For the executives at the wheel of the monolithic corporations that made up 90% of the modern music industry, the tail end of the 1990s must have felt like the scene in Rocky IV where the once-broken hearted Italian Stallion reaches that crucial point in his training reigimen where he has regained the eye of the tiger, the killer instinct, the feeling of absolute power and ability. Flush with the realization of that he is at last fully ready to absolutely clobber his opponent, Rocky clambers up what must be the tallest peak in all of Siberia and bellows "DRAGOOOOOOOOOO!!!" at the top of his lungs. After thirty years of mergers, buy-outs, disco booms and MiniDisc busts, the big labels was kicking ass and taking no prisoners as CD sales soared to an altitude only hinted at during the format's explosive early growth of the 1980s. In addition to the rosy picture at retail, the long-term cultural effects of MTV (along with the labels' relentless marketing expansion and licensing into satellite markets) pushed contemporary music into people's faces during almost every waking hour of existence. If it wasn't enough that you heard music pumping forth from TV shows, talk radio and movie screens, most Muzak systems had moved on from the omnipresent "beautiful music" versions of pop songs to playing the actual hit versions instead (you haven't really lived until you've heard Wall Of Voodoo pumping forth from supermarket speakers at 2 A.M.). Nearly every facet of the business from distribution to publishing was growing at a breathtaking pace, and it was all the labels could do to keep the pipelines full of fresh new product. Sure, it might have been increasingly safe and calculated product, but people were buying this music like it was going out of style, so why mess with the formula?Following years of burgeoning, cult-level success just out reach of the mainstream, hip hop and so-called alternative rock exploded to the forefront of popular culture over the course of the 1990s in much the same way that synth pop and hair metal had done so during the previous decade, though these new genres had a far more polarizing effect on the mainstream listening audience. Partially as a result of that polarization, large numbers of aging music fans jumped ship and turned away from modern rock and towards the slicker, more-pop friendly incarnation of country music that had exploded at about the same time alternative rock had arrived, while their kids discovered the joys of youthful pop idols breaking out of the Disney Channel.
While many can argue that the surges in country and teen-pop in particular merely serve to illustrate the cyclical nature of the business, there was something else to this exponential leap in popularity that had rarely been the case before: enormous album sales. Until the 1990s, pop and rock tended to lead the pack in the blockbuster category, with only rare incursions into this rarefied air from country or show tunes. Teen-pop, which had historically been dominated by one-hit flash in the pans, also rarely produced mega sellers, yet by the end of the decade, there were several acts roaming the savannas sporting record sales at or above the eight-figure mark.
What happened to cause this massive commercial gold rush? The root causes of this period of incredible success were two key changes in the way the industry marketed their wares at the very beginning of the decade: the move away from commercially available singles and the advent of computerized record charts.
The first instance of a label deliberately withholding a hit single from the Top 40 market happened in the spring of 1990. Capitol Records was about to release M.C Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em, which had already begun to accumulate a scary amount of early momentum thanks to the song "U Can't Touch This." Capitol was so sure it had a smash on its hands that they attempted the unheard-of strategy of not releasing "U Can't Touch This" to retail as a cassette single, instead servicing only a vinyl 12" version (a format which by then was nearly exclusively aimed at DJs). The gambit worked: Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em was a monster throughout the summer of 1990, powered entirely by a song that could not be purchased on its own unless you had five bucks and a working record player.
A few months later, a similar stunt was successfully pulled off with another crossover rap monster: Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby." With the song going nuclear all over the country, SBK Records (a subsidiary of EMI, the same distributor that housed Capitol Records) chose to delete the cassette single just as it was reaching the Top 10 at the onset of the Christmas season. Again, the lack of a single steered customers towards the full album, in this case Ice's To The Extreme. Total combined sales of the MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice albums were an astronomical 17,000,000 copies, and a daring precedent had been set: a technique would come into play often in the future, especially once the old machinery of record promotion had been upended by the arrival of SoundScan.
Until May of 1991, all record charts that ran in Billboard magazine were totted up the old fashioned way: a whole lotta people manning phones, calling retail outlets and distributors, and creating a sales picture based on the reports provided by each. It probably goes without saying that this system was inherently flawed and these reports (if not the reporters themselves) were a cinch to manipulate (and they very often were), but that was simply the way the industry approached record charts for decades until the idea of a truly accurate survey derived entirely from Point-Of-Sale systems (the contraptions in stores that read and tot up bar codes) became a workable concept.
Suddenly, a true picture could finally be made available of the best selling music in America, and when that first SoundScan chart hit the stands, it was absolute mayhem in promotion departments as country albums suddenly flooded the upper half of the album charts as if a dam had burst (and it had: unlike store reporters who tended to read off their "pop/rock" albums to the people totting up the "pop/rock" charts, SoundScan drew no lines between genres). In the space of a week, many "pet projects" that had been artificially worked up by label promotional departments to a false level of success in order to gain attention and create a buzz were utterly wiped out. In a couple of months, the Top Pop Albums chart had to be re-named The Billboard 200 so that people would quit asking the magazine's editors "why are there so many country/rap/soundrack albums on the pop chart?"
One thing that took a lot of getting used to was that these new album charts moved fast: the way an album lived out its chart life in Billboard finally matched the true pace of record sales in the real world. Having become familiar with the old system for a few years before I started at Record Den, it was quite startling to witness new releases exploding out of the box like there was no tomorrow at work and then watch them take their sweet old time climbing the lists in Billboard. With SoundScan, all of that had changed: albums now regularly debuted at or near the top of the charts and plummeted rapidly down the ladder in successive weeks (instead of entering low and climbing upwards as they always had before), with only a handful of titles managing to keep their heads regularly above water on an ongoing basis. While the initial shock of the new sales system made for a fascinating learning experience over those first few months, it was only a matter of time before the industry started devising ways to make this brave new world of POS charts work for them, and that is where the fun (and, eventually, the problems) really started.
Looking back from this point in time, the most harmful effect of the SoundScan era on the record business has been a seismic shift in the perception of a record's success. It was once common to wait out an album's first few weeks before declaring the project a success or failure, but after a couple years of SoundScan, that perception was winnowed down to a few days (the same dangerous shift in perception that became common around Hollywood as box office reports became widely publicized in the 1980s). Eventually, albums that failed to knock the socks off of industry observers in their debut weeks were written off as "duds" almost immediately, while those that entered high were hailed as smash hits, regardless of how long they failed to hang around afterwards. Gaining that lofty first-week debut was of paramount importance to record companies, and the best way to engineer an immediate No. 1 album was do what the movie business had been doing for years: hype release dates to the point that not only would everyone know when a hot release was coming but they also would feel the overwhelming compulsion be one of the first to own it ... and the surest way to prime that pump was to take singles out of the picture.
As I wrote in a previous post in the series, singles sales were once a crucial step in the creation of a long-term music consumer. By the early 1990s, however, emboldened by the success of the MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice albums, labels were beginning to see singles as a zero-gain irritant. In the wake of additional deleted (or never available) radio hits by the likes of Bryan Adams, The Offspring, Live, and Van Halen, it had been proven conclusively that it was possible to withdraw from sale even the hottest songs in the country and still get people to pony up for a full-length album instead (especially when said song was in the rap or rock genre). Elated by the results of their new strategy, labels carried out a charade of acting like the format still mattered for a few more years while systematically cutting the legs out from underneath it.
During this time, Billboard attempted to keep labels honest by insisting that any song not available at retail would therefore not be allowed on the singles chart, which was still collated by a combination of sales and airplay. In response, record companies worked out a cute runaround to this rule by "flash releasing" a song for a week or two to gain chart eligibility and then immediately deleting said single so as not to damage sales of its parent album. By the beginning of 1997, however, CD sales were so hot that the labels didn't really give a shit anymore if Garbage wasn't eligible for the Hot 1oo since the soundtrack to Romeo & Juliet was selling like proverbial hotcakes (largely thanks to there being no available single for "#1 Crush"). With fewer massive radio hits available to retail, the labels managed to force Billboard's hand at last as the magazine, seeking to remain the most accurate arbiter of the music industry's fortunes, changed their own rules and allowed unavailable "radio hits" to compete alongside actual physical singles for the first time.
For singles, the game was up, yet album sales incredibly continued to track upwards through the end of 1999, despite growing consumer complaints concerning the lack of singles in the marketplace and the substandard artistic quality of the CDs they were being forced to buy instead. Once it became apparent that only one hit single was really needed for an album to sell 5-10 million copies (instead of 3 or more as was usually the case prior to this decade), the quality of most albums began to nose-dive. The entire "art" of creating a listenable, balanced record album was being lost, and in a society that was increasingly moving in fast-forward, that didn't seem to make much of a difference to anyone.
At the dawn of the 21st century, with selected new albums now capable of selling into the seven-figures in their opening week, the music industry appeared invulnerable (the operative word here being "appeared").
While the major labels crowed over the amazing wave of success they were riding into the year 2000, hardly anyone realized that the stone-faced corporate, quarterly-profits-first frame of mind which had been running the record biz for years was about to suddenly become a major liability. While the decisions arrived at by the numerous bean-counters and lawyers who had come to dominate the executive level during the 90s mostly "worked" in the sense that they created immense short-term windfalls and drove the overall sales performances of each megacorporation higher, these same decisions would also turn out to have terrible repercussions on nearly every single corner of the industry in the near future. Imagine if you will a game of Jenga, with the initial construction completed at the start of the decade, and with pieces being systematically moved and arranged on top throughout the following ten years. The tower becomes taller and taller, but also begins to lose structural integrity as the whole structure imperceptibly weakens. After a certain point, all it takes is one event (or move, if you will) to start a catastrophic collapse.
Granted, there were a lot of bad moves being made during the 1990s that ruthlessly exploited the good will of the average customer to the breaking point, but none of them turned out to be as catastrophic in the long run as the death of the commercially available single. More so than any other callous, wrong-headed policy change from that decade (the tilting of the playing field to the "big boxes," the continual raising of CD list prices, the elimination of defective returns, etc.) the forced removal of an affordable one-song format for people to buy was the first domino of many to fall, and it was the specific void in the marketplace left by singles that P2P networks filled the instant they appeared.
Who knows, perhaps it was inevitable that all of this would happen, but I have a difficult time believing that this business would have degenerated so quickly if a low-cost method to "getting that one song I like" had still been around in the middle of 1999. Instead, millions of irate customers reveled in their chance to give greedy music execs the bird and went on a downloading free-for-all.
For the major labels, the best option they could think of when they finally started to get an idea just how much of a world of shit they were in about a year later was not to adapt and perhaps make the situation work to their advantage, but to sue everyone in sight while committing the PR disaster of mobilizing a few asshole multimillionaire rock stars to appear on the steps of a courthouse, wagging their fingers importantly while crying poverty. Worse, the labels blamed everyone and everything but themselves for the predicament they were in. How dare these people try to screw us back the way we've screwed them all these years, they raged, utterly ignorant of the raging contempt for them (earned or otherwise) that had been simmering in the minds of the record buying public.
Meanwhile, the old retail base of actual music-oriented record stores (which were once the financial backbone for major labels whenever a bigger account floundered or declared bankruptcy) continues to disappear, store by store, chain by chain. Most of these closings are due to the lethal combination of runaway downloading by their old customer base and the predatory pricing policies of such 800 lb. gorillas as Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy. These policies, by the way, are only made possible by massive advertising kickbacks, generous returns allotments and "20% free goods" shipping policies instigated by ... you guessed it, the major labels.
Faced with this knowledge, and yet still being badgered by these same record companies to buy the same titles being given away by the big boxes at a higher wholesale price doesn't exactly fill what's left of the music retail base with sympathy for their beleaguered suppliers. In fact, I'm quite willing to wager that many of the remaining record stores are secretly looking forward to the day when the "big boxes" finally decide that music simply isn't worth their floor space anymore. When that happens, the major labels will only be able to watch in horror as over two-thirds of their business suddenly vanishes from their balance sheets. A little while later, with no viable account base to fall back on, the Big Four will quickly shrivel up and blow away like a pile of dead leaves, leaving the indies with the chance to start it up all over again, if such a thing will be possible by then.
While many can argue that the surges in country and teen-pop in particular merely serve to illustrate the cyclical nature of the business, there was something else to this exponential leap in popularity that had rarely been the case before: enormous album sales. Until the 1990s, pop and rock tended to lead the pack in the blockbuster category, with only rare incursions into this rarefied air from country or show tunes. Teen-pop, which had historically been dominated by one-hit flash in the pans, also rarely produced mega sellers, yet by the end of the decade, there were several acts roaming the savannas sporting record sales at or above the eight-figure mark.
What happened to cause this massive commercial gold rush? The root causes of this period of incredible success were two key changes in the way the industry marketed their wares at the very beginning of the decade: the move away from commercially available singles and the advent of computerized record charts.
The first instance of a label deliberately withholding a hit single from the Top 40 market happened in the spring of 1990. Capitol Records was about to release M.C Hammer's Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em, which had already begun to accumulate a scary amount of early momentum thanks to the song "U Can't Touch This." Capitol was so sure it had a smash on its hands that they attempted the unheard-of strategy of not releasing "U Can't Touch This" to retail as a cassette single, instead servicing only a vinyl 12" version (a format which by then was nearly exclusively aimed at DJs). The gambit worked: Please Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em was a monster throughout the summer of 1990, powered entirely by a song that could not be purchased on its own unless you had five bucks and a working record player.
A few months later, a similar stunt was successfully pulled off with another crossover rap monster: Vanilla Ice's "Ice Ice Baby." With the song going nuclear all over the country, SBK Records (a subsidiary of EMI, the same distributor that housed Capitol Records) chose to delete the cassette single just as it was reaching the Top 10 at the onset of the Christmas season. Again, the lack of a single steered customers towards the full album, in this case Ice's To The Extreme. Total combined sales of the MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice albums were an astronomical 17,000,000 copies, and a daring precedent had been set: a technique would come into play often in the future, especially once the old machinery of record promotion had been upended by the arrival of SoundScan.
Until May of 1991, all record charts that ran in Billboard magazine were totted up the old fashioned way: a whole lotta people manning phones, calling retail outlets and distributors, and creating a sales picture based on the reports provided by each. It probably goes without saying that this system was inherently flawed and these reports (if not the reporters themselves) were a cinch to manipulate (and they very often were), but that was simply the way the industry approached record charts for decades until the idea of a truly accurate survey derived entirely from Point-Of-Sale systems (the contraptions in stores that read and tot up bar codes) became a workable concept.Suddenly, a true picture could finally be made available of the best selling music in America, and when that first SoundScan chart hit the stands, it was absolute mayhem in promotion departments as country albums suddenly flooded the upper half of the album charts as if a dam had burst (and it had: unlike store reporters who tended to read off their "pop/rock" albums to the people totting up the "pop/rock" charts, SoundScan drew no lines between genres). In the space of a week, many "pet projects" that had been artificially worked up by label promotional departments to a false level of success in order to gain attention and create a buzz were utterly wiped out. In a couple of months, the Top Pop Albums chart had to be re-named The Billboard 200 so that people would quit asking the magazine's editors "why are there so many country/rap/soundrack albums on the pop chart?"
One thing that took a lot of getting used to was that these new album charts moved fast: the way an album lived out its chart life in Billboard finally matched the true pace of record sales in the real world. Having become familiar with the old system for a few years before I started at Record Den, it was quite startling to witness new releases exploding out of the box like there was no tomorrow at work and then watch them take their sweet old time climbing the lists in Billboard. With SoundScan, all of that had changed: albums now regularly debuted at or near the top of the charts and plummeted rapidly down the ladder in successive weeks (instead of entering low and climbing upwards as they always had before), with only a handful of titles managing to keep their heads regularly above water on an ongoing basis. While the initial shock of the new sales system made for a fascinating learning experience over those first few months, it was only a matter of time before the industry started devising ways to make this brave new world of POS charts work for them, and that is where the fun (and, eventually, the problems) really started.
Looking back from this point in time, the most harmful effect of the SoundScan era on the record business has been a seismic shift in the perception of a record's success. It was once common to wait out an album's first few weeks before declaring the project a success or failure, but after a couple years of SoundScan, that perception was winnowed down to a few days (the same dangerous shift in perception that became common around Hollywood as box office reports became widely publicized in the 1980s). Eventually, albums that failed to knock the socks off of industry observers in their debut weeks were written off as "duds" almost immediately, while those that entered high were hailed as smash hits, regardless of how long they failed to hang around afterwards. Gaining that lofty first-week debut was of paramount importance to record companies, and the best way to engineer an immediate No. 1 album was do what the movie business had been doing for years: hype release dates to the point that not only would everyone know when a hot release was coming but they also would feel the overwhelming compulsion be one of the first to own it ... and the surest way to prime that pump was to take singles out of the picture.
As I wrote in a previous post in the series, singles sales were once a crucial step in the creation of a long-term music consumer. By the early 1990s, however, emboldened by the success of the MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice albums, labels were beginning to see singles as a zero-gain irritant. In the wake of additional deleted (or never available) radio hits by the likes of Bryan Adams, The Offspring, Live, and Van Halen, it had been proven conclusively that it was possible to withdraw from sale even the hottest songs in the country and still get people to pony up for a full-length album instead (especially when said song was in the rap or rock genre). Elated by the results of their new strategy, labels carried out a charade of acting like the format still mattered for a few more years while systematically cutting the legs out from underneath it.During this time, Billboard attempted to keep labels honest by insisting that any song not available at retail would therefore not be allowed on the singles chart, which was still collated by a combination of sales and airplay. In response, record companies worked out a cute runaround to this rule by "flash releasing" a song for a week or two to gain chart eligibility and then immediately deleting said single so as not to damage sales of its parent album. By the beginning of 1997, however, CD sales were so hot that the labels didn't really give a shit anymore if Garbage wasn't eligible for the Hot 1oo since the soundtrack to Romeo & Juliet was selling like proverbial hotcakes (largely thanks to there being no available single for "#1 Crush"). With fewer massive radio hits available to retail, the labels managed to force Billboard's hand at last as the magazine, seeking to remain the most accurate arbiter of the music industry's fortunes, changed their own rules and allowed unavailable "radio hits" to compete alongside actual physical singles for the first time.
For singles, the game was up, yet album sales incredibly continued to track upwards through the end of 1999, despite growing consumer complaints concerning the lack of singles in the marketplace and the substandard artistic quality of the CDs they were being forced to buy instead. Once it became apparent that only one hit single was really needed for an album to sell 5-10 million copies (instead of 3 or more as was usually the case prior to this decade), the quality of most albums began to nose-dive. The entire "art" of creating a listenable, balanced record album was being lost, and in a society that was increasingly moving in fast-forward, that didn't seem to make much of a difference to anyone.
At the dawn of the 21st century, with selected new albums now capable of selling into the seven-figures in their opening week, the music industry appeared invulnerable (the operative word here being "appeared").
While the major labels crowed over the amazing wave of success they were riding into the year 2000, hardly anyone realized that the stone-faced corporate, quarterly-profits-first frame of mind which had been running the record biz for years was about to suddenly become a major liability. While the decisions arrived at by the numerous bean-counters and lawyers who had come to dominate the executive level during the 90s mostly "worked" in the sense that they created immense short-term windfalls and drove the overall sales performances of each megacorporation higher, these same decisions would also turn out to have terrible repercussions on nearly every single corner of the industry in the near future. Imagine if you will a game of Jenga, with the initial construction completed at the start of the decade, and with pieces being systematically moved and arranged on top throughout the following ten years. The tower becomes taller and taller, but also begins to lose structural integrity as the whole structure imperceptibly weakens. After a certain point, all it takes is one event (or move, if you will) to start a catastrophic collapse.
Granted, there were a lot of bad moves being made during the 1990s that ruthlessly exploited the good will of the average customer to the breaking point, but none of them turned out to be as catastrophic in the long run as the death of the commercially available single. More so than any other callous, wrong-headed policy change from that decade (the tilting of the playing field to the "big boxes," the continual raising of CD list prices, the elimination of defective returns, etc.) the forced removal of an affordable one-song format for people to buy was the first domino of many to fall, and it was the specific void in the marketplace left by singles that P2P networks filled the instant they appeared.Who knows, perhaps it was inevitable that all of this would happen, but I have a difficult time believing that this business would have degenerated so quickly if a low-cost method to "getting that one song I like" had still been around in the middle of 1999. Instead, millions of irate customers reveled in their chance to give greedy music execs the bird and went on a downloading free-for-all.
For the major labels, the best option they could think of when they finally started to get an idea just how much of a world of shit they were in about a year later was not to adapt and perhaps make the situation work to their advantage, but to sue everyone in sight while committing the PR disaster of mobilizing a few asshole multimillionaire rock stars to appear on the steps of a courthouse, wagging their fingers importantly while crying poverty. Worse, the labels blamed everyone and everything but themselves for the predicament they were in. How dare these people try to screw us back the way we've screwed them all these years, they raged, utterly ignorant of the raging contempt for them (earned or otherwise) that had been simmering in the minds of the record buying public.
Meanwhile, the old retail base of actual music-oriented record stores (which were once the financial backbone for major labels whenever a bigger account floundered or declared bankruptcy) continues to disappear, store by store, chain by chain. Most of these closings are due to the lethal combination of runaway downloading by their old customer base and the predatory pricing policies of such 800 lb. gorillas as Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy. These policies, by the way, are only made possible by massive advertising kickbacks, generous returns allotments and "20% free goods" shipping policies instigated by ... you guessed it, the major labels.Faced with this knowledge, and yet still being badgered by these same record companies to buy the same titles being given away by the big boxes at a higher wholesale price doesn't exactly fill what's left of the music retail base with sympathy for their beleaguered suppliers. In fact, I'm quite willing to wager that many of the remaining record stores are secretly looking forward to the day when the "big boxes" finally decide that music simply isn't worth their floor space anymore. When that happens, the major labels will only be able to watch in horror as over two-thirds of their business suddenly vanishes from their balance sheets. A little while later, with no viable account base to fall back on, the Big Four will quickly shrivel up and blow away like a pile of dead leaves, leaving the indies with the chance to start it up all over again, if such a thing will be possible by then.
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