SOUND RECORDING and Popular Music - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

and Popular Music

Analyze the patterns that emerge in both lists:

• Can negatives be seen as positives (and vice versa), depending on the viewer’s point of view?
• Overall, evaluate rock and roll as either a negative or positive force in American culture.

With a partner, make two parallel lists:

Five to ten ways rock and roll has had a positive impact on American culture since the 1950s

Five to ten ways rock and roll has had a negative impact on American culture since the 1950s

• Three typical developmental stages:
• NOVELTY stage
• ENTREPRENEURIAL stage
• CONSUMER MARKETING stage

• De Martinville, France, 1850s
• Edison, USA, 1877
• Berliner, USA, 1880s
• Victor Talking Machine, USA, 1900s

“This tongueless, toothless instrument mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words and centuries after you have crumbled into dust, may repeat every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you choose to whisper against the thin, iron diaphragm.”

• Edison’s wax cylinders: analog recording
• Berliner’s flat disk-->vinyl records
• Magnetic audiotape (Germany, 1940s)
• stereo sound (1950s)
• digital recording (1970s)
• compact discs (1980s)
• audio DVDs

• Mass-marketed publishing of sheet music: Tin Pan Alley
• Birth of JAZZ in New Orleans: fusing rhythm & blues and gospel into swing bands
• popular vocal stars (harmonies and crooners)
• ROCK AND ROLL

• Fused traditions of country, R&B, pop
• Significantly merged music of black and white cultures in the American South
• No music style has ever had such widespread impact, thanks to mass distribution techniques
• Transformed the structure of two mass media industries: recording and radio

• High and low culture
• Masculine and feminine
• Black and white
• North and South
• Sacred and secular

• The British Invasion: sound recording goes international
• Development ofSouland theMotownlabel
• Political impact offolk rock
• Punk and grungemovements
• Rapand the rise of black urban style

• Recording industry generates more revenue than all other media except TV
• a GLOBAL OLIGOPOLY: A few corporations control most of industry worldwide

• Four corporations produce 85% of all American CDs/tapes, 80% of global market
• AOL Time Warner
• Vivendi/Universal (MCA/Universal/Polygram)
• Sony
• Bertelsmann (BMG/RCA)
• “Indies” produce 16% of America’s music
• How do the independents survive in the global marketplace?

• To start a band in a garage, write songs, perform in local clubs, and then get discovered by a major label, which provides limo rides, arena shows, parties and a big house.
• Independence: to break away from the record label and go it alone.

--Neil Strauss, The New York Times

Downloading: What does the law say? Should we have ethical concerns about downloading?

Censorship: How far should the government or watchdog groups be able to go?