The Single and The Music Industry-Part Two

Part Two of The Single and The Music Industry, read Part One.

In the beginning, there was the piano.

In the year 1800, the first true upright piano was invented in Philadelphia by John Isaac Hawkins, and this smaller and cheaper (in comparison to the full grand piano) instrument grew to become a required item in middle-class homes by the end of the century. This growth was accompanied by similar growth in sheet music sales, and before long the sheet music publishing industry, largely a product of New York’s working-class Jewish community, started to cluster together on 28th Street in Manhattan between Broadway and 6th Avenue, close to the Broadway theatres which were the testing ground and largest promotional venue for new music in the pre-radio and television era.

This area soon became known as Tin Pan Alley, possibly because the sound of so many pianos playing in such a geographically small area was like that of tin pans being thrown around. Very quickly these businesses saw the value of banding together to make their interests heard and, in 1895, formed the Music Publishers Association of the United States. This act – the point where organizing started - was the start of the modern music industry, and many of the founders of these companies would go on to drive the industry long after the Tin Pan Alley “sound” - a very commercial style, heavily linked with the Broadway hits of the day – fell out of fashion.

From the adoption of the disc as the preferred format for the music-buying public (beating out Edison’s cylinder format) in 1913, music sales started to pick up steam, but with the debut of the 78 rpm record in the mid-20s, these Tin Pan Alley businesses started to see the business potential of the new technology. Unfortunately for them the Depression right around the corner crushed business to nearly nothing; sales dropped from 104 million records in 1927 to only 6 million in 1932. [Goodman, “The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-On Collision of Rock and Commerce” 1997]

It wasn’t until the 1948 invention of the “microgroove” record, playing at 33 1/3 and 45 rpm, combined with the dawning buying power of the Baby Boomers to make the industry, which was in some cases still sore from the Depression, start to buy into the record business in a big way. Record sales rose from $109 million in 1945 to over $500 million in 1958. The majors of the time (Columbia, RCA Victor, Decca, Capitol and Mercury – all US-based except for the British Decca) controlled the fledgeling market until rock ‘n’ roll burst onto the market in 1954 courtesy of an army of (mostly) fly- by-night indies. These indie labels dominated the charts until 1958.

By the early 1960s, however, the majors had re-established their dominance, and profited as much as anybody in North America from the British Invasion. It’s worth noting, though, that up to this point the pop music business had been based on singles, with albums only serving as a compilation of “hits.” Artists such as Bob Dylan, whose 6-minute-long “Like A Rolling Stone,” released in 1965, paved the way for the longer, non-single-friendly tracks which would rise later in the decade, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band changed the way albums were perceived by proving that an album could be a discrete artistic work. The fact that it sold well didn’t hurt, either.

Labels were over the moon. Finally they could make some real money. The 1970s, with the popularity of multi-disc albums and bands that rejected the single format such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, were a windfall time for the industry. The 1980s saw the slow debut of compact discs and rise of the cassette format, a boon for labels as consumers repurchased vinyl albums in both these formats, even as the “Home Taping Is Killing Music” campaign proclaimed that the end of Western music as we know it was upon us…

Photo: we have a map of the piano - Flickr user Sashamd