The Facile Eclectic

In my last post I covered the history of the record industry up to the 1960's. At the beginning of the sixties recordings where still a way of capturing a live performance. Basically you got the band or orchestra in a room along wih the the vocalist(s), miked everything up, and mixed directly to a stereo tape recorder. After the development of multitrack recorders it became possible to do more. You could for instance sing a second vocal part with yourself after you recorded the first. This meant recordings could be made that could not be duplicated live. In this way records evolved into a more complex artform. A few early examples are Brian Wilson's "Pet Sounds" and the Beatles "Sergent Pepper". In addition new technoligies like synthesisers gave muscicians an increasing range of sonic possibilties. By the seventies artists like Stevie Wonder where producing recordings where a single artist performed all the various parts of the piece. This trend led to the conclusion by industry people that sales could be grown by increasingly perfecting and improving recording thechnology and audio quality. This drove up production costs and increased sales where needed to offset those costs. As a result, starting in the seventies, more money was put into promotion. Concert touring took on new dimensions. Even when the tour lost money it was considered a good investment to sell the product, records. When MTV came along it added another expensive layer to the industry business model. This is when sales hit their peak. It all culminated with Michael Jacksons "Thriller". It had all the ingredients, high production values due to Quincy Jones expert hand in the studio, a massive world tour, an award winning video, and even a high profile product endorsment. We will never see it's kind again which in my opnion is not a bad thing. The reasons for this, as most young folks know, is digital technology. If you think I'm talking about CD's you are wrong.

CD's where a big improvement in audio quality and industry folks thought that people would be willing to pay more for that improvement. They anounced the death of the LP record was iminent and would soon go the way of the 8-track. For engineers like myself they where great. For eus the holy grail has always been acoustic accuracy and CD's made that possible for the first time. Now you can hear on your home system exactly what I hear when I'm mixing a project. Other media like LP's and analog tape always lose some acoustic quality in reproduction and aren't faithful to the orginal master recording. The problem is that this sublety is lost on most music lisenters. They really care about a good song or a piece of music that moves them. LP's already sounded "good" and CD's sounded different but not necessarily better. In addition CD's where more expensive than records. The only reason people bought them is because the major record labels stopped making vinyl. CD's became the only game in town. And with the costs of recording, promoting, and production so high, no independent could play the game. The only source for music was the major labels. Thats what really changed and it didn't start with the internet. It really started with musicians. Tune in next time for the conclusion.