This is part 3 of Bill Drummond’s critique of the music industry, you can find the first 2 parts here.
Around this time the long player which we later learned to call the album was fast becoming the format that most people listened to recorded music on. On this long player up to forty minutes of music could be contained, on the old 78′s we could only get a few minutes on either side of the disc. Fast forward again, this time mid 60′s. Around about then, two incidents took place that were to symbolise yet another massive shift in our relationship with music. Each of these incidents happened on separate continents and in totally different disciplines of music. One was in Canada the other in England. In 1964 a young Canadian classical pianist who had already made a name for himself in concert halls around the world decided for various reasons to never play as a soloist in concert again, but dedicated himself to making recordings. This pianist was Glen Gould. The vast majority of music he chose to record was music composed in the pre-recorded era. 18 months later, in 1966 a young English beat group who had rapidly become the biggest thing since Stalin, the first beat group to fill sports stadiums – even Elvis did not do that – made the decision to never preform in concert again. The beat group was the Beatles. The difference between Glen Gould and the Beatles was that Glen Gould wanted to record his interpretation of old music that he considered to intimate to be exposed to the concert platform. Whereas the Beatles wanted to create new music that could only ever exist as a recording. For both of them to go out and attempt to play their music live infront of an audience would have compromised the music. Thus make null and void the complete raison d’etre of the art they were making.
Savage young Beatles
There had been pop record producers and avant-garde composers who used the recording studio as their primary musical instrument before. But Glen Gould and the Beatles were the first two major artists to make the decision that what they did as artists was from then on only going to exist as recordings. Before that historic point in the mid-sixties recorded musics prime reason for existing was to promote the live careers of music makers. Recorded music has been made so that the listener could have the illusion that they were actually listening to the musicians playing in their front room. That they were at the concert where it was being performed. But 1966 was, to use the now tired cliche, a tipping point. I was just going to say tipping point but a friend of mine read through this and said, “You can’t use the word tipping point, that’s the ultimate cliche. Anyone talking about American politics now will talk of the tipping point. But I wanted to keep it in”.
From here on in or at least until the end of the 20th century, more and more of the music performed live was only done so to promote recorded music. We now judge the careers of almost all music maker by the albums they have made. Whether it was Herbert von Karajan, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Fela Kuti or whoever the rock and roll sensation of the moment was. Thus all ambitious young music makers aspired to get recording contracts so they could be allowed to make albums. The recording of and the subsequent release of an album gave complete validation to the their ambitions. The whole of the world wide music industry was based on a business model built around the recording and selling of albums. Radio stations, music magazines, concert tours, music videos all existed for one reason, to sell more albums. It was in nobodies interest to question the restrictive elements of the album format to closely, while the business model still worked and we still loved to own them. Very few of us noticed that the physical restrictions of the album format was turning all music into almost exactly the same thing. From wherever the music on these albums came from in the world or whatever tradition be it classical, jazz, world, rock, pop, etc. it all ended up as recorded music. We could walk into a major HMV or Virgin Megastore and choose from upwards of 300,000 albums. Every type of music known to mankind would be represented. Every year there were thousands more of these albums being recorded as our tastes became more refined we stumbled across undiscovered continents of music. How could we ever tire of it all?
But this sense of limitless choice was an illusion. The reason why all this music from every corner of the world, from every musical discipline was becoming the same thing was that it was all brought to us in a roughly identical length, equalised within the same narrow band of frequencies, broadcast through the air to our ears via similar electronic speakers. Close up all this music may have sounded different but take a few steps back and you notice how similar and one-dimensional it all is. The technology that had evolved through the 20th century to record and produce music had morphed it all from just being a convenient and marketable format into one mega all encompassing genre – that of recorded music.
