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 May 15, 2009 Self-Destruction
Mellencamp points to two industry trends of the late 1980s and early ’90s that hurt pop music. First, record companies grew in size during the ’80s, then merged to form even larger corporations. In truth, large corporations had begun to gobble up record companies as far back as the late ’60s, but the process accelerated in the ’80s. As record companies began to be driven more by the stock market than by record charts, they became increasingly dominated by accountants and lawyers -- and, as often happens with large corporations, they became risk-averse. Prior to all the mergers, record companies were often run by people who loved music, or by show-biz-savvy businessmen with good ears. They didn’t always like the records they released on their labels, but they knew what might sell, and they kept an ear open for music that was novel. By contrast, major labels have, for some time now, been signing bands that sound familiar. The second damaging phenomenon Mellencamp highlights was the industry’s embrace of Broadcast Data Systems (BDS) and SoundScan, two measuring techniques used by Nielsen Media Research, of the famed "Nielsen Ratings," that used barcodes and emerging digital technology to gather information about music sales and radio play. Up to that point, sales charts had been created by journalists who polled retailers and radio stations to see which records were selling or getting a lot of requests from listeners. Magazines like Billboard got their data by talking to stores and broadcasters nationwide. Although SoundScan and BDS were, in theory, more objective than the older method, both ended up giving more prominence to big cities, where sales were in greater numbers and each radio request went out to more listeners. As a result, regional markets, both radio and retail, began to have a much smaller influence on pop music. As Mellencamp explains it, "Why pay attention to Louisville -- worth a comparatively few potential listeners -- when the same one spin in New York, Los Angeles or Atlanta, etc., was worth so many more potential listeners?" Mellencamp, a child of the 1960s, remembers when "Artists and their music flourished in back alleys, taverns and barns until, in some cases, a popular groundswell propelled it far and wide." In the ’50s and ’60s, the groundswells Mellencamp describes depended on airplay on small AM radio stations in small markets, which could have a profound impact by introducing a record and helping it grow into a national hit. When AM radio ruled, a band with a single on a small label might be lucky enough to have a DJ give it a spin. If listeners liked it and requested it, it would go into rotation, and kids in nearby towns might hear it and start calling their own Top 40 stations to request it. If that pattern repeated itself, a record could soon appear on radio stations across America. That Thing You Do!, Tom Hanks’s great 1996 film about a one-hit wonder from Erie, Pennsylvania, brilliantly shows how a band could come out of nowhere to score a Top 40 hit. Even FM stations, which had weaker signals than AM stations and couldn’t reach as far as AM could on a clear night, could still, with the help of local record-company reps, help break an act regionally. As long as stations could choose their own playlists, it was still possible to hear unique homegrown music, but the Telecommunications Act of 1996 led to deregulation and media consolidation. As increasing numbers of stations were owned by an ever-shrinking number of vast media conglomerates, stations whose playlists were now managed and programmed from a single national command center couldn’t boost or champion a local band on an indie label. A DJ -- even a station programmer -- could no longer champion that band and put its single in rotation. Mellencamp remembers that one of his own early songs, "I Need a Lover," was first played by a station in Washington, DC, then was picked up by other stations nationally because of "much work from local radio reps at the record company." When a radio station loses the choice to occasionally play a record it thinks might have a chance, artists who don’t have a record label’s full promotional push behind them get lost.
If you’re lucky enough to pick up a college station in your town, you might get to hear music that’s off the beaten track. Otherwise, it’s classic rock, and playlists controlled by record companies and media conglomerates. I have no idea how kids in the US hear new music, but they don’t hear it on American airwaves. If radio seems too old-school to bother with, consider this: Only by the Night, the latest album from The Kings of Leon, has sold 3 million copies worldwide, of which 1.8 million copies sold in the UK alone. In the UK, BBC Radio 1 plays new pop music, and there are many independent stations that bring new records to the public’s attention. Word of mouth, the Internet, and satellite services can help push a tune into the spotlight, but radio is a portable, reliable place to find new music you didn’t even know you were looking for. Some of Mellencamp’s article strains to connect what’s going on now in music to the economic policies of the Reagan years. He cites the development of the CD as an example of corporate avarice, but I think the Compact Disc’s developers, Sony and Philips, while obviously looking for a way to make money, also sincerely believed that some aspects of the new medium were preferable to cassettes and LPs. It seems likely, at any rate, that some form of technology would eventually have unseated the LP in a world where VCRs and personal computers had increasingly accustomed people to convenience and instant gratification. Mellencamp does make the valid point that the CD "was devised to prop up record sales on the expectation of people replenishing their record collections with CDs of albums they had already purchased." While I’m not certain it was devised for that purpose, that was undoubtedly the result. Record companies had already been riding a wave of unprecedented success when the Compact Disc was introduced. Baby boomers had degrees of commitment to pop music and to the LP that were much higher than those of the preceding generation. CDs sustained the financial success, both for recording artists and for the music industry, that grew out of those commitments, and the frustration currently felt by artists and record companies flows out of expectations set by 40 years of very high revenues. Some of the decline in music that Mellencamp and others have made so much of may be a natural leveling; boomers have already replaced their music collections, and don’t have the same love for music they had when they were younger. The current generation of pop listeners doesn’t care about the LP as a form of expression, and has other interests to distract it. And perhaps, after more than 50 years, rock’n’roll has run its course. A number of the things I’ve just pointed out deserve to be examined at length, and I’ll try to do that in another piece. For now, it appears that whatever cultural and other changes have brought music sales down, record companies and radio conglomerates can lay some of the blame at their own feet. . . . Joseph Taylor
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On March 22, John Mellencamp gave
readers of the Huffington Post a 
The result, Mellencamp suggests, is
musical homogenization. "Sing the chorus of ‘I Need a Lover,’" he
writes; "It’s not the best song I ever wrote . . . but nevertheless,
you can sing that chorus." He uses Mariah Carey as an example of what happens when a
pop song is aimed for mass appeal rather than springing from a songwriter’s vision:
"Now sing the chorus of even one Mariah Carey song. Nothing against Mariah,
she’s a brilliantly gifted vocalist, but the point here is the way that the songs
were built -- mine from the ground up, hers from the top down." Carey is typical of
current young pop singers in that many of her songs are contrived by what amount to entire
committees of songwriters. "We Belong Together," from The Emancipation of
Mimi, lists 11 cowriters; "Get Your Number" credits nine.