene began
to infiltrate the mainstream. One of the first was "Soul Makoosa"
by the Cameroon-born saxophonist Manu Dibango. Hypnotic in
its effect, "Soul Makoosa" relied on a chanted vocal hook ("mama-
koo mama-sa mama-koo-ma-koo-sa MAMAKOOSN') and com-
plex, compelling rhythmic repetitions. It was more than a novelty:

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it was the kind of dance record you'd remember the morning after.
Recorded in Paris, "Soul Makoosa" was discovered as an import by
club DJs and eventually rereleased by Atlantic Records in 1973.
When it crept into the Top 40 that summer, not even disco cultists
realized it was an omen.
It wasn't only the music played in discos that slipped into the
mainstream; the turntable strategies and rhythmic tricks of the
DJ s themselves began to influence the act of recording. Tom
Moulton is the man who shepherded this process. He's the master
of the 12-inch mix, or remix. Ironically, perhaps tellingly, he was
never a club DJ.
A former model, Moulton pioneered the process of restructur-
ing a record to suit the dance floor, juggling the elements of mul-
titrack recording in order to shift emphasis. He discovered his
metier while programming homemade party tapes for a Long Is-
land disco. Turning pro, Moulton found ways to extend a three-
minute song to more than six minutes by stretching instrumental
sections. Working with sixteeen- or twenty-four-track master
tapes, slicing and dicing, he could play up the bass and drums or
whatever elements triggered a response in dancers. ''A monoto-
nous piece with few breaks or melodic hooks could be recon-
structed in such a way that you lengthened the breaks," Moulton
patiently explained, "or incorporated catchy tunes at the right
places. Behind this was the idea to produce the best possible rela-
tion between tension and relaxation."
Merging with the producers Tony Bongiovi and Meco
Menardo, Moulton utilized his ideas on a series of midseventies
singles and albums by the soul singer Gloria Gaynor. Working
with the original "disco diva," the team brought the New York
club sound to mainstream middle America. One of Gaynor's spe-

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cialties was a showstopping fifteen-minute medley in which she'd

smoothly progress from song to song, flowing from "Never Can
Say Goodbye" to "Reach Out I'll Be There" and leaping from
"Casanova Brown" to "How High the Moon." The flow pro-
gressed with the same seamless motion a disco DJ would strive
for. It was a radical move on a record album.
As the 1970s wore on, more records were made with dancing in
mind, and the pop singles chart started to reflect this new trend.
The Florida-based label TK Records and its light-soul "Sound of
Miami" yielded Top 10 smashes by George McCrae ("Rock Your
Baby") and Gwen McRae ("Rocking Chair") in 1974, and a string
of irresistibly silly-sexy hits by KC & the Sunshine Band. All these
songs featured swaying Caribbean-influenced rhythms and a gen-
tle, hedonistic vibe-and they sold as well. "Rock Your Baby" was
a hit around the world, selling two million here and one million
in the United Kingdom. A silly piece of syncopated fluff, Van
McCoy's "The Hustle" sold ten million copies in two years. Disco
was knocking on the door.

Fever

A hot disco mix ... is a sexual metaphor. The DJ plays

with the audience's emotions pleasing and teasing in a
crescendo of feeling. The break is the climax.
-Andrew Kopkind, "Dialectics of Disco"

The record that finally did it, that pushed disco into the Amer-
ican mainstream, was all break-actually one long, extended cli-
max. Sex already suffused popular music in general and R&B in

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particular. Barry White, for instance, was hugely influential, both

in terms of his orchestrated rhythm tracks and his salacious,
velvet-voiced come-ons.
But it was Donna Summer who would forever unite disco with
the idea of mechanical sexiness. Blatant, anonymous, somewhat
impersonal, and maybe even self-directed, "Love to Love You
Baby" broke the field wide open, especially in its epic, extended,
seventeen-minute disco version. The sultry, disembodied voice of
Donna Summer shudders and sighs in orgasmic release while the
syncopated backing moves through grand symphonic orchestra-
tions and cool synthesized drones. This combination of frank
sexuality and futuristic, electronically enhanced music defined a
new genre: Eurodisco. When a shortened version of "Love to Love
You Baby" reached the Top 10 in late 1975, Time magazine tagged
it as the centerpiece of an alarming new movement, sex rock.
The Boston-born Summer had been trained as a gospel singer,
toured Europe in productions of Hair and Godspell, and in
Berlin had hooked up with the producer Giorgio Moroder and
his songwriting partner, Pete Bellotte. They sculpted a fresh
sound for her: rhythm-driven, with room for melody and ambi-
tion to spare. Suites and concept albums were the stuff of Eu-
rodisco. Other producer-artists such as Cerrone and Alec Co-
standinis took this approach even further on their own albums:
Eurodisco's shimmering technological edge and stiff robotic
beats complimented the science-fiction fad of the late seventies
and paved the way for the mechanical, purely synthesized sound
of the eighties.
"We take something from everything," Moroder declared,
"and then we make it our own."

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 Last Dance

Disco is soon to be the R&B sound of today. [In 1978, that

wasn't obvious.] And these ideas that writers are having about
using machines and becoming like machines-they must be
making a joke. I know for sure we are, and maybe, as I think
you say in English, we are having the last, longest laugh. All
this talk of machines and industry makes me laugh. Even if you
use synthesizers and sequencers and drum machines, you have
to set them up, to choose exactly what you are going to make
them do. It's nonsense to say that we make all our music auto-
matically.

Perhaps the mechanical nature of disco has been overempha-

sized-or indeed, demonized. With its relentless repetition and
studied anonymity, disco feels like a self-aware celebration of
mass production. Is this truly such a threat? The vast majority of
pop songs and singers are faceless and interchangeable; cover ver-
sions and copycat artists go all the way back to the beginning of
recording, when every record company worth its wax released a
rendition of ''After the Ball." The history of pop music is an end-
less scroll of one-offs, overnight sensations, hypes, disposable
idols, comic novelties, and sentimental favorites. A final word:
Nobody got the last laugh on disco.

The Crash of '79

Then we went to Studio 54. Truman was there. He goes

up into the crow's nest where the OJ spins the records
and it's like his private office. People come up to see him,
and he stays until 8:00 ... Rod and Alana were in the

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back, I introduced them to the manager. It's hard to get

coke there now, they're not really selling it.
-Andy Warhol, Diaries, Saturday, January 6, 1979

We will have more Saturday Night Fevers and great

years, but the lessons of 1979 will not be forgotten. "Prof-
itless prosperity" is a term we could do without.
-Barrie Bergman,
president of Record Bar retail chain, 1979

The communal ecstasy and high style of the urban disco scene
spread to the suburbs, gradually sweeping middle America via
two concurrent tornadoes. The movie Saturday Night Fever and
its accompanying soundtrack launched the disco craze, and the
media's obsession with celebrity-studded Studio 54 defined disco
in the national consciousness. The brainchild of Long Island
restaurateur Steve Rubell and his partner, Ian Schraeger, Studio 54
epitomized the decadent image of disco. It was aggressively ex-
clusive, ambitiously elegant, and unabashedly gay. During its hey-
day, from 1977 to 1979, "Studio" made a star of everybody on the
dance floor-that is, anybody who could gain admittance. Drug
and tax evasion convictions closed the club in 1979 and both own-
ers spent time in jail. They weren't the only disco entrepreneurs
who suffered through rough mornings after.
If disco was producers' music, then Saturday Night Fever was
a producer's film. The bond between the movie and songs on the
soundtrack album set the stage for many a marketing package to
come. The complex, enveloping web of tie-ins and synergy starts
with Saturday Night Fever (and Star Wars as well) in 1977.
The producer Robert Stigwood assembled the Saturday N ;ght
Fever package after reading and obtaining the rights to a 1976

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 Last Dance

New York magazine article portraying restless postteens in a

Brooklyn disco, "Rituals of the New Saturday Night," by Nik
Cohn. Stigwood had a background in movie and theatrical pro-
duction (Jesus Christ Superstar); conveniently, he was also man-
ager of the Bee Gees. Comprised of the three Gibb brothers (Bee
Gee stands for brothers Gibb), this Australian pop group made
their name as sweetly harmonizing Beatles clones in the late
1960s. After a fallow period, they'd reinvented themselves with
vaguely funky dance hits such as 1974's "Jive Talkin'." In the film,
a white-suited, open-shirted John Travolta made the dance floor
seem accessible to blue-collar youth; the pumping music and
suavely choreographed dance scenes levitated the corny, follow-
your-dreams plot. And the soundtrack album was cleverly split
between the Bee Gees' satiny, sanitized grooves and compelling,
authentic disco classics such as the Trammps' "Disco Inferno."
Saturday Night Fever perfectly defined a musical movement, and
millions of middle Americans couldn't resist hustling on board.
Undeservedly, perhaps, the Bee Gees were recast as disco's blow-
dried Chubby Checkers.
Of course, one sequence from the film will live forever in pop's
collective unconscious: John Travolta in his white suit, looking
magnetic, dancing by himself. Disco was a solo turn by definition,
albeit performed in a group setting. The sublimated sexual mo-
tion of an old-fashioned teenage slow dance would be utterly su-
perfluous in a modern 19705 discotheque.
Eventually selling more than thirty million copies, the Satur-
day Night Fever album spent twenty-four weeks at number one in
1977 and 1978. The marketing campaign, masterminded by vet-
eran record man Al Coury, connected like none previous. In De-
cember 1977, half a million copies of Saturday Night Fever

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 PLAYBACK

shipped all at once. Movie trailers that prominently featured

songs were shown in theaters, a prime example of crossover mar-
keting. Four singles were released simultaneously, and each
wound up in the Top 10 at the same time (equaling the Beatles'
British invasion coup). Yet these record companies soon would
come to rue this kind of oversaturation.
At first, the flush of success was contagious. Explains WBLS
DJ Frankie Crocker in 1979, "Disco is definitely replacing rock
... rock is no more important than Dixieland jazz in New York
City right now." Nationwide chains of Saturday Night Fever-style
nightclubs opened. Radio stations adopted disco formats-reluc-
tantly. Before the bust, ads for a line of Studio 54 blue jeans ap-
peared. A Broadway musical titled Got Tu Go Disco, budgeted at
half a million 1979 dollars, mercifully went belly-up. Recording
artists lined up to remake themselves as dance mavens. Some of
these conversions were suspect, to say the least. Rod Stewart, the
Beach Boys, Cher, Dolly Parton, Shirley Bassey, Andy Williams,
Barbra Streisand, Englebert Humperdinck, Helen Reddy, Herbie
Mann, and Ethel Merman all released nominal disco records.
Country veteran Porter Wagonner announced (or was it a threat?)
that he might record a disco version of "The Star-Spangled Ban-
ner." Somehow the quacking "Disco Duck" sold four million
copies, but most of these unlikely crossover hits bombed. The
campy carrying-on of the costumed Village People
-however charming in their self-deprecating humor-became
synonymous with disco itself. Their success brarided the genre a
musical joke. And no matter how funny it is, any joke has a
severely limited shelf life.
The Roman-candle flameout of Casablanca Records, the home
of Donna Summer, the Village People, and KISS dramatically il-

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 Last Dance

luminates the commercial crash-and-burn of disco itself.

Casablanca's founder, the late Neil Bogart, rode the rocket; in his
time, he had become disco's reigning mogul.
Bogart (nee Bogatz) was a consummate striver. Prescient
enough to sign Donna Summer after hearing "Love to Love You
Baby" in Europe, Bogart insisted on releasing the radically long
version of the song. He also instituted the play-fast-and-loose
business strategy that eventually spelled doom for disco. Still,
those giddying highs must've had breathtaking peaks. At first, the
numbers surely were intoxicating. In 1978, Bogart's Casablanca
and Stigwood's RSO combined sold $300 million worth of
records for the joint owner, Germany's Polygram.
Bogart's career path began in Philadelphia, at the Cameo-
Parkway label; his connection to Dick Clark and the Philly teen-
idol scene runs deep. He honed his chops at Buddah Records, the
late sixties home of bubblegum music. Buddah's preteen pop is an
eerie prediction of disco in some ways: conceived by producers
and studio musicians, assigned to bland or anonymous perform-
ers, relentlessly promoted.
Before disco, the foundation of Bogart's empire was built on
the cartoon-rock of Kiss, the loony funk of Parliament, and a
flukey LP of Tonight ShoUJ comedy routines. Not surprisingly,
Donna Summer's breakout success saved Casablanca from crum-
bling. Doubling its bet on disco, the German conglomerate Poly-
gram purchased a half stake in Casablanca in 1977. (Polygram
had owned a piece of RSO since 1975.) The influx of money, how-
ever, only served to justify the questionable practices at
Casablanca.
One favored Bogart ploy was overshipping-that is, sending
out many more copies of a record than the market demanded,

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logging them as sales and notching up another platinum hit. The

only problem was in returns: since there was no limit on the num-
ber of unsold records a store could send back for a full refund, re-
tailers would accept any size shipment.
The Casablanca roster included the Village People, but the
label also signed dozens of other artists whose records, in the
words of one ex-employee, "shipped gold and returned plat-
inurn." On top of general overspending and mismanagement,
amid rumors of rampant drug use, Bogart made gigantic miscal-
culations that undermined even his surefire successes. Releasing
four solo albums by members of Kiss in 1979 didn't exactly turn
the tide. Casablanca went under a few years later, an overdose vic-
tim of disco-era indulgence.
Casablanca was merely the most extreme example. All of the
major labels had an overly generous return policy until 1979, the
year they got burned. According to historian Russell Sanjek, "CBS
and Warner had spent in excess of $20 million to erect new man-
ufacturing facilities in order to meet expected large sales. Finding
themselves, instead, with millions of LP returns, they lowered the
boom on the 100% return policy. There was also the problem of
counterfeit LPs among the returns." In the wake of Saturday
Night Fever, record sales hit a slippery slope.
The death knell of disco sounded during the summer of 1979.
The funeral rites occurred in a baseball stadium on July 12. A
popular Chicago radio DJ named Steve Dahl staged an ominous
promotional event at Comiskey Park in between games of a
White Sox doubleheader. It was a publicity stunt gone haywire
and a bitter expression of the growing divide in popular music.
The unified musical discourse of the 1960s splintered into a shrill,
unnecessary debate: rock versus disco.

1-32
 Last Dance

This so-called Disco Demolition started with Dahl blowing up

an enormous pile of disco records in center field. Dressed in mil-
itary garb, the DJ fled in a jeep before thousands of his fans
stormed the field. They destroyed signs, tore up the sod, knocked
over the batting cage, and caused the second game to be canceled.
A fairly recent arrival at rock station WLUP-FM, Dahl was
protesting his former employer's (WDAI-FM) move to a disco for-
mat. He was also pandering to the rabid "disco sucks" mentality
that had invaded the pop music scene-or at least the male ado-
lescent end of it. Homophobic and obnoxious, to be sure, this
small-scale riot also reflected a widespread ambivalence toward
disco in the general population-an ambivalence rapidly curdling
into outright hostility. Like any musical fad accelerated by mass
media, disco had saturated its audience and worn out its wel-
come. The backlash had begun, and it was brutal.
Yet the Chicago antidisco rabble probably didn't appreciate the
full irony of their publicity-grabbing protest. Their funeral pyre
burned not just for disco; the LP format itself was on its last legs.
Both cassette and compact disc were waiting in the wings. Before
those struggles could begin, however, the phonograph had to
complete its journey from playback device to musical instrument,
from record player to turntable. Luckily, the next generation of
radical DJs emerged from the unlikeliest of places just in time.
Hip-hop would pick up the thread exactly where disco left off.

133
 chapter 7

GENTURES ON WHEELS OF STEEL

THE INCREDIBLE HIP-HOP SAGA actually begins on an island even

more hardscrabble than the Bronx-Jamaica. In the 1950s, long
before the rise of reggae and the Jamaican music industry, sound
systems, or mobile discos, dominated the island scene. Live bands
were mostly limited to the tourist trade. Speakers, amplifier, and
a turntable mounted on the back of a truck met the basic re-
quirement, though anyone equipped with rare R&B records from
the States gained status. Massive volume was also key-especially
fat, pumped-up bass lines that could rumble through dancing
crowds.
The sound system operator, or DJ, functioned as both techni-
cian and selector, requiring an equal mastery of technology and
music. The most successful sound system operators-Duke Reid,
Sir Coxsone, Prince Buster, and King Tubby-eventually started
to cut records by local acts. So they morphed into entrepreneurs,
by necessity, becoming DJ s in the Dick Clark sense. Gradually, a
uniquely Jamaican variant of R&B known as ska issued forth
from sound systems. In time, the local music scene grew into
something deeper, ever more singular and complex. Ska turned

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into reggae as its bass lines grew even fatter, peppy horn charts re-
ceded, and the creed of Rastafarianism surfaced in the lyrics.
Even as the music played on these sound systems developed
into something more indigenous and original, however, the D J s,
or operators, continued to manipulate or distort the records to
their own ends: boosting the bass and volume, conjuring spaced-
out special effects, adding verbal commentary and between-songs
patter. Verbal introductions, announcements, segues, and slang
could be supplied by a sidekick, also known as a DJ, or toaster.
Scatting and exhortations in the singular island patois became a
crucial ingredient in the sound system mix; by the turn of the
1970s, toasters such as V-Roy became recording stars in their own
right.
The toaster sputtered commentary on the passing parade like
a stoned carnival barker. The background for his spiel was often
the borrowed rhythm of a popular record. Literally, anything was
fair game. The version (as in cover version) came to rule Jamaican
music, mostly because the field was wide open-until 1993, Ja-
maica had no copyright law pertaining to music. You didn't have
to pay to play or make records; a Jamaican cover version didn't
cost a penny. Such legal concepts as plagiarism and piracy had no
meaning. The British critic Dick Hebdige supplied a hindsight
label for this new kind of music making: cut 'n' mix. No one
owns a song or melody or rhythm; music makers simply borrow
tunes, returning them in slightly different form.
Roughly at the same time, in the mid sixties, both Coxsone and
Duke Reid started to make their own records. Laboring in
Kingston's handful of recording studios, they laid the ground-
work for reggae's world takeover. Working in his Studio One (the
first black-owned studio in Kingston), Coxsone over time estab-

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lished the fundamental methods of record mixing. Obscure but

crucial is that in addition to his famous efforts with Bob Marley
and countless others, Coxsone cut hundreds of one-off party
discs. These were specialized records born of need and tailored
specifically for the dance floor. Made on the cheap and not origi-
nally intended for commercial consumption, they were rough
analogues of the 12-inch single-test runs for the next revolution
in sound recording. Even more than the disco mix, the dub plate
was malleable, open-ended raw meat for the DJ.
The dub plate was usually a 10-inch acetate. Think of these
clunky discs as stepping-stones, as formative pauses on the way to
the finished product. Dub plates introduce the idea of an unfin-
ished record, recasting pop music as a work in progress (for the
technologically capable). Perhaps the science of record mixing be-
gins with the dub plate.
Working with just two tracks, the sound system engineer took
songs and pared them to a basic rhythm piece-just drums and
bass, with most of original vocals removed. Songs then could be
refit with different singers or lyrics and preexisting rhythms fit
with different songs. One song could be slightly reshuffled and
rerecorded in fifty (minutely) different versions for fifty different
sound systems. The variations were fluid and forever multiplying.
By the late 1970s, a track known as the Real Rock Rhythm was re-
puted to exist in 800 versions (including '~rmagiddeon Time" by
The Clash).
One day at Duke Reid's studio, in 1967 or 1968, a happy acci-
dent changed the course of Jamaican music (and also prefigured
some of disco's innovations). A sound system operator, Rudolph
"Ruddy" Redwood, happened to hear a tape on which the engi-
neer forgot to add the vocals and liked the eerie quality of the in-

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strumental version. Ruddy asked Duke to put it on the back of a

record and took it to the dance that night, and a new sound was
born-dub. The instrumental version was more than a flip {or B}
side: it was raw {or half-cooked} wax, a template; successive sin-
gles could be cut from the same backing track, or rhythm.
The key figure in dub history-a sound system DJ tinker
turned scientist, Lee "Scratch" Perry--cast a mad shadow over
reggae. Working in his homemade studio, Black Ark {a backyard
setup}, Perry broke new ground during the 1970s. He deployed his
crude recording equipment willfully, using its defects and short-
comings as sound effects. Perry embodies the transforming power
of technological innovation utterly on the cheap. In his home-
made studio, Perry concocted sounds and techniq ues-a whole
recording aesthetic-that others still employ, at far more expense.
Overdubs, abrupt silences, an abundance of echo and distor-
tion, and ghostly, half-spoken and chanted vocal snatches drift
through the throbbing mix. Lee Perry produced legitimate hit
records, for all his signature bizarre qualities. Two of reggae's
crossover classics bear his stamp: Max Romeo {"War Ina Baby-
lon"} and Junior Murvin {"Police & Thieves"}. And his early sev-
enties alliance with Bob Marley was a formative collaboration for
both. Perry produced the Wailers on some key 1970 sessions, sub-
tly guiding them from U.S. R&B toward a topical Jamaican roots
sound. Scratch's midseventies deal with Island Records gained the
dub sound some international exposure during reggae's commer-
cial heyday.
Dub paved the way for dancehall in the 1980s; the wake of Bob
Marley's death spelled retreat for reggae culture at large. Natu-
rally, Jamaican music returned to the sound system at that point,
only to be revived and refreshed as dancehall a few years later. If

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the staccato fire of Jamaican dancehall-liquid verbal dexterity

and mechanical rhythms-resembles American hip-hop, this is
because there is indeed a direct connection.

The Holy Trinity of Hip-Hop

The Bronx was already home to a sizable community of

Caribbean immigrants in the 1960s and 1970s, but the musical
connection between reggae and rap can be traced to one man.
Clive Campbell, better known as Kool DJ Herc, moved to New
York at age twelve in 1967. Growing up in Kingston, Campbell
had been exposed to the sound systems at an early age (that is, he
was too young to actually attend the dances). When he began to
spin records himself, at parties in the early 1970s, he naturally em-
ulated that approach. The reggae records he played at first didn't
spark the same response in New York, so Herc (as in Hercules) de-
veloped a new repertoire, heavy on James Brown and funky soul
with Latin percussion from local favorites such as Mandrill and
The Jimmy Castor Bunch.
Like the disco DJ s, Herc employed two turntables to insure
nonstop dance floor action. Where Francis Grasso developed
smooth, beat-perfect segues, however, Herc deployed abrupt,
attention-grabbing transitions. He noticed that certain sections of
records-usually percussive breaks or isolated beats-always
elicited a strong response from his audiences. So why not give the
people what they want? Spinning on two turntables allowed Herc
to cut to the chase, literally. With two copies of the same record,
he could play one section over and over, returning the needle to
start one record while the other played through. Thus he could ex-

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tend a record's peak indefinitely, working the crowd into a frenzy.

The term for his manual edits became break beats.
Herc labeled his raucous adolescent (mostly male) audience
the B (for break) boys. Their ballet of hyperathletic moves on the
dance floor morphed into the art of break dancing, and their cal-
ligraphic art-spray-paint graffiti of Byzantine complexity-
could be seen everywhere in the city, thanks to the mobile canvas
of mass transit. Hip-hop culture was born.
Hip-hop started as a black bohemian movement, like bebop,
only younger and farther uptown, in the Bronx. If the DJ s resem-
bled jazz soloists in flight, then the early rappers snapped and
stretched the sounds of their words like scat singers. Hip-hop
arose from recording technology, a pure product of the turntable.
In turn, the new music sparked the next generation of changes in
that industry. After hip-hop, records would never be made the
same way again. To put it bluntly, a lot of professional musicians
lost their jobs.
Hip-hop didn't have time for disco's tension and release, all
those anthem choruses broken by extended vamp sections. As the
British observer David Toop succinctly put it, "Break-beat music
simply ate the cherry off the top of the cake and threw the rest
away."
Continuing another tradition of Jamaican DJs, Kool DJ Herc
relied on a powerful sound system and became known for pun-
ishing levels of bass emanating from his own "legendary" speaker
cabinets (the "Herc-V-Lords"). Initially, Herc handled Me duties
himself, pausing between songs to add encouragement-a Bronx-
accented slant on the slangy rhetoric of the toaster. "To the beat
y'all, you don't stop"; "Rock on, my mellow."

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As his fame spread, Here recruited a pair of MCs-Clark Kent

and Coke La Rock (sic)-and played dances in public parks as
well as local hangouts such as the Hevalo, Disco Fever, Executive
Playhouse, and Twilight Zone. There were other DJs around at
the time, such as Pete "DJ" jones, Grandmaster Flowers, and DJ
Hollywood, but Kool Here co'mmanded a hardcore following. Be-
tween his jump cuts and exclusive taste for hard funk, Here's
sound ruled the streets-until two younger men came along.
Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa took Kool Here's
break-beat approach, refined his technique, and broadened its ap-
peal. They brought hip-hop to the world at large.
Growing up in the South Bronx, most boys couldn't afford a
bedroom sound system. Young joseph Saddler developed the knack
for repairing disabled equipment, assembling a homemade rig from
the ample refuse surrounding him. Between his technical expertise
and fascination with his father's record collection, the future
Grandmaster was a natural on the turntables. The aspiring D j
Flash improvised his own variation on Here's style-and improved
on it. Hitting the streets, literally, Flash conducted market research
at ad-hoc dance parties in the local concrete-and-trees parks. Power
source: a jury-rigged telephone pole, more often than not.
Perhaps not as stridently antidisco as Here, Flash favored hard-
driving funk beats but he'd also pull romantic R&B harmony
records from his crates as the night wore into day or vice versa.
Flash prided himself on the breadth of his record collection and
the length of his D j performances. He never had to repeat himself
by playing the same record twice.
According to Flash, Here didn't seem quite comfortable with
headphones and his mixes sounded crude as a result: he'd drop

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the needle by eyeballing the record grooves. Flash made maximum

use of headphones, precisely mixing one record into another and
experimenting with the process. He'd augment the record while it
was spinning, switching the mixer from his headphones to the
speakers for isolated blasts of sound, adding an emphatic brass
riff or drum slap. He called it punch phasing. Eventually, he de-
vised a way of using the record itself as a percussion instrument.
This procedure-quickly moving the record back and forth over
the same beat or chord-became known as scratching. Flash
makes it seem simple.
Actually, Flash modestly defers full credit for the scratching
technique. He cites the influence of another DJ, his boyhood
friend and neighbor, Theodore Livingston, a.k.a. Grand Wizard
Theodore. Too young to spin records at parties, Theodore ad-
vanced the D]'s science behind closed doors in his bedroom.
When his mother yelled "turn it DOWN" one fateful day, he held
the stylus while the record kept spinning. "What Theodore would
do with a scratch is make it more rhythmical," said Flash in 1993.
"He had a way of rhythmically taking a scratch and making that
shit sound musical. He just took it to another level." That result-
ing sound-wicka wicka wick-is now recognized as the hip-hop
D]'s sonic signifier.
Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" (1983) propelled the scratch tech-
nique into the pop eye, courtesy of one Grandmixer DST. This hit
single and early MTV staple is also (for its time) a high-tech fu-
sion of break beats and synth blips. The rhythmic skips and hops
of live DJ scratching had never appeared on a pop record before-
"the freak crossover success of 1983," noted Rolling Stone maga-
zine. "Rockit" also furnished the background for a million televi-
sion sports events through the years. The scratch has been a

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recurring note in pop music ever since, for some, an annoying

noise that won't go away.
If Flash (and Theodore) advanced hip-hop as a science, then
Afrika Bambaataa pushed the new form forward to a broader cul-
ture. A former member of the Black Spades gang, Bambaataa led
the transition from street crime to street creativity. He founded the
Zulu Nation, a peaceable crew dedicated to hip-hop with the
same organization and fervor that the gangs had devoted to drugs
and violence. Devoted to the philosophy of "James Brown, Sly
Stone and Louis Farrakhan," these Zulus were far more tolerant
and inclusive than many of their Nation of Islam brethren. (Their
name was inspired by Zulu, a 1966 film featuring Michael Caine
and some stunning technicolor battle scenes.)
As a DJ, Bambaataa's taste was marvelously eclectic. "I played
so much crazy shit they called me Master of Records." Hardcore
funk and break beats were both his base and springboard. He'd
play the Beatles and the Monkees, hard rock by Grand Funk Rail-
road and Thin Lizzy, the theme music from the Pink Panther car-
toons-any record with a rhythmic break or catchy hook was
game. Behind the turntables, Bambaataa wasn't a technical whiz
in the engineering sense, as Flash was. He'd even allow his
acolytes (Jazzy Jay and Red Alert) to physically implement his se-
lection. Years later, even Kool Herc admitted that Bambaataa
"could turn my head around" with offbeat choices-a catholic
taste was Bambaataa's secret weapon. To prevent espionage, he'd
disguise the labels on his discs.
Bambaataa and Flash, like Here before them, attracted devoted
followings among teenagers in the Bronx. Gradually, word spread
throughout the five boroughs of New York City. Cassette tapes of
DJ s were circulated and car services and private taxis would ob-

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tain a "dope" Herc, Flash, or Bambaataa tape in order to attract

and maintain customers. And as this music grew in complexity
and sophistication, the role of the MC, or rapper, increased.
Grandmaster Flash led the way in this arena as well. His first side-
kick was Cowboy (Keith Wiggins), who wielded the deep, mel-
lifluous voice of a radio announcer. Cowboy gets credit for intro-
ducing rhymes into hip-hop's verbal mix. Next to join Flash were
the Glover brothers, Melvin and Nathaniel, better known respec-
tively as Melle Mel and Kid Creole. They brought a literate, hy-
perarticulate spin to the proceedings. With the addition of
Rahiem (Guy Williams) and Scorpio (Eddie Morris), the crew be-
came known as Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. They
were unabashed showmen, rapping in unison and individually,
playing their vocal cords and vocabularies like percussion instru-
ments, incorporating homemade costumes and Temptations-style
dance routines into their act. But the driving force behind it all,
and perhaps the center of attention, was the action behind the
turntables.
In 1993, Kool Herc said he shrugged off the prospect of record-
ing. "I was always maintained as far as running the sound system
and giving parties. The Mic was always open for the MCs. My
thing was just playing music and giving parties. 1 wasn't interested
in making no records." Eventually, the rappers caught the ears of
the people who make the records. At that point, on records, hip-
hop turned into rap. Yet that great leap forward took a while.
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were the obvious can-
didates to put hip-hop onto records. But how could you make a
record of music based on other records? Others were interested,
of course, yet these originators weren't the first. Like Bill Haley in
the early days of rock 'n' roll, the first true rap record didn't come

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straight from the source. Sylvia Robinson, the coowner of Sugar

Hill Records, first heard the sound of hip-hop from her children
and threw her considerable business acumen behind it. Rap
music, as it became known, put this street-smart, black-owned
independent label on the map. Robinson assembled a group called
the Sugar Hill Gang. Basically a trio of wannabe rappers, they
borrowed rhymes from established Bronx stylists, most notably
Grandmaster Caz of the Cold Crush Brothers. The Gang's "Rap-
per's Delight" crossed over to the pop charts in 1979, mostly on
the strength of musical hooks lifted from Chic's late-disco hit
"Good Times." That ascending bass line and liquid pulse were re-
peated in a hypnotizing loop while the rappers plied their rhymes.
Chic insisted on a royalty payment, naturally. Sugar Hill settled
and set another precedent.
Sugar Hill Records finessed the problem of how to record DJ
music with help from an expert crew of studio musicians. They
appropriated beats and subtly recast melodies, reshuffling and
polishing until their borrowings sounded shiny and new, or at
least novel. If that sounds like an approximation of the DJ's ap-
proach, it should. After recording for the even smaller Enjoy label,
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five signed with Sugar Hill
and released a succession of sleek, exciting singles. "Freedom,"
"Birthday Party," and "It's Nasty (Genius of Love)" function as
party chants and also feature fearsome levels of verbal dexterity
and an irrepressible love of language.
Despite the endless verbal tributes paid to Grandmaster Flash
on all of the Furious Five's classic raps, the king of the quick mix
is strangely inactive on these early records. "I wasn't ready," Flash
said of making records; by the standards of that time, he was
right.

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Those standards were upended, however, with the 1981 release

of "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of
Steel." A showcase of the Drs mixing talents, "Wheels of Steel"
features bits of "Good Times," ''Another One Bites the Dust" by
Queen, "Rapture" by Blondie and more, topped off by voiceovers,
drum breaks, and the rough, percussive wicka-wicka-wick of
scratching. Then and now, Wheels of Steel sounds like nothing else
on earth: the first record made entirely out of other records. "I
wanted to do something like ["Wheels of Steel"] for a long time,"
said Sylvia Robinson, in 1981. With perfect hindsight, she contin-
ued, "I spoke to Flash about it and he said, 'A record? Are you se-
rious?' The kids really like doing that on turntables. It took about
a day to do directly from record to tape. Flash is really the best."
Sugar Hill no doubt aimed "Wheels of Steel" as a novelty, but
this cut-and-mix milestone presaged the day, soon to come, when
records could be made without the services of any musicians, or
any traditional musician at least, save a vocalist or two. Once
again, the record business was undergoing subtle changes that
would ultimately lead to a major transition in how music would
be recorded and produced.
The next 12-inch single by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious
Five, "The Message," had a more immediate effect-thanks to the
supercharged social realism of its lyrics and Melle Mel's deadpan
staccato delivery. Rap would no longer be party music. Yet the
terse synthesizer figure at the center of "The Message" turned out
to be as influential as the so-called message itself. Electronic'
sounds came to dominate pop in the mid 1980s, and black pop
(R&B as well as rap) provided both the blueprints and the prov-
ing ground.

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Die Mensch Maschine

In a simultaneous exchange, rap music has made its mark

on advanced technology and technology has profoundly
changed the sound of black music.
- Tricia Rose, Black Noise

Released around the same time as "The Message," another

early rap single energized the eighties. "Planet Rock" by Afrika
Bambaataa & Soul Sonic Force solidified the live-wire connection
between black music and technological innovation. "Planet Rock"
became a left-field commercial sensation, the only certified gold
12-inch single of 1982. Soul Sonic Force's rhymes and lyrics are
weak compared with the Furious Five's output, and their mes-
sage, aside from the music, is nonexistent. But the haunting syn-
thesizer echoes and eerie machine beats of "Planet Rock" her-
alded a new methodology of recording. Processed by the hip-hop
DJ, tweaked and rewired, the clockwork mechanical repetitions
and hypnotic synthesizer drones of Kraftwerk somehow re-
emerged as dance music.
Kraftwerk took technology to heart. More accurately, Kraft-
werk took technology as its heart. Kraftwerk is the pulsing em-
bodiment of purely synthetized music, generated by a new race,
die mensch maschine. The Man Machine is not only the name of
a Kraftwerk LP but also defined the group's image and method-
ology. Group leaders Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider created a
sonic template composed of layers of synthesized textures over-
lapping precise beats. Of course, Kraftwerk acknowledged the
human role by mocking it outright.

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Kraftwerk's 1975 opus ''Autobahn'' ambulates for more than

twenty minutes, filling one entire side of an LP record. Such in-
dulgences were common at the time, but Autobahn stretched the
album format subtly out of proportion. The serene synthesizer
ebb and flow subverts the limits of the LP, along with the listener's
sense of time. Every so often, oceanic waves of human (Beach
Boys) harmony roll through the window. Compatible with Amer-
ican expressways, the Autobahn album hit number five here in the
States. Almost as a teaser or perverse joke, an edited 45 rpm ver-
sion even floated into the Top 40.
Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express" reached a different audi-
ence, by accident or design. In retrospect, what attracted Bam-
baataa is obvious. Underneath the immaculate layers of keyboard
sounds, the mechanical rhythms nail down a groove. On the Trans
Europe Express album, the travelogue title track segues neatly
into the resonant ricochet of "Metal on Metal." Interestingly, it
took a crew of Germans to replicate break beats. Even the hip-
hop DJ s were awed. Grandmaster Flash confessed to putting
Kraftwerk on the turntable and letting it spin, unedited. Shifting
tracks such as "Trans Europe Express" and "Metal on Metal"
didn't require further cuts.

The Music Machine

Eventually, technology caught up with the DJs. In the recording

studio, keyboards and samplers made handier tools than two
turntables and an endless stack of records of records. In time, a
supplement to the D]'s turntables became a substitute.

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The expansion of the hip-hop D j's palette began with the beat
box. The first drum machines literally were beat boxes, prepro-
grammed analogue machines that let you choose a basic rhythm
pattern. A crude metronome pulse functioned as the hook on
George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby" and "Why Can't We Live To-
gether" by Timmy Thomas, two key entries in the Miami Sound
predisco sweep. Grandmaster Flash blazed this side trail, supple-
menting his rig with a dinosaur beat box (made by Vox). While
Flash approved of this supplement to the turntables, he consis-
tently resisted the use of samplers in the 1980s and 1990s. So the
recorded rap revolution left Flash behind. He still spins in New
York clubs and on the radio.
Afrika Bambaataa, though, immersed himself in the new tech-
nology of the early 1980s. Along with the producer Arthur Baker,
Bambaataa relied on the services of John Robie, a keyboard
player and, more important, a programmer. On "Planet Rock,"
the soon-to-be ubiquitous Roland 808 drum machine provides the
pulse. A Fairlight sampling keyboard regularly emits a polyphonic
blat-the compressed reproduction of ten orchestras squatting on
one note. This neck-snapping hook worked every time, becoming
one of many thunderous 1980s dance music cliches. Thankfully,
the technology that produced these inhuman sounds was capable
of generating more humane sounds as well.
Reproducing them in recognizable form led to legal problems.
A copyright skirmish erupted over "Planet Rock," this time be-
tween Kraftwerk and Bambaataa's label, Tommy Boy Records.
According to Tommy Boy founder Tom Silverman, his pioneering
rap and dance company had to pay dearly for the inspiration.
From the first, another precedent was set: dance to the music, pay

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the piper. Eventually, record companies realized that paying DJ s

to actually play the new machines would be cheaper than paying
royalties for every direct quote or appropriation. Still, pay to play
remains the name of the sampling game. Hip-hop is purely func-
tional music. The DJs aren't disrupting the past with their mixes
and cuts; rather, they're putting it to use.
Rap crossed over into the (white) mainstream in the mid eight-
ies, when Run-DMC hit with a hip-hop version of Aerosmith's
hard rock warhorse "Walk This Way." And the homemade tech-
niques of hip-hop DJs crossed over too: Engineers and producers
in expensive recording studios adopted the ideas behind scratch-
ing and break beats. Synthesizers, digital samplers, and drum ma-
chines could enhance the rhythmic collages generated by the
turntables-or replace them outright.
Sampling became the high-tech version of DJ mixing, especially
the way hip-hop DJ s would "cherry pick" or take snatches of
breaks, beats, and hooks from records. Sampling used digital tech-
nology to take apart and reassemble prerecorded music to give it
new meaning. The development of inexpensive digital samplers,
synthesizers, recorders, and computers brought the most advanced
sound recording techniques within reach of the home user.
A sampler converts analog sounds (from recorded sources) into
digital code, stores the code in memory, and converts the digital
code into analog sound (playback). At first, due to limited mem-
ory, samplers could only supplement the DJ's turntables and
records. But as technology improved, sampling gradually lured
the DJ away from turntables. Programming offered a quicker and
more efficient method of mixing.
The mellotron was probably the first sampler. This archaic de-
vice was a late sixties staple, often mistaken for an early synthe-

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sizer. It's the droning keyboard used by the Bearles, Led Zeppelin,
Pink Floyd on Dark Side of the Moon, and by the Moody Blues on
everything. Actually, the mellotron did function as a crude sam-
pler, as the keyboard triggered recorded musical notes on tape
loops. Typically, mellotrons were utilized to "re-create" the sounds
of instruments (as opposed to creating "pure" electronic sound);
as a result, the mellotron has been associated with a soupy sound
usually meant to echo a string section.
Another early protosampler was the Optigan, a toy marketed
from 1971 to 1975. Built by Mattel, the Optigan was an electric
organ knockoff, a keyboard with sounds supplied by a locked-
groove record player inside. Owners received a set of insertable
12-inch discs. The discs held recordings of organ, drums, bass,
piano, guitar, and so on. Press the keys on a keyboard and a light
beam would play the celluloid discs, in much the same way that a
movie projector would "play" the soundtrack strip on the film.
In 1979, the Australians Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie developed
a true music-sampling machine, the Fairlight eM, a massive
tabletop keyboard with a big TV monitor. By all accounts, the
Fairlight produced crude sound-but it could reproduce any-
thing. Also popular was the Emulator by EMU, which was similar
to the Fairlight but even bulkier and less practical. Then came the
funky Synclavier, a distinct-sounding digital synthesizer that
added some sampling capacity. AKAI made sampling accessible to
the average musician, offering short memory on affordable ma-
chines such as the iconic AKAI 5-1100 sampler. These machines
empowered an entire wave of British pop in the 1980s, not to men-
tion American R&B.
Synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines became as com-
mon as the Technics twin turntables: Linn-Drums, Roland and

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Oberheim, and more. Microprocessors introduced memory ca-

pacity and acoustic sounds could be stored digitally, recalled, and
recombined at will. The ability to program your own rhythms
. while manipulating stored beats made for (seemingly) infinite
variations. In modern hip-hop, the role of record spinner (DJ) has
morphed into record maker (producer).
Rap music has assumed the name hip-hop once again, but
turntables are no longer the prime tool in the hip-hop D]'s arse-
nal. The cult of the turntable has continued on the fringes of pop
culture.

Defenders of the Faith

There are still DJ s who operate the turntables, creating live sound
collages through athletic displays of spinning skill. The turnta-
blists are DJ crews who raise the competitive bar of early hip-hop
several notches higher. Armed with two turntables and a mixer
(phaser), they channel the art and science of disc jockeying into a
form of musical sport. Call what they do analog scratching. And
the nature of their performance is decidedly athletic-a contest
or "battle" such as the International Turntablist Federation World
DJ Battle held in Amsterdam in late 1998, or the Technics-
sponsored North American DJ Championship held in New York
City in 2000.
These events are more akin to sports matches than dance par-
ties; DJ s are judged in strict categories such as scratching, beat
juggling, freestyle spinning, and team routines. Prominent
turntablist crews include the Incredible Scratch Pickles (Bay
Area), Beat Junkies (Los Angeles), and X-ecutioners (New York

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City). Other turntable tag teams scratch records throughout the

American suburbs, in Europe, and of course Japan. All it takes is
a stack of records and a lot of practice.
Such turntablism isn't concerned with music per se; for the
most part, you can't dance to their on-the-spot sound collages. In-
deed, they don't play the records so much as they play the scratch.
As macho as early hip-hop could be, in the end it was all about
"rocking the house." At least the turntablists don't take them-
selves seriously. The sense of humor is goony and obvious; to a
man, these extreme DJs splice and dice bits of comedy, mostly TV
and movie dialogue from the likes of rubber-faced seventies icon
Jimmy "JJ" Walker.
"There's one style of DJ-ing where you can only use this once
scratch," explained DJ Q Bert (Richard Quitevus).

That's the standard scratch sound. If you can mess with that
sound and manipulate it in a unique way, then that gauges your
skill. Then there's the other style, where you can use any sound
you want.
You're really only taking sounds from other people's records
and using them to make something new, and I'm only using
second-long sections of those records. It's hard to explain, but
I'd say it's like making a collage-a bit like taking the face of a
monkey and sticking it onto the body of a giraffe in order to
make a new creature.

The old-school Bronx masters have enthusiastically endorsed

the turntablists as their successors. Grand Wizard Theodore is
their role model, Afrika Bambaataa their spiritual godfather. But
are they furthering that tradition or just preserving it in strict for-

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malist terms? Recall that the turntable itself is a piece of out-

moded hardware.
Are turntablists defenders of the faith? In a narrow sense,
they're extending and reinventing hip-hop on a purely technical
level; Sean "P-Diddy" Combs probably couldn't do what they do.
But music itself often goes missing and is indeed missed. Too
often, turntablism revolves around technological innovation and
technical perfection. In other words, turntablists tend to be long
on skills, short on style. And make no mistake, the original hip-
hop DJ s had style to spare.
Lately, the top turntable crews have been making their presence
known in the mainstream. X-ecutioners significantly dented the
Billboard pop album chart in March 2002, when their CD Built
from Scratch debuted at number fifteen-the strongest showing
for a turntable act to date. "Hopefully our success will prove
we're musicians," DJ Rob Swift told the New York Daily News.
"We're not just playing records. If you just heard it, you might
think it was just samples. When you see us, that's when you know
we're building it from scratch."
Once you get past the pun, the ambition of Swift's statement
sinks in. In the hands of the X-ecutioners and DJ Shadow, the
turntable is no different than the electric guitar. These high-tech
pancake flippers didn't replace musicians, they became musicians.
In effect, they joined the union. In the long run, the great fears of
J ames Caesar Petrillo were groundless-or were they? While ma-
chines haven't yet completely replaced musicians, they certainly
have replaced more than a few musical instruments.

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 chapter 8

GDEN DEATH OF THE RECORD

"CDs are shit!" he said with sudden, surprising bitter-

ness. "Horrible, emasculated travesties of their analog
originals. They are nothing more than a plot concocted
by greedy record companies to gull brainless consumers
into discarding their vinyl and repurchasing the very
same performances in overpriced, sonically inferior
forms. It makes me furious to think that the medium
which has preserved some of the greatest performances
of the greatest music ever written is being sacrificed
wholly for gain. These things are priceless time ma-
chines." He tapped the album with his forefinger.
-Jonathan Valin, The Music Lovers

DURING THE DARKEST DAYS of the postdisco depression, a tiny

light flickered at the end of the tunnel. When Billboard noted the
introduction of a new cassette tape player in the December 8,
1979, issue, the earth didn't move-at first. Described as "Sony's
Tiny Stereo Player," the Soundabout was a handheld, 14-ounce
playback-only machine that used headphones and standard-size
cassettes. Retail price: $199.99.

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The future was clear, with one catch: Following this particular
path would lead the music business away from the record player
and the record itself. Any revolution in music technology impacts
on two fronts: software and hardware. In most cases, hardware
developments are harbingers of trouble among software formats.
When Billboard announced the arrival of the Walkman in
1979, the accompanying article also laid out some safe predic-
tions for the ensuing decade. "Cassettes are expected to emerge as
the dominant form of prerecorded tape by early next year." Yet
the following caveat seems overcautious in retrospect, that "no
one is predicting the early demise of the 8-track form." In fact, 8-
track tapes disappeared in the next three years. By 1983, prere-
corded cassette sales caught up with vinyl record sales, but the
record industry hadn't even begun to fight. The cassette battle
was a mere skirmish, a contained conflict that eventually trig-
gered the mother of all format wars.
Records and record players, of course, were not suddenly de-
clared obsolete; they became obsolescent, and slowly but surely
they grew less useful as objects, at least to the non obsessed lis-
tener. Maintaining a large record collection tends to get in the
way of daily life. At a certain point, all those albums begin to take
up space. You can really fill a room with shelves, cases, stacks,
racks, and entire walls of classic albums, platters du jour, trifling
vinyl cupcakes, and timeless desert-island discs alike. The reality
is that not only do records accumulate, they're also more or less
immobile. Listening to records is largely a stationary activity.
The cassette tape challenge crept up on the record industry,
quietly gaining ground in the postdisco chaos. Perversely and per-
haps fittingly, the advent of the cassette tape comes roughly 100

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years after Edison's groundbreaking 1877 invention. In 1979, an-

nual sales of audio products were neatly split between three for-
mats, with $2.1 billion worth of vinyl disks sold, along with $1
billion in prerecorded cassette tapes and $1 billion in 8-track
tapes. Yet few if any industry pundits guessed that cassette sales
would overtake vinyl records in the 1980s. Eight-track tape was
the first obstacle for cassettes to overcome.
Today, the 8-track format is fondly recalled as a relic of smiley
face seventies kitsch, about as practical as a pair of men's plat-
form shoes. Conceived by William Lear, inventor of the Lear Jet,
the 8-track cartridge contains a continuous-loop tape with four
sets of paired stereo tracks. Beginning in 1966, the Ford Motor
Company installed Motorola 8-track players in its cars as a lux-
ury option. In an exclusive software deal, RCA offered hundreds
of prerecorded selections for the new machines to play back. The
success of the 8-track format (by 1975, it accounted for 25 percent
of all prerecorded music sales) must be attributed to the automo-
bile. Convenient for drivers owing to its size and shape, an 8-track
tape could be inserted and removed with one hand while driving.
Tellingly, this awkward format never caught on outside the car-
crazed United States.
In hindsight, the obvious shortcomings of the 8-track format
negate any of its virtues. Despite a generous total playing time of
one hour, the 8-track tape automatically switched from one pair
of stereo tracks to the next, which means glaring interruptions in
the middle of a song. Also, a selection couldn't be repeated with-
out running through the entire tape. There was no fast forward or
rewind, which meant 8-track tapes didn't manually cue as a cas-
sette did; and while the sound quality of 8-tracks couldn't com-

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pare to vinyl LPs, it sure beat cassettes, at least for the time being.
With the advent of Dolby noise reduction that advantage gradu-
ally eroded.
Compact-sized cassettes were portable as well, and not only
when installed in the dashboard of a car. The handheld transistor
radio of the sixties was replaced in the seventies by the boom box,
or ghetto blaster, named in honor of its marketplace. These hulk-
ing rectangular compacts-including radio, cassette player, and a
pair of speakers in one machine-could be carried like a suitcase
or hoisted onto an ample pair of shoulders. For the young, mo-
bility was important and the turntable came to be seen as a cum-
bersome stationary object. Record players were still the center-
piece of any serious sound system, but the alternatives to owning
a turntable were multiplying, sounding better, and dropping in
price. In the expert hands of a DJ, such as the radio jocks of the
sixties or the disco and hip-hop innovators of the seventies,
turntables fueled public consumption of pop music.
Portable cassette players, though, fueled private consumption
of music. Headphones became ubiquitous on urban streets. It is
no accident that the new generation of players in the early eight-
ies became known as personal stereos. Almost overnight, porta-
bility turned into a crucial issue for audio consumers. People now
expected freedom of movement while playing back prerecorded
music-or at least they demanded it as an option.
By 1981, Sony's aforementioned Soundabout had morphed
into the Walkman II, a model that was 25 percent smaller than its
predecessor and contained 50 percent fewer moving parts-and it
was cheaper too. Other manufacturers followed Sony's lead, and
the same trademark name, Walkman, stuck. It became generic,
applicable to all personal cassette players, like the Victrola eighty

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years earlier. The Walkperson's reliance on headphones-unlike

the all too conspicuous consumption of the boom box fan or car
stereo buff-intensified a new dynamic, the one-on-one experi-
ence of music and portability: immediate and intimate, purely in-
dividual, and somewhat isolating. By 1989, Sony had sold twenty-
five million of its various Walkman models in the United States.
By that time, overall U.S. sales of personal stereos hit twenty-five
million units per year. The move toward the personal stereo
clearly indicated where audio technology was heading, which was
away from the turntable. Sales of vinyl records plummeted during
the 1980s. The popularity and portability of cassette players un-
doubtedly had much to do with this decline. In 1981, roughly 100
million prerecorded cassettes were sold, and 308 million LPs; the
next year's figures were 125 million and 273 million, respectively.
By 1986, the numbers flipped, with 350 million cassettes sold ver-
sus 110 million LPs.
Despite the overall rise in the combined sales of prerecorded
tapes and discs, the music business decided that consumption of
blank tape was eating away their profits. As Russell Sanjek noted
at the time, while CBS's music sales hit $1 billion in 1979, operat-
ing profits dropped almost by half. Forty million buyers of blank
tape made a handy scapegoat-or target. In 1980, a CBS study
reckoned that home taping cost the industry hundreds of millions
of dollars and then the die was cast. Clearly, home taping repre-
sented a greater threat than any competing technology. The
record industry responded with the ugly and hugely unsuccessful
Home Taping Is Killing Music campaign.
The RIAA and its members claimed that home recording was
a form of piracy and began lobbying for a tax on both tape
recorders and blank tape. For the most part, their efforts were too

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little and too late. By the early 1980s, tape recording had become
simple; the only skill required was being able to push a button. A
random sampling of any home music collection would've turned
up homemade tapes. Still, the massive success of Michael Jack-
son's Thriller, coming as it did at the height of the home taping
controversy, didn't exactly bolster the record industry's empty-
pockets argument. Nor did an independent study by the Copy-
right Royalty Tribunal, released that same year. The results indi-
cated that home tapers purchased the most recorded music and
possessed the deepest pocketbooks. How could it be that affluent
consumers with large appetites were murdering the music busi-
ness? In retrospect, the entire controversy reads like shtick: "Busi-
ness is good, but these home tapers are killing me!" Confronted
with a new format, record makers looked at a potential ally and
perceived an enemy. It wouldn't be the first time that the music in-
dustry resisted technological change rather than turn it to a posi-
tive (that is, profitable) end.
Now, of course, it seems perfectly logical, elemental: Home ta-
pers would continue to buy records. What else would they tape,'
without commercial interruptions? For most consumers, home-
programmed cassettes served as an accompaniment to records-
enhancement, not replacement. Perhaps the deeper threat behind
home taping was this implicit act of consumer empowerment, the
ability to select; and indeed a deadly threat was exactly what the
record industry made of the cassette trade. Home taping gave lis-
teners the power to program. Call it freedom of choice.
Records were in a rut. Home taping offered an escape from all
those crappy LPs. By 1980, there was an actual physical glut of
vinyl. Hit records stayed in the market longer, while tighter return
policies strangled small record stores. A flood of cutout LPs (dis-

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counted and nonreturnable) helped to sink some retailers. In-

evitably, prerecorded cassette sales began to dent LP sales. The
ruling format had sprung a leak. And the ensuing furor over home
taping exposed a fatal flaw in records.
Cassette tape recorders always held that promise of freedom of
selection. You could play DJ, in a sense. Japanese manufacturers
began adding cassette players to hi-fi systems in the early 1970s.
The smaller tapes were easier to handle at home, and more im-
portant, they could be used for recording as well as playback. In-
expensive stereos with turntable, radio, and cassette player em-
powered the average listener: Now you could tape a copy of
almost anything you heard. For a while in the mid 1970s, FM
radio facilitated home taping with midnight "album hours." In-
deed, many stations would actually broadcast a tone so that
everyone could set their meters accordingly. Aside from portabil-
ity, the cassette format promulgated as well a crude form of in-
teractivity. Armed with reasonably priced technology, consumers
could now compile, program, and package their own albums.
In the end, cassettes remain sonically inferior (arguably) and
less durable (surely) than vinyl records. Cassettes deteriorate
quickly, and often get chewed up during playback. But one ad-
vantage of cassette tapes over records is that they don't scratch or
skip. This may have been their initial strong point. Moreover, the
LP format had been compromised, mortally wounded during the
music industry's postdisco slump. Another revolution hovered in
the wings, in the form of a dramatic new sound technology and
playback-only format. Digital recording and the compact disc
would launch the ultimate format war.
Let's digress for a moment. The parallel between videotape
and audiotape is imprecise but interesting. The film industry

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fought against the advent of the videocassette recorder (VCR) for

a while in the early 1980s, briefly insisting that videotapes be pur-
chased and kept instead of rented and returned to the store. That
effort failed, and Hollywood quickly realized that watching
movies at home and buying tickets at a movie theater were com-
plimentary, not competitive, activities. As with music, the so-
called threat of video home taping was relatively small potatoes.
It became a joke, since nobody knows how to program a VCR in
the first place.
Whether video technology or music technology, commercial
success in the mass market is obtained via mastery of hardware
through standardization and domination of software through
availability.
Consider the case of a failed hardware format called quadro-
phonic sound. This four-channel "double' stereo" sound system of
the early seventies was doomed from the get-go. Lack of stan-
dardization inflamed a confusing, hypercompetitive situation:
Companies brought out stereos and released records that were in-
compatible with one another. Appeal to consumers was appar-
ently not even a consideration. Adding to the mess, availability
was inconsistent at best. The number of "quad" record releases
was severely limited, as major labels hesitated to choose anyone
delivery system. The sonic advantage of listening to four speakers
at once was unclear as well, and the quadrophonic revolution was
over before it even began.
In the videotape format war, Sony lost a similar battle. Sony's
Betamax format was the first technically successful VCR when it
debuted in 1975. It soon was wiped out by the competing VHS
system, even though Betamax came first and was generally re-
garded as a higher-quality machine. It was reminiscent of Edi-

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son's fight, when his cylinder phonograph came up against the

disc-playing Victrola. Not only did VHS tapes run slightly longer,
many more movies were available on VHS than on Betamax, and
in the end, user choice was key. If Sony had had access to a film li-
brary, it might have been different. As it was, Betamax went the
way of quadrophonic sound-straight to the consumer-electronics
junkyard.
Akio Morita, cofounder of Sony, ultimately accepted responsi-
bility for the fatal Betamax decision. The VHS format emerged as
a viable alternative because Sony had refused to license its tech-
nology to other Japanese electronics companies. The competition
joined forces, thereby guaranteeing that VHS would rise as the
dominant format.
Sony wouldn't make the same mistake again. In 1988, they
bought CBS Records for $2 billion. As a leading manufacturer of
compact disc players, Sony now had the software-a music cata-
logue, including Michael Jackson-to sell alongside its hardware.

Zeros and Ones

Digital communication was born in the telephone labs. In fact,

the dot-dash system of Samuel Morse's telegraph can be seen as a
crude approximation of binary code, which is the basis of digital
sound and digital computers. Digital sound works through the
pulse-coded modulation (PCM) of audio signals into digital code.
This process transmits an enormous, dynamic range of sounds
with little or no background noise.
Perhaps a brief review will clarify this complex progression.
Edison's acoustic phonograph mechanically reproduced sound

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waves, shaping them in the soft wax of the cylinder. Electrical

recording, the next step, converted sound waves into varying volt-
ages of current; they could then be reconverted to wave form in
the record's grooves, or stored on magnetic tape. Finally, digital
recording turns the sound waves into a pulsating electric current
that can be measured and expressed as a binary code of digits.
In 1978, the Netherlands' Phillips NV wheeled out a prototype
compact disc player comparable to today's players, but it played
slightly smaller discs (4.5 mm) compared with today's CD norm.
Having learned a lesson from the Betamax debacle, soon after-
ward Phillips and Sony teamed up for a standardized-and hence
universal-compact disc format, agreeing to produce compatible
machines and software. Sony's experience with the Walkman
guaranteed portability; Phillips had manufactured cassette car-
tridges since the early 1960s.
The first commercial compact discs were offered for sale in
1982. Right away, the differences between vinyl records and the
new format were dramatic. On CD, the clarity and definition of
sound are certainly noticeable. The absence of background noise
means that every instrument in the mix comes through loud and
clear; fullness takes on new meaning.
Instead of splicing and dicing tape, digital editors alter binary
code. It's possible to make hundreds of changes in a few seconds
of music: surface noise, blurs, muffling, pops, and clicks can all be
eliminated. Older, predigital (analog) recordings could also be
converted to digital with little discern able difference. This al-
lowed a wealth of music to be heard-and purchased-by a new,
presumably hungry, audience. If the improved quality of digital
recording and remixing sounded clinical and dry to some, many
more perceived the new format as a revelation.

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The compact disc's advantages don't stop at sound quality.

CDs run nearly twice as long as conventional forty-minute LPs-
seventy-four minutes and forty-two seconds, to be precise. As far
as the compact disc itself goes, size mattered (in reverse). The
compact disc's 5-inch (12 cm) diameter made CDs easier to han-
dle and carry. Improved portability enhanced the appeal of a
CD-perhaps it could replace both LPs and cassettes. Prerecorded
CDs are intended for playback only, of course, but they are pro-
grammable: you can hear songs in the sequence or duration you
choose. While slight damage is done each time a vinyl record or
cassette tape is played, the CD does not suffer similar deteriora-
tion (or so it was claimed). Unlike the diamond stylus of a
turntable, the laser on a CD player doesn't wear or tear the disc
as it reads the encoded sounds. Theoretically, a CD will last for-
ever and sound the same every time it spins. No warps, stretches,
scratches, or skips: not from playback, anyway. Handling them is
a different story.
Compact disc sales started slowly, then hit their stride just as
cassettes became the dominant format. In 1986, when cassettes
led at 350 million units sold and album sales dropped to 110 mil-
lion units, about 50 million CDs were sold. Two years later, com-
pact discs outsold vinyl for the first time. During the preceding
ten years, between 1978 and 1988, LP sales had dropped 80 per-
cent even as the overall music market grew. Singles sales had fallen
off the map; the 45 rpm record became the province of radio DJs
and jukebox operators. The conversion movement gathered steam
quickly.
Compare the first six months of 1988 with the first six months
of 1989: Compact discs sold 70.4 million copies versus 43.4 mil-
lion LPs in 1988, and 96.8 million CDs versus 17.5 million LPs in

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the same period one year later. During the first five months of
1989, 1.2 million CD players as opposed to a mere 180,000 turnta-
bles were sold. By 1990, an estimated 90 million turntables were
still in use across America. One nagging question remained. How
often did consumers actually use them? One possible answer is
not as often as they might've wished, because there weren't as
many new records as there used to be.

CD Versus LP: Victory by Any Means Necessary

The transition from turntable to CD player proceeded quickly, but

not fast enough to suit the music business. Though the movement
to digital clearly was unstoppable, the record industry gave it a
firm shove in the years 1990-91. Rather than fade away, records
were removed from record stores. Almost overnight, CDs replaced
LPs and vinyl albums were relegated to back shelves, cutout bins,
and bargain basements.
The major record retail chains-Tower, Camelot, Sam Goody,
Coconuts-took a proactive approach. Sensing the shift, they
chose to anticipate customers' changing preferences rather than
play catch-up after the fact. In 1987, a small and ambitious reis-
sue label, Rhino Records, born in the back room of a store in
West Los Angeles, la unched an unsuccessful campaign to save the
LP. Four years later, Rhino had no vinyl releases scheduled. "The
problem with LPs is we couldn't make any money selling them,"
said Harold Bronson, Rhino's managing director. By late 1990,
most of the aforementioned chains either had dropped or severely
reduced the availability of vinyl. Mom-and-pop specialty stores
soon became the only well-stocked vinyl outlets. "Nobody is buy-

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ing them," declared Russ Solomon, president of Tower Records.

"So why sell them?"
That wasn't a problem with CDs, at least not for record com-
panies. New CDs sold for SIS or $16 compared to 59 or $10 for
LPs. Even as the manufacturing costs of CDs equaled and eventu-
ally fell below the cost of making records, their retail price stayed
the same. Overall growth slowed in the music business during the
early nineties, but profits were high because CDs cost more. The
reissue phenomenon further fueled this prosperity; catalogue
sales blossomed as consumers replaced their scratched-up vinyl
collections with crisp, clean CD reissues. Eventually, this bear
market had to fade; as the boxed-set memorials multiplied, record
company vaults were plundered. Ironically, Rhino Records-once
denigrated as a novelty-obsessed oldies label-cleaned up on this
trend by licensing catalogue rights from major labels and releas-
ing a seemingly endless stream of retrospectives and compila-
tions. Yet the reissue boom created a backlash in a sizable group
of wary, cynical consumers who were in no hurry to replace their
"permanent" CD collections with yet another generation of soft-
ware. The latest format war ended in short-term victory for the
music business, but companies paid a long-term price for their
profits.
From the start, retailers questioned the new arrangement. In
the LP to CD shuffle of product, the feeling was plain: record
stores were getting screwed. There were a few lone cries in the
wilderness that went largely unheeded. One such clarion came
from the very top of the chain. Investor Stanley P. Gold, whose
Shamrock Holdings company owned the Music Plus chain and
other record stores at the time, administered a bracing wake-up
call in 1990. Addressing a music-biz convention, Gold chided a

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roomful of major record company executives by branding them

an "oligarchy" that willfully inflated prices. Quite reasonably,
Gold suggested lowering the wholesale price on CDs from
roughly $10 to $7. The record industry consortium disputed his
numbers, but Gold insisted that the cost of manufacturing a CD
had dropped from $2.50 to $1.25.
Sporadic grass-roots resistance flared. For a few months in
1990, the owner of a Virginia record store named David Campbell
defied the high price of CDs. He contended that record compa-
nies could sell three times as many CDs at a price comparable to
prerecorded cassettes. Campbell's noble and dramatic gesture
made a point but didn't leave a lasting mark. This brave soul be-
came the Don Quixote of the CD pricing scandal, an unlikely
hero tilting at a high-tech windmill.
In 1989, Campbell bought a 30,000 CD inventory for his store,
The Music Man, in a Norfolk shopping mall. "They just sat
there," he told Newsweek. "It nearly put me out of business." So
Campbell lowered his "front line" CD prices to $11.98 (from the
usual $15.98 or $16.98). Campbell claimed that his monthly sales
more than tripled-rising from $19,500 to $70,000. Of course, his
margin was so low that he lost money and eventually had to raise
prices again-but not before he took out a full-page advertise-
ment in Billboard in 1990, challenging the music industry to fol-
low his lead and cut prices. The national media jumped on Camp-
bell's story, but the record companies patiently waited for him to
come around, along with everybody else. Campbell's experience
wasn't unique, but this particular grass-roots rebellion never got
off the ground. Records were disappearing. Forget availability;
compact discs achieved inevitability. CDs surely won the format

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war against LPs, but it was a victory achieved through a cunning

stealth campaign.
Obviously, popular music also changed in ways that acceler-
ated the CD revolution. The divisive effects of disco had split the
world into self-sufficient, mutually exclusive spheres by the 1980s.
Fragmentation became the buzzword, as every style, subgenre,
and splinter group had its own support system. MTV and music
videos overshadowed radio and hit singles, making television the
means of dissemination for each new generation of fans. MTV's
initial reluctance to broadcast videos by black artists-the last
gasp of FM radio's "disco sucks" backlash-sparked a contro-
versy in the early eighties. That fire had to be cooled by the net-
work, because CBS threatened to pull all its videos if the door
didn't open-and the rest is history. Michael Jackson waltzed on
through, pointing the way back to a color-blind crossover (in pop
music, anyway). Ten years later, middle America was conquered
by a constantly broadcast stream of hip-hop videos from both
urban coasts.

Death of the CD?

Technology is moving at such a fast pace now I wonder if

another five years something might begin to replace the
CD. I can see the total demise of software in the future.
You'd have a system where every song ever recorded is
on a central computer, and people would subscribe to a
service where they could punch in the song they wanted
on their stereo and it would play it.
-Jim Mayhercy, Last Chance Records (Chicago), 1990

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Prerecorded music has two dying configurations-cas-

settes and singles-while the mainstay configuration, the
CD, is more than twenty years old. You can't expect
growth from the configuration scenario.
-John Marmaduke, Hastings Entertainment, 2001

I think the CD system will be around for another 20 years.

There is no reason for it to go away. Certainly not be-
cause of the Internet-which will never represent mass
tonnage market for albums. It will only be good for sin-
gles or free music.
-Russ Solomon, Tower Records, 2001

The bright, expansive compact disc helped to shape the syn-

thesized sounds of the previous two decades. One exception to
this high-tech sonic juggernaut was the postpunk underground
rock scene, where passion and nonconformity mattered more
than production values, and vinyl records remained a viable
medium. Independent labels such as SST Records-an Orange
County, California, source of low-budget classics by Black Flag,
Sonic Youth, the Meat Puppets, Husker Du, and the Minute-
men-were shrewd and economical in their cult focus. The trick
consisted of releasing just the right number of records and getting
them to the right listeners. A collegiate circuit of clubs guaranteed
support and survival if not financial success. The so-called Indies
didn't get rich, but their bohemian dedication prolonged the life
of vinyl into the nineties.
Once Nirvana cracked the Top 10 in late 1991, underground
rock turned into major-label grunge. At this point, the CD revo-
lution was complete. Kurt Cobain and company's breakthrough
album Nevermind transformed the music business like nothing
since Saturday Night Fever. The parallels are inexact, but striking

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enough to merit comparison. In both cases, crossover marketing

corrupted an underground-bred style, reduced it to fad status,
then ran it into the ground. Just as disco inexorably led to the
record slump of the late seventies, the flood of inferior grunge
CDs (Nirvana knockoffs with one good song per hour-long
album) nearly choked the music business in the latter half of the
1990s. Just as hot disco mixes demanded the extended 12-inch sin-
gles format, the five-minute energy blasts of grunge were best pre-
served on (low-tech) 7-inch vinyl singles. Nirvana's crossover and
the grunge fad came too late for any possible rehabilitation of the
45. Back in 1990, a front-page story in Billboard diagnosed the en-
tire singles format's health status as moribund, "in its death
throes." One remaining genre of music depended on the vinyl for-
mat. Once independent-label rock got absorbed into the corpo-
rate monolith-joining forces with the compact disc revolution-
fewer and fewer vinyl records indeed were even released.
In the late nineties, the seeds of disenchantment were sprout-
ing among music consumers. People grew frustrated with the CD
itself, those 3.5-inch-wide wafer-thin plastic wheels, as well as the
sounds contained within.
Valiantly and in vain, Sony twice tried to vary and improve the
CD format's appeal. The Pocket Discman, in 1987, was a portable
playback-only machine that used 3-inch CD singles. Unsurpris-
ingly, the CD single format tanked as both hardware and soft-
ware. Record retailers rejected the CD single, and by the turn of
the decade it had been replaced by the cassingle (cassette single).
Songs were still the measure of pop currency, but to purchase
them individually no longer made sense.
Initial attempts to supplement the CD with a new format were
unsuccessful. Clearly, a CD-quality tape was the place to start.

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Sony unveiled its digital audio tape (DAT) in 1990. DAT was half
the size of a traditional cassette, playing up to three hours and
rewinding in seconds. To most people's ears, DAT offers the same
purity of sound as compact discs, yet there were two immediate
drawbacks. The hardware price tag was heavy and software selec-
tion was thin. One year later, Phillips responded with its own dig-
ital tape format, digital compact cassette (DCC). These tapes were
the same size as traditional cassettes, and they were also compati-
ble, which meant old tapes and old tape players didn't have to be
immediately discarded. Again, major flaws existed: the players
were pricey and prerecorded tapes were scarce or nonexistent.
Neither format caught on with the public. Today, DAT is
widely used in recording studios. For obvious reasons, record
companies fiercely opposed digital home taping in the early
nineties and the RIAA went to work, lobbying in Washington,
D.C. In 1992, Congress imposed a royalty on blank digital tape, to
be paid to composers, performers, and record companies. The
dire threat of piracy, or home taping, was vanquished.
The MiniDisc came next. It too never quite caught on. Intro-
duced in 1992, and marketed exclusively by Sony, MiniDiscs of-
fered the same seventy-four-minute capacity as CDs at roughly
half the size. Sony expected its MiniDisc to replace the failing cas-
sette format and then perhaps supersede the CD itself (a mere ten
years after CDs emerged). Today, in 2003, this delusional Mini-
Disc mission clearly must be judged a failure. The problem is that
none of the three competing formats-DAT, DCC, and Mini-
Disc-are compatible with one another. Each cancels the other
out.
The cassette wound down, eventually wearing out of its own
accord. The portability of CDs and ease of operation made the

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cassette seem redundant and as clumsy as its packaging: an awk-

ward, eminently breakable little plastic box. Cassette sales de-
creased every year, from 1989 on. The compact disc became the
ruling format; but ubiquity has its downside. The fundamental
flaw, the limitations of CDs, became apparent, at least to a far-
sighted few.
By the end of 1996, CD sales growth had stalled, while many
suspected that perhaps music itself had stagnated too. Several
years down the road from the vinyl phaseout, Tower Records chief
Russ Solomon sounds less than sanguine. "We don't have any teen
idols," he mournfully noted. (A sad state of affairs that would flip
in less than a year with the arrival of the imported Spice Girls.)
"Record companies have been busy trying to create new technol-
ogy," he continued, "like the mini-disc and the digital cassette,
which have been flops, instead of focusing on music."
Moreover, those permanent, impregnable CDs certainly do
scratch, skip, jump, and emit strange beeps, especially when you
play them over and over. According to the bottom line-minded
Wall Street Journal, by 2001, between $1 billion and $4 billion
worth of unplayable CDs had accumulated in America's collective
living rooms, assuming that a modest 1 percent damage rate
translates into 51 billion worth of faulty discs. Compact discs
may be more durable than vinyl records, but they sure are sensi-
tive. A little oil from your finger can ruin that CD in a magnetic
flash.
Reminiscent of the great vinyl floods of 1980, by century's end
there was a CD surplus, an absolute glut. The music business's
focus on blockbusters translated into a random hit-or-miss ap-
proach multiplied by platinum-that is, millions and millions of
copies unsold. That time-honored show-biz practice-throwing a

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load of crap at the wall and waiting to see whatsticks-can back-

fire, despite all the technology in the modern world.
The first half of the nineties signaled a boom period during the
rise of alternative rock and suburban country; the second half
greeted a parade of one-hit wonders and overnight sensations of
questionable durability. "Maybe we're seeing the start of a new
development," said British executive Rob Dickson in 1991. "There
will still be loads of hit records, but not so many actual artists."
Perhaps this was a self-fulfilling prophecy; by 2003, it still feels
like an accurate assessment of the pop scene.
In 1999, less that 1 percent of the myriad CD and cassette titles
released sold more than 10,000 copies, according to Soundscan (a-
computerized sales monitor). Hence, 99 percent of new releases'
didn't appear on the racks of mass-merchandise stores such as
Wal-Mart. Forget about the fabled mom-and-pop operators; the
idea of a sizable retail store specifically devoted to music products
suddenly seemed doomed.
According to a dire Washington Post report in 2001, the end
was approaching. "Specialty chains like Tower records-which
typically carry 20 times the merchandise of Wal-Mart-are
steadily losing market share." The same article noted that "the
typical Wal-Mart carries roughly 4,000 titles." So much for the
once-vaunted catalogue sales, lifeblood of the boom; surely by
now, every vinyl treasure had been traded up for the CD. At any
rate, the vaults had long been emptied of everything but curios,
castoffs, rehearsals, and reruns.
Even though teenage pop ruled the charts during the late
1990s, nominal grown-ups became the music industry's fastest
growing group of customers. According to the RIAA, consumers
over age thirty-five accounted for 35 percent of all sales in 1999.

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Ten years earlier, that count was a mere 28 percent. More and
more, CDs were becoming the province of baby boomers-an af-
fluent quality-minded demographic with established tastes and
.buying patterns. The young must be hungering for their own for-
mat. Now, each successive subgeneration expects audio hardware
and software custom-fit to suit the times. Everybody deserves a
portable and affordable recorded soundtrack to (extended) ado-
lescence-and technology continues to deliver it.
One key feature of the MiniDisc might have enticed younger
consumers, had anyone paid attention. These compact CDs car-
ried audio and data (text). They were also rewritable; in other
words, you could erase and rerecord music while maintaining dig-
ital quality. MiniDiscs were a resounding dud, but they nudged
open a door that couldn't be easily shut. Sony and Phillips re-
united and developed a rewritable CD in 1989. In time, commer-
cially marketed prerecorded CD-ROM discs featured elaborate
audio and visual display for home computers, but the audio mode
was invariably playback-only.
Though rock survived the millennium, the rock album showed
signs of formal burnout. Rock albums constitute the backbone of
both the LP and CD formats, but the aesthetic form is wearing
thin. CDs have stretched the album concept out of shape. In
short, CDs hold too many songs. Quantity fatally compromises
quality. Simply put, seventy-four minutes and forty-two seconds
are far better suited to a symphony than a collection of popular
songs. Even the most accomplished pop artists can't be expected
to keep up a level of rapturous engagement-in other words, gen-
uinely hold one's interest-for more than three or four five-
minute songs per hour. The album format-forty minutes divided
into two discrete twenty-minute sides-was seriously undermined

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by the CD player and its programming function. This bells-and-

whistles option makes it possible to play your favorite CD tracks
in the desired sequence again and again, while blissfully ignoring
the rest of the album. Perhaps a historical note is required: Vinyl
LP sides were usually played without interruption because most
people couldn't be bothered to keep getting up to lift the needle.
The power of CD programming-enhanced selection-wields a
subversive and lasting effect on pop music consumers. Apparently,
the driving urge behind the dread practice of home taping wasn't
satiated by the compact disc.

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 chapter 9

GNED MUSIC'S LAST STAND

FOR THE MUSIC BUSINESS, compact discs were a curse disguised

as a blessing. The damned things were booby-trapped, like a Tro-
jan horse. The triumph of CD over LP turned out to be a hollow
victory. Consumers found out the hidden truth before record com-
panies did-that compact discs didn't have to be playback-only.
The CD code had been cracked. For the music industry, the worst
nightmares of the early eighties were about to come true. Home
taping is a Halloween prank compared to what you can now ac-
complish with a home computer and a high-speed Internet con-
nection. By the end of the 1990s, recorded music could be lifted,
liberated from its package, reproduced, and reconstituted. In cur-
rent parlance, CDs can now be ripped (music transferred to com-
puter files) and burned (music files transferred to blank discs).
Thanks to a process called peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing,
computer users copy files that are stored on each other's comput-
ers. P2P file sharing became widespread within two years, from
1999 to 2001, thanks to a software program (later a web site)
called Napster. A college dropout named Shawn Fanning began
writing code to help his roommates, who were collecting music on

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their home computers. They had just discovered MP3, a new kind
of high-compression file that stowed a lot of music in a little
space. Scouring the web for MP3s, Fanning's buddies became fed
up with poky search engines. In January 1999, Fanning left
Northeastern University to work full time on Napster. His uncle
John, a local Internet entrepreneur, offered support and financial
assistance. John Fanning perceived and promoted Napster as a
business; Shawn pursued it for the love of technology (nineteen
year olds can afford to be high-minded). By summer, Napster.com
was up and running. Soon literally thousands of people were
downloading the free Napster software every day. Like books in
the public library, all the music on Napster.com was free.
Then came the deluge. Peer-to-peer file sharing eliminated the
middleman in the recorded music market and cut out the cash reg-
ister. Napster of course never made any money, but so what? Lots
of grandiose Internet schemes never generated profits. Napster
certainly attracted investors, as do many Internet businesses. Per-
haps Napster never even tried to make money; it surely wasn't de-
signed for that purpose.
This computerized swap meet rapidly morphed into a world-
wide phenomenon. The file-trading network multiplied by the
millions, at home and abroad, everyone pooling their musical
booty into a huge communal treasure chest. There were 13.6 mil-
lion U.S. Napster users in early 2001, when the service was run-
ning at the peak of its popularity.
Obviously, the music industry couldn't take this threat lying
down. What Napster and others were doing was clearly copyright
infringement. The major record companies, now controlled by
entertainment conglomerates, retaliated with lawsuits. Their
trade group, the RIAA, drummed up a storm of publicity. Years of

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 Canned Music's Last Stand

RIAA lobbying in Washington, D.C., guaranteed a congressional

inquiry into the matter, complete with hearings, star testimony,
and attention-grabbing headlines.
Napster wasn't the only file-sharing offender, just the most
popular and visible. This made Napster an easy target, but gave it'
the added value of brand name recognition. Trying to create a
scapegoat or offer a sacrificial lamb led to mixed results, the
RIAA having succeeded in giving Napster loads of free publicity
and making its own spokespeople sound like shrill demagogues.
Their plan worked in the short run: Napster.com was shuttered in
summer 2001 and the company finally declared bankruptcy in fall
2002. The legal song and dance had been a protracted battle, with
Napster hustling to raise funds and cut deals up to the very end.
Yet the fundamental problem remained, despite the public demise
of Napster itself. File sharing was far from over. The P2P tech-
nology behind Napster was still out there, being refined and im-
proved-and spreading.
A virus had invaded the music business, one that couldn't be
eradicated. Clones of the Napster service immediately filled the
void. The next generation of P2P thrived on sites such as KaZaA,
Grokster, and Morpheus. The KaZaA Media Desktop software
had 8.3 million American users in June 2002. During the week of
September 15,2002, according to download.com, KaZaA Media
Desktop was downloaded 2.75 million times.
Extreme measures would be required to defeat such rampant
piracy. The major labels decided it was time to fight fire with
fire-but doing so also doubles the risk of being burned. Today's
format conflict already resembles a guerilla war. Future battles
over file sharing could end up like Vietnam if the record compa-
nies aren't careful.

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In July 2002, U.S. Representative Howard Berman of Los An-

geles, California, sponsored legislation that would "protect copy-
right holders from liability for any damage they may cause while
using software to disrupt file-sharing services and search public
files on consumers' computers for illegal reproductions of copy-
righted music." These disruptions would be caused by technolog-
ical countermeasures----echoes of cold war espionage! Copyright
holders wanted to sabotage the copyright pirates, to beat them at
their own game.
The Berman bill translated as a mandate for legalized home
computer invasions: hacking the hackers. This tactic is tricky be-
cause it risks alienating consumers. Technological countermea-
sures included such preemptive moves as interdiction, spoofs, and
redirection. Interdiction is the most radical means of copyright
protection: an avalanche of bogus requests shuts down a file-
sharing service. Spoofs are booby traps, fake files, and distorted
or aborted songs disguised as coveted items. Redirection sends an
unsuspecting file trader, someone duped by a decoy track, to an-
other site where CDs are for sale.
During 2002, a more subversive tactic surfaced. Record com-
panies have been quietly releasing protected CDs; just how many,
nobody knows for sure. These "secure" CDs can't be copied, with
the predictable result of further angering consumers, who are fed
up with limitations on the way they consume music. At this point,
not all prerecorded CDs are created equal, and this no doubt has
wreaked further havoc in the record business. Simply put, record
companies will not be able to regain control by sabotaging their
own products. The practice is downright perverse.
Peer-to-peer file sharing does, however, have an Achilles heel:
privacy is not protected, as it is in home taping. You can be

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peered at while you're doing anything on the Internet. In 2003,

the battle over file sharing got personal. The RIAA switched the
target of its lawsuits, from the P2P networks to individual file
sharers. In January, Judge John D. Bates of the federal district
court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the phone company Veri-
zon had to supply the RIAA with the name of an Internet sub-
scriber. This man stood accused of making available hundreds of
illegal downloads on his home computer. In retrospect, the next
step is obvious: to go after big-time MP3 pirates on college cam-
puses. In March, four college students were sued by the RIAA.
Each young man was accused of acting as a virtual download
central, providing a cache of unlicensed music for his peers at
Princeton, Michigan Tech, or Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in
New York; their cases were settled, each paying around $15,000.
That was only the first volley. A gaggle of major Internet
providers was then subpoenaed, including Comcast, Earthlink,
Time Warner Cable, and Pacific Bell. Universities felt the heat as
well. Total lawsuits approached 1,000 by July, with no end in
sight. The word was out.
RIAA sent the following "gotcha" instant message to active
KaZaA and Grokster users online during summer 2003.

COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT WARNING: It appears that

you are offering copyrighted music to others from your com-
puter. Distributing or downloading music on the Internet with-
out permission from the copyright owner is ILLEGAL. It hurts
songwriters who create and musicians who perform the music
that you love, and all the other people who bring you music.
When you break the law, you risk legal penalties. There is a
simple way to avoid that risk: DON'T STEAL MUSIC either

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by offering it to others to copy or downloading it on a "file-

sharing system" like this.

Right or wrong, record companies can be seen as self-defeating

zealots who treat consumers-that is, potential customers-as
criminals. This isn't very likely to stimulate CD sales.

Back in the Day

As Napster grew and ultimately hit its peak, if you look at

CD sales [they] were up as long as Napster was popular.
The point at which Napster started filtering (blocking out
certain songs after a court order in March 2001) is the
point at which the record industry announced that the
constant increase in their CD sales suddenly changed.
-Shawn Fanning, Wall Street Journal, October 2002

Before the emergence of Napster and file sharing, a few artists

valiantly struggled with selling their music on the Internet. They
didn't find it any easier than did the record companies. At the
time, the Net offered unlimited-and undefined-sales potential.
A few vanguard acts viewed it as a tantalizing escape route from
record-company dependency, but this escape route led into a tor-
turous maze. You can give away music on the Net, but selling it
has always been a different story.
In 1999, the rapper Chuck D (Carleton Ridenhour) of Public
Enemy told it like it was. He already had a reputation for being
articulate, radical, and prone to shooting straight from the hip,
and his take on the burgeoning Internet was typically scathing.
"The execs, lawyers and accountants who lately have made most

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of the money in the music biz are now running scared from the
technology that evens out the creative field and makes artists
harder to pimp."
Hip-hop DJs always existed at the cutting edge of music tech-
nology. So it comes as no surprise that two groundbreaking rap
groups of the late eighties plunged into the Internet music scene
ten years later. Testing the waters while others watched, Public
Enemy and the Beastie Boys each took the plunge in summer
1998. Both groups posted free digital recordings on their web
sites. They were giving away their music.
Net-savvy Beastie Boys fans could download a selection of live
tracks accompanying the recently released Hello Nasty album.
(Canny marketers at heart, the Beastie Boys methodically gener-
ated a valuable e-mail list of 100,000 digital dabblers.) Inevitably,
the punky white rappers had their knuckles rapped by their label,
Capitol, in fall 1998, and they caved in to the pressure. By De-
cember, Capitol persuaded the thirty-something Boys to drop the
digital giveaway, pronto. By April 1999, the hip-hop trio was of-
fering remixed tracks and video clips on their official site with the
record company's full approval. Not long afterward, the Beastie
Boys renewed their contract with Capitol Records. Their multi-
year deal was estimated to be worth around $30 million.
Between its politics and polemics, Public Enemy wasn't as
cagey or lucky as were the Beastie Boys. Chuck D and company
broke with their long-standing label, Def Jam, a record company
that never tried to censor or even influence the group's controver-
sial lyrics and complex music. So this particular split was a seri-
ous sign of dissension. Public Enemy bounced to an Internet
start-up label, Atomic Pop, a move that was adventurous, al-
though doomed: typically, the label proved short-lived. A digital

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version of There's a Poison Going On, the group's subsequent re-

lease, was made available online for two months before the CD
showed up in retail stores. Unfortunately, Public Enemy's sales
base continued its slump, even in the new medium. Chuck D pros-
elytized effectively, but the truth of the digital situation wasn't yet
so clear. At this point, the whole phenomenon of Internet music
still hung on the CD, the packaged product of record companies.
That was about to change. In the meantime, Public Enemy tried
to make the Net function as an alternative to record companies,
as a kind of independent online label. It didn't really work, but it
was a step in the right direction. Underneath his rhetorical flour-
ishes, Chuck D must've sensed a simple truth. Technology was
about to change the rules of the music business, leveling the play-
ing field once and for all.

Opening Salvo

In the San Diego area, a computer consultant named Michael

Robertson ran a search engine clearinghouse out of his living
room. He stumbled onto a nascent revolution in 1996, completely
unexpectedly. Robertson noticed a mysterious request popping up
on the engines again and again: MP3.
The MP3 format caused the first major battle in the Internet
music wars. MP3 files represented a giant step forward for Internet
music delivery. Think of it as an especially concise way of encoding
music in digital zeros and ones: supercompact storage coupled with
easy retrieval. Before the MP3, WAY and MIDI files comprised the
first delivery formats for Internet music. In the early nineties, they
were about the only game in town. One grave drawback was built

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into WAYs and MIDIs-it took hours to download mere minutes

of music. WAY is a Microsoft format for use on Windows only.
Since these files aren't compressed, like MP3 files, WAY delivers
high-quality sound-and download at a turtle's pace. MIDI (Mu-
sical Instrument Digital Interface) files were mostly used to store
data on electronic keyboards and synthesizers, though they could
also be transferred to computer and played back.
MP3 is shorthand for MPEG-1 Layer Three. MPEG is an
acronym for Motion Picture Experts Group. This committee of
engineers is part of the International Organization for Standard-
ization in Geneva. In 1992, they established the MPEG formula.
Initially, MPEG was used to compress digital video into small
computer files. After a while, word circulated that MPEG could
also reduce digital audio, without losing the sound quality of a
CD. MPEG-1 Layer Three was capable of fitting songs into files
twelve times smaller than the preceding WAY files. A five-minute
song once hogged fifty megabytes; now it could be comfortably
stored in five megabytes. Download time nearly disappeared, or
so it seemed. The new format translated hours of waiting back
into minutes. Supercompression also increased the volume of a
disc. Using MP3, a single CD-ROM could accommodate a full
dozen albums of music.
College students converted to the new format with missionary
zeal. They're the perfect demographic to spread the gospel: music
obsessed and technologically savvy. Many college students gained
frequent access to speedy Net service via their large school com-
puter systems-and college students by definition have too much
time on their hands.
In 1995, Progressive Audio introduced its Real Audio software.
Marketed as the Real Player, it captured the public imagination-

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and a spot in the marketplace-before MP3 could really spread its

tentacles. Real Audio players made it possible to listen to musical
bits while you downloaded a song; the process of listening to
music this way, "live" on the web, became known as streaming. In
April 1996, the web site D].com launched the concept of Internet
radio. Using Real Audio streams, the early D].com offered twenty-
four channels of music.
During the next couple of years, high-speed Internet connec-
tions became commonplace. The method of music consumption
shifted from streaming (hear now) to downloading (save for
later). After downloading MP3 files into your computer, you
needed a software program to play them. Developed by Nullsoft,
the popular Winamp player performed the same function as the
old-fashioned hardware (that is, the phonograph), only now the
record player is inside the computer-and no records.
In 1998, Robertson founded the web site MP3.com. and pre-
sented it as a clearinghouse for new music, a repository of songs
stored in the new format. At the very start, the web site focused
on unknown artists, who could agree freely to post their music
online, unlike musicians signed to a major record label. Moreover,
those downloaded files came scot-free; MP3.com generated much
of its income from advertising. By 1998, the young web site
claimed 150,000 visitors a day. By spring 2001, MP3.com attracted
nearly one million regular users overall.
For fiscal 2000, MP3.com's revenues hit $80 million, a 266 per-
cent improvement over the previous year. At the same time,
MP3.com posted a $23 million loss. For an Internet start-up, it
easily could've been worse. By then, however, MP3 also stood for
something else in many people's minds: copyright infringement.

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 Canned Music's Last Stand

Blame it on the burners. More and more, personal computers

came equipped with a CD-RW drive known as a CD burner (RW
stands for rewriteable). Unlike CD-ROM, music or text could be
recorded on CD-RW discs. Sales of blank CD-RW discs soared.
Prerecorded music CDs could be converted-ripped-into
computerized MP3 files; and MP3 files could be reconverted-
burned-back onto a standard disc. Of course, the capacity of
that homemade CD returned to the traditional seventy-four
minutes. The software circle was now complete-with record
companies effectively removed from the loop. Predictably, this un-
fettered technology and accompanying freedom-of-information
rhetoric did not sit well with the increasingly nervous music
industry.
In the first month of the new century, MP3.com welcomed a
bold sibling. Somewhat naively, Robertson thought he'd finessed
the copyright complications and record company concerns. On
MyMP3.com, users could listen to their CD collection online.
The musical contents were tucked away in "virtual lockers. " Once
your purchased copy of a prerecorded disc was scanned (to prove
ownership), you gained access to a copy stored online. From that
point on, it's yours to rip and burn.
Access could be gained from any Internet connection, anytime,
anywhere. My MP3.com users could program their own albums
and select their own playlists, an attractive proposition. MP3.com
owned and controlled all the name-brand material-a.k.a. copy-
righted recordings-on the web site, and the music files were
stored on its computers, so users gain access only to the songs al-
ready owned, guaranteed. All the bases were covered. What's not
to like?

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The industry responded with lawsuits, instantly. Record com-

panies didn't appreciate that proof-of-ownership ploy. Neither
did music publishers.
That spring, a copyright violation came before Judge Jed S.
Rakoff of the federal district court in Manhattan. He rulede
against MyMP3.com, determining that its database of 80,000
CDs was being used in violation of copyright law. So the web site
was shuttered in April, scarcely three months old.
In a later ruling, the same judge directed MP3.com to fork
over a hefty royalty settlement to Universal Music Group,
$25,000 per CD used on the web site, an extraordinary sum. An
undisclosed settlement was reached out of court for much less,
but the point was clear. This was war: take no prisoners. Eventu-
ally, MP3.com settled the virtual locker dispute with the five ti-
tans in the record cartel: BMG, EMI, Sony, Warner, and Univer-
sal. The music publishers-ASCAP and BMI-also received their
piece of the pie.
The copyright suit squelched MyMP3.com for seven long
months in 2000. As a fall from grace, it was truly humbling.
MyMP3.com finally resurfaced as a sort of shadow, a weak re-
flection of its former glory. With no major-label talent in the
locker, the resurrected MyMP3.com remained a bush-league
music service.
The online music locker controversy was eventually settled to
the tune of $130 million, paid by MP3.com to the record compa-
nies. Adding irony to injury, MP3.com was bought by Vivendi in
May 2001; the French telecommunications giant paid $372 mil-
lion. And yet another Net music movement stole the media thun-
der from MP3.com during 2000 and 2001. A new software pro-
gram took the concept of downloading music and turned it into

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a virtual free-for-all. The MP3 mess is child's play compared with

what came next: the Napster melodrama.

Napster Holds No Patents

In 1999, ex-freshman Shawn Fanning set out to build the prover-

bial better mousetrap and named his invention Napster, in honor
of a childhood nickname. Setting out to refine a search engine, he
specifically designed a program that could reel in MP3 files
quickly. Napster enabled Net users to share-and copy-MP3
files with a minimum of fuss and muss.
On a standard web site, users receive information from a cen-
tral source, or server. In a peer-to-peer network, users receive and
send information. Each participating computer becomes a source
or server. Downloading the Napster software empowered users:
you could now transfer, index, and catalogue music files at will.
Napster itself was not a new format; rather, it rendered an exist-
ing format-MP3-more accessible. For Net regulars, MP3 files
suddenly became easy to track down. Type in a song title and
artist's name and see the list of users who have that tune on file.
Select a source and download. The MP3 file copies from one hard
drive to another. Napster was not so much an under-the-counter
retailer as it was an enormous and illicit library.
Some Napster enthusiasts insist it wasn't just about the down-
load. Using Napster enrolled you in a community, they suggest.
Not only songs were shared, but broader musical tastes and
habits, the most personal of information. Musical passions were
communicated and expanded via the technologically enhanced
transfer of computer files.

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In January 1999, Napster started handing out free downloads

of its software. A few months later, Napster, Inc. was formed in
San Mateo, California. Plans existed to commercialize the prod-
uct, but downloads of the software program itself were always of-
fered free of charge. Revenue-admittedly not a major concern
during the Internet boom-would come from advertising.
Shawn teamed up with his uncle, John Fanning, who previ-
ously owned Netgames, an online gaming site. John held as much
as 70 percent of Napster initially, having supplied much of the
capital. Shawn supplied a winning, low-key charm as the com-
pany's public face. At nineteen, he made a shuffling, brilliant,
anti-icon, a man of baseball caps and a few carefully chosen
words. His share of the company never exceeded 3 percent to 5
percent. His uncle considered that stake to be a better-than-
average deal for somebody in his position-that is, the inventor.
Elaine Richardson, a venture capitalist from Boston, was hired
as Napster's first chief executive officer in 1999. Surprisingly, a
compromise between Napster and record companies was
broached in the fall of that year. Later, Business Week reported
that Richardson's abrasive style chafed the head honchos of the
music industry. Perhaps, but whatever happened, the conversation
ended there, and Napster didn't attract many glances from in-
vestment firms or corporate suitors. In fall 1999, with a sigh of re-
lief, N apster finally received $2 million in venture capital from an
outside source. The gambler was a Silicon Valley-based firm
called Hummer-Winblad. By May 2000, Hummer-Winblad
dropped another $15 million into Napster's till. The first order of
business was unplugging Richardson and installing a new CEO. A
Hummer-Winblad partner and corporate lawyer named Hank
Barry was duly appointed to the hot seat.

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By year's end, Napster passed the million-download mark. At

that point, the record companies-through the RIAA-filed a
copyright infringement suit, in December 1999. Through the early
months of the new century, scores of colleges and universities
banned Napster. From New York University and Cal Berkeley to
Indiana and Notre Dame, the massive school computer systems
were log-jammed by students downloading music from the con-
troversial site.

Noble Opposition

In April 2000, the hard rock band Metallica sued Napster for
copyright infringement. One month later, Napster cut loose more
than 300,000 users for the heinous crime of downloading Metal-
lica songs. Two weeks after Metallica, the hardcore rapper and
hip-hop producer Dr. Dre filed his own suit against Napster.
There's a delicate irony contained in Dre's stance. Part of the
good doctor's mad genius rests in his canny ability to duplicate
classic breaks and beats on 'synthesizer keyboards, rather than
sample old records and pay the accompanying licensing fees. In
general, Napster was opposed by superstar-level performers and
embraced by struggling up-and-comers. That divisive class war-
fare was unpleasant, but also perfectly understandable.
At that point, Napster was being used by nearly one million
people per day.
Napster insisted it wasn't liable because it didn't keep any
music on its computers. Napster's lawyers employed the "fair use"
defense, arguing that the same legal rights that protect home tap-
ing of video and music must cover copying a CD for personal use.

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The Betamax decision was most often cited as precedent for Nap-
ster's defense. When the movie industry tried to squelch the VCR
in the early 1980s, the u.s. Supreme Court ultimately ruled in
favor of Sony, in 1984. The Court acknowledged that VCRs could
be used for a legitimate purpose-that is, home taping for indi-
vidual use. On one hand, it can't be denied that Napster made it
possible to copy CDs at a far greater magnitude than would have
been possible otherwise. On the other hand, consider the history
of video: Hollywood film studios eventually made pots of money
on prerecorded cassettes, despite widespread home taping.
On June 13,2000, the battle royal began. The RIAA filed a mo-
tion for preliminary injunction to block all major-label content
shared or traded on Napster. Apparently, Napster saw the threat
coming and continued to stand firm, confident of beating the
charge. John Fanning claimed to be a diligent student of copy-
right law as it applied to digital music, and that he was specifi-
cally acquainted with the decisions of the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals. So the Napster forces entered the legal fray utterly con-
vinced that their brand of peer-to-peer file sharing would prevail
in the U.S. court system.
Heavy-hitting support was quickly arranged, however, just in
case. A few days after the RIAA motion, Hank Barry brought in
the legal superstar David Boies. At this time, mid June 2000, Boies
was widely hailed as the lawyer who had triumphed over Mi-
crosoft in the Justice Department's antitrust case. He was not yet
known as the lawyer who failed to salvage the contested Florida
election for presidential candidate Al Gore.
On July 26, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Patel ruled in favor of
the record industry. Judge Patel ordered Napster to halt major-
label content trade in (little more than) forty-eight hours. Two

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days later, just nine hours before shutdown, the Ninth U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals ruled that the company should be allowed to
continue operating.
N apster made its appeal in October 2000. The decision came
down four months later and it was unanimous-against Nap-
ster. The three-judge panel at the Ninth Circuit Court of Ap-
peals backed Judge Patel's earlier decision. Napster was also de-
clared liable for user's copyright infringement. In other words,
they had to pay the equivalent of royalties on music that had al-
ready been downloaded. The judges' decision on the appeal
stressed that peer-to-peer services are not inherently illegal, just
the Napster application itself-a point that foreshadowed the
immediate future.
At this point there were twenty-one million registered Napster
users. On any given night, 500,000 of them signed on-which
gave Napster one-third the number of AOL's audience in the same
time slot.

Net of Thieves

The Court of Appeals found that the injunction is not only

warranted, but required. And it ruled in our favor on
every legal issue presented.
-Hilary Rosen, Recording Industry
Association of America, 2000

The major labels were asleep at the switch. They are

asleep no longer.
-Richard Parsons, president,
AOL Time Warner, Inc., 2000

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They [Napster users] can't all be criminals.

-Thomas Middlehoff, CEO, Bertelsmann AG, 2000

At the darkest hour, support came from an unlikely quarter. In

November, Napster announced an alliance with Bertelsmann, its
first successful attempt to deal with the record companies. The
proposal centered on a subscription fee charged by Napster, with
part of the fee distributed as royalty payments to record compa-
nies. More savage irony: this arrangement will be financed, in
part, by one of the very companies who fought to close down the
rogue file-sharing network. The German-based entertainment
conglomerate eventually coughed up $85 million for the Napster
deal.
Bertelsmann CEO Thomas Middlehoff and Napster founder
Shawn Fanning performed an odd-couple act for the media. Their
joint venture was announced at a plush press conference in New
York City. The dapper middle-aged executive and the young man
in a University of Michigan cap consummated their deal, clutch-
ing shoulders in a celebratory bear hug. Slightly more than fifty
years previous, the long-playing record debuted in much the same
fashion. One crucial distinction is that LP inventor Peter Gold-
mark was a CBS employee (if not always a "company man"). At
the turn of the twenty-first century, the music industry no longer
controlled the technology on which it depended. Now record
companies were compelled to court inventors and technological
a
upstarts or else seek to impede them in the courts la James
Petrillo of the AFM. Bertelsmann tried to attract other record
companies to the Napster cause, but there were no takers. The
grand experiment never got off the ground. By this point, the
count on N apster users was thirty-eight million and rising.

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Suddenly, the jig was up. The deadline passed in spring 200t.
Napster had to pull down its copyrighted major-label tracks or
shut down the service completely. Metallica and Dr. Dre songs
were promptly removed from Napster, but copying persisted on
the sly. Song titles were purposely misspelled by the users, coded
in slang to foil the filters. As it turns out, the "protected files"
weren't all that secure.
Napster shut down for a spell in the summer then reemerged,
vanquished. Cleansed of major-label content, the revived ser-
vice-call it Napster II-looked like a burned-out shell of its for-
mer self. Napster use plummeted, along with the departure of all
that pirated brand-name music. In a month's time, half as many
users were logging on, a catastrophic loss. Other peer-to-peer
services emerged to answer the demand. Skirting around the law
was a breeze.

Gnutella and Others

What we want is someone to think twice before they start

a business.

-Hilary Rosen, Recording Industry

Association of America, 2001

Gnutella was not a web site, a company, or a product. It was a

protocol: a set of rules that guided peer-to-peer computer file
sharing. Gnutella connected users' computers without relying on
a central computer, as did Napster. Thus it was harder to stop.
Free downloadable software for Gnutella was readily available on
the Internet. Introduced in March 2000, Gnutella allowed users to

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exchange music and other files. When the Napster battles raged,
searches for Gnutella software spread like wildfire.
Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper devised the original program
for Gnutella. Heads of a programming team at AOL Time
Warner's Music Division, they'd already become Net millionaires.
They sold their start-up company (Nullsoft) to AOL. At Nullsoft,
they'd launched the popular Winamp MP3 player. At their new
AOL gig, Frankel and Pepper started work on an alternative file-
sharing program. Their major motivation stemmed from a belief
that Napster was headed toward oblivion. They didn't want to see
the peer-to-peer concept disappear with it. When the bosses got
wind of what was going on in the software lab, AOL Time
Warner put its foot down-too late.
The Gnutella protocol was now the property of a program-
mers network, circulating among hundreds of collaborators
who helped to refine the software program and spread it around
even further. (In a sense, this setup resembles the free Linux op-
erating system.) The file-sharing genie was out of the bottle.
Since Gnutella allows users to trade video, text, and graphics as
well as audio, now pornography and pirated computer pro-
grams coexisted with the music. Neither the movie industry nor
the music business was happy about that. A generation of tech-
savvy consumers who completely ignored copyright law was
truly something to worry about. The CD was their parents'
recording format.
KaZaA, a popular file-sharing program developed by an
Amsterdam-based company called Fast Track, operated differ-
ently from Gnutella and Napster. Instead of a central directory,
KaZaA created supernodes, or search hubs, along the network.
Individual computers formed a chain of minidirectories among

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active users. "Consumers are making a statement that 518 is not

the right price for a CD," declared Niklas Zenstrom, president of
Fast Track, in 2001. "But the record companies aren't giving
them an alternative."
Aimster was another free-download software program for
peer-to-peer file sharing. Aimster utilized AOL's popular instant
message and buddy lists features. (E-mail stays on your computer
until you read it; instant messages disappear when the on-screen
interface concludes.) Aimster allowed users to swap files via the
instant message system. The so-called buddy lists kept Aimster
users informed about who else is on-line and in the trading mode.
Justin Frankel developed an early software program for this in-
stant-message file sharing called AIMazing, and his bosses at
AOL liked it even less than Gnutella.
More than two million people regularly used Aimster by Feb-
ruary 2001. Three months later, predictably, the RIAA initiated a
lawsuit against Aimster for copyright infringement. In his de-
fense, the developer of Aimster, Johnny Deep, sincerely con-
tended that Aimster was intended as an instant message system.
The previous winter, though, he had crowed to the New York
Post, "if Napster were to swallow the poison pill, we could take
off." More or less, that is exactly what happened.

Napster Wraps

Naturally, the major record labels viewed Napster as a gang of

rank opportunists, amateurs launching a business without a busi-
ness plan. For a while, Bertelsmann had money to burn on Mid-
dlehoff's consuming interest in Net music, since it was the only

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media conglomerate not financially tied to the film business. In

addition, the prospect of further deals with record companies of-
fered a neat solution to Napster's vaguely addressed problem:
How do you take a hugely popular Net service and actually make
it profitable? The example recently set by Microso&'s Slate mag-
azine and ESPN's SportsZone had been troubling, to say the least.
These two successful web sites switched to pay-to-play then
watched visitor traffic start to disappear. Subscription fees had to
be jettisoned in both cases.
Meanwhile, the clock ticked on Napster. Negotiations with
Bertelsmann dragged and stalled well into 2002. The summer
ouster of CEO Thomas Middlehoff, Napster's great champion at
Bertelsmann, surely didn't help settle matters. A settlement was
pursued even a&er Middlehoff was out of the picture. Bertels-
mann offered to payoff Napster's debts and buy its assets, but
they couldn't agree on terms. There were many reports of disar-
ray at Napster; John Fanning eventually filed suit against the
other members of the board. Finally, Shawn Fanning and other
Napster top executives resigned in May 2002. Napster declared
bankruptcy one month later. By then, negotiations with Bertels-
mann had collapsed and Napster was broke. Bertelsmann still
wanted to buy the remaining assets, possibly to use the name for
a new service, but a Delaware bankruptcy court forbade Bertels-
mann's acquisition in September 2002. Liquidation, rather than
reorganization, was the inevitable next step.
Napster had been off-line since July 2001, but its effect is still
being felt. Asked about the effect of file sharing on CD sales, Shawn
Fanning still defended the practice in late 2002. "It may be hurting
the music industry at this point," he admitted. "But my view is the
consumers have the ability to learn about new and interesting

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music, and the barrier is lowered in a way that gives them control
over how they experience it. I think those are positive things."
It's safe to say that the MP3 format was never intended to be
the exclusive preserve of bootleggers and pirates. The point was
to achieve a quick and easy transfer of music, from CD to per-
sonal computers and portable players. Consumer demand re-
mains high, the technology is more than ready, but the record
companies lag behind the technological pace. The seductive allure
of the MP3 format is all about selection and portability, not thiev-
ery and deceit.
The Napster crisis offered a window of opportunity. Some
clever soul in the music business might deduce a way to charge a
nominal fee per song: miniscule amounts, perhaps, but those
nickels and dimes add up. Until then, the idea of leveling web site
subscription fees will be met with stiff resistance. The free stuff is
much easier to obtain, and so far there's been much more of it. All
along, the almighty power of selection has been driving the run-
away popularity of Napster and its spawn, such as KaZaA and
Morpheus.
Digital music offers enhanced choice, while it also jacks up the
consumer's level of convenience and flexibility. Napster was not
blameless in this affair: musicians deserve fair compensation for
their labors. But the success of Napster identified a fresh appetite
in the music-buying public. The record companies ignore these
hungry cries at their peril. Instead of feeding dissatisfied cus-
tomers, they've tried to discredit any competing technology. This
strategy of resistance didn't work for James Petrillo and the AFM
in their fight against canned music. The truce after the Napster
fight was temporary, truculent, and illusory. This promises to be
a fight to the finish.

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Hardware as Software

The portable MP3 player was the hardware component of the

sound-compression technology. In October 1998, Diamond Mul-
timedia Systems, Inc., introduced its RIO PMP 300. Though it
stored just sixty minutes of music, the RIO player boasted a rea-
sonable price, retailing for less than $200. This handheld MP3
player engaged the roaming ears of a restless listening public.
With any purchase of a player, Diamond supplied a free software
program for converting CDs into MP3 files.
The music industry didn't much cotton to that technological
innovation either. The RIAA applied for a court order preventing
sales of the Diamond RIO player. The judge denied their request,
and the so-called killer app proliferated. Electronics manufactur-
ers fell over each other in the rush to produce digital audio prod-
ucts that would work in tandem with personal computers.
The Nomad Jukebox, courtesy of the Singapore-based outfit
Creative Technology, represented the next step in portable digital.
,Nomad debuted in late 2000. Though it fit the size and shape of
a standard CD player, the Nomad lived up to its name: featuring
a whopping 100 hours of storage time (roughly 1,500 songs), the
Nomad really was a mobile jukebox.
The ultimate app, at least for now, may well be iPOD. Intro-
duced by MacIntosh in late 2001, the iPOD attracted media at-
tention with its sleek design and capacious storage. Weighing 6.5
ounces, the iPOD fits in your pocket, the size of a cigarette pack.
Its 5-gigbyte hard drive holds 66 hours of music; that's roughly
1,300 songs or 130 albums. A high-resolution screen displays song
title, artist, and album (if the MP3 files contain that information).
This was portability perfected, at least until Creative Technology

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 Canned Music's Last Stand

unveiled the Nomad Muvo. The size of a cigarette lighter (or fat
stick of gum), the Muvo contains 64 megabytes of music, or 15 to
20 songs. The player's bottom half is a solid-state memory unit
that slips off and plugs the Muvo into the USB connector on the
back of your personal computer for easy downloading. The
Nomad Muvo resembles a sort of reprogrammable hardware, a
postsoftware music player. Behold the portable album.
For the remaining turntable fanciers who aren't Djs, rarefied
machines are available. These turntables redefine a fabled 1950s
concept: stratospherically high-end hi-fi for the new century. The
Rockport System III Sirius suggests a high-tech rendition of an
antique. Hand tooled by an engineer over a period of six months,
this Ferrarilike turntable weighs 550 pounds and costs $73,750.
There were twenty-five or so of them in existence in 2001. The Sir-
ius suspends the record and tone arm on a cushion of compressed
air. A magnetic-induction motor keeps the disc spinning without
touching the turntable mat, so the sole physical contact occurs be-
tween needle and record. If you have to ask how great it actually
sounds, then you definitely can't afford it.

Software Is Nowhere

If it becomes a format war, it will ruin the whole thing.

-Stan Goman, Chief Operating Officer,
Tower Rec'ords, 1999

Software was the last frontier in the digital music wars. In the
late 1990s, two spanking-new silver discs were hyped as the future
of recorded music-and guess what? Backed by two different

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music-biz consortiums, these variations on the disc happened to

be completely incompatible with each other. Given the historical
record, how could that be?
This latest software struggle begins in 1997. Compact disc
sales were stagnant and mainstream musical taste had turned
stale, shifting from rock and country to pop and hip-hop. The
time had come for a technological nudge, a format change.
The Digital Video Disc format, or DVD, debuted around this
time. Commercial acceptance was enthusiastic and almost instan-
taneous. To the film industry's delight, the DVD was playback-
only. Given the rapid sales of the new video players and discs, DVD
Audio appeared a logical progression and to some, a solid bet in a
suddenly volatile marketplace. A forum of ten companies united
behind the new format: electronics giants such as Hitachi and
Toshiba held hands with content providers like AOL Time Warner
and Universal.
DVD Audio contained seventy-four minutes of sound, just like
a standard CD. The bulked-up sound quality came (at least in
part) from DVD Audio's six channels of sound, like quadro-
phonic with two more added on. Incredibly, that means purchas-
ing a new player with six speakers. "Six-channel surround sound"
may well appeal to the growing number of people who harbor a
DVD "home theater" setup in their den or basement. The only
drawback was a familiar, nagging complaint: DVD Audio discs
didn't play on traditional DVD machines. Purchasing a new DVD
Audio player was unavoidable.
The scheme behind DVD Audio is a familiar ruse: the industry
expected that sheep like consumers would replace their musty CD
albums with this state-of-the-art software. Can lightning really
strike twice? After the sudden death of vinyl, perhaps consumers

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were wary, afraid of being burned again.

DVD Audio's opponent in this old-fashioned format war-bat-
tle of the speeds revisited-went by a rather military-sounding
acronym, SACD, for Super Audio CD. Backed by Sony and
Phillips, SACD was directed away from the mainstream and in-
stead targeted the audiophile market.
Sony unveiled SACD at a 1999 press conference. Nobyuki Idei,
the company's president, touted the new format as the sonic
equivalent of analog. Here was an unlikely, brilliant instance of
closure: What 'goes around comes around. "When we introduced
CD in 1981," recalled Idei, "most people were satisfied with the
great sound-especially for pop and rock. Yet some people prefer
analog. Audio purists remain loyal to analog."
Super Audio CD contained slightly more music-110 minutes-
than the rival format. Unlike the DVD Audio players, Super Audio
CD players accommodated a traditional compact disc, and many
SACDs could be played in a standard CD player. Confused? So were
most music consumers. Neither DVD Audio nor SACD was exactly
a commercial juggernaut. The initial number of titles released in
both configurations is miniscule, barely topping 100 discs in either
SACD or DVD Audio-a paucity that reflects a considerable lack of
interest in new recorded music software, or at least in recorded
music software that must be purchased. The right kind of record-
ing, however, may yet provide ignition for the new format: perhaps
something to demonstrate its enhanced audio quality, something
along the lines of sound effects or exotic percussion.
DataPlay may be a final, desperate ploy for physical music
software. DataPlay discs are 1-inch-wide discs holding a little less
music than a CD-ROM, but with comparable sound quality.

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Once again, the new discs (software) dictate the purchase of a

new player (hardware). The latter function as portable music
players, or as drives plugged into a personal computer. But the
DataPlay discs are copy protected. That means the files-the
music-can't be ripped into a computer or burned onto a CD. At
first, the tiny discs were intended as a storage format for digital
cameras. Steve Yolk, who founded the Colorado-based DataPlay,
Inc. in 1998, eventually flashed on the musical potential of his
new minidiscs. He also recognized their utility for "protecting"
or controlling content. Concerned with piracy, eager for a secure
new format, the record companies signed on with DataPlay. A
flood of prerecorded disc releases from the major labels was ex-
pected to launch the format. At the same time, though, a nasty
rumor kept circulating: the music software of the future would
be no software at all.

Too Little Too Late?

Even with N apster in ruins, peer-to-peer file trading ran rampant

on the Net. Alternate sharing services flourished. The cat re-
mained out of the bag, despite threats and impending lawsuits
from the RIAA. It took a while, thanks to the royalty demands of
songwriters and music publishers, but in late 2001, the record
companies finally unveiled their digital music platforms. After
years of foot-dragging, this ballyhooed pair of on-line debuts ar-
rived as a distinct anticlimax, if not a flat-out disaster.
Musicnet was a joint venture between EMI, Bertelsmann, AOL
Time Warner, and Real Networks. Users paid approximately $10
per month for the right to stream and download a designated

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number of songs, around 100. The fee allowed customers to listen

to their selections for a month, so in effect, you were renting the
music rather than owning it. Keep listening past the thirty-day
deadline, and another charge would appear on next month's
statement.
Press Play teamed Universal and Sony with Yahoo! and the Mi-
crosoft Network. For $10 and change, Press Play allows users to
download and stream a selection of songs. One slight but signifi-
cant improvement over Musicnet was offered: On Press Play,
downloaded songs can be replayed indefinitely, as long as you pay
your subscription fee. One major drawback, though, is that the
music from both sites gets stuck inside your computer. Songs from
Press Play and Musicnet can't be converted to CD or transferred
to portable MP3 players. While both sites draw on song libraries
of 100,000 titles or more, neither cover the catalogues of all five
major record companies. And the best-selling artists who control
their own web rights aren't included. Legitimate downloads of the
Beatles, the Eagles, or Led Zeppelin are not to be found.
Rhapsody, launched by Listen.com with music supplied by the
major labels, represents a small step forward. For its monthly fee
of $10, Rhapsody offers subscribers an extra degree of freedom.
That's the initial draw: unlimited streaming and some burning, at
99¢ a song, but no MP3 downloading. In its first year, Rhapsody
amassed a larger song library than any of the other legal services;
yet there are still major gaps in content.
At this point, the music business needed a white knight. Enter
Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple Computer, on horseback.
Apple's online iTunes Music Store opened for business on April
28, 2003. "Consumers don't want to be treated like criminals and
artists don't want their valuable work stolen," declared Jobs at

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the San Francisco launch. "The iTunes Music Store offers a

groundbreaking solution for both." The story of iTunes will be a
case study, a test run. Leaving the corporate war on piracy aside
for a moment, can a pay-as-you-play downloading service survive
on the Internet-that is, payoff for the music industry and satisfy
customers?
The iTunes pitch is simple: No subscription fee, 99¢ downloads.
iTunes users are granted more freedom than any other pay service
subscribers. For their 99¢, iTunes customers can download a song
onto an unlimited number of iPod players as well as three Apple
Macintosh computers. They can also burn up to ten CDs with the
same playlist. The initial iTunes library included 200,000 songs. (A
thirty-second sample or preview is available for many songs.)
Employing charisma and, perhaps, connections, Jobs con-
vinced No Doubt and the Eagles to license their music online for
the first time. The iTunes Music Store drew the bulk of its mer-
chandise from the five usual suspects: Warner, BMG, EMI, Sony
Music, and Universal. Any deal, however, between Apple and the
big music companies must have required an extra round of diplo-
macy. Famous for its striking ads, Apple originally marketed the
iPOD (and an early version of iTunes) with the provocative slogan
"Rip. Mix. Burn." Yet the music business apparently is willing to
forgive and forget Apple's slap in its face, since record companies
rushed to stock the shelves of the online store. Hilary Rosen,
speaking in one of her last official acts before steeping down as
RIAA spokesperson, delivered a ringing endorsement of the new
service. The iTunes ad logo was a neck-up shot of a Gibson elec-
tric guitar-an iconic and reassuring image in place of the anar-
chic earlier slogan.

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 Canned Music's Last Stand

The response was instantaneous and electrifying. Apple re-

ported a total of one million iTunes downloads in the first week
of May 2003. That number fell to 500,000 by June. Still, half a
million seems more than respectable; in fact, it seems remarkable,
considering that Apple has only a 2.4 percent share of the com-
puter market. A decade earlier, 9.4 percent of home computers
were Macs. One can assume that a majority of Mac users are
music fans. The introduction of iTunes shrewdly tied into the
continuing success of the iPOD player; and the subsequent suc-
cess of iTunes may serve another vital function for Apple: It
would be a great way to boost the company's shrinking presence
in the computer market. If nothing else, iTunes is off to a sur-
prising start. The legal competition certainly noticed. Rhapsody
responded by slashing its burn rate to 79¢ a song. Musicnet and
Press Play had to rethink their strict burn policies. Openly target-
ing iTunes, AOL designed its own online music download service.
But will the illegal competition take heed? On April 25, 2003,
a lower federal court in California ruled that two free song-
sharing services-Grokster and Morpheus-couldn't be held li-
able for any copyright infringement committed by their users. U.S.
District Court Judge Stephen Wilson stunned the music industry
with his decision. The pirates, at least some of them, are here to
stay.
Before the dust cleared, the Napster struggle already looked
like a turning point for the record business. Most probably, the
fight over Napster will be remembered as a lost opportunity that
was tragically misapprehended as a triumph for the status quo.
All this technological change is just beginning to affect the aes-
thetic of pop music. For the past fifty years, music has come
prepackaged in collections of ten or fifteen or so songs. From the

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LP era through the CD regime, the album ruled as a creative for-

mat. The rise of digital music threw the individual song back into
high relief. While the single isn't likely to return as a physical ob-
ject, pop musicians are now free to concentrate on songs again.
Someday soon, digital technology will inspire a new musical
movement, a revolution nurtured and spread on the Internet. The
catalyst will be a high-impact recording: a dramatic song or per-
formance that defines a new style and demonstrates its range. It
will be a digital-era echo of preceding twentieth-century mile-
stones such as "0 Sole Mio," '~lexander's Ragtime Band,"
"Crazy Blues," "The Prisoner's Song," "Pistol Packin' Mama,"
"How High the Moon," Sgt.Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band,
Dark Side of the Moon, "Love to Love You, Baby," "The Adven-
tures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel," and "Planet
Rock."
In the year 2000, a vaguely ominous prediction appeared in
Billboard: "Physical Sales of Music Will Top off by 2004." Don't
look for those rotating discs to completely disappear anytime
soon, however; the CD package may resemble damaged goods at
this point, but its contents haven't settled or shifted. Music itself
is still miraculous. It's just that the science of recording isn't as re-
mote, mysterious, and awe-inspiring as it once was. Thanks to
technology, the magic finally escaped from the can.

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AFTERMATH

"1 think the downloading problem won't be solved

until we're able to electronically interfere with the
process. There are some new technologies being
tested and I think they'll be ready pretty soon ... very
soon. In one or two years, we'll have taken care of the
problem."
-Gunter Thielen, Chief Executive
of Bertelsmann AG, September 2004

THE NAPSTER BATTLE was only the beginning of a bitterly con-

tested campaign, a fight to the finish between Big Music and
millions of Internet users. If the record industry is also trying to
influence the hearts and minds of digital copyright violators,
then so far it has utterly failed. In September 2003, the Boston-
based Yankee Group research firm estimated that 57 million
Americans were sharing music files online. Ever since, the music
industry has resorted to desperate measures in its fight against
illegal downloading. Bluntly put, the fight got personal. By
September 2004, more than 5,000 individuals had been sued by
the music companies' trade group, the Recording Institute As-
sociation of America (RIAA). In many cases, the plaintiff was

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an unwIttmg computer owner being sued for his teenager's

music collection. Out of the first couple of hundred culprits
sued, inevitably, a poster child emerged. But Brianna La Hara
couldn't have been the kind of freeloader the RIAA lawyers had
in mind when they set out to make an example of somebody.
Twelve-year-old Brianna was literally a poster child. She was
also an honor student at a parochial school in New York City,
and a resident of public housing. "I got really scared, my stom-
ach is all turning," she told the New York Post when the suit was
filed. "Out of all the people, why did they pick me?"
She couldn't have been the only person asking that question.
Sylvia Torres, Brianna's mother, had mistakenly assumed
KaZaA was a legal service. After all, she paid a monthly service
charge. Eventually Ms. Torres settled out of court with the
RIAA, for $2,000. Frankly, it was a public relations disaster for
the record industry group. But one year down the road, the law-
suits keep right on coming, filed every few months in waves of
several hundred at a time. So far more than 600 of these suits
have been settled out of court, for amounts ranging up to
$15,000.
"I've never had a situation like this before, where there are
powerful plaintiffs and powerful lawyers on one side then a
whole slew of ordinary folks on the other," said U.S. District
Judge Nancy Gertner. According to the Los Angeles Times,
dozens of RIAA lawsuits have passed through Judge Gertner's
Boston courtroom. In a recent letter to the New York Times, the
chairman of the RIAA defended the legal assault on file sharing.
"The best approach is innovation and enforcement," wrote
Mitch Bainwol on April 24, 2004. ''And that's exactly what the
music community is doing."

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 Aftermath

Well, the threat to the music industry is real. The so-called

digital pirates have persisted and even prospered in the face of
prosecution. In September 2004, the Big Champagne research
firm estimated that 24 million Americans were using file-sharing
online services like KaZaA and Grokster, mostly to trade copy-
righted content like music and movies. And apart from those
well-known commercial sites, file sharing has burrowed deeper
underground. Many more users have formed smaller, hard-to-
penetrate "encrypted" networks and switched to noncommer-
cial "open source" software like eDonkey and BitTorrent.
There is no doubt that file sharing has become more difficult
in the wake of the RIAA lawsuits. Aside from the obvious in-
timidation factor, there are roadblocks and booby traps. By now
it is common knowledge that up to 30 percent of the available
files on the net are spoofs, or fake tracks planted by record com-
panies. This assertion from the last chapter of Playback still
stands: Illegal downloading requires patience, savvy, and a high-
speed connection. Now we should add one more requirement:
access to legal representation.
And the sole prediction I made in the last chapter has stood
the test of time. Unsurprisingly, the compact disc has yet to dis-
appear. In fact, prerecorded CD sales have slightly improved
after several years of decline. According to Nielsen SoundScan,
album sales were up nearly 7 percent in the first six months of
2004. There were 305 million total albums sold, compared to
286 million for the same period in 2003. One sobering note
lingers, though: Sales still lag behind the year before (2002) by 2
percent. The boom years of the nineties are ancient history. At
the same time, sales of legal music downloads have increased-
dramatically. Taken together, the online music services average

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 Aftermath

sales of more than 2 million a week. Fifty-four million songs

were legally downloaded in the first six months of 2004. But the
media hype overshadows the reality: The market size for legal
downloads is extremely modest. Despite the aura of success sur-
rounding the iTunes Music Store, legal downloads account for
one percent of total recorded music sales.
Is this up-tick in CD sales a product of the RIAA lawsuits?
Clearly, quite a few illegal file-sharers were deterred by the
RIAA campaign. The Pew Internet and American Life Project
survey, released in January 2004, suggests that the number of
U.S. Internet users who download music has fallen dramatically:

The percentage of online Americans downloading music files

on the Internet dropped by half and the numbers who were
downloading files on any given day plunged after the Record-
ing Industry Association of America (RIAA) began filing
suits against those suspected of copyright infringement. A
nationwide phone survey of 1358 adult internet users showed
that the percentage of music file downloaders had fallen to
14% (about 18 million) from 29% (about 35 million) six
months previous.
Furthermore, a fifth of those who say they continue to
download or share files online say they are doing so less often
because of the suits.

Of course, the reliability of such self-reported data is open to

question. How many people will admit to breaking the law for
the sake of a survey? Especially when you consider the threat of
RIAA lawsuits, these results begin to reek of self-censorship. At

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 Aftermath

the other end of the scale, Big Champagne's summer 2004 re-
search showed that illegal file sharing has increased in the year
since the RIAA began its plan of prosecution.
Right now we have to declare this bout a draw.
A crucial legal decision has helped to protect or even perpet-
uate file sharing, at least for the present time. In August 2004,
the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Grokster and
other peer-to-peer (file-sharing) services were legal because their
software could also be used for legitimate purposes. The RIAA
and Hollywood film studios protested this decision, making the
perfectly reasonable point that most of the material shared on
these services has been illegally copied. The Ninth Circuit was
upholding the U.S. Supreme Court's Betamax decision: In 1984,
the Court ruled in favor of Sony (makers of the Betamax video
recorder) over the film and television studios who claimed home
videotaping was a copyright violation. In October 2004, repre-
sentatives of the entertainment industry requested that the
Supreme Court overturn the Ninth Circuit Court's ruling.
A legal sanction on the very machines that enable file sharing
may be the entertainment industry's next move. Currently being
considered by the U.S. Senate, the Inducing Infringement of
Copyrights Act (SB2560) was introduced in June 2004. The chief
sponsor is Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), head of the Senate Ju-
diciary Committee. The bipartisan group of supporters includes
such unlikely allies as Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle
(D-South Dakota) and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Ten-
nessee). Under the act, anyone who "aids, abets, induces, pro-
cures" unauthorized copyright material is held liable. So when
the RIAA sues a KaZaA user, say, the manufacturer of any prod-
uct used in that file-sharing process-software and hardware--

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 Aftermath

faces a secondary liability. Opponents of the act, mostly tech

companies and consumer groups, claim the so-called Induce Act
is so broadly worded that any electronic device that promotes
copying of digital content is threatened: personal computers,
iPods and other digital music players, CD burners, DVD players,
VCRs, and Tivo. By its very nature, the Induce Act seeks to
modernize--or undermine--the Supreme Court's Betamax de-
cision. The lines in the sand have been drawn.
In the midst of all this litigation, a controversial study by two
economics professors raised questions about the basic assump-
tions behind the RIAA's entire anti-piracy crusade. Felix Ober-
holzer-Gee, associate professor at the Harvard Business School,
and Koleman Stumpf, associate professor at the University of
North Carolina, tracked sales of 680 albums over the course of
seventeen weeks in the second half of 2002. Matching that data
with file-sharing activity on the OpenN ap network, they ob-
served that file sharing actually increased CD sales for albums
that sell more than 600,000 copies, that is, hit albums.
"Our hypothesis was that if downloads are killing music,
then albums that are downloaded more intensively should sell
less," said Strumpf. Amazingly, the opposite results emerged.
"It's a finding that surprised us," Oberholzer-Gee told the Har-
vard University Gazette. "We just couldn't document a negative
relationship between file sharing and music sales." The RIAA
and many other industry analysts scoffed at the study, dismiss-
ing it as an eccentric academic fluke. Yet it seems entirely plau-
sible that even voracious downloaders wouldn't totally stop
buying CDs. In this model, file sharing complements and en-
courages CD sales. Users sample a wide range of (free) music via
downloading, and then actually buy the entire albums (includ-

214
 Aftermath

ing packaging and information) by their favorites. Here's an-

other not-so-bold prediction: Prerecorded CDs will stick around
a while longer.
Along with the technology challenge, however, the music in-
dustry faces a widening generation gap. In the twentieth century,
young people listened to rebellious music. In the twenty-first
century they listen to music in rebellious ways. There's a deeper
reason why teenagers and college students, more than anyone
else, still traffic in illegitimate MP3 files. Free music is only part
of the allure. File sharing is forbidden, communal, insular, clan-
destine, and uncommonly cool. Downloading is the new rock
and roll; for devotees the very act of file sharing becomes an ex-
pression of cultural rebellion. This should come as no surprise:
The first hip-hop generation, raised on the sounds of samples
and bites, views the whole notion of intellectual property rights
in a radically different way than their parents do.
Downloading will never go away; it can only be contained.
But in the end, the downside of illegal file sharing is inescapable.
The risks begin to outweigh the benefits. After ~ll, most people
don't want to live outside the law. It gets too complicated.

The Looming Format War

Let's reconsider the very first sentence of Playback: "Suddenly,

popular music resembles an alien landscape." In 2004, the alien
landscape-where people download recorded music from the
Internet-feels more and more like familiar territory. Look at
the most obvious example: Those white ear buds you see all
around were just beginning to sprout when the hardcover

215
 Aftermath

edition was finished. And now, after three years on the market,
Apple's portable digital player already seems ubiquitous. Sleek
and efficient, the iPod has become an icon, maybe even a
cliche. At this point its very name works as a genre-defining
brand like Coca-Cola-or the Victrola.
In other words, the iPod rules, OK? Analysts say the iPod
has more than a 50 percent share of the market for hard
disk-based audio players. More than 4 million of these slim,
pocket-size players had been sold by mid 2004, with 1.7 million
sold in the first six months of 2004 alone. And 70 million songs
were sold on iTunes Music Store site during its first year of
operation.
Even as it struggles with a tiny share of the personal com-
puter market, Apple is busy remaking itself as a music company.
iPods are selling at a rate of about $1 billion a year and account
for more than 12 percent of Apple's revenue. Hardware profits
from iPod carry software losses on iTunes. And iPod sales
helped boost the company's third-quarter profits in 2004 by a
whopping 30 percent over the previous year.
"We basically make only a little bit of money on [iTunes]-
we break even to make a little bit of profit, somewhere in that
range," Apple chief executive Steve Jobs told the BBC. ''And
we're the largest by far. So everyone else must be losing money.
I don't know what people that don't have an iPod business are
doing because there's not a lot of money to be made running an
online music store."
That hasn't stopped anybody from trying. Thanks to iTunes'
piggyback ride on the accelerating success of the iPod, the com-
petition amid online music stores is heating up. A shakeout
seems inevitable, but it hasn't happened yet. Microsoft and Sony,

216
 Aftermath

slow to enter the fray, are now mounting the most serious chal-
lenges to Apple's dominance. And a slew of services have been
bucking against iTunes since the beginning: Online offerings
from Yahoo, Real Networks, the legalized Napster (now owned
by Roxio), Wal-Mart, MusicMatch, BuyMusic, eMusic, and
others have been met with only middling response from con-
sumers. Lurking on the sidelines are subscription sites like Real's
moderately popular Rhapsody, which offers streaming and CD
burning but no actual downloads.
But the success of the iPod, arguably the biggest triumph in
music technology since Peter Goldmark invented the LP, could
quickly turn into a disaster for the emerging digital music scene.
A full-scale format war may now be inevitable, due mostly to
Steve Jobs' intransigence. A lack of compatibility between the
competing portable players threatens to cripple the entire digital
music market. Playing hardball with iPod's challengers could ul-
timately backfire for Jobs and Apple. The problem in a nutshell:
Only music downloaded through iTunes will play on iPods, and
iTunes music won't play on any portable device except an iPod.
Apple refuses to license its technology to third parties.
"The iPod already works with the number one music service
in the world and the iTunes music store works with the number
one digital music player in the world," said Jobs. "The number
twos are so far behind already. Why would we want to work
with a number two?"
Without basic compatibility between formats, confusion
reigns and consumers grow hesitant about the new technology.
Then the whole business suffers, and development grinds to a
halt. That was the lesson of the Battle of the Speeds in the late
1940s, which RCA and Columbia learned the hard way. Wisely,

217
 Aftermath

they cooperated in the end, making their mutually exclusive for-

mats-33 and 45 rpm records-adaptable to any record player.
Incredible as it may seem, the iPod could wind up a loser in the
currently looming war-the digital equivalent of an 8-track tape
player or a Betamax video recorder.
The first skirmish in the iPod war flared up during 2004.
After Steve Jobs rejected a personal appeal from Real Network's
chief executive to include his firm's music on iPods, Rob Glaser
refused to take no for an answer. He instructed Real Network's
engineers to penetrate the proprietary digital rights manage-
ment (DRM) format used by the iPod. And they managed to
crack the code. Real Network developed a technology called
Harmony, effectively circumventing Apple's ironically named
FairPlay DRM format. DRM is a copy-protection technology
that limits how a song purchased through iTunes (or any online
service) can be duplicated. Despite the iPod's rapid rise, Glaser
told the Washington Post that online music won't really take off
until standards are established that make it possible to hear any
file on any device-just like CDs and DVDs.
"There's a format war," he said.
One feature on the iPod that's worth noting is its ability to
copy and store all the music files on another iPod. In essence,
you can peruse a friend's music library, and also open up your
own collection for browsing and borrowing. The iPod also al-
lows users to stream (listen to) other iPod users' libraries over a
network (like the iTunes Music Store). Here's yet another cau-
tious prediction: Gradually, the personal play list will replace
the album as the organizing principle and basic currency of pop
music exchange. There's a huge opportunity here for savvy
record companies; downloading songs over the Internet can be-

218
 Aftermath

come as addictive as eating potato chips. One track inevitably

links to a hunger for more and more and more. As we've seen all
along, the very nature of the Net-diverse and data-saturated-
encourages musical tastes to expand and grow exponentially.
In fact, many of the patterns and precedents charted in Play-
back keep coming back to haunt us. A developer who worked on
the iPod recently made the unsurprising claim that Steve Jobs
was personally involved in every mundane detail of the project.
According to Ben Knauss' quite credible testimony, once the
basic iPod prototypes were built, Jobs peppered the designers
and engineers with daily queries and demands. One result of
Jobs' micromanaging should sound eerily familiar, as it's a di-
rect echo of his forebear Thomas Edison. The iPod is louder
than most MP3 players because Jobs is partially deaf, Knauss
told Wired News. "They drove the sound up so he Uobs] could
hear it," he said.
One thing is certain: Before this century is over, the mighty
iPod will sound as primitive and quaint as Thomas Edison's
cylinder phonograph does now. What goes around comes
around.

219
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Introduction and Chapter One

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Internet
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The Player Piano Page: www.pianola.demon.co.uk
U.S. Patent Office: www.uspto.gov/
UK Patent Office: www.patent.gov.uk/patent/

Chapter Two

Articles
Dreazen, Yochi J. "Pittsburgh's KDKA Tells Story of How Radio Has
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V-Disc Records." Goldmine, 29 January 1999.

Chapter Three

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Chapter Four

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Angwin, Julia. "Web Radio Showdown." Wall Street journal, 15 May
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Survived." Wall Street Journal, 15 May 200l.
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Chapter Five

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Chusid, Irwin. "joe Meek's Musical Rocket Science." DISCoveries
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Tyler, Kieron. "Adventures in Stereo." Mojo (August 2000).

Chapter Six

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"Music to Move to: Disco: A Billboard Supplement." Billboard, 1 No-
vember 1975.
Strauss, Neil. "Francis Grasso, 52, 60s OJ and Master of the Club
Mix." (Obituary.) New York Times, 25 March 2001.
Traiman, Stephen. "Sony's Tiny Stereo Player." Billboard, 8 December
1979.

Internet
Tom Moulton Tribute Page: www.disco-disco.com/tributes/tom.html

Chapter Seven

Articles
Allen, Harry. "Why Sugar Hill Records Matters." Liner notes. The
Sugar Hill Records Story. Rhino, 1997.
Beresford, Steve. "Cut Above the Rest: A Brief History of Dub." Reso-
nance 2, no. 2 (n.d.).
Farber, Jim. ''A Team of OJ Veterans Busily Turning Tables." New
York Daily News, 12 March 2002.
Ford, Robert, Jr. "Jive Talking NY DJs Rapping Away in Black
Discos." Billboard, 5 May 1979.
George, Nelson. "Hip Hop History: Founding Fathers Speak the
Truth." The Source, November 1993.
George, Nelson, and Brian Chin. "The Sylvia Robinson Story." Record
World, 1 August 1981.
Heibutzki, Ralph. "Time Enough for the Old School: The Hip Hop
Revolution 1970-1990." Goldmine, 24 May 1996.
Hodgkinson, Will. "Spin City." The Guardian, 2 September 2002.
Houston, Frank. "Gather Round the Electronic Piano." New York
Times, 16 December 1999.

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Hundley, Jessica. "Interview: OJ Qbert." New York Press, 21-27 Feb-

ruary 2001.
Nossiter, Adam. "Hip-Hop Club (Gang?) Is Banned in the Bronx: Cul-
tural Questions About Zulu Nation." New York Times, 4 Octo-
ber 1995.
Sockwell-Mason, Ikimulisa. "Farrakhan: Rappers Scare White Par-
ents." New York Post, 14 June 2001.
Strauss, Neil. "The Battle of the Needle Freaks." Spin, 1999.
Toop, David. Tommy-Boy's Greatest Beats. CD box liner notes. 1998.
Werde, William. "The Real Spin Doctors." Washington Post, 7 Febru-
ary 1999.

Chapter Eight

Articles
Barrett, Todd. "The Start of a CD Backlash?" Newsweek, 16 July 1990.
Browne, David. ''A Vinyl Farewell." Entertainment Weekly, 4 Ocotber
1991.
Christman, Ed. "Retailers Call for Lower CD Prices: Shamrock CEO
Irks Labels at NARM." Billboard, 24 March 1990.
Ehrlichman, James. "Sudden Death of the Long-Playing Record."
Manchester Guardian Weekly, 17 March 1991.
Farhi, Paul. "Compact Discs Turn Tables on Vinyl Record Sales."
Washington Post, 14 March 1989.
Fremer, Michael. "Fans Flock to Vinyl in the Era of CDs." New York
Times, 7 July 1998.
"Janus of the Turntable." Economist, 11 August 1990.
Meltzer, Richard. "Buy a VTR and Rule the World." Village Voice, 13
November 1978.
Morris, Edward. "Virginia Retailer Steps up Drive to Lower CD
Prices." Billboard, 17 March 1990.
Pollack, Andrew. "Akio Morita, Key to japan's Rise as Co-Founder of
Sony, Dies at 78." New York Times, 3 October 1999.
Popson, Tom. "Counter Intelligence-Launching an All-Vinyl Record
Store in the '90s." Chicago Tribune, 13 April 1990.
Segal, David. "They Sell the Whole World Songs: Mass Merchants
Offer Convenience." Washington Post, 21 February 2001.

229
 Select Bibliography

Strauss, Neil. "For Record Industry, All Signs Are Gloomy." New York
Times, 4 December 1996.
Terry, Ken, and Dave Dimartino. "Vinyl's Demise Accelerated by Label
No-Return Policies." Billboard, 24 February 1990.

Chapter Nine

Articles
Ahrens, Frank. "Apple's Different Tune: Jobs Sells Music Service as So-
lution to Piracy." Washington Post, 29 April 2003.
- - - . "Song Sharers Get an Instant Scolding." Washington Post,
30 April 2003.
"Airplay." (System III Sirius Turntable.) Wired, October 2000.
Anderman, Joan. "Singled Out:.Technology Has Put Users in Control,
and Made Full-Length Albums Obsolete." Baltimore Sun, 4 July
2000.
Ante, Spencer E. "Inside Napster." Business Week, 14 August 2000.
Arango, Tim. "Apple Peeling Off." New York Post, 9 June 2003.
Barack. Lauren. '~pple's New iTunes Falls Prey to Piracy." New York
Post, 15 May 2003.
- - - . "Music Biz Subpoenas 150 Users." New York Post, 17 July
2003.
- - - . "Subpoenas Sent to 870 Music File Bootleggers." New York
Post, 22 July 2003.
Barlow, John Perry. "The Next Economy of Ideas." Wired, October
2000.
Berenson, Alex, and Matt Richtel. "Heartbreakers, Dream Makers:
Despite Digital Upstarts, Big Labels Still Rule the Music Indus-
try." New York Times, 25 June 2000.
Berlind, William. "The Future in 30 Seconds: Listening to iTunes for
Free." New York Observer, 12 June 2003.
Brinkley, Joel. '~fter 15 Years, the Music CD Faces an Upscale Com-
petitor." New York Times, 28 July 1997.
- - - . "Disk vs. Disk: The Fight for the Ears of America." New York
Times, 8 August 1999.
Cummings, Sue "The Flux in Pop Music Has a Distinctly Download
Beat to It." New York Times, 22 September 1999.

230
 Select Bibliography

Flynn, Laurie J. "Apple Offers Music Downloads with Unique Pricing."

New York Times, 29 April 2003.
Fremer, Michael. "SACD and DVD-A: The Promise of a Better Sound
... But for Whom?" Pulse! December 2001.
Gallagher, David F. "Napster Users Test File-Sharing Alternatives."
New York Times, 20 July 2001.
Gallivan, Joseph. "Napster Working Against Deadline, Smart Bootleg-
gers." New York Post, 6 March 2001.
Gallivan, Joseph, and Allyson Lieberman. "Shotgun Wedding: Nap-
ster's Deal with Foes May Be Too Late." New York Post, 6 June
2001.
Garrity, Brian. "Forecast: Physical Music Sales Top Out in 2002, Retail
Prices Drop." Billboard, 19 August 2000.
Gomes, Lee. "Gnutella, New Music-Sharing Software, Rattles the CD
Industry." Wall Street journal, 4 May 2000.
- - - . "Entertainment World Has Flawed Crystal Ball." Wall Street
journal, 20 June 2000.
- - - . "Napster Ruling May Just Be the Overture." Wall Street jour-
nal, 28 June 2000.
- - - . "Napster, Fighting for Survival, to Make Case Before Appeals
Panel." Wall Street journal, 2 October 2000.
- - - . "Entertainment Firms Target Gnutella." Wall Street journal, 4
May 2001.
Gomes, Lee, and Anna Wilde Mathews. "Napster Suffers a Rout in Ap-
peals Court." Wall Street journal, 13 February 2001.
Harmon, Amy. "Potent Software Escalates Music Industry's Jitters."
New York Times, 7 March 2000.
Heilemann, John. "David Boies: The Wired Interview." Wired, October
2000.
Holson, Laura M. "Conducting Music's Digital Shift: A Top Lobbyist
Seeks Harmony in a Time of Discord." New York Times, 20 Au-
gust 2001. (Profile of RIAA's Hilary Rosen.)
Howe, Jeff. "Net Loss: Music Industry Report Projects Huge Losses to
Web Piracy." Village Voice, 30 May 2000.
Huhn, Mary. "Big Deal May Force Free-Music Fans to Flee." New York
Post, 2 November 2000.
Jenkins, Holman W., Jr. "Let's Give It Up for Metallica." Wall Street
journal, 10 May 2000.

231
 Select Bibliography

- - - . "How to Survive a Post-Napster Copyright Holocaust." Wall

Street Journal, 6 September 2000.
Kirkpatrick, David D. "Thomas Middelhoff Has a Hunch." New York
Times Magazine, 10 June 2001.
Klein, Alec. "Going Napster One Better." Washington Post, 25 Febru-
ary 2001.
Krim, Jonathan. "Recording Firms Win Copyright Ruling." Washing-
ton Post, 22 January 2003.
Kushner, David. "The Beat Goes On Line, and Sometimes It's Legal."
New York Times, 17 June 1999.
Marriott, Michael. "In the Storage Race, Will Consumers Win?" New
York Times,,5 April 2001. .
- - - . "With Plenty to Shine and Spin, CDs Weave Tapestries of
Data." New York Times, 23 September 1999.
- - - . "Hey Walkman: Time to Face the Music on a Chip." New
York Times, 20 July 2000.
Mathews, Anna Wilde. "Can the Record Industry Beat Free Web
Music?" Wall Street Journal, 20 June 2000.
Mathews, Anna Wilde, and Nick Wingfield. ''Apple's Planned Music
Service for Windows Draws Rivals." Wall Street Journal, 9 May
2003.
Mossberg, Walter S. "Record Labels Launch Two Feeble Services to Re-
place Napster." Wall Street Journal, 7 February 2002.
Musgrove, Mike. "RIAA Plans to Sue Music Swappers." Washington
Post, 26 June 2003.
o 'Harrow, Robert, Jr. "Music Industry Will Offer Some Songs On
Line, for a Price." Washington Post, 25 July 2001.
Peers, Martin, and William Boston. "Sour Note: Plugging into the Web
Is a Jarring Experience for the Music Industry." Wall Street Jour-
nal, 12 April 2001.
Powers, Ann. "Fans Go Interactive, and Popular Culture Feels the
Tremors." New York Times, 20 September 2000.
Repsher, William S. "E-Music vs. Napster." New York Press, 31 Janu-
ary-6 February 2001.
Richtel, Matt. ''Appellate Judges Back Limitations on Copying Music."
New York Times, 13 February 2001.
- - - . "Aimster Heads Down a Path Already Taken by Napster."
New York Times, 1 June 2001.

232
 Select Bibliography

- - - . ''Aggressive Strategy Brought on Inquiry of Recording Indus-

try." New York Times, 22 October 2001.
- - - . "Apple Is Said to Be Entering E-Music Fray with Pay Service."
New York Times, 28 April 2003.
Richtel, Matt, and David D. Kirkpatrick. "In a Shift, Internet Service
Will Pay for Music Rights." New York Times, 1 November 2000.
Sorkin, Andrew Ross. "Software Bullet Is Sought to Kill Music Piracy."
New York Times, 4 May 2003.
Strauss, Neil. "Foraging for Music in the Digital Jungle." New York
Times, 20 August 2001.
Tam, Pui-Wing. ''Apple Launches Online Store Offering Downloadable
Music." Wall Street Journal, 29 April 2003.
Tam, Pui-Wing, Bruce Orwall, and Anna Wilde Mathews. "As Apple
Stalls, Steve Jobs Looks to Digital Entertainment." Wall Street
Journal, 25 April 2003.
Taub, Eric A. "New Ways for Discs and Heads to Spin." New York
Times, 17 May 2001.
Toomey, Jenny. "Hear Me Play, but Respect My Rights." Washington
Post, 4 June 2000.
Viega, Alex. "File-Sharing Dips After Threat to Sue." Washington Post,
15 July 2003.
Waldemar, Patti, Andrew Heavens, and Christopher Grimes. "Copy-
right Ruling May Close Napster Song-Swap Website." Financial
Times, 27 July 2000.
Weintraub, Arlene. "MP3.Com Faces the Music." Business Week, 9
April 2001.
Wingfield, Nick. "Napster Boy, Interrupted." Wall Street Journal, 4
October 2002.
- - - . "Students Settle File-Sharing Suit; Each to Pay Recording In-
dustry." Wall Street Journal, 1 May 2003.
Wingfield, Nick, and Anna Wilde Mathews. "Online Music Goes
Mainstream." Wall Street Journal, 29 November 2001.

233
INDEX

Abbey Road (Beatles), 104, 108 American Popular Music Business in

Abbott, Daisy, 15 the 20th Century, The (Sanjek),
Acoustic phonographs, 35-36 67
Acoustic science foundation, 7 American Society of Composers,
Adams, Thomas, 42 Authors and Publishers, 45-46,
AFM (American Federation of 75
Musicians), xvii, 40, 41, 47 America on Record (Millard), 21
African-American music. See Black Ampeg Compan>, 95
music Ampex, 97
Afrika Bambaataa AM radio, 83, 84
Antiquity (technology life cycle), 3
new technology and, 149
AOL, 196, 197,207
popularity of, 143-144, 153
Apple Computer, 205-207
recordings and, 141, 147-148
Armstrong, Edwin, 6-7
AIMazing and, 197
Armstrong, Louis, 31
Aimster, 197
ASCAP, 45-46, 75
Album Atlantic Records, 74, 77
naming of, 59 "Autobahn" (Kraftwerk), 148
reign of, 207-208
"Alexander's Ragtime Band" (Berlin),
B (break) boys, 140
22,23 Baker, Arthur, 149
Amazon.com and patents, 7 Ballard, Hank, 116
AmberollBlue Amberol, 19 Bambaataa. See Afrika Bambaataa
American Bandstand, xxii Barraud, Francis, 17
American Decca, 69 Barry, Hank, 190, 192
American Federation of Musicians Basement Tapes, The (Dylan), 78
(AFM), xvii, 40, 41, 47 Bates, John, 181
American Graphophone, 15 Beach Boys, 111
American Marconi Company, 34 Beastie Boys, 183
American Music Industries (AMI), 43 Beat box, 149

235
 Index

Beatles Bongiovi, Tony, 124

influence of, 108 Boom box, 158
Murray the K and, 82, 83 Boone, Pat, 27
pop music reinvention b>; 84, 102, Bootleg/pirate recordings, 22
103-104 Boss 30, 83
Bee Gees, 129 Boss Radio, 83
Bell, Alexander Graham "Brazil" (Paul), 95
graphophone and, 11-12 Break beats, 140, 150
telephone and, 6, 11 Break dancing, 140
Bell, Chichester, 11 Broadcast Music International, 46,75
Bell labs, 13 Broadway music and LPs, 68
Bellotte, Pete, 126 Bronson, Harold, 166
Berliner, Emil Brown, james, 120-121, 139
background of, 12-13 Bruce, Lenny, 69
gramophone/disc phonograph and, Buddah Records, 131
xix, 12, 13, 15, 25 Buddy Dean Show, The, 116
influence of, xx Business Week, 190
Berlin, Irving, 22
Berman, Howard, 180 Cage, John, 109
Berry, Chuck, 74 Cahill, Thaddeus, 112
Bertelsmann, Germany, 64, 194, Campbell, David, 168
197-198 "Canned music" opponents, xvii, 39,
Betamax format, 162-163 40-41,45,47,48-49,80
Betamax Supreme Court decision, 192 Cannon, Freddie "Boom Boom," 74
Bettini, Gianni, 15-16 Capitol Records formation, 48
Bezos, jeffrey, 7 Carlos, WalterlWendy, 113
Billboard, xxiv, 23, 155, 156, 168, 171, Carson, john, 32
208 Caruso, Enrico, xviii, 18, 19-20
Binary code, 163, 164 Casablanca Records, 130-132
"Birthday Party" (Grandmaster Cassette tapes/players, 155-159, 165
Flash/Furious Five), 145 Cassingle (cassette single), 171
Blackface routines, 21 Castle, Vernon/Irene, 27
Black music CBS
cover versions and, 77-78 formation of, 39
disco and, 118-119 LP and, xxi-xxii, 53-55, 58-60
early recordings and, 21-22 record format wars and, 64-67
first dance craze and, 26-28 CDs
Block, Martin, 79-80 advantages over LPs, 164-165
Blues origins, 24, 31 boom of, xv, 165-166, 167-169,
Blumlein, Alan, 98 172-173,174
BMI,46,75 disadvantages with, 173
Bogart, Neil, 131-132 format wariLPs, 164-169
"Bohemian Rhapsody" (Queen), 108 frustrations with, 171
Boies, David, 192 history of, 164

236
 Index

LPs/casscttcs sales comparisons, Coke La Rock, 141

165-166 Collins, Arthur, 23
portability of, 164, 165 Columbia Broadcasting System. See
pricing of, 167-168, 197 CBS
programming of, 176 Columbia Phonograph Company, 12
protected CDs, 180 Combs, Scan "P-Diddy," 154
recording duration and, xxi, Computcrs
175-176 CD-RW drives of, 187
reissue phenomenon, 164, 167 See also File sharing
rewritable form of, 175, 177, 187 "Confess" (Page), 95-96
ripping/burning description, 177 Conrad, Frank, 33
rock albums and, 175-176 Cooke, William Fothergill, 6
sales decrease in, xiv, 173-174 Coon songs, 21, 23
variations on, 171-172,201-204. See Copyright Royalty Tribunal study, 160
also File sharing Countr)' & western music
Charleston dance, 31 beginnings of, 32-33
Checker, Chubby, 116 rock and, 76-77
Chess Records, 74, 77 Country music
Chic, 145 cover \'crsions and, 78
Chicago Exposition (World's first number one record of, 47-48
FairI1893), 14 foundation of, 32
Chicago World's Fair (1933), 97-98 Coury, AI, 129
Chuck D (Carleton Ridenhour), Cover versions, 77-78, 136
182-184 Cowboy (Keith Wiggins), 144
Clapton, Eric, 120 "Cow Cow Boogie" (Morse/Slack), 48
Clark, Dick Cox, Ida, 30
American Bandstand and, xxii, 71, Coxsone, Sir, 135, 136-137
73,76 "Crazy Blues" (Smith), 30
music industry investments of, xxii, Creative Technology, 200-201
71, 72-73 Crocker, Frankie, 130
payola investigations and, 72, 74, 75, Crosby, Bing, 44, 94, 95
76 Cros, Charles, 10-11
Classical music Cultural integration and music, 30, 31
before the twentieth century, 1 Cut 'n' mix Jamaican music, 136
Caruso, xviii, 18, 19-20
early recordings and, 18, 19-20, 26 Dahl, Stcve, 132-133
45 rpm records and, 65 Dalhart, Vcrnon (Marion Try
LP launching and, 59-60 Slaughter), 32
Clavivox, 112 Dance Master (jukebox prototype), 42
Clear Channel Communications, 90 Dancing
Clef Club, 28 first dance craze, 26-28
Cobain, Kurt, 170 following WW 1,29,31
"Cohen at the Telephone," 22 jukebox and, 42, 43
Cohn, Nik, 129 See also specific types

237
 Index

Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd), in hippie era, 85-86

107, 108 history of, 79-86
DAT (digital audio tape), 172 Jamaican music and, 135-138
DataPlay, 203-204 "Make-Believe Ballroom, The" and,
DCC (digital compact cassette), 172 79-80
Decca Company discount records, 44 of mid sixties, 81-82
Deep, Johnn); 197 as musical innovators, xxii-xxiii
De Forest, Lee, 6-7,109, 112 as pancake flippers, 79
Development (technology life cycle), 3 payola scandal effects on, 76
Dexter, AI, 47-48 as technological innovators, xxiii
Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc., 200 Terry Noel, 122
Dibango, Manu, 123 toasters, 136
Dickson, Rob, 174 turntablists, 152-154
Digital audio tape (DAT), 172 waves of influence, xxii-xxiii
Digital communication, 163-164 See also specific Dls; Top 40
See also specific forms Donahue, Tom, 85
Digital compact cassette (DCC), 172 "Down Hearted Blues" (Smith), 31
Digital Video Disc format (DVD), 202 Drake, Bill, 83-84, 85
Disco Dr. Dre, 191, 195
albums and, 120 Drum machines and hip-hop, 149,
becoming mainstream, 125-127 151-152
description of era, 117-120, Dub/dub plate, 137-138
128-130 Dukes of Dixieland, 100
DJs and, xxiii, 117-118, 123 Duranite, 15
end of, 130-133 DVD (Digital Video Disc format), 202
Eurodisco, 126-127 DVD Audio, 202-203
history of, 115-116 Dylan, Bob, 78
mechanical nature of, 126, 127
vs. rock, 132-133 Eagles, 206
Disco Demolition, 132-133 "Easy listening," 99
Disco mix/12-inch singles, 118, Edison Diamond DiscslPhonograph,
119-120, 124 24,25,35
Discotheque, 115 Edison Phonograph Works, 14
Disc phonograph/gramophone, xix, 12, "Edison's Dream of New Music," 26
13,15,25 Edison Speaking Phonograph
DIY (do-it-yourself) music approach, Company, 10
105 "Edison's Tone-Test Recitals," 26
DJ Hollywood, 141 Edison, Thomas
DJs competition and, 11-12
black-sounding white DJs, 73 disc phonograph of, 24-26, 35
as commercial innovators, xxii hearing problems of, 37, 61
computers and, 90-91 invention fields of, 12
disco and, xxiii, 117-118, 123 misreading potential of
hip-hop and, 133, 135-146 phonograph, 10, 12

238
 Index

"natural sounds" and, xvii-xviii FFRR (full frequency range recording),

patents and, 7, 8, 10 55-56
phonograph and, xix, xx, 9-10, File sharing
11-12, 13, 14, 15, 19 AIMazing, 197
phonograph business decline/end, Aimster, 197
24-26,35,37 AOL Time Warner and, 196, 197
recordings/playback and, xix attraction of, xvi
8 tracks, 4, 156, 157-158 battles over, 178-182, 186-189,
"Eleanor Rigby" (Beatles), 103 191-193
Electricity, science foundation, 7 effects of, xv
Electronic music Gnutella and, 195-196
disco and, 118 Grokster, 179, 181,207
history of, 108-114 individuals as lawsuit targets,
Moog synthesizers, 108, 112-113 181-182
theremin, 109-111, 112 instant message system and, 197
vacuum tubes and, 109-110 Internet watching of, 180-182
Electronics World, 113 KaZaA, 179, 181, 196-197, 199
Electronic Video Recording (EVR), Morpheus, 179, 199,207
62-63 record companies strategy and,
Elgar, Sir Edward, 102 199
Elizabeth I, Queen, 6 technological countermeasures to,
Emerson, 23 180
EMI Records, 67, 102 See also MP3 files; Napster
EMI studio, 102 Fletcher, "Dusty," 78
English Decca, 55, 56 FM radio and rock, 84-86
Epstein, Brian, 102 Ford, Mary, 94, 96, 105
Eurodisco, 126-127 Format description, 8
European Pathe label, 23 Format wars
Europe, James Reese, 27-28 LPs/CDs, 164-169
Exclusive Society Orchestra, 27 overview, 8
Exorcist, The, 107 record speed, xxi-xxii, 64-68
tapes, 4, 156, 157-158
Fanning, john, 178, 190, 192, 198 CD variations, 171-172,201-204
See also Napster videotape, 162-163
Fanning, Shawn, 177-178, 189, 190, 45 rpm records
194, 198-199 CD boom and, 165
See also Napster grunge music and, 171
Faraday, Michael, 7 LP records vs., xxi-xxii, 64-68
Farnsworth, Philo T., 7 microgrooves and, 65
Fast Track, 196-197 popular music and, 67-68, 76-78, 79
Federal Communications Commission, Frankel, Justin, 196, 197
47 Freed, Alan
Federal Radio Commission, 39 description of, 71
Fender Stratocaster, 94 OJ beginnings of, 73

239
 Index

Freed, Alan (cont.) Haddy, Arthur, 55-56

payola investigations and, 74, 75-76 Haley, Bill, 144
R&B music and, 73-74 Hancock, Herbie, 142
"Freedom" (Grandmaster Handy, W. C, 24
Flash/Furious Five), 145 Harlan, Byron, 23
From Stage to Studio (Kraft), 40 Harrison, H. C, 34-35
From Tinfoil to Stereo (Read and "Have I the Right?" (Honeycombs), 106
Welch),56-57 Headphones and cassette players,
Full frequency range recording (FFRR),
158-159
55-56
Hello Nasty (Beastie Boys), 183
Funk music, 120-121
Helmholtz, Heinrich, 7
Heterodyning, 109
Gaisberg, F. w., 17, 18, 19
Hi-fi
Gates, Bill, 11-12
following WW II, 55-57
Gay nightclubs, 121-122
invention of, 54
Gaynor, Gloria, 124-125
Gelatt, Roland, 100 LP effects on, 69
Glass, Leon, 14 High Fidelity, xxiv, 87
Gnutella, 195-196 "Hillbilly" music, 30, 32-33
Goldmark, Peter Hip-hop
background of, 61-62 DJsand, 133, 135-146
CBS and, xx-xxi, 51-55, 59, 62-63 first records of, 144-146
record/phonograph improvements origins of, 135-141
by, xx-xxi, 51-55, 59, 62 popularity of, 143-145, 169
as visionary, 62-64 rock vs., xiii
Gold, Stanley P., 167-168 samplers and, 149, 150-152
"Good Times" (Chic), 145, 146 scratching, 142-143
"Good Vibrations" (Beach Boys), 111 technology catching up to, 148-152
"Gramo-fright," 18 turntablists, 152-154
Gramophone/disc phonograph, xix, 12, See also Rap
13,15,25 Hippie music
Grandmaster Caz, 145
DJs and, 85-86
Grandmaster Flash Uoseph Saddler),
psychedelic music, 120
141-142, 143-146, 149
"His Master's Voice"/Nipper, 16-17,
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious
64, 72
Five, 144-146
Grandmaster Flowers, 141 Hitchcock, Alfred, 111
Grand Wizard Theodore (Theodore Hollywood, Anton, 106
Livingston), 142, 143, 153 "How High the Moon" (Ford/Paul), 94,
Graphophone, 11-12 96
Grasso, Francis, 122-123 Hummer-Winblad, 190
Gray, Elisha, 6 Hunter, Alberta, 30
Great Depression, 30, 38 Hunting, Russell, 22
Grokster, 179, 181,207 "Hustle, The" (McCoy), 125
Grunge music, 170-171 Hutter, Ralf, 147

240
 Index

Idei, Nob)'uki, 203 Jobs, Stcve, 205-206

Imaginary Landscape No.1 (Cage), Joey Dee & the Starlighters, 116
109 "Johnny Remember Me" (Hollywood),
Industrial Revolution 106
leisure time and, 2 Johnson, Eldridge, 17
patents and, 6 jones, Pete "DJ," 141
Information Revolution, 2 Joplin, Scott, 22
Instant message systemlfile sharing, Jukebox
197 dancing and, 42, 43
International Organization for primitive forms of, 2, 14,42
Standardization, 185 success of, 43
International Turntablist Federation
World DJ Battle, 152 Kallen, Kitty, 81
Internet Kapp, jack, 44
providers/subscriber information, Kaufmann, Murray, 82, 83, 84-85
181 KaZaA, 179, 181, 196-197, 199
selling music on, 182-184 KC & the Sunshine Band, 125
streaming, 186 KDKA radio station, 33
See also File sharing Keller, Arthur, 98
Internet radio, 88-89, 91, 186 Kent, Clark, 141
Invention Keyboard history, 4
age of, 7 Kid Creole, 144
business applications and, 7-8 Kid Ory, 31
See also Patents; specific inventions King Records, 74, 77
"I Pagliacci Vestila Giubba" (Caruso), King Tubby, 135
xviii KISS, 130-131, 132
iPOD player, 200, 206, 207 Kool Dj Here (Clive Campbell),
Israel, Paul, 10 139-142
"It's Been a Long, Long Time" Kraft, joseph P., 40
(Crosby),94 Kraftwerk, 147-148, 149
"It's Nasty" (Grandmaster Kurzweil, Ray, 3
Flash/Furious Five), 145 Kurzweil Reading Machines, 3
"It's Now or Never" (Presley), 20
iTunes Music Store, 205-207 Laine, Frankie, 78,81
"I Want to Hold Your Hand" (Beatles), Lear, William, 157
103 Les Paul instrument, 93, 94
Les Paul Trio, 94
Jackson, John A., 73 Les Paulverizer, 96
jackson, Michael, 160, 169 Let It Be (Beatles), 104
Jamaican music, 135-139 "Life Cycle of a technology," 3
Jazz Light, Enoch, 100
LPs and, 69 Lippincott, jesse, 14
origins of, 23, 28, 31 Lissajous, Jules Antoine, 7
Jazz Age, 31 Listen.com, 205

241
 Index

"Lover" (Paul), 95 McCoy, Van, 125

"Love to Love You Baby" (Summer), McRae, George, 125, 149
xxiii, 125, 126, 131 McRae, Gwen, 125
LP records Meek, joe, 104-106
Broadway/movie music and, 68 Melba, Nellie, 16
CDs/cassettes sales comparisons, Melle Mel, 144, 146
165-166 Mellotron, 150-151
classical music and, 59-60 Menardo, Meco, 124
comedy and, 69 Mercer, johnny, 48
early popularity of, 68-69 "Message, The" (Grandmaster
format war/CDs, 164-169 Flash/Furious Five), 146
45 rpm vs., xxi-xxii, 64-68 Metallica, 191, 195
independent labels and, 170-171 Micro-phonograph,15-16
invention of, xxi, 52-55, 59 Middlehoff, Thomas, 194, 198
jazz and, 69 MIDI files, 184-185
launching of, 58-60 Millard, Andre, 21
microgrooves and, 52-53, 59, 60-61, Miller, Mitch, 75
62 Milligan, Spike, 102-103
Philco adaptor and, 60 Mills Novelty Company of Chicago, 42
pop collection and, 60 MiniDiscs, 172, 175
post punk underground rock and, Mitchell, joni, xxiv
170-171 Modulation (lateraVvertical), 25
rock albums and, 175-176 "Mood music," 99
Lucky Strike Hit Parade, The, 80 Moog, Robert, 112-114
Moog synthesizers, 108, 112-113
MacIntosh, 200, 207 Morita, Akio, 163
Magnetophon recorders, 57-58,95 Moroder, Giorgio, 126-127
"Make-Believe Ballroom, The," 79-80 Morpheus, 179, 199,207
Marching band music Morse, Ella Mae, 48
before the twentieth century, 1 Morse, Samuel, 6, 163
early phonographs and, 19,20-21 Moulton, Tom, 124
Marconi, Guglielmo, 6-7 Movie music and LPs, 68
Marketing of music MP3.com, 186-187
manipulation beginnings, 56-57 MP3 files
technology and, xxiv CD capacity and, 185
Marley, Bob, 137, 138 CD-RW discs and, 187
Martenot, Maurice, 111 description of, 178, 184, 185
Martin, George, 102-104, 107 file-sharing web sites, 186-189
Martin, Tony, 20 players for, 186, 200-201
Martinville, Edouard Leon Scott de, 10 portability and, 199
Maturity (technology life cycle), 3 selection and, 199
Maverick Inventor (Goldmark), 52 MPEG (Motion Picture Experts
"Maybellene" (Berry), 74 Group),185
May, Billy, 69 See also MP3 files

242
 Index

MTV, 169 jazz ban b}, 115

Multitrackingloverdubbing tape players and, 57-58, 95
Beatles and, 101-104 NBC formation, 39
beginnings of, 94-96 Nevermind (Cobain), 170-171
Tubular Bells and, 107-108 Newhart, Bob, 69
Mun'in, Junior, 138 New Rural Society of Goldmark, 63
Music New Sound, 95, 96 '
before twentieth century, 1 Newsweek, 168
cultural integration and, 30, 31 New York Daily News, 154
early recording types of, 19 New York magazine, 128-129
fragmentation of, 169 New York Post, 197
generational differences in, xiii-xiv New York Times, xv, 114
leisure time and, 2 Nipper/"His Master's Voice," 16-17,
listening differences, xiii 64, 72
Music choice Nirvana, 170
jukebox and, 42, 43 No Doubt, 206
MP3 files and, 199 Noel, Terry, 122
tapes and, 160, 161 Nomad Jukebox, 200
Top 40 and, 81 Nomad Muvo, 200-201
See also File sharing :--=orth American OJ Championship,
Musicians union 152
Petrillo and, xvii, 40 North American Phonograph
radio record playing and, 39,40-41 Company, 14
See also AFM Nullsoft, 186, 196
Musicnet, 204-205, 207
Music Plus stores, 167 Obsolescence (technology life cycle), 3
Musique concrete, 109 Ohm, Bernard, 7
Muzak Company, 99 Oklahoma!,68
MyMP3.com, 187-188 Oldfield, Mike, 107
Ondes Martenot, 111
N apster/Napster.com Online music services, 204-207
attempted alliances with, 194, "Open the Door, Richard"
197-198 (Fletcher/others),78
battles over, 178-182, 191-193 Optigan, 151
beginnings of, 177-178, 189-191 Original Dixieland Jazz Band, 23,30
colleges banning of, 191 "0 Sole Mio" (Caruso), 20
music industry reaction to, 178-179 Othophonic Victrola, 36
music selection and, xvi Overdubbing. See
shut down of, 179, 192-193, 195, Multitrackingloverdubbing
198
venture capital for, 190 P2P file sharing
National Broadcasting Company, 39 description of, 177
National Phonograph Compan}, 14 See also File sharing; Napster
Nazi regime Page, Patti, 78, 95-96

243
 Index

Paley, William, xxi, 62-63, 64, 65 disc vs. cylinder, 13, 14, 15, 16-20,
Panatrope, 36 24,24-25
Patel, Marilyn, 192, 193 as efficient invention, 8
Patents electrical recording technology and,
description of, 5-6 34-37
for disc gramophone, 13 first dance craze and, 26-28
Edison and, 7,8, 10 first record changer with, 36
for electrical recording technology, Goldmark's improvements to,
34-35 xx-xxi,51-55,59,62
examples of, 6-8 Great Depression and, 38
history of, 6 life cycle of, 3-4
for phonograph/record player, 8, 10, micro-phonograph, 15-16
11,15 misreading potential of, 10, 12
for radios, 6-7 musicians/inventors association
radio stationslWW I, 34 with, 19-20, 25
Paul, Les, 93-95, 96, 105 patents and, 8, 10, 11, 15
Payola portable type of, 87-88
in the 1980s, 76 protophonograph,10-11
description of, 72 public demonstrations of, 14
going underground of, 76 radio competition and, 29-30, 34,
investigations on, 72, 74, 75-76 44
PCM (pulse-coded modulation), 163 record speed adaptor and, 60, 66, 67
Peer, Ralph, 30, 32 sales increase (1952-1954), 67
Pennsylvanians, 45, 94 as stenographer's tool, xix, 9-10, 12
Penny arcades, 2, 14 swing and, 43, 44
Peppermint Lounge, 115, 116 volume control and, 35
Pepper, Tom, 196 See also Edison; Records
Perry, Lee "Scratch,» 138 Phonoscope magazine, 22
Persuasive Percussion (Light), 100, 108 Pianola (player piano), 4-5, 42, 114
Petrillo, James Caesar, xvii, 4D-41, 45, Pianos and keyboard beginnings, 4
47,48-49,80 Piccadilly model phonograph, 56-57
Philco Company, 60 Pink Floyd, 107
Phillips Piratelboodeg recordings, 22
CD standardization, 164 "Pistol Packin' Mama" (Dexter), 47-48
digital compact cassette (DCC), 172 "Planet Rock" (Africa Bambaataa &
Phonoautograph,10 Soul Sonic Force), 147, 149
Phonograph/record player Playback-only machines
(early) advertising industry, 16-17 description of, xix
acoustic phonographs, 35-36 history of, xix-xx
Bettini and, 15-16 Player piano (pianola), 4-5, 42, 114
coin-operated type of, 2, 14 Pocket Discman, 171
competition and, 9-12, 13-15 Portability
cylinder type of, xix, 13 CDs, 164, 165
disc phonograph, xix, 12, 13, 15, 25 MP3 files, 199

244
 Index

tapes, 156, 158-159, 161 phonograph/record player

Walk man, 156, 158-159 competition, 29-30, 34, 44
"Preacher and the Bear, The" (Collins), record use on, 34,38,39-40,40-41,
23 76-78
Precursor (technology life cycle), 3 satellite radio, 91-92
Presley, Elvis transcription discs and, 39-40
Caruso connection to, 20 Radio Corporation of America. See
Hollywood and, 84 RCA
Press PIa). 205, 207 Radiohead, 111
Pretenders (technology life cycle), 3 Radio stations
Prince Buster, 135 beginnings of, 33-34
"Prisoner's Song, The" (Dalhart), 32 stifling of new music by, xiv
Prohibition repeal (1933),43 Telecommunications Act (1996)
Provocative Percussion (Light), 100 and,89-90
Public Enemy, 182-184 \Y/W I and, 34
Pulse-coded modulation (PCM), 163 Radio syndication beginnings, 80
Punch phasing, 142 Radio transcription discs, 53, 59
"Put a Ring on My Finger" (Ford/Pau\), Ragtime music
105 fad of, 22-23
"Put a sock in it," 35 origins of, 24
Rahiem (Guy Williams), 144
Q Bert (Richard Quitevus), 153 Rainey, Ma, 30
Quadrophonic sound, 162 Rakoff, Jed 5., 188
Queen, 108 Rap
becoming mainstream, 150
R&B music first recordings of, 144-146, 147
Alan Freed and, 73-74 hip-hop MCs and, 141, 144
following WW 11,73-74 See also Hip-hop
rock and, 76-77 "Rapper's Delight" (Sugar Hill Gang),
sex and, 125-126 145
"Race" music, 30 Rastafarianism, 136
Radio & Television News, 112 RCA
Radio formation of, 34
computer programming and, 90-91 record format and, xxi-xxii, 64-68
current demand of, 88 television patents and, 7
during FM rock era, 88 theremin designs and, 111
early sound of, 30,33 RCA Vktor, 20
effects on phonographs, 2 Read, Oliver, xviii, 8, 56-57
9-30,34 Real Player, 185-186
as furniture, 29-30 Record changers, 36, 65
Great Depression and, 38 Record companies
independent stations, 77 artists on multiple labels, 23, 32
Internet radio, 88-89, 91 early companies, 23, 30-31
live musicians and, 38, 39, 40 online music services of, 204-207
patents for, 6-7 See also specific companies

245
 Index

Recording duration See also Hip-hop; Rap

CD design and, xxi Reid, Duke, 135, 136, 137-138
CDs and, 175-176 Rhapsody, 205, 207
early attempts at increasing, 59 Rhino Records, 166, 167
Edison's improvement to, 19 RIAA
LP invention and, xxi Aimster/file sharing and, 197
opera/symphony music and, 20 CD sales demographics, 174-175
technology and, xix, 1 Diamond RIO players and, 200
Recording Industry Association of home taping, 159-160, 172
America. See RIAA Napster/file sharing and, 178-179,
Recording process (early) 181, 192
description of, 6<H51 stereo standardization and, 98
electrical technology adaptation, Richardson, Elaine, 190
34-35 Riddle, Nelson, 69
recording curve standardization, 98 RIO PMP 300 player, 200
sound distortion with, xviii Robertson, Michael, 184, 186, 187-188
Recording studio as instrument, 102 Robie, John, 149
Record player. See Phonograph/record
Robinson, Sylvia, 145, 146
player
Rock
Record producer, 102
disco \'s., 132-133
Records
FM radio and, 84-86
decline in interest, xiv-xv
hip-hop vs., xiii
discounting records, 44
rise of, 76-78
Goldmark's improvements to,
synthesizers and, 108
xx-xxi,51-55,59,62
interdependence with radio, 76-78
Rock Encyclopedia (Roxon),
xxiv-xxv
lateraVvertical modulation and, 25
mass production beginnings, 13 "Rockit" (Hancock), 142
opponents of, xvii, 39, 40-41, 45, Rockport System III Sirius, 201
47,48-49,80 "Rock Your Baby" (McRae), 125, 149
radio use of, 34, 38, 39-40 Rolling Stone magazine, 142
record sales following WW II, 73-74 Romeo, Max, 138
records as instrument, 142 Rosen, Hilary, 206
regional specialties, 77 Roxon, Lillian, xxiv-xxv, 116
tapes vs. records, 156-157, 158, Royalties
159-161 on blank tapes, 172
WW II material shortages, xx-xxi, Caruso and, 18
47 Goldmark and, 62
See also Phonograph/record player Internet radio and, 89
Redwood, Rudolph ("Ruddy"), MP3.com and, 188
137-138 Napster and, 193
Reggae Rubell, Steve, 128
origins of, 135-136, 138 Run-DMC, 150
popularity of, 138, 139 Ryrie, Kim, 151

246
 Index

SACD (Super Audio CD), 203 Solomon, Russ, 166-167, 173

Samplers and hip-hop, 149, 150-152 Sony
Sanctuary, 121-122 CD standardization, 164
Sanjek, Russell, 5, 67, 132, 159 Columbia and, 64
Sarnoff, David digital audio tape (DAT), 172
record speed and, xxi-xxii, 64, 65, MiniDiscs, 172, 175
66 Pocket Discman, 171
television patents and, 7 SACD,203
Satellite radio, 91-92 transistor radios and, 87
Saturday Night Fever, 119, 120, videocassette format war, 162-163
128-130 Walkman, 156, 158-159
Satttrday Night Fever soundtrack, 128, "Soul Makoosa" (Dibango), 123-124
129-130, 132 Soul music, 121
Schaeffer, Pierre, 109 Soundscan, 174
Schneider, Florian, 147
Sousa, John Philip/Marine Band, 20
Schraeger, Ian, 128 Spector, Phil, 105
Scientific American, xxiv, 10
Spellbound (Hitchcock), 111
Scorpio (Eddie Morris), 144
Spencer, Len, 23
Scott, Raymond, 112
Standardization
Scratching, 142-143, 146, 150
for CDs, 164
Selection. See Music choice
International Organization for
Sellers, Peter, 102-103
Standardization, 185
78 rpm records, xx
recording curve/stereo and, 98
Sex and music
Steam engine patents, 6
"Lm'e to Love You Baby" and, xxiii,
125,126 Stereo
R&B and, 125-126 beginnings of, 96-100
"Sexy Ways" (Hank Ballard & the home computer vs., xiv, xv
Midnighters), 116 miniaturization of, 100
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band records and, 98
(Beatles), 103-104 tapesand,97,98-99
Shearer, Harry, 83-84 Stewart, Sylvester, 121
Siemens Synthesizer, 112 Stigwood, Robert, 128-129, 131
Silverman, Tom, 149 "St. Louis Blues" (Handy), 24
Sinatra, Frank, 44, 69 Storz, Todd, 75, 76-77
Sirius and satellite radio, 91-92 Streaming description, 186
Ska, 135-136 Strike (musicians), xvii, xx, 47, 48-49
Slack, Freddie, 48 Studio 54, 118, 119, 128
Slip-cueing, 122-123 Sugar Hill Gang, 145
Sly and the Family Stone, 121 Sugar Hill Records, 145, 146
Smith, Bessie, 30, 31 Summer, Donna, xxiii, 119, 126, 131
Smith, Harold c., 39 Swift, Rob, 154
Smith, Mamie, 30, 35, 78 Swing, 43, 44
Smith, "Whispering" Jack, 36 Switched-on Bach (Carlos), 113

247
 Index

Symphonie Pour un Homme Seul There's a Poison Going On (Public

(Schaeffer), 109 Enemy), 183-184
Synthesizers "There's No Tomorrow" (Martin), 20
hip-hop and, 151-152 33 1h rpm records. See LP records
Moog synthesizers, 108, 112-113 Thomas, Rufus, 23
Siemens Synthesizer, 112 Thomas, Timmy, 149
Thriller Oackson), 160
Tainter, Charles Sumner, 11 Time magazine, 126
"Take Me Back to Tulsa" (Wills), 48 Tin Pan Alley music publishers, 39, 45
Toasters, 136
Tape players/tapes
Tommy Boy Records, 149
adoption of, 58
Toop, David, 140
attempts to tax, 159-160
Top 40
cassette tapes/players, 155-159, 165
beginnings of, 80-81
cassingle (cassette single), 171
Boss 30 and, 83-84
CD quality tapes, 171-172, 172-173
Murray the K and, 82
editing music and, 58
of today, xiv
8 tracks, 4, 156, 157-158 Tornados, 106
home taping and, 159-161, 172 Toscanini, Arturo, 66
music choice and, 160, 161 Transcription discs and radio, 39-40
Nazi regime and, 57-58, 95 "Trans Europe Express" (Kraftwerk),
portability of, 156, 158-159, 161 148
as pretenders challenge (seventies), 4 Transistor radios, 86-87, 88
as record competition, 156-157, 158, Travolta, John, 129
159-161 Tubular Bells (Oldfield), 107
royalties/blank digital tapes, 172 Turntables
stereo and, 97, 98-99 history of, 12-13
tape recording as musician, 109 Rockport System III Sirius, 201
videotape comparison, 161-163 See also Hip-hop
Technology Turntablists, 152-154
hip-hop and, 140 Twist fad, 116-117
impact on music overview, 1-2 "Twist, The" (Ballard/Checker), 116
life cycle of, 3-4 Typewriters, 4
See also specific teclmologies
Telecommunications Act (1996), 89-90 U-Roy,136
Telegraph, 6, 9, 163 USA Today, xiv
Telephone, 6, 8,9, 13 U.S. Department of Commerce, 34
Television U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
MTV, 169 (USPTO),5
patents for, 7
Telharmonium, 112 Vacuum tubes and electronic music,
"Telstar" (Tornados), 106 109-110
Theremin, 109-111, 112 Vallee, Rudy, 36, 44
Theremin, Leon, 110 Van Koevering, David, 114

248
 Index

Van Kocvcring Inreracth'e Piano, 114 Waring, Fred, 45, 94

Variet)',32-33 Warner Brothers cartoons music, 112
Vaudeville recordings, 1, 19,21 Washingtou Post, 174
"Vaya Con Dios" (Ford/Paul), 94 Watt, James, 6
VCR WAV files, 184-185
film industry and, 161-162, 192 WEAF/WNBC radio station, 34
legal rulings on, 192 Welch, Walter, xviii, 8,56-57
videotape format war, 162-163 "West End Blues" (Armstrong), 31
V-discslVictory Disc Records, 48-49 Western Union, 13
Version (cover version) in Jamaica, 136 Westinghouse Electric, 33, 34-35,
VHS format, 162-163 35-36
Victor Company Wheatstone, Charles, 6
acoustic phonograph of, 36 "Wheels of Steel" (Grandmaster
Berliner and, xix-xx Flash/Furious Five), 146
Caruso and, xviii Whitburn, Joel, 23
formation of, 30 White Album (Beatles), 104
radio competition and, 30 White, Clinton R., 41
Red Seal label, 18 "Why Can't We Live Together"
Victor's Duo Jr., 43-44 (Thomas), 149
Victory Disc RecordslV-discs, 48-49 Willis, Bob, 48
Victrola Wilson, Brian, 111
Caruso and, 18, 19-20 Wilson, Stephen, 207
description of, 17-18 Winamp MP3 player, 186, 196
history of, xix-xx Wolfe, Tom, 82
Videocassette format war, 162-163 Wonder, Stevie, 3
Village People, 119,130-131,132 "Work With Me, Annie" (Hank Ballard
Vinyl records & the Midnighters), 116
beginnings of, xx-xxi, 54, 59 World War II
post punk underground rock and, record material shortages during,
170-171
xx-xxi,47
See also 45 rpm records; LP records technological development and,
Vitaphone, 15,36
55-56,57
Vitaphone Company, 39
Victory Disc Records and, 48-49
Vogel, Peter, 151
"Wreck of the Old '97" (Dalhart), 32
Voice tracking, 90
Wurlitzcr Company, 4-5
Volk, Steve, 204
Votey, Edwin, 4
X-ecutioners, 152-153, 154
XM and satellite radio, 91-92
Wagonner, Porter, 130
Walkman, 156, 158-159
"Walk This Way" (Aerosmith), 150 "Yesterday" (Beatles), 103
Wallerstein, Ed, 53, 55
Wall Street Journal, xiv, 173 Zenstrom, Niklas, 197
Wal-Mart, 174 Zulu Nation, 143

249