FM and AM still rule? Not a chance, even on the road. There was a time when cars had (optional) AM radios and you selected a station manually, so you would not be inclined to change the station. Then pushbutton tuning came along and you could have several choices just as easily as one. Then FM came along and offered better fidelity and noise limiting at the cost of erratic reception in urban areas where skyscraper framing was on the order of several FM wavelengths causing fading. Then along came FM stereo and AM started its long decline and reassignment to talk shows and sports where stereo made no difference and oldies music was still played that was originally recorded in mono. Some car radios added stereo AM but by that time, the damage had been done. Then car audio added non-radio media: 8-track, cassette, CD and an auxiliary input that let you run an iPod or MP3 player in a car. About half of my driving time is spent listening to CD's. Not a good omen for the future of radio. If I had advertising money to spend, I would be aware that even if you were always listening to something, that something would be recorded music that could not be reached by an ad and that would be about half the time (for me - it may vary for others).
Radio could have stayed in the "driver's seat" at home as well as in the car. The greatest benefit of radio was that radio stations could air and promote new music but they completely missed the boat on this one. The music labels were the ones to have Artist & Repertoire people going out and beating the bushes for new acts whereas radio was content to let the labels do all their decision-making for them. Radio should have had the decision makers, not the record labels, but radio missed the opportunity to remain relevant. The payola scandal of 1957 where record companies or rock groups paid the station to play their records effectively put an end to any hope of radio being the decision maker ever again.
A lot of great acts were either never signed or signed with labels that had very little presence in the business. But the labels soon proved to be a rapacious influence in the industry. As Hunter S. Thompson said:
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
He was correct about the greed but not specific about who is doing the stealing. A band that I know (The Joys, based in London Ontario, about 100 miles west of here) was offered a contract and were excited about it - until they read the terms. The label wanted to:
- break up the band and take only the lead singer, Sarah Smith (a great rocker with a great set of pipes),
- the label would get almost all the income from CD sales (she would get $1 for each CD sold),
- and would assume ownership of all material she had written, past present and future,
- she would have to appear where they wanted, when they wanted and conform to the fashions and style they wanted.
They declined to sign and got a distribution contract to make CD's and deliver them to record shop shelves and were still looking for a label contract with acceptable terms when their lead guitarist decided had had enough of the road and settled down to become a recording engineer, effectively ending the band. In fact, many signed bands are so upset with their CD revenue (they may get $1 from each CD sale and the label gets the rest but some rap stars got as little as 31 cents) that the bands recommend their fans download songs for free. One of the Joys songs, “Do I”, has been selected as the theme for a television program and was in a movie, so they are using every other avenue available.
This is nothing new. Atlantic records started as a competitor to Mercury in the 1950's with a promise that the artist would get 5 percent of sales when Mercury was offering 7 percent. So why did Atlantic survive and not Mercury? Because no one signed with Mercury got their 7 percent (or pretty much any money). And some of the early black singing groups only got a one-time cash deal – sometimes as little as $30 – for transfer of ownership of a song because rock and roll was originally distributed via "Race Music" departments of the record labels.
More recently, the RIAA attempted to get payment for every blank recording medium sold. They claimed it was to go back to the artists. Well how did they know who was being recorded so they could get money back to them? They didn't. And they never paid anything to anyone. Eventually, there was the threat of a RICO act prosecution for charging a private tax and this sort of disappeared with the demise of the cassette. And with semiconductor and hard drive digital media, they could not get anyone to pay.
If you go to a party today, there is almost no correlation between what you hear at a party and what gets air time on radio. The most recent party I was at had music from a laptop - if you did not like the music that was playing, you could click on something else and get some control over what you were hearing, and you could see the about 30 items on the playlist.
Here in Canada, the government initiated a Canadian Content policy requiring stations to play 25% (at first) and later 33% Canadian Content in the early 70's to try to get local groups on the air. The result was disappointing - we got the Guess Who, Anne Murray and Gordon Lightfoot in endless heavy rotation for two years until station managers wised up and realized there were other artists out there and their programming people (sometimes they were American programming consultants) had no clue. This eventually gave Canadian music some of the vitality it currently has. The content rules use the "LAMP" rule - of lyrics, artists, music and production, at least two categories have to be exclusively Canadian to be counted as Canadian content. This has resulted in some strange artifacts - some Aerosmith records are Canadian Content. However, this was a shameful political move necessitated by an equally shameful lack of talent development in radio.
Radio is supposed to be responsible to the public and stations are allocated based on the format (light rock, country, oldies rock etc.) for each location. I would like to see a new license category for "new artists" that would follow the same format as the Canadian Content laws where a station would have to play a certain percentage of unsigned or uncharted artists. Just to be diabolical, the rule should be that they could play artists that finally made it to the big time (charted, signed etc.) - but only if they had played them before they "made it". In fact, I think we could transform some stations by refusing license renewal in any other category, just to jump-start the process. Nowhere is it written that the major networks or station owners should retain their stranglehold on the market, so new entries should be welcome.
I was in public school for the beginning of rock, so I recall when the weekly charts came out, everyone treated it as information vital to your social credibility in school. The hit parade had been developed (first in country music) and the concept was that there was one list that applied to everything - Elvis would compete on the same chart as Ferranti and Teicher (piano duos) or Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Radio was our friend, especially in a world that considered rock and roll as subversive as being a teenager. It helped to have larger-than-life DJ's like Wolfman Jack and Cousin Brucie (Bruce Morrow). But the hit parade itself was a major problem for new indie music that was played in local clubs - if you didn't get nationwide exposure, you didn't get on the chart. And there was a lot of backroom decision making - who decided what was the "hit" record on an album with a dozen songs? People we never heard of who were responsible to no one.