To prove that I wasn’t just talking out of my ass when I wrote my series on the Corporate Era in the Arts, successful musician, producer, and YouTuber Rick Beato talked recently about one of the specific pieces of evidence I cite for the reality of 1997 being Cultural Ground Zero and the beginning of the end of the corporate era in music: the Telecommunications act of 1996, which allowed a few companies to own all of the radio stations in every market and thus have just a few people (or one, a program manager) decide via fiat what music people would listen to, and then buy (for $18.99). Rick and his guest go into more detail than I did with my series, but they rightly point out that the bomb to the music industry that was Napster was merely pushing the industry into the grave which it had already dug for itself.
Check it out here:
Also of note is the discussion of how things were before 1997, when the record industry was riding high on money and sucking it from every possible angle, especially from the artists themselves, who paid lavish sums out of their own advances for slick album recordings that the companies demanded. The 1990s were a great rise followed by a great fall, and the end result was that rock music was dead by 2012.
But this is more than just the business as a separate thing from the music. Due to the changes in the radio industry, the recording industry went through a great homogenization circa 1998, so that by 2000 all the rock bands were produced and mixed by a small handful of people. They all had roughly the same production sound and mix, if not the same artistic direction. Where the radio waves were diverse in 1996, they were a vast expanse of grey goop in every market by 1998.
Not just that, but increasingly program managers had to add in older music to overcome listener boredom. I personally remember the rock station I listened to in the 1990s went through these phases. It went from playing the plethora of new music available in 1996 (most of it I didn’t like) to playing the same 6 songs every hour all day (none of which I liked), to being more or less a classic rock station that also played Nickelback (which was half good). It was an early version of what would follow: older acts becoming increasingly valuable because newer music just fell flat on the market.
Keep in mind I’m primarily talking about popular music here. The internet in a lot of ways returned diverse choices to the people, but it also presented new challenges to artists, particularly in the years 2002-2012, who had to rely more an more on live performance rather than the mass-media product that is an album to make their livings.
What’s also interesting in the video is something I didn’t mention in my article, which was producer managers, who managed to eat out percentages on things they had no part in. Payola post 1997 was much more efficient, too; before then you had to bribe dozens of stations in as many markets, but after that you really only had to convince one or two people, the program managers at Clear Channel, to get your record on the air coast to coast, and those program managers often had an investment in the bands they put on the air!
The late corporate period dream in a nutshell: popularity by fiat.
Take a listen. There is one thing that is missing from the discussion and that is the FCC. Clear Channel (not I Heart Radio) owning every station would be less of a raw deal if it weren’t illegal to start your own competing radio station in the same genre.
Also, be sure to check out my own music and listen to my weird new music (all live) on my no-talking YouTube channel.
The discussion about station consolidation diminishing the influence of DJs and the organic discoverability of music was especially interesting. I'd bet that a lot of us between 35-50 noticed that period in 1996-2000 when radio changed from diverse to uniform. I'd bet that few of us know why.
Perhaps an interesting thought: Napster thrived not ONLY because it offered a better value, but because it offered suburban kids an avenue to finding more novel music. That was one of my motivations. I discovered tons of bands that played in Pennsylvania bars or Georgian bluegrass festivals just by downloading live recordings and checking them out. And because I had time at that age, I found a lot of great stuff.
I remember this showed up on my feed and I ignored it. I'll watch it now. I noticed that music became really uniform sometime after the late nineties, though I did like a lot of the stuff that came out in 00s, the fun ended around 2010. The best place to find new music is on your own now on streaming services.