Playback and payback series; (part 14) Control issues: did home taping kill music (continued)

But what was it really scared of? More than anything else, it was lack of control. For the first time since one of Edison’s minions put a music cylinder on a phonograph for public consumption, the industry that controlled the music did not entirely control the medium on which people consumed the music (although we’ve already established that Phillips, inventors of the cassette, owned several record companies, including classical music monolith Deutsche Grammophon). As the technology became better, the music business’s paranoia escalated.

The palpable fear wasn’t limited to the record industry, either. Home taping scared the publishing business as well, because without the mechanical royalties that came from the record companies, the publishers and songwriters were also out of business. When the digital tape recorder entered the picture in the early 1980s, it only got worse. As songwriter and publisher George David Weiss, whose credits include the Louis Armstrong hit “What a Wonderful World” and the Tokens’ version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” saw it:

When you tape something analogue, with a home taping machine, you are degrading the original, because the head is being touched. The copy is not so hot. It’s a copy. After you copy the first about six or seven times, you’ve got to go out and buy another tape. Another original. You have to buy one more so maybe we get out two, two and a half cents to take home. With copies we’re getting zero.

But with the digital audio tape, forget it. You buy a compact disc, put it into this machine and nothing touches. It’s all electronic information that is being sent from one side to the other. Nothing is being degraded, and the second one that it made is a clone, not a copy. It’s exactly as good and authentic and with as much fidelity as the original. Imagine what that means for us…this DAT machine is just going to devastate us: copy copy copy! Clone clone clone!

The music industry as a whole grew so frightened, it lobbied Congress and got the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, which amounted to a levy on digital audiotape. It also pressured the manufacturers to include a serial copy-management system in the DAT recorders, which made it impossible for any one DAT recorder manufacturers – Philips, Sony, and Panasonic – all had interests in the music business, so it wasn’t that hard to convince them to do this, but it also made the medium all but useless as a consumer audio item, and limited the DAT market to the professional and semiprofessional music enthusiast. Once again, things were relatively under control.

So the record industry continued to exploit and benefit from the new digital medium of the compact disc. However, as we’ll discover in the next chapter, less than 40 percent of the records sold in 2000 were new releases. If we can assume that it was more or less a “normal” year in the record business, that means that over 60 percent of the records sold are what the record business calls “catalog” albums. These albums were once upon a time, and remain such consistent sellers that enough stores keep them in stock for the record companies to keep them in print.

When they cease to sell, the record company will cut the record out of its catalog and take a band saw to the boxes of CDs left in its warehouse, cutting a small slit through the carton and into the jewel box of the CD – not so far that it damages the actual disc, but far enough that the cut is evident. Then it sells the boxes to a record liquidator, who puts them into stores for 99c or $1.99. For the most part, the artist will never see money on these CDs, as most contracts don’t pay royalties for cut-rate and cutout albums. (But then most artists, more than likely, never saw money for their records beyond the advance anyway).

So catalog is a very important part of the record business. Because of catalog, the CD essentially saved the industry. Vinyl still ruled during the disco boom, which led to the disco debacle of 1980, sparked, in part, by the failure of the soundtrack to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a dog of a movie, a year and a half later. By the turn of the decade, the music business was in piss-poor shape. Record sales slipped by close to 20 percent. With pirated, counterfeit copies, some records got more returns than the company actually sold to the stores.

These things happen in waves. Artie Ripp, who had a label with Gulf and Western, recalled:

Gulf and Western Records put out this soundtrack by Elton John from a movie called Friends. I think it was the first album that shipped platinum and came back double platinum. They took back that many returns with counterfeiters. They presented Jim Jones, the G&W president, with platinum and gold records and so on, and it was a total farce.

A year after the great disco deflation, Philips introduced the CD, first in Europe, then in America. It was a revelation to some. “We knew that CDs would become the dominant format when we first saw a CD player in 1982,” said Don Rose, the founder of Rykodisc, the first CD-only record company. “We realised there was a potential for a lot of material to be reissued on compact disc, a lot of significant music that had more or less saturated its viability in the analog market.”

Having recently mined the windfall of cassettes spawned by the advent of the Walkman, and having relied on dominance of LP for 35 years before that, the record business moved on from the “saturated…analog market” and took advantage of this opportunity to once again exploit their catalogs.

The allure of the CD was clear to both the consumer and the record companies. Since it was a laser-read digital format, nothing ever made contact with the actual recording. Unless you were very careful, most LPs developed scratches, attracted dust, and developed hisses, clicks, pops, skips, and all manner of surface noise. CDs, on the other hand, theoretically had none of these problems.

The actual music, encoded digitally into pits encased in clear plastic, would supposedly last forever. The record companies sent interns and minor minions into the vaults to locate the master tapes of their bestselling recordings so they could digitise them and release their lucrative catalogs in the new format, once again capitalising on recordings they had long ago paid for.

One music industry expert particularly recalls working in record retail when the first CD first arrived in America, managing one of the first stores in New York City’s Greenwich Village to stock them – as imports initially, costing upward of $30. He further recounts that people in the village tended to be early adapters. They bought their players (which cost in the neighbourhood of $1,000 in those early days) and needed the software to play on them.

During the onset of stocking CDs at the store, he had lunch with his district manager, who asked him what he thought of this new format. The expert told his then manager he thought it was great, but he wondered if he would ever see some of his favourite records, which tended toward the obscure, on the format. He needn’t have worried. Nearly every record he ever owned on vinyl (with a few notable exceptions) came out on CD.

Doors producer Paul Rothchild didn’t even know that Elektra had rereleased the Doors records on CD until he wandered into a record store and actually saw them. He bought the CDs and put one into his player. “It was abysmal,” he said. “It had been taken from a minimum of fifth-generation master, perhaps even eighth-generation cassette-running master. It was noisy, distorted, obscene.”

Rothchild was not alone in this experience. “The first few CDs of Elton that came out were dreadful,” said Elton John producer Gus Dudgeon. “They were just terrible because [the people who made the digital transfers] basically didn’t understand what they were doing.” It took a few years, but finally they got this issue straightened out, largely through the efforts of people like Rothchild and Dudgeon.

The first decade and a half of the CD era were boom years for the record business. Indeed, even in the period from 1989 to 1998, CD sales doubled in dollar value from $6,579,400 to $13,723,500. Seemingly, music managed to survive home taping nicely.