Americanmusic 33 4 0441

Crowds, Clouds, and Idols: New Dynamics and Old Agendas in the Music Industry, 1982-
2012
Author(s): Charles Fairchild
Source: American Music , Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter 2015), pp. 441-476
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/americanmusic.33.4.0441
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Charles Fairchild
Crowds, Clouds, and Idols:

New Dynamics and Old Agendas
in the Music Industry,
1982–2012
The claim that the popular music industry as a whole was dying was
made in a wide range of forums between the emergence of mass illegal
downloads in the late 1990s and the dropoff in album sales that began
around 2001–2, a drop that resulted in a halving of the sales of recorded
music by 2012.1 The declarations of ruin, which continued through at
least 2011, came from major news outlets, industry insiders, academics,
high-profile musicians, and so-called digital visionaries.2 While this claim
was often stated as if it were part of a larger presumed consensus, it was
very often used for plainly varied purposes. On the one hand, this claim
was used as a carefully chosen rhetorical device that proved politically
convenient for the entertainment industry in its long, mostly successful
campaign to transform intellectual property law in the United States and
around the world.3 On the other, it allowed some to herald the end of
the “old” music industry as the clunky old containers that held music
in place gave way to an industry potentially revived through flexible,
mobile, geographically unrestrained consumption.
Regardless of the rhetorical contests surrounding it, this claim is impor-
tant to get to grips with, as it obscures salient aspects of the ways in which
the music industry has changed since the turn of the century. Importantly,
it is not hard to find evidence that shows us that more recorded music
is being experienced across more platforms, devices, and media in more
places more often than ever before. Indeed, there are at least two very
simple measures that should suggest that the music industry was not in
Charles Fairchild is associate professor of popular music at the University of

Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Danger Mouse’s “The Grey Album” (Blooms-
bury, 2014), Music, Radio and the Public Sphere (Palgrave, 2012), and Pop Idols and
Pirates (Ashgate, 2008).
American Music Winter 2015
© 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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442 Fairchild
such a derelict state as was often suggested in this period: headphone

sales and performing rights revenues both hit all-time highs in 2010–11.
In 2011 one major royalty collector said simply, “More music is being con-
sumed today than ever before.”4 Even the music industry’s own numbers
have told a different story, as have some of the music industry’s highest
profile successes of the first ten or so years of the new century. There is
simply a wide range of facts that cannot be easily incorporated into the
death-rattle narrative some quarters of the industry have pursued for
so long.
These apparent contradictions strongly point to the need for a more
detailed reconsideration of the period in which the future of the music
industry seemed most mired in a lethal crisis, from about 1999 to 2010 or
so, by placing these years in the larger historical trajectory of the period
from 1982 to 2012. There are three broad tasks pursued here in service
of this reconsideration.
First, we need a more lucid understanding of how the music industry
has worked to adapt to the digital economy in music. While this period
of time is replete with reluctant, halting efforts that were laced with
some impressive failures, several of which are detailed below, the causes
of those failures need to be more widely understood.5 Some influential
figures within the music industry were adapting to a digital economy
in music both conceptually and practically far earlier than many might
have suspected and with a degree of prescience rarely ascribed to their
industry as a whole. This was especially true in relation to digital stream-
ing services.
Second, we need a clearer understanding of what people meant when
they said that the music industry was “dying.” Clearly, few, if any,
commentators thought the music industry would no longer be able to
make money from the experience of music. The more salient questions
were about how to make money from music in a context of increasing
media saturation and technological change. Specifically, it needs to be
acknowledged that a very carefully restricted definition of “the music
industry” was crafted by a few of this industry’s dominant entities to
reflect a similarly circumscribed focus on album sales as the sole pub-
lic measure of the industry’s overall health. In short, for the big play-
ers in the music industry, as album sales fell, the health of “the music
industry” did too. While this formulation was clearly a rhetorical gam-
bit designed to most effectively put the antipiracy case to the public, it
also happened to exclude from serious consideration one of the music
industry’s most undeniable successes in this period: music-based reality
television. Importantly, when considered within the broader corporate
strategic landscape within which the entertainment industry as a whole
was operating at that time, there was some form of truth to the claim.
There remain persistent barriers to entry into the music industry despite

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Crowds, Clouds, and Idols 443
the significant change in its technological base. It is precisely these bar-

riers that are largely responsible for the continued dominance of a small
number of corporations over most sales of recorded music and the small
number of artists whose recordings make up the vast majority of those
sales, regardless of how reduced overall sales figures may have been.
Further, despite much confident prognostication, the fabled “long-tail”
market of the “new” music industry simply had not emerged by 2012.6
Therefore, the politics and rhetoric surrounding the sales of recorded
music are central to this time period.
Third, we need to more fully understand the incontrovertible successes
produced in this period, most notably, music-based reality television, and
the relationship these successes have to the larger changes in the music
industry, especially the advent of music streaming services. We need a
much broader understanding of why a long-standing phenomenon such
as music-based reality television could have thrived at the exact same
time as the most dire claims of disaster but only rarely be recognized as
a conceptual, strategic, or structural model for the future of this indus-
try. In the final section of this article, we will see how music-based real-
ity television and contemporary streaming services both grew from the
same conceptual and strategic soil. Specifically, both phenomena were
made possible by the shift to a music industry primarily concerned with
managing and profiting from its immense stores of intellectual property
in a global economy marked by cheap, easy-to-source labor, pervasive
mobile and digital consumption, outsourced production of content, and
the exponentially increased size of its potential markets.
My primary goal is to extract from these points a more precise recog-
nition of the continuities exhibited by central, important, and influential
parts of the music industry through the period of its greatest disruption
in recent history. This examination of these continuities is intended to act
as a corrective supplement to the larger, dominant narratives that focus
mostly on disruption and chaos. While the disruptions and upheavals
in the music industry have been explored in impressive and profitable
detail, the continuities in the music industry over this important period
have received far less attention.7 The continuities examined throughout
this article demonstrate that despite the complex forms of change the
music industry has been facing over the period in question, certain key
facts remain stubbornly persistent. First, the same small number of large
corporations has maintained a substantial range of power and influence
over the global music industry. Second, despite the obvious turmoil they
have faced, these entities have managed to continue pursuing the same
narrow range of interests and objectives in order to maintain that power.
Third, over the same period, roughly the same small percentage of artists
still managed to take the lion’s share of music sales despite the radical
opening up of technological and economic access to new, cheaper, and

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444 Fairchild
better means of distribution.8 We need to work toward some understand-

ing of why these facts might persist.
Presented below is a wide-ranging compilation of evidence to account
for the above-noted points of continuity within the turmoil of this period.
The most important of these has been the music industry’s continuing
ability to assemble the kinds of social and economic relationships that
allow it to create a mass audience, a context in which that audience can
find satisfying ways to consume music, and convince enough people that
what they were experiencing was worthwhile enough to do so repeatedly.
The music industry’s main way of doing this remains the exploitation of
the perceived benefits of the experience of music, or what some scholars
have called its “affordances,” to create various kinds of social, cultural,
and economic relationships with as many consumers as possible and to
maintain these relationships as long as possible.9 The main actors in the
music industry—especially big labels such as Sony/BMG, Universal,
and the Warner Music Group—have long used the dynamic relation-
ship between the emotional and social investment most of us make in
music to extract financial gain from our experience of it. What is of most
interest here is how the dynamic relationships between these various
social and economic relationships have evolved in recent decades. From
the early to mid-1980s onward, a steadily decreasing number of large
corporations increasingly dominated the music industry. They deliber-
ately worked to constrain the options available for the exploitation of
the experience of music down to one: the full-length album on compact
disc. Yet there were several important countervailing forces that emerged
in this period as well. The ways and means through which music was
being experienced were proliferating, becoming more numerous in both
technological form and geographic spread. Whether through film, televi-
sion, radio, mobile phones, or the Internet, the size and scope of potential
markets for recorded music grew to unprecedented size. This trajectory
has culminated in the more or less ubiquitous availability of recorded
music in the world’s largest and most lucrative markets for it, creating
both unavoidable crises and myriad opportunities. On the one hand,
the music industry can now reach more people more immediately than
ever. On the other, the shape and character of many of those connections
largely transcend the kinds of tangible transactions the music industry
depended on until the mid-1990s, provoking the lengthy crisis that has
only recently begun to abate.10
The dynamic relationship between these two sets of forces evolved
over the period from 1982 to 2012. It is clear that, from the mid-1980s for-
ward, the economic basis of the primary relationship between the music
industry and consumers on which its success depended for decades was
one in which consumers bought and possessed what the music industry
produced through reasonably tangible transactions, such as buying 45s,

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LPs, or CDs. Further, the few dominant players in the music industry
focused most intently on increasing album sales through the 1980s and
1990s. However, the social and economic relationships that formed the
basis of the music industry’s continued existence have always acted in
tandem with social and economic relationships in which the music indus-
try either produced or exploited various experiential contexts for music
in which the consumer participates as part of a longer-term, more habit-
ual social relationship, such as that offered through radio or television.
Through the comparative analysis of digital music streaming services
and music-based reality television shows that concludes this article, it
is clear that one of the most important aspects of this period of crisis for
the music industry has been the rapid evolution of the dynamic relation-
ship between these complex, varied, co-mingled, social, and economic
relationships. Music streaming and music-based reality television bear
remarkable and telling similarities distinctly well suited to the emergence
of a “new” music industry.
The exploitation of the dynamic relationship between selling tangi-
ble products by using various venues for experiencing music has deep
historical roots. Music has always been right on the cusp of develop-
ments in new media, whether we are talking about the printing press,
sound recording, radio, film, television, or digital media. Yet within the
well-known series of conflicts and crises over new technologies in the
music industry since before the introduction of sound recording, one key
thread in these contests has persisted. The experience of music and the
exploitation of this experience through the production and possession
of discrete artifacts is plainly inseparable from the kinds of relationships
created by the far less tangible complex of social rituals and experiential
circumstances always occasioned by music. It is the affordances of these
circumstances, such as the endlessly varied forms of social connection,
imaginative response, and emotional sustenance, that the experience of
music provides, that the music industry needs to link to more immedi-
ately tangible transactions in order to survive.11
We can see the dynamic relationship between these two kinds of social
and economic relationships being used to contest the character of the
music industry at several key turns in the past hundred years or so. There
have been repeated and dramatic shifts in the relationship between the
production of musical products to be possessed by consumers and the
exploitation of the experience of music both as an end in itself and as
an enticement to buy other things. Throughout the last century, music
has been immediately and intimately allied with the advent of every
major new form of audiovisual media as part of a larger experiential
enticement into new forms of social, cultural, and economic connec-
tion.12 In this respect, it should be obvious that the music industry has
been enthusiastically and aggressively insinuating itself into more and

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446 Fairchild
more areas of social life for well over a century and has often done so
with extraordinary success. The complex dynamic interaction between
the kinds of relationships enacted by the production and possession of
music in some material form and those produced by experience and
habit has been the underlying force in the development of nearly every
form of contemporary media through which we consume music.
One of the main reasons the music industry hasn’t died through any
of the preceding crises and transitions brought about by new forms of
media is that enough parts of it have remained reasonably capable of
doing what they have always done to survive: muster up a mass audi-
ence by giving them convenient, satisfying ways to consume music and
making a good number of those people feel that what they were con-
suming was worthwhile enough to do so over and over again. Despite
the often radical changes to these tasks in the last decade or so, they
have still managed to persist. Most recently, it has been digital music
streaming and music-based reality television that have provided the
environments in which the sorts of crowds the music industry thinks it
needs to survive can be assembled. For better or worse, these are two
of the mediums that are most obviously pointing us forward into what
remains a murky future.
In 1999 Reebee Garofalo presented a comprehensive analysis of the
underlying forces that shaped the political economy of the music indus-
try across the length and breadth of the twentieth century. One of his
main conclusions was that in order to understand the evolution of the
music industry across this time period one had to definitively link the
complex interactions of the broader developments in cultural produc-
tion and expression to the intentions and actions of those with the tech-
nological, political, and economic power to most effectively direct or
exploit those developments.13 One of the main goals here is to build on
Garofalo’s framework by relying on more recent work in order to the
bring the analysis of the same forces underlying the evolution of the
music industry between about 1982 and 2012 to the fore. This article is
meant to point us toward an enhanced understanding of the continuities
exhibited in the music industry across the last two decades, not just a
reiteration of the obvious turbulence and disruption. Before this, how-
ever, it is important to recount how easy assumptions of music industry
recalcitrance in the face of overwhelming technological change are not
the simple, clear stories they are often purported to be.
The Consensus That Wasn’t

In 1999, 2001, and 2002 four mostly unrelated analytical pieces appeared
that set about describing the unenviable economics of selling music in
our soon-to-be-digital world. These articles were quite distinct from

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one another in form, source, and methodology. However, when taken

together they collectively present a reasonably insightful set of param-
eters for the survival of this “dying” industry. We can see that they estab-
lished the outlines of the conceptual framework for a good deal of what
has happened in the music industry since about 2002 without necessarily
claiming to do so. Specifically, we can extract from these articles a clear
understanding of the fact that some within the music industry recog-
nized three crucial dynamics of the shift to digital: (1) the profoundly
disruptive force of free exchange online, (2) the basic resources the music
industry could not abandon despite the acknowledged presence of this
force, and (3) the strategies the music industry thought it would have to
pursue in order to perpetuate its dominance over the production, distri-
bution, and sale of music into a suddenly unreliable future. This analysis
is meant to show that these articles are emblematic of the fact that most
of the major ideas about the various potential futures facing the music
industry that gradually came to the fore by about 2010–11 or so had long
been present within or around the music industry. Further, taken as a
group, they clearly show that it was the dynamic relationship between
new experiential contexts for music and the music industry’s ability to
economically exploit these contexts that was most at stake in this period.
The first two of these articles appeared a few months before Napster
went online. They were both published in Wired on April 4, 1999, and
featured industry consultant Jim Griffin, often said to be one of the more
perceptive observers of the music industry’s transition to digital.14 Grif-
fin clearly recognized the multifarious power of an open Internet. Rather
than counsel resistance, Griffin advised accommodation. He argued that
mp3 downloading, while not containable, was mostly a way station
on the road to a music industry defined by flat-fee, subscription-based
audio streaming services. Against the prevailing hysteria, he argued that
the “economic model behind streaming and ubiquitous access obviates
piracy. Intellectual property gains value as it is widely distributed, much
like television or radio.”15 Like many observers, Griffin recognized that
the trajectory of the Internet was toward increasing speed, bandwidth,
and mobility of access, which meant that, given that the value of digital
content is “plummeting towards zero . . . unless we stop letting people
listen to music, we have no way to control the quantity and the destina-
tion of those digits.”16 Griffin, like a few others in and around the music
industry, saw that industry’s future as a content aggregator funneling
music to consumers “whether from portable devices, home stereos, or
desktop PCs. By aggregating content, the major labels could offer music
services that let consumers customize channels in whatever fashion they
like, and pay a monthly, all-you-can-eat fee similar to the broadcast mod-
els used by AOL and HBO.” According to Griffin, “the distribution chain
[was] being wasted on delivering digits on a plastic disc. . . . Once freed

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up, we can sell items associated with music that have higher margins.
It’s actually a better business to not sell the content. Selling items associ-
ated with the music is where it’s at.”17 As we will see toward the end of
this article, these points coincide almost precisely with those forms of
music-based reality television that would emerge starting in 1999.
It is easy to read these kinds of comments now and take them for
granted. But in 1999, two years before the iPod and eight years before the
iPhone made their now-storied appearances on the consumer market, it
probably would not have been unreasonable to see Griffin’s blunt claims
as mere speculation, given the range of things that would have to hap-
pen for the world he imagined to come into being. There are two areas
of interest here: the practices the major labels would have to defend to
maintain their dominance over the global music market and those they
would have to reinvent or refashion to do so. An exemplary study pub-
lished in 2001 by Martin Kretschmer and colleagues explained in detail
what they were trying to defend.18 Drawing from qualitative interviews
with a substantial range of music industry executives, musicians, band
managers, publishers, and those working in copyright agencies, interna-
tional trade organizations, and other relevant industries, the researchers
extracted a set of defensive strategies the music industry had already
been using in dealing with the shift to digital. First, the major record
labels refused to license their catalogs to third parties offering digital
distribution. The goal was to avoid creating a new market that “canni-
balized” the existing one.19 As suggested later, cannibalization is not the
straightforward issue it might seem to be. Second, they were working
to assert legal and technological control over their content.20 This was
accomplished through a largely successful campaign to transform intel-
lectual property law, a campaign that preceded the turn-of-the-century
piracy crises by many years.21 Third, they were working to establish new
kinds of relationships with various parts of the media, computer, and
Internet industries while still trying to maintain something approach-
ing a dominant position within these relationships. Finally, they tried
to develop their own “procedural competencies in the new technology”
and thereby establish their own brands “as the music navigator of the
online environment.”22 While the results of these efforts before 2012 were
decidedly mixed, the researchers accurately concluded that “we should
expect that initially the established players would act defensively while
new patterns of dis-and reintermediation emerge.”23
These new patterns of intermediation were foreseen the next year by
someone who didn’t actually think they would eventuate. In an article
that appeared in Wired in 2002 under the somewhat alarmist headline
“The Year the Music Died,” Charles Mann of the Atlantic told readers
very plainly what practices he thought the major labels needed to change
to sustain their market power. In the midst of a good deal of sharply

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worded analysis, Mann laid out his inadvertent master plan: “To leap
the hurdles posed by digital technology, the industry must find a way
to make money selling downloaded music on a per-track basis . . . slash
recording costs with cheap software and hardware, and change artists’
contracts to reflect the new economic reality. Doing any one of these
will be next to impossible. Doing all of them would be one of the more
amazing turnarounds in business history.”24 To do this, Mann argued, the
industry had to “make file-swapping more difficult, and legitimate online
services easier and less expensive.”25 Mann recognized the obvious need
on the part of the music industry to establish strong relationships with the
computer and Internet industries, or what he called at the time, “friends
it didn’t have.”26 As I will show throughout the remainder of this article,
if we take all four of these articles together, they describe much of what
has happened in the music industry between about 2002 and 2012. As
I show, while the music industry conceded significant ground on some
issues, such as licensing its catalogs to third parties, it has still been able
to exert the very powerful leverage of intellectual property ownership
within its new alliances to extract some very significant advantages.
There are two key caveats for what follows. First, the simple appear-
ance of these ideas and arguments should not attribute any degree of
inevitability to them, nor should we necessarily accord their authors
with any unusual degree of foresight. These ideas were not nearly as
isolated and contrarian as they might appear to us today. Second, there
are no predictions as to the longevity of the efforts and agendas these
ideas in the near or long-term future set out below. Instead, we need to
understand why these ideas were borne out to the extent that they were
in the period examined here because they point to a necessary reassess-
ment of the dynamics between the different types of social and economic
relationships between the music industry and consumers under consid-
eration here.
Persistent Barriers to Entry

There were two issues that dominated the discussion in the literature
examining the often painful transition to digital in the music indus-
try. One important theme surrounded the future of the music industry
between about 1999 and 2012 or so. There was a broad consensus that
the Internet would inevitably create a music industry defined by new
kinds of “direct” relationships between musicians and fans. This was
widely thought to create the conditions for a more diverse and varied
industry less reliant on a small number of superstar artists producing
massive hits to fund the rest of the industry.27 The second, which followed
directly from this, was the issue of album and single sales and the ways
in which these may or may not have changed since their decline began

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in 2001. In both cases, we can see that the terms “music industry” and
“dying” often had very particular and very narrow meanings in these
debates. Specifically, the term “music industry” was most often used
synonymously with the small number of dominant players in the global
music market. The term “dying” was used mostly to describe the drop-
off in album sales by these same dominant players that began around
2001. As we will see here, there are some very specific reasons for this.28
The idea that the Internet would, by its very architecture, transform
most social and economic relationships was by no means limited to the
music industry. It was part of a much larger and very influential set of
ideas put forward by a small collection of people who, regarding them-
selves as countercultural figures, argued for the great “leveling” power
of the Internet. This leveling would mean that the state would mostly
vanish, and the corporation would implode. Civil society would blos-
som, and centralized authorities of all kinds would atrophy.29 All of this
would happen specifically because the liberated and autonomous indi-
vidual would be able to negotiate with large institutions from a position
of equality; the Internet would gradually wear the power of these insti-
tutions down. We were repeatedly told that all musicians would really
need was a small group of devoted adherents whose support they could
leverage into the various forms of emotional, monetary, and material
investment musicians needed to make a good living without relying on
intermediaries to exert that leverage for them.30
However, while it has clearly become much easier to record and offer
music to a potential mass audience, this has simply not led to “direct”
and persistently profitable relationships between most musicians and
their fans. Several traditional and persistent barriers to entry into the
music industry still appear to exert a powerful influence. The term “bar-
rier to entry” is used to denote precisely the lack of sustained profitabil-
ity experienced by many despite increased access to larger numbers of
consumers at lower costs. As Kretschmer and colleagues noted, these
barriers have been numerous. One is the “complex, capital-intensive
logistics of an international distribution network that must cope with
sudden changes in demand.”31 Second are the huge marketing costs
involved not just with bringing music to market but with making it
stick when it gets there. Indeed, the logistics of this can be so daunting
that the “winner-take-all” market in music in which “nobody knows the
reasons for success” remains heavily laden with serious risk and almost
shocking levels of failure.32 Finally, the music industry’s aggressive if not
ruthless management of intellectual property “allows the hedging of risks
in a way unavailable to new entrants focusing on the promotion of new
material.”33 These factors have led many independent record labels onto
the rocks in the past.34 While the availability of various online services or
devices was said to significantly mitigate or even eliminate these risks,
this has not happened, at least not yet.35

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There are several key forms of continuity within the music industry
that show us that these barriers to entry are still exerting a consequential
force in the market for music. Despite all of the obvious tumult in recent
years, there are a few sales and revenue numbers that show that some
very important things haven’t really changed very much. The first form
of continuity is the fact that the sales numbers described below are a
direct consequence of the fact that the entertainment industry, of which
the music industry is a comparatively small part, has continued its multi-
decade trend toward industrial consolidation and global market expan-
sion. This has resulted in a smaller number of larger corporations that
own and control an increasing majority of the companies the make, sell,
and profit from recorded music. In 1996 six big corporations controlled
about 80 percent of the global music market.36 By 2012 there were three
even bigger corporations that controlled a slightly larger percentage of
the total global sales of recorded music.37
Another result of this long-term trend toward consolidation has been
how familiar certain types of changes in the long-term numbers for
the sales and value of recorded music have been since the early 1980s.
Despite the dire claims of the big labels, they really weren’t doing that
badly, all things considered, even as late as about 2003–4. Of course, it
was around this point that overall album sales began their precipitous
decline to about half their former value. It is helpful to understand these
changes in their larger historical trajectory. After the global recession
of the late 1970s, the music industry began to recover by about mid-
1982. The introduction and industrially enforced dominance of the CD,
starting in 1983, as well as a selective but significant global economic
expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, produced a nearly unbroken upward
curve of sales value of recorded music that lasted from about late 1982
until 2001. After 1986 the numbers were better than anyone had ever
seen. Simply put, if you counted what was being sold and how much
money was being made from selling it, the value of recorded music
increased steadily for a very long time.38 As Billboard noted in 2004, the
“industry began a run of unprecedented growth in 1986, according to
the Recording Industry Assn. of America. That streak came to a halt in
2001 when album sales were off 2.9%.”39 A lot was made of the fact that
this was the first decline in album sales since the CD was introduced.40
The lobbyists representing the music industry claimed that piracy was
to blame, somewhat hysterically estimating that low-cost CD-R burners
had allowed 640 million pirated discs to be sold worldwide. When one
added the IFPI’s estimates of illicit cassettes into the mix, the number of
pirate “sales” jumped to 1.8 billion, a number that was far bigger than
all worldwide sales of legal copies of all recorded music.41 Yet despite all
this alleged lawlessness, there are many credible arguments that the size
of what some analysts call the “broader music industry” has still been
expanding since 2001, even as album sales have declined dramatically.42

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As noted in the introduction, there were many contending forces run-

ning into each other in this period. New technology was only one. On
the one hand, the global market in music was growing significantly
throughout this period and becoming much more immediately accessible
to its biggest players. In sum, the small number of larger corporations
that dominated the music industry could make more money by selling
more music to more people in more ways in 1999 than they could in 1989.
On the other hand, this also meant that more music was being used in
more profitable ways in more places than had ever been the case before.
This fact served to link the music industry more and more directly with
other parts of the global entertainment industry, many parts of which
had priorities that contradicted an increasingly singular focus on sell-
ing full-length albums. Therefore, while this long upward trend in the
expansion of the global market for music might seem to contradict the
often apocalyptic rhetoric that has surrounded the music industry, the
important thing to remember about any public accounting of the health
of “the music industry” is that it was far too often exclusively about
“sales of recorded music,” that is, the sales numbers produced by the
three or four most powerful of the major record labels that routinely
refer to themselves, inaccurately, as “the music industry.”43
Specifically, despite the rapid proliferation of the forms, sources, and
channels that let us consume music, a lot of things got lost or marginal-
ized in the process of counting and reporting on the resulting sales num-
bers.44 Until very recently, the numbers used to measure the health of
“the music industry” provided by those who claimed to do the counting
most reliably specifically excluded revenues from live performance, mer-
chandising, digital streaming, publishing royalties, public performance
royalties, and any sales revenue related to things like ringtones or the
use of songs in video games, television shows, or films.45 The numbers
said to tally sales of albums and singles also exclude a lot of independent
producers, distributors, retailers, and often whole countries or even entire
geographic regions thought to be too small to matter in the big picture.
Most measures purporting to assess the state of the music industry do
so mostly by defining the term “sales of recorded music” as the sales of
albums produced by record labels owned by the main conglomerates
sold in major retail chains along with a few cautious estimates about
the kind of trade some independent record labels and retailers might
be doing. Simply put, the term “music industry” has often been a very
selective, even speculative term that has had very particular meanings,
in this case denoting a very small range of activities conducted by only
the most powerful entities.
Perhaps just as importantly, the often highly rhetorical parsing of
music industry sales numbers has most often been used to express a
fundamental distinction in the market for music that the most powerful

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entities in that market had no choice but to emphasize: the importance of

market value over sales numbers. It is this necessary preference that has
defined the market in music since the recovery of the early 1980s, after
which most of the record labels responsible for most sales began to be
incorporated into the larger entertainment industry and the values and
directives of the form of global capitalism commonly referred to as “neo-
liberal globalization” that came to dominate the world economy between
the mid-1980s and the present.46 It is this distinction that has caused one
of the most consequential problems the music industry faced in recent
decades: the exclusive embrace of the album to the detriment, exclusion,
or even wholesale destruction of competing formats. As should become
clear in the next section, the increasingly exclusive focus on album sales
was part of the quest for ever-rising market value, not just increased sales
numbers. The treatment of the single format by the music industry from
about the early 1990s until the early 2000s is a case in point in the effort
to enhance market value over sales numbers, an effort that is ongoing.
It was during this period that the term “dying” became almost entirely
synonymous with collapsing album sales.
Cue: Dramatic Interlude

As noted above, the gradual intermingling and collision between a radi-
cally expanding global market for music and the many competing uses
for music within that larger market provided both opportunities and
problems for the dominant players in the music industry. On the one
hand, these large corporations were the most suited to quickly adapt to
and exploit broader changes in the global economy. On the other, that
new global economy was far more crowded and competitive than those
that preceded it. These forces came to a head with the advent of mass
illegal downloading and file sharing starting in 1999, a historical moment
when technological change briefly outpaced everyone. Yet despite the
underlying changes in the market for music, which largely preceded the
technological upheavals of recent years, certain key facts have persisted.
The same small number of corporations continued to dominate the global
market in recorded music, and very small percentages of artists still sold
vastly more than their less financially successful peers.
We will now focus on the two sides of this equation. In the next section,
we will see how the dominant players in the music industry continued
to focus more and more on facilitating the kinds of social and economic
relationships suited to selling ever-increasing numbers of recordings.
Their increased focus on selling full-length albums deliberately crowded
out other options. Specifically, it is important to see that this was a stra-
tegically necessary and not altogether irrational strategy if considered
only within the largely myopic assumptions under which the big players

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in the music industry were operating at the time. However, at the same
time, they were increasingly faced with a broad range of new environ-
ments and delivery systems to experience that music. Simply put, there
were huge new vistas of musical experience becoming available through
new forms of media that eventually transcended and became mostly
detached from the sale of tangible physical artifacts. In the final section of
this article, it should become clear that music-based reality television and
digital streaming services were aptly suited to these new environments
of experiencing music through television, film, mobile phones, and the
Internet. Some looked at these new soundscapes and saw nothing but
piracy and vice. Others looked at them as rich new experiential envi-
ronments to exploit. It is the balance and intermingling between these
two understandings of the potential economic exploitation of musical
experience that is central to a clear understanding of the recent history
of the music industry.
Selling the Album, Deleting the Single

In the 1990s the dominant players in the music industry worked dil-
igently and assiduously to wipe out a staple of low-cost music con-
sumption, the single.47 There are three key issues to take into account
to understand this quixotic attempt at planned obsolescence. First, the
most important consequence of the effort to eliminate the single was,
at the time, a widely recognized shift to illegal downloads by those
said to be uninterested in buying whole albums. Second, the remarkable
persistence in the character of certain specific sales curves and patterns
throughout the 1990s and early 2000s suggests that the issue of “canni-
balization” may not be as simple as is often claimed. If we look closely
at the ways in which music actually sold in this period, we will see very
clearly that the extraordinary profits garnered from the dominance of
sales of full albums on CD in the mid-to late nineties were profoundly
anomalous. Third, it is very important to note that this was a largely
necessary anomaly. The one factor almost all sources analyzing the many
failures of the music industry in this period have not acknowledged is
that these corporations are legally bound to do everything in their power
to expand their market value above all other considerations.48 This is a
bedrock principle of the systems of corporate law and governance that
define neoliberal globalization, that set of economic values and goals that
have dominated the global economy for the past several decades. These
principles defined the response of the music industry to new entrants
in the market for music, and they inspired the seemingly quixotic cam-
paigns to stamp out all formats for music consumption other than the
full album on compact disc.
Singles have been consistently and remarkably popular for decades all
over the world because they are cheap, durable, and attractive.49 Despite

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this, the three or four major players in the music industry listed above
have repeatedly tried to stamp them out.50 They have done so for two
reasons. First, obviously, albums are worth a lot more than singles. More
importantly, a string of multiplatinum albums will contribute far more
to the perception of the market value of a company than any number of
hit singles. The effort at building market value, or the perceived over-
all value of a company and its assets, is an ongoing effort sometimes
undertaken even in preference to enhancing the sales numbers of what
that company produces. Second, the big labels were afraid of what they
called “cannibalization.” As Billboard explained, “Many label executives
believe singles sales cannibalize album sales, and their companies don’t
issue singles or, if they do, cut them out once a song becomes a hit, with
the hope that fans will buy the album.”51
We can trace the enforced decline of the single back to the early nine-
ties, when most major record labels began deleting singles from their
catalogs as soon as a song became a hit, a practice designed to force
album sales upward. The next logical step was to stop producing any
singles at all for most album releases.52 The very small numbers of singles
that were released were produced to try to boost early chart positions,
with labels often deliberately selling them so cheaply that they were
unprofitable.53 These convoluted tactics appear to have worked, but only
briefly. In 1995 the IFPI claimed that “worldwide sales at retail values
were worth $39.7 billion,” a jump of nearly 10 percent from the previous
year. This growth was fueled by the strong growth in the sales of albums
on CD.54 Despite the fact that the growth of sales for singles remained a
perplexingly strong “phenomenon in the big music markets with sales
in Japan, the U.S., the U.K., Germany and France accounting for 90% of
the global market,” the practice of deleting singles only become more
scrupulous.55 We can see this clearly in the sales numbers that came from
Nielsen-Soundscan research undertaken at the end of 1999. In that year,
in the dominant US market, new hit albums on CD were the driving
force of the continuing expansion of the market in recorded music. This
jump in market value came directly at the expense of competing formats.
Cassettes were deliberately consigned to obsolescence despite strong,
consistent, global demand for them both as singles and as albums.56 Sin-
gles in all formats experienced a “precipitous drop” in numbers, which,
unsurprisingly, “industry observers” attributed to “a reluctance on the
part of the major record companies to release singles.”57
Not everyone agreed with the practice. According to Billboard, some
“retailers argue that a low-priced music configuration is essential if the
industry wants to encourage young consumers to buy music,” and “since
labels mostly refuse to release hit songs on the format, that group is turn-
ing to the internet to download pirated copies of those tunes or asking
friends to burn the more costly albums that contain them.”58 One reporter
for Billboard summed up the late 1990s music market very succinctly,

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if simplistically, when he said that “pushing bundled products down

the throats of consumers in the form of bloated, overpriced CDs, plus
the deletion of physical singles, is what drove the revolution in song
downloading.”59
By start of 2002 the single was meant to be a nostalgic remnant of a
bygone era. The single was pronounced dead after falls of 23.8 percent
in 1999, 36 percent in 2000, and 41 percent in 2001, ultimately landing on
the lowest number of singles sold since the early 1950s.60 Despite half-
hearted efforts by some to revive the format, such as five-and six-track
“singles” sold at higher prices or rereleases of “classic tracks” intended
to avoid cannibalization, the matter appeared to be closed. The final
push to bury the single once and for all began in 1999. The timing was
telling, as the music industry unwittingly picked what was probably the
absolute worst moment in history to try and finish the job; it was the
year Napster appeared, and illegal downloads of single tracks began to
surge in an unprecedented way.
The intense focus on selling albums through the promotion of one
or two hit songs resulted in a hugely important continuity between the
“old” music industry and the “new” one, an impressively persistent
type of sales curve that remained an embedded characteristic of the
mainstream music industry to at least 2012. This sales curve is defined
by a vertical axis that exhibits a death-defying drop from the upper left
corner of the graph, in which a small number of albums sell a very large
number of copies, all the way down close to the bottom of the graph,
where a very long “tail” begins to stretch off into the nether regions of
the horizontal axis all the way to the lower right-hand corner of the
graph. At that end, a very large number of albums sell very few copies.
Since at least the mid-1990s and possibly earlier, Nielsen-Soundscan has
reported that sales figures for the largest record companies have shown
that a very small number of albums accounted for a huge chunk of total
sales. In 1995 0.2 percent of all the albums that were available for sale
that year tallied up about 40 percent of all sales. The next 2 percent of
albums accounted for 32.6 percent of sales, and all the remaining sales
were spread across the remaining album releases; these releases num-
bered over 140,000.61 Over 90 percent of the albums available that year
sold fewer than 5,000 copies. We can find similar numbers in subsequent
years as well.62 In 1997 through 1999, the percentage of sales clocked up
by a decreasing number of hit albums had ticked up even further by
1999.63 In 2000, even though the industry produced twice as many albums
as in the previous year, still only 0.35 percent of all of the 288,592 titles
being tracked accounted for 56 percent of the total market.64 We can find
the same story more recently, as just over 400 titles out of a total of the
33,443 new albums released in 2002 accounted for about 72 percent of
total sales.65 In 2005 about 0.7 percent of an even larger total number of

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new releases accounted for about the same percentage of sales.66 Finally,
in 2011, out of the more than 75,000 new releases noted across the whole
music industry, only 1,500 titles, or 2 percent of the total, accounted for
over 90 percent of total sales.67
Remarkably, this sales curve persisted even after the market in digi-
tal downloads was established. As Billboard calmly pointed out in 2011,
“Continuing a years-long trend, the top digital sellers in the United States
are grabbing an increased share of sales, thanks to a surprisingly vibrant
digital market.”68 Interestingly, it appears that this sales curve is not lim-
ited to music people buy. Those who studied download patterns on peer-
to-peer networks thought they may have found a very similar curve. As
the researchers note, when comparing legal sales and file trading, “both
legal and illegal music consumption patterns are tucked up against the
bottom left axis, contrary to Long Tail–like expectations, suggesting that
much of the volume is concentrated amongst a small proportion of the
available tracks.”69
Despite the massive changes in the market for music, this resolute fea-
ture of that market persisted even when many other important variables
changed dramatically. For example, the average number of new releases
more than doubled between 2004 and 2011. While some of the increase
has been attributable to a greater number of independent releases, the
major record labels have increased their output more than commensu-
rately.70 Also, one of the biggest changes over the last ten years is the
sheer number of songs now available digitally. According to many influ-
ential digital luminaries, this expansion of the available range of music
is precisely why we were supposed to be seeing a very different kind of
music market, one defined by its “long tail.” On the sales graph that I
described above, the massive downward curve should have become less
steep as top sellers accounted for a smaller percentage of total sales, and
the tail should have gotten “thicker” as the sales numbers for all those
many, many titles on the lower reaches of the graph rose. While there has
been some evidence that shows that the percentage of albums bought
digitally has ceded some ground to the “tail” albums, small numbers of
hit albums still dominate in roughly the same proportions they did in
1999, and hit singles are even more dominant than ever; very little has
changed in terms of general ratios of sales of so-called physical goods
(i.e., actual CDs).71 As Billboard tersely concluded, “Labels have con-
tinued to focus on finding hits for a reason: It’s almost impossible for
them to make any real money any other way.”72 For artists, the digital
panacea has been slow to materialize, because “although niche titles
collectively account for a greater percentage of sales, no individual one
accrued any meaningful income—and few have received the attention
their creators would need to perform or sell merchandise at a time when
those revenue streams are becoming more important.”73 We can again

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see that the dominant market position of the big three translates into
some advantage in terms of getting people’s attention and turning that
attention into money. While there still may be a “long tail” revolution
lurking out there somewhere, the fact remains that it simply hadn’t hap-
pened by 2012.74
One of the main reasons for these particular forms of continuity in
the market for music is that the market in music was and continues to
be operated as a cartel. This is not a metaphor. It is the actual descrip-
tion given to the music industry multiple times by entities such as the
European Union, the US Federal Trade Commission, and the attorneys
general of forty-two American states, among others.75 Like all cartels, the
goal is to control prices by colluding to restrict competition. The sales
curve I have been describing is, in part, the result of this. There are other
consequences of this in the music industry. They are numerous and point
to some of the equally significant problems that have dogged the music
industry for years, beyond file sharing.
In 2007 Billboard published the results of one of its regular analytical
forays into the numbers tallied up by Nielsen-Soundscan. Its goal was
to track the potential for the development and nurturing of new artists,
a feature of the music industry many thought to be on the wane since
the late 1990s. The situation was clear, according to industry insiders:
“Record companies no longer have the time, the staffing and the money
to provide that infrastructure around an artist early on.”76 But it was the
reasons given that were striking. Piracy barely got a parenthetical refer-
ence. The primary concern was the consolidation of the radio broadcast-
ing and music retailing industries, which followed along the same lines
as the consolidation of the music and entertainment industries. This con-
solidation has been widely recognized to have constricted the outlets for
new and emerging artists more significantly than any other factor in this
period.77 There were simply fewer people in a smaller number of larger
and more powerful corporations who decided what music made it onto
the radio or which CDs made it onto the shelves of their stores or onto
the pages of their websites. This meant that those larger, more powerful
entities had a disproportionate influence over the rest of the market, or
what those in the music industry call “market moving share.”78 If a new
release was not a more or less immediate success, it was less likely that
it would ever break through. Within the big record companies, consoli-
dation meant that fewer and fewer people were available to promote,
distribute, and push an increasing number of new releases. In addition
to the increasing mass of music now available, there is also an increasing
number of other things consumers are doing with their time and money,
from seemingly infinite numbers of television channels, DVDs, video
games, and websites.79
Remarkably, despite the seemingly profound shift to legal digital
downloads, many of the same tactics and strategies persist. The fact

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that the main players in the music industry have actually had some
success with them is notable. Specifically, the underlying, and seem-
ingly counterintuitive, preference of expanding the market value of a
company, even if this means deliberately depressing sales numbers, is an
ongoing phenomenon that does “work” at least to some limited degree.
For example, when the major record labels licensed Apple to sell their
catalogs through the iTunes Store starting in 2003, they still managed to
maintain significant leverage despite giving up a fair amount of techno-
logical and marketing control. The leverage the dominant players in the
music industry exercised was the fact that they owned all of the music
Apple wanted to put up for sale. They also had almost all the artists
Apple wanted to promote under contract. This leverage also took the
form of the extensive and increasingly draconian legal control the music
industry exerted over their music, which still gave them some semblance
of influence over how that music was used by other major players in the
market. The major music labels began to exercise that control a few years
after the deal with Apple was completed. From the start, the big record
labels complained that they weren’t making enough money, despite the
immediate, sustained success of the iTunes Store, and despite claiming
forty-seven cents of every sale.80 Further, the labels continually pushed
for variable pricing in order to charge more for new releases and hits and
to discount slower-selling tracks. Of course, there were familiar reasons
for the music industry’s years of nagging for variable pricing. First, and
most obviously, they expected that selling some tracks for $1.29 instead
of $0.99 (USD) would not depress sales enough to cost them money. It
looks like they were probably right.81 As Billboard noted, “In the six weeks
after iTunes introduced variable pricing . . . [c]onsumer spending on the
catalog tracks dropped about 2% and net revenue to labels rose around
6%.”82 In short, the major record labels were happy to sell less music for
more money to fewer people. They were also hoping that higher track
prices would nudge people to buy more albums. It seems pretty clear that
the bet on selling more albums did not pay off.83 There have even been
some dark mutterings about “dynamic pricing” in which prices change
in real time based on some complex measurements of website usage in
order to maximize “the revenue potential for [a] specific product and its
demand in the marketplace.”84
If these complex machinations seem to have a distinct ring of despera-
tion to them, consider the fact that throughout the last century music
has been immediately and intimately allied with the advent of every
new major form of audiovisual media we have collectively experienced
as part of a larger range of new forms of social, cultural, and economic
connection. In short, what these efforts to restrict or control the flow of
music should make obvious is that the music industry has been enthu-
siastically and aggressively “cannibalizing” itself at every turn for well
over a century and has often done so with great success. The complex

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dynamic interaction between the kinds of relationships enacted by the

production and possession of music in some material form and those
produced by experience and habit has been the underlying force in the
development of nearly every form of modern media through which we
consume music. Despite the manifest and seemingly insurmountable
challenges to the familiar ways of doing things, important and influen-
tial players in the music industry persisted with familiar strategies of
market creation and protection. However, we should not simply assume
this is all they were doing. Some parts of the music industry were adapt-
ing with both speed and prescience to the emerging contours of a new
world in media.
Reality Intercedes
Given the changes in the global media landscape between the early
1980s and the present, it should not be surprising that there is another
side to the familiar story of technological upheaval resulting in a dying
industry. Specifically, music-based reality television and digital stream-
ing services are two of the more instructive new forums for the experi-
ence of music that grew dramatically during this period. Importantly,
both music-based reality television and digital music streaming have
enacted dynamic relationships between the production and possession
of music and the habitual experience of it in ways that give us important
examples of how the music industry is surviving. Just as importantly,
both phenomena began before the most difficult period of technologi-
cal change actually hit the big players in the music industry. If we look
back to the criteria for the survival of the music industry set out above,
both music-based reality television and digital streaming satisfy every
single one: each has been built around new alliances with different parts
of the media, computer, and Internet industries; each has made piracy
a marginal concern; each has sold a good deal of music that is already
widely available in multiple forms; each has made profitable use of the
music industry’s existing intellectual property; each has reformulated
the central strictures of artist contracts to manage the major cost center
embodied by those actually making the music; and each has installed its
own brands at the heart of the consumer experience.85 Indeed, television
shows such as American Idol, The Voice, and The X Factor provide a tell-
ing glimpse into the kinds of structural attributes and strategic alliances
a “new” music industry will have to foster to survive. These programs
are owned by what amounts to a management company of the sort that
is hardly unprecedented in the entertainment industry. They are under-
written by investors (hailing from hedge funds most often) and survive
through forging seasonal tactical and strategic alliances with specific
record labels, sponsors, product lines, and television networks. From

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a structural standpoint, they are very similar to those offering music

streaming services. The specific ways in which both music streaming
and music-based reality television have taken advantage of the larger
changes in the music and entertainment industries to thrive can provide
us some insight into how the music industry might survive the continu-
ing upheaval.
First, it is important to understand that music streaming and music-
based reality television were both made conceptually and economically
possible by a profound change in the music industry: its evolution from
an industry concerned primarily with producing and selling recorded
music to an industry that is just as concerned on balance with the exploi-
tation of intellectual property rights. In both cases, music-based real-
ity television and music streaming created and exploited characteristic
ways of managing and profiting from their enormous stores of intellec-
tual property, which allowed both to take advantage of a global econ-
omy marked by cheap, easy-to-source labor, mobile consumption, out-
sourced production of content, and the exponentially increased size of
their potential markets. It has been from this well-established foundation
of aggressive cost and risk management suited to the specific economic
circumstances I have been describing throughout this article that the
sponsors of each phenomenon I am describing here have worked to
successfully exploit the experience of music.
The shift to a music industry based on intellectual property manage-
ment began much earlier than some might have thought. As a fairly com-
prehensive report from 1985 argued, in the mid-1950s “record companies
bought their way into music publishing as a means of securing control
over the various ancillary rights that surround a recording,” and by “the
end of the sixties they had become integrated to such an extent that it
was impossible to untangle their activities.”86 The author then added
rather presciently: “Whatever future emerges, the music industry’s fate
may well be determined by how successfully it manages to lobby gov-
ernments on the matter of copyright reform.”87 As we now know, the
industry has done this very successfully.88 A decisive factor in this shift
of focus to managing intellectual property has been the realignment of
the cost and royalty structures for large swathes of the music industry.
These changes have meant that the costs of licensing songs for wider use
through deals with labels and artists have become increasingly fixed or, at
the very least, far less flexible and therefore far more predictable and thus
less risky. Controlling costs through managed negotiations and contracts
is a notable aspect of both music streaming services and music-based
reality television, both of which rely on mostly fixed costs as an impor-
tant hedge against risk. The major costs of global franchises like American
Idol and The X Factor are straightforwardly managed through compara-
tively formulaic types of sponsorship and traditional advertising, as well

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as somewhat novel iterations of increasingly onerous artist contracts.89

However, licensing rates for new streaming and webcasting services are
increasingly being fixed through high-level negotiations between the
big labels and service providers or by a statutory authority empowered
by government. Thus, it is important to see how the more complicated
financial issues surrounding streaming in particular have been resolved
through the exertion of political clout in negotiated settlements relying
on skills the music industry has honed to a lethal point in recent decades.
This has been especially true in the globally influential US market.
These factors paved the way for the kinds of streaming services we
commonly see today. Digital streaming was accepted both conceptually
and practically within the mainstream of the music industry far earlier
than is usually acknowledged. The first efforts toward creating large-
scale streaming services began as early as 1994–95 with the development
and diffusion of Real Network’s RealAudio tools for webcasting and
podcasts, as well as the all-important legal infrastructure to support
widespread use of these tools.90 As early as 1995 the music industry in
the United States began crafting deals to fix the costs and set out the
legal infrastructure that would allow streaming services to operate on a
mass scale. This infrastructure first took shape through the Digital Per-
formance Rights Act of 1995, which was later supplemented by the more
comprehensive Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. These two
laws established the first performance rights for sound recordings of any
kind in the United States, a major political victory by any standard, and
established the royalty collection organization SoundExchange, which
began to collect and distribute money owed to the owners of sound
recordings by satellite radio services and webcasters in the mid-1990s.91
These sorts of legal mechanisms have generally been spread globally
through regional and bilateral trade negotiations.
One of the main consequences of these laws was to establish the legal
recognition of and distinction between two kinds of streaming services:
on-demand and noninteractive.92 On-demand services are those such
as Spotify that allow users to create playlists or choose which songs to
play, while noninteractive services like Pandora provide audio streams
that are only broadly tailored to a user’s behavior and preferences. Each
type of service pays royalties to labels and artists in different ways to use
their music. On-demand services require voluntary licenses negotiated
directly with copyright holders, while noninteractive services must avail
themselves of compulsory licenses, with rates set by a statutory author-
ity.93 As a condition of the compulsory license, services have to abide by
a clear set of uniform parameters established in 1998 that restrict how
the service provider can present music to the user.94 Services defined as
interactive have much greater latitude, but as one analyst noted, they
also have much higher “transaction costs,” potentially restricting this
market to only a few dominant players.95

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Perhaps the most prominent issue surrounding the introduction of

the many different kinds of streaming services has been the levels of
compensation paid to copyright holders and artists. Given that these
payments are the streaming services’ greatest costs by a wide margin,
there have been protracted negotiations and legal battles between the
major labels and the streaming services over these rates. These negotia-
tions have dwarfed the negotiations over the prices for music down-
loads cited above in terms of both length and intensity.96 As is often the
case, the place of musicians in these new negotiated systems of power
is precarious at best. As one music industry analyst reported eleven
years before these issues began to make headlines, “As more contracts
are being drawn in the Internet age, lawyers working on behalf of the
labels have come up with more rigid and unavoidable contract clauses
to hold against artists. . . . The norm has been that, with new technology,
the labels try to pay the artist less. It is a strategy that saved the majors
millions when CDs were introduced nearly twenty years ago.”97
By 2001 the conceptual shift to some kind of digital streaming econ-
omy in music was widely proclaimed to be complete at last. As one
Billboard analyst argued, by 2001, “in the wake of the shakeout of the
venture-capital-fueled online music sector, there has emerged a more
bottom-line-focused industry designed to aid and, ultimately, provide
profits for media conglomerates.”98 The industry was paying enough
attention to streaming and its relationship to what would eventually be
called “cloud” computing to try to establish its own streaming services,
which it hoped would sap the energy of increasingly robust file-sharing
networks. As music industry lawyers began attacking those networks
in court and lobbying for specific changes to copyright law in the US
Congress and in a series of bilateral and multilateral trade deals, the big
labels set about creating MusicNet, sponsored by Warner, BMG, EMI, and
Real Networks, and Pressplay, sponsored by Sony and Universal. Char-
acteristically, the music industry’s focus was mostly on perpetuating the
cartel-like business model described above through aggressive manage-
ment of intellectual property. The failure of these services is important
to understand.
The intense, dedicated, single-minded, long-term, and successful
efforts that served the industry so well when remaking intellectual
property law abandoned it when it set about trying to create its own
streaming services. This explains the unalloyed failure of MusicNet and
Pressplay when they were rolled out in 2001–2 after extensive delays and
lengthy negotiations within the industry. The reasons for their failures
were numerous. The first was the design and structure of both services.
Both charged $9.95 per month and allowed consumers access to a set
number of streams and downloads of individual songs. However, most
downloads were temporary, expiring if subscriptions lapsed. Also, there
was a whole basket of restrictions about what users could and couldn’t do

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with the files they downloaded, and the limited catalogs made available
by these services proved unattractive to potential customers.99 Both were
dismal, expensive failures. However, beyond their insufficiently flexible
user interfaces, it is important to note the considerable hurdles faced by
these services when they were brought out. According to one analyst,
these included “tenuous consumer demand, undefined economic mod-
els, unknown costs, a lack of compelling content selection, clearance from
all interested rights holders, an understanding of how to market the new
services, a relationship with traditional retail, and—despite hundreds of
millions of dollars of collective development spending—sustained sup-
port from the labels and their parent companies themselves.”100 From
this litany of serious obstacles it is entirely reasonable to suggest that
the big labels got into the digital music market too early rather than too
late.
When it comes to early efforts at streaming, the music industry dis-
played what has to be seen as a comprehensive lack of foresight. While it
is hard to blame any industry for not immediately conjuring an entirely
new economy on the fly, what was really astonishing was the lengths
the big record labels went to in order to create the exact same sort of
cartel online that they had set up in the real world. Before either sub-
scription service was even available to the public, the US Department of
Justice and the Federal Trade Commission opened what would become
very lengthy investigations into the way MusicNet and Pressplay had
established themselves.101 Smaller companies had complained that the
big record labels “planned to cross-license only themselves and other
major players,” while others had told authorities they had been “refused
licenses by MusicNet because they did not pony up hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars for negotiations.”102 Further, major labels were accused
of colluding to “set artificially high prices for digital downloads” by
secretly agreeing with each other not to undercut a set price and col-
lectively refusing to do business with anyone who didn’t agree to their
terms of service.103 While the initial case was dismissed in 2003 and a
similar class-action suit was also dismissed in 2008, the latter decision
was reversed in 2010. This case has continued right up to the present
and may yet come back to sting the big record labels.104 The most strik-
ing feature of the accusations is that the major record labels were trying
to impose abnormally high prices on digital downloads at the very time
free illegal downloads were arguably at their peak. When people said
at the time that the music industry “didn’t get it,” this is a pretty good
example of what they meant. However, these halting, possibly criminal
efforts were more important than their abject failure suggests. They were
successful in providing models through which the music industry could
establish new partnerships, alliances, and mergers with the computer
industry in such a way as to protect their content and brands. It was this
necessary cooperation that began to break down the music industry’s

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grumpy resistance to letting others sell its music online, leading to the
establishment of the wildly successful iTunes Store in 2003.105
These kinds of selective forms of industrial cooperation began to mul-
tiply between 2003 and 2012. First, the big labels began licensing their
catalogs across an increasing range of services from the many free and
subscription streaming services that emerged over those years, such
as Spotify, Pandora, Rdio and Rhapsody;106 to the “bundles” of music
offered with the different usage plans of mobile phone companies;107 to
allowing so-called cloud locker services offered by Amazon and Google
to go forward.108 Second, since around 2004 or so, the music industry
began working to integrate its own services with those of the most used
online platforms. It has defined new systems of licensing rights and dis-
tributing royalties to encourage rather than strangle new businesses that
want to sell music in new ways, and it has been finding limited ways to
meet tech start-ups and behemoths alike somewhere in the negotiated
middle.109 Third, the major record labels have begun to link their own
digital storefronts with different social media platforms. Social media
generally seem to offer the kinds of relationships with consumers that
seem well suited to the exploitation of what musical experience affords
people online and transform these experiences into any number of tan-
gible transactions. For example, Facebook offers record labels what they
call “a ‘social graph’ that represents relationships between its 700 mil-
lion users and the things they care about” by measuring the kinds of
relationships users have with followers by tracking the kinds of things
they share, such as comments, photos, video files, or links, and how the
value of what they are sharing changes over time.110 This gives the music
industry the ability to track and analyze a whole range of users’ habits
in order to exploit what they call “consumers’ social nature.”111 As one
Billboard writer noted, “If iTunes boosted digital music into low-earth
orbit, Facebook can send it on a course to the moon by turning subscrip-
tion services into a household product.” In the near future, he predicted,
“Facebook’s most important gift to subscription services will be its social
graph, that connective tissue that can give context to unwieldy catalogs
of music as large as 15 million songs.”112 By integrating streaming or
Internet radio services into social media sites, the music industry can
integrate its content to users’ wider online experiences and manage its
relationships with them through any number of social networks, online
services, and media forms. Again, we can see how the attributes of music
streaming are well suited to a global economy marked by cheap, easy-to-
source, “user-generated” labor that provides mobile, flexible, outsourced
production of content in an exponentially increasing market to consum-
ers who are more and more digitally accessible more of the time.
We can profitably compare more recently successful music stream-
ing services such as Spotify and Pandora with the far more established,
long-term successes of music-based reality television. Programs such as

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466 Fairchild
American Idol and The X Factor have provided a seemingly obvious model
for success in the music industry for quite a long time. Moreover, it has
been a showy, flamboyant success that has been based on the promiscu-
ous use of a wide range of media forms dedicated to the exploitation of
what musical experience affords a mass audience. Yet for reasons that are
not entirely clear, few outside of the music industry seem to have noticed.
During the darkest days of the music industry, congested as they were
with histrionic claims of obsolescence and decay, shows like American
Idol, The Voice, and The X Factor did everything imaginable to provide
a new model for the music industry.113 They established new alliances
with the television and computer industries; made piracy a practical
irrelevance; turned extensive file sharing into an economic and market-
building bonus; crafted multiple revenue streams that managed to share
out the extensive risks of these long-running, expensive projects; cleverly
used existing intellectual property to their benefit; and established their
brand as the navigator of the many sales environments in which they
thrived. Importantly, these shows were integrated into a range of online
social media forms long before the idea was fashionable not as ancillary
add-ons but as central forums for fan engagement that included voting
for contestants and participating in myriad contests and so-called street
team campaigns that sustained or enhanced knowledge of and interest
in the shows.114
Beyond these comparatively philosophical attributes, they also man-
aged to sell a lot of music and make a lot of money. Between 2001 and
2010 American Idol alone claimed to have sold 126.5 million albums,
singles, and downloads, it was the top-rated television program in its
timeslot for well over five years, and it had the highest advertising rates
of any American television program for almost as long.115 Spinoffs and
competitors like The X Factor and The Voice, as well as music-centered
dramas such as Glee, have also found sustained success by attracting
large audiences and launching, or relaunching, the careers of contestants,
judges, and guests alike, not to mention that little One Direction thing.116
Yet despite the unalloyed financial success of the form, one senior music
industry executive could blandly claim as late as 2011 that “television
is a great opportunity. . . . We haven’t innovated in the living room for
many years.”117
Not only have these programs been successful in creating a mass audi-
ence in an era defined by demographic niches, but they fit snugly into
the emerging business models the music industry has been adopting,
models perfectly in line with the global neoliberal model of corporate
practice adopted worldwide. Music-based reality television is based on
cheap, disposable, contracted labor. Musicians enter into a period of con-
tracted servitude and serve entirely at the leisure of their employers.118
The contestants, like their songs and performances, are more or less inter-
changeable, unless one of them manages to produce a hit. The contestants

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are primarily a cost that is tightly controlled, while everything they pro-
duce is property to be owned and exploited by their employers and
across multiple media and revenue streams.119 Again, the parallels with
music streaming services should be clear. Low-cost “user-generated” (or
contestant-generated) labor provides an eminently flexible platform for
the music industry’s intellectual property that can then be introduced,
used, and reused across an endless variety of media in an exponentially
larger market than those that preceded it, all cost-effectively exploited
by a fairly run-of-the-mill global franchising system. Importantly, these
shows also produce the necessary illusion of “democracy” through the
expertly crafted simulacrum of consequential audience agency. Despite
continual claims of openness and democracy, these shows remained
tightly controlled forums for the music industry to showcase itself above
all else.120
This is where these shows teach us the most about why they present
a potent model for the future of the music industry. Over the last fifteen
years or so, the production and sale of tangible musical artifacts in which
record labels seek out and develop musicians to help them forge long
stable careers as creative artists through fan support of recordings and
live performances has been gradually made the subservient but necessary
corollary of the exploitation of the many new environments in which
we can experience music. These new environments have been used to
create brands whose experiential content can effortlessly and invisibly
slip across any existing or emerging media channel and produce profit
in any of the multiple guises in which they might appear. These guises,
and the seemingly endless opportunities for merchandising, only seem
to multiply, whether they appear as part of a live show; a one-off per-
formance; a soundtrack to a film, television show, or advertisement; a
promotional appearance; a television or film documentary; a fictional
film; or a television miniseries. In fact, one largely overlooked result of
the turmoil in the music industry since 1999 has been that the range of
tie-ins a record company might be able to link to an artist has become
unfathomably wide. As one group of economists recently argued, record
companies have long sought “product line extensions, including down-
loadable music, cellphone ring tones, ringback tones (snippets of music
that play to callers while they wait for their call to go through), cellphone
wallpaper, music embedded in video games, DJ remixes, and numerous
other offshoots. One source estimates that more than four hundred dif-
ferent items might be offered in connection with a specific album.”121
It should be reasonably clear that contemporary music-based reality
television is part of a long tradition of the multimedia exploitation of
musical performance and merchandising. Aspects of music-based reality
television practice stretch back to the first radio stars using their consid-
erable media savvy to link newly intimate forms of microphone singing
to the passionate attachment of fans through a coordinated range of new

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468 Fairchild
media such as weekly radio shows, glossy magazines, merchandise, and

sound recordings.122
The producers of music-based reality television programs have spent
over a decade polishing their considerable abilities to exploit the musical
affordances their shows construct since the first of their contemporary
permutations appeared in 1999.123 Every imaginable musical moment or
gesture is itself part of a larger, more encompassing brand. The songs,
performances, celebrity guest appearances, and advice and admoni-
tions of the judges are stitched together as part of a constant, breathless
narrative of dreams, drama, success, and failure. This narrative shapes
the substantial range of aesthetic materials on offer into continuously
available brand-building opportunities for all involved.
The main economic attribute of selling tangible artifacts for some parts
of the music industry is that music can then become so much low-cost,
low-risk grist for the ever-expanding mill of mediated social experi-
ence. The logic of this model demands that music must be not so much
rationed as economically directed and purposefully exploited in all of
its many potential incarnations. The music industry is using streaming
and music-based reality television to aggressively manage the costs and
risks of increasingly large, accessible, complex, and unruly markets, to
develop new and profitable parts of an industry increasingly focused on
intellectual property exploitation, to link itself meaningfully into other
industries and the social networks managed by them, and to incorpo-
rate the experience of music and social connections it affords people
into a larger landscape of economic exploitation. While the claims that
the music industry was “dying” persisted for far longer than one might
think necessary, the increasingly apparent consequence of the digital
“revolution” in music has been the ever-more-secure incorporation of the
experience of music into the larger schemas of neoliberal globalization.
Conclusion: Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda

When album sales began their decline in 2001, many music industry
analysts and observers were absolutely certain that the big players in
the popular music industry had blown it. The general consensus stated
that the major record labels should have made a deal with Napster in
2001, which would have lured in millions of loyal users who could have
spent billions on legal downloads.124 For many, the ramifications of the
music industry’s lack of vision seemed clear. In early 2011 an authorita-
tive article written by a senior editor at the New York Times claimed that
the market in digital music “may already be as big as it is going to get,”
with “growth in digital revenue slowing nearly to a standstill.”125 Based
on various industry sources and consultants, the author predicted that
sales of digital music would top out at less than $5 billion. By the end

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of 2012, however, that market had surpassed $5.6 billion, a modest but
solid expansion. More importantly, this increase in sales volume was an
important part of that rarest of rarities, more than two years of increased
revenues for the global music industry. Further, because of its extremely
uneven global reach, the digital music market was still largely confined
to a small number of wealthy countries such as the United States and
the UK as of 2013. This is especially true of music streaming and cloud
locker services, and even in the countries in which these services are
most established, they still made up only small percentages of the total
music market.126 Three years later, one music market research firm, with
all the retrospective clarity it could muster, predicted that music com-
panies would experience several more years of economic pain and that
musicians would ease into a stable music market dominated by a small
number of streaming businesses.127 In short, given the perceived poten-
tial upside of a still-nascent digital market, a faint glow of optimism
emanated from quarters long known to be utterly bereft of the stuff. It
has proven extremely difficult if not foolhardy to predict the future of
these markets and to determine whether this subtle breath of hope is a
sudden intake of air or some sort of terminal exhale. What is relevant
here is assessing what preceded this apparent but ambiguous and frag-
ile recovery.
What this article has hopefully demonstrated is that what preceded
the mild, comparative cheer of 2012–13 was more than a decade of con-
fusion, conflict, and economic pain that was arguably unprecedented
in the history of the modern music industry. Underneath the spectacle
of an industry appearing to consume itself is a more subtle dynamic
that I have tried to set out here. I have tried to definitively link the key
determinants of a complex political economy that can help us trace the
intentions, actions, and influence of those who have the technological,
political, and economic power to exploit the broader developments of
our collective music culture. One of my main goals here has been to build
on existing understandings of this political economy to show how seem-
ingly novel expressions of this dynamic can be more comprehensively
understood not just as the death rattle of a once-powerful industry but
as a driving force of a particularly brutal realignment of the underlying
dynamics of that industry’s relationship to the broader society.
NOTES
1. It seems important to point out that I am not putting forward a new definition of the
“music industry.” As I have argued elsewhere, this is unnecessary. Instead, I am using the
term “music industry” to denote any entities that profit from the production, distribution,
and/or sale of music, much in the same broad way one might use the term “oil industry”
or “auto industry.” See Charles Fairchild, Pop Idols and Pirates: Mechanisms of Consumption

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470 Fairchild
and the Global Circulation of Popular Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); see also John Wil-
liamson and Martin Cloonan, “Rethinking the Music Industry,” Popular Music 26 (2007):
305–22.
2. The following works offer broad, uniform accounts of the “death of the music indus-
try”: Steve Knopper, Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Music Indus-
try in the Digital Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009); Greg Kot, Ripped: How the
Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010); Phil Hardy,
Download: How the Internet Transformed the Record Business (London: Omnibus Press, 2012);
Eric Pfanner, “Music Industry Braces for the Unthinkable,” New York Times, January 23,
2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/24/technology/24music.html; Charles Blow,
“Swan Songs?,” New York Times, August 1, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/01/
opinion/01blow.html. There are several more measured and nuanced presentations of
these issues. Chief among them is Barry Kernfeld’s meticulous book on piracy, in which
Kernfeld demonstrates a century-long repeated pattern of struggle in which those fighting
piracy are continually forced to adapt to new conditions. See Barry Kernfeld, Pop Song
Piracy: Disobedient Music Distribution since 1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2011). Also see Jim Rogers, The Death and Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age (Lon-
don: Bloomsbury, 2013); Aaron Furgason, “Afraid of Technology? Major Label Response
to Advancements in Digital Technology,” Popular Music History 3 (2008): 149–70; Richard
Warr and Mark Goode, “Is the Music Industry Stuck between a Rock and a Hard Place?
The Role of the Internet and Three Possible Scenarios,” Journal of Retailing and Consumer
Services 18 (2011): 126–31.
3. Peter Drahos, Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? (London:
Earthscan, 2002).
4. Ed Christman, “Road Curves Ahead,” Billboard 123 (2011): 8; “Headphones Thrive
while Consumer Electronics Sales Slump,” What Hi Fi?, February 6 2012, http://www
.whathifi.com/news/headphones-thrive-while-consumer-electronics-sales-slump; “State-
ment of Financial Position 2010: Sennheiser Achieves Record Turnover,” Sennheiser Group,
http://en-de.sennheiser.com/ news/statement-of-financial-position-2010-sennheiser
-achieves-record-turnover-sennheiser-groups-turnover-has-increased-by-201-per-cent
-strong-market-growth-in-all-sales-regions.
5. A very recent book offers some parts of the larger story, although often in a fairly
sensationalist manner. See Stephen Witt, How Music Got Free (New York: Viking, 2015).
6. The concept of the “long tail” was popularized in Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why
the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006).
7. Knopper, Appetite for Self-Destruction; Kot, Ripped; Hardy, Download; Rogers, Death and
Life. For complex critical accounts about what various authors term the “contested future
of the music industry,” see Tim J. Anderson, Popular Music in a Digital Music Economy:
Problems and Practices for an Emerging Service Industry (New York: Routledge, 2014); Patrik
Wistrom, The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud (Cambridge: Polity, 2009); Steve Collins
and Sherman Young, Beyond 2.0: The Future of Music (Sheffield, UK: Equinox, 2014).
8. Derek Thompson, “The Shazam Effect,” Atlantic, November 17, 2014, http://www
.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/12/the-shazam-effect/382237/.
9. For discussions of the term “affordances,” see Georgina Born, “On Musical Mediation:
Ontology, Technology and Creativity,” Twentieth-Century Music 1 (2005): 7–36; Tia DeNora,
Music in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 46–47; Antoine Hen-
nion, “Music and Mediation: Toward a New Sociology of Music,” in The Cultural Study of
Music: A Critical Introduction, ed. Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton
(London: Routledge, 2003), 80–91.
10. See Fairchild, Pop Idols.
11. For early examples of leveraging live performance as a form of payola to sell records,
see David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Kerry Segrave, Payola in the Music Industry: A His-

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tory, 1880–1991 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1994). For examples of using the
fascination of new technology to sell familiar music, see Emily Thompson, “Machines,
Music and the Quest for Fidelity: Marketing the Edison Phonograph in America, 1877–
1925,” Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 131–71; Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has
Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). The case of the introduction
of new hi-fi systems in the immediate postwar era offers a similar use of music to sell new
forms of experiencing it. See Eric D. Barry, “High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime,
1950–1961,” in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. David Suisman and Susan
Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Tim Anderson, Making
Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2006); see also Albin Zak, I Don’t Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music
in 1950s America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
12. Russell Sanjek, Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twenti-
eth Century (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996); James Wierzbicki, Film Music: A History (New
York: Routledge, 2009); Murray Forman, One Night on TV Is Worth Weeks at the Paramount:
Popular Music on Early Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
13. Reebee Garofalo, “From Music Publishing to MP3: Music and Industry in the 20th
Century,” American Music 17 (1999): 318–54.
14. Jennifer Sullivan, “MP3: Flash in the Pan,” Wired, April 19, 1999, http://www.wired
.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/04/19189; Christopher Jones, “Digital Music at the
Crossroads,” Wired, April 19, 1999, http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/
1999/04/19171; see also Eric Alderman, Sonic Boom: Napster, MP3, and the New Pioneers of
Music (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2001); Bruce Haring, Beyond the Charts: MP3
and the Digital Music Revolution (Los Angeles: OTC Press, 2000).
15. Sullivan, “MP3: Flash in the Pan.”
16. Ibid.
17. Jones, “Digital Music at the Crossroads.”
18. Martin Kretschmer, George Michael Klimis, and Roger Wallis, “Music in Electronic
Markets: An Empirical Study,” New Media and Society 3 (2001): 417–41.
19. Ibid., 426.
20. Ibid., 426.
21. Drahos, Information Feudalism; Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of
Profit and Power (New York: Free Press, 2004).
22. Kretschmer, Klimis, and Wallis, “Music in Electronic Markets,” 426.
23. Ibid., 436.
24. Charles Mann, “The Year the Music Dies,” Wired, November 2002, http://www
.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/dirge.html.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. The influence of Anderson’s “long tail” thesis should not be underestimated here. Nor
should the influence of Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans” idea, which I summarize shortly. See
Kevin Kelly, “1000 True Fans,” Technium, 2008, http://kk.org/thetechnium/2008/03/1000
-true-fans/.
28. It should be obvious that I do not regard this definition of the music industry as
in any way useful, accurate, or credible. I would like to reiterate and draw the reader’s
attention to my definition of the music industry used in my first endnote.
29. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Net-
work, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1,
13–15.
30. Kelly, “1000 True Fans.”
31. Kretschmer, Klimis, and Wallis, “Music in Electronic Markets,” 425.
32. Ibid. I will note examples of the failure rate in music sales later in this article.
33. Ibid.

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472 Fairchild
34. Neil Taylor, Document and Eyewitness: An Intimate History of Rough Trade (London:
Orion, 2010); Chris Opfer, “The Downward Spiral of TVT Records,” Village Voice, October
20, 2010, http://www.villagevoice.com/2010–10–20/music/the-downward-spiral-of-tvt
-records/; Matt Hendrickson, “Sub Popped?,” Rolling Stone, November 12, 1998, 37; Gavin
Edwards, “Sub Pop Label Thriving by Staying Lean,” Chicago Tribune, January 17, 2012, 4.
35. For a critical examination of the famous case of Radiohead selling their album In
Rainbows directly to fans on a pay-what-you-like basis, see Charles Fairchild, Danger Mouse’s
“The Grey Album” (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
36. Mark Crispin Miller, “The National Entertainment State III: Who Controls the
Music?,” Nation, August 25 / September 1, 1997, 11–16; Thierry Rayna and Ludmila Stri-
ukova, “Monometapoly or the Economics of the Music Business,” Prometheus: Critical
Studies in Innovation 27 (2009): 211–22.
37. Ed Christman, “Taking Share,” Billboard 125 (2013): 26–27; Juliette Garside, “Warner
Music Buys Parlophone Label,” Guardian, February 7, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/
business/2013/feb/07/warnewr-music-parlophone-record-deal/; Eamonn Forde, “EMI:
The Sad Demise of a Very British Company,” Guardian, November 11, 2011, http://www
.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/nov/11/emi-demise-british-music-company.
38. Ken Terry, “Global Music Sales Surged in ’88, IFPI Says,” Billboard 101 (1989): 8; Dave
Laing, “World Record Sales 1992–2002,” Popular Music 23 (2004): 88–89; Michael Lesk,
“Chicken Little and the Recorded Music Crisis,” IEEE Security and Privacy, September/
October 2003, 73–75.
39. Ed Christman, “Have Sales Finally Hit Bottom?,” Billboard 116 (2004): 61.
40. Gordon Masson, “IFPI Reports Global Decline for 2001 Music Shipments,” Billboard
114 (2002): 6.
41. Ibid.
42. Michael Masnick and Michael Ho, The Sky Is Rising: A Detailed Look at the State of
the Entertainment Industry (Sunnyvale, CA: Floor 64, 2012), http://www.techdirt.com/
skyisrising/; “The Recorded-Music Industry Is Still a US$40 Billion Business,” Music and
Copyright, September 19, 2012 http://musicandcopyright.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/
the-recorded-music-industry-is-still-a-us40-billion-business/.
43. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, four major labels dominated the music industry.
More recently, their number has decreased to three. See Miller, “The National Entertain-
ment”; Rayna and Striukova, “Monometapoly.”
44. Fairchild, Pop Idols, 66–72.
45. As much important research has begun to demonstrate, the economic importance
of live music has not gone unnoticed by record labels as the move to incorporate touring
revenue into so-called 360 contracts gathers pace. See Lee Marshall, “The 360 Deal and
the ‘New’ Music Industry,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (2013): 77–99; Matt Stahl
and Leslie Maier, “The Firm Foundation of Organizational Flexibility: The 360 Contract
in the Digitalizing Music Industry,” Canadian Journal of Communication 37 (2012): 441–58.
Importantly, a methodologically sound and data-rich study from the research arm of the
Future of Music Coalition has shown that revenues from live music are not the panacea
for musicians some might suspect them to be. See “Mythbusting: Data Driven Answers to
Four Common Assumptions about How Musicians Make Money,” Artist Revenue Streams,
http://money.futureofmusic.org/.
46. Noreena Hertz, The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy (New
York: Harper Business, 2003); William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of
Global Capitalism (New York: Penguin, 1997).
47. When I use the term “single,” I am using it to cover all formats, including vinyl,
cassettes, and CDs. I am not, however, referring to downloads, which are a distinct case I
address shortly.
48. Bakan, The Corporation, 36–37, 101–2.

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49. Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, 45 RPM: The History, Heroes & Villains of a Pop Music
Revolution (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2003); Jeff Clark-Meads, “CDs Fuel 10% Value
Growth in 1995 Global Music Sales,” Billboard 108 (1996): 98.
50. Fairchild, Pop Idols, 59, 69; Ed Christman, “Fate of Singles: Who Can Kill or Save
Them and Why,” Billboard 114 (2002): 1, 11.
51. Ed Christman, “Hit-Driven Album Sales Lead in ’99 Report,” Billboard 112 (2000): 5.
52. Ed Christman, “Fate of Singles”; Cropper, Appetite for Destruction, 105–7.
53. Ed Christman, “Sony Slashes Singles Prices,” Billboard 112 (2000): 78; Christman,
“Labels Taking Fresh Look at Singles,” Billboard 111 (1999): 76; Michael Ellis, “Commentary:
How to Revive the Singles Market,” Billboard 113 (2001): 84; Don Jeffery, “As Sales Drop,
Singles Debate Heats Up,” Billboard 111 (1999): 71.
54. Clark-Meads, “CDs Fuel 10% Value Growth,” 98.
55. Ibid.
56. Ed Christman, “Biz Monitors Cassettes’ Fall,” Billboard 112 (2000): 1, 18; Christman
and Don Jeffery, “Industry Rallies around Cassette: Retailers Urged to Promote Format
Sales,” Billboard 109 (1997): 51–52.
57. Christman, “Hit-Driven Album Sales.”
58. Ibid.; Ed Christman, “U.S. Music Sales Hit a Wall: Albums Down, Singles Lowest
since Inception,” Billboard 114 (2002): 1, 76.
59. Brian Garrity, “A Song at Any Cost,” Billboard 118 (2006): 23.
60. Ibid.; Ed Christman, “Album Sales Increase by Only 4% in 2000,” Billboard 113 (2000):
88; Christman, “Fate of Singles”; Christman, “U.S. Music Sales Hit a Wall.”
61. I should note very clearly that the number of releases tracked in the article cited here
includes all albums in print at that time, not just new releases.
62. Ed Christman, “1995 Figures Show Industry Imbalance: Small Numbers of Albums
Take Bulk of Year’s Sales,” Billboard 108 (1996): 6, 88.
63. Christman, “Hit-Driven Album Sales.”
64. Ed Christman, “SoundScan Numbers Show .35% of Albums Account for Half of All
Units Sold,” Billboard 113 (2001): 66.
65. Ed Christman, “Average Sale of Albums Dropped in ’02 as Labels Released More,
Sold Less,” Billboard 115 (2003): 9.
66. Ed Christman, “2005 Sales Data: Long Tail Is Wagging,” Billboard 118 (2006): 9–10.
67. “The Nielsen Company and Billboard’s 2011 Music Industry Report,” January 5, 2012,
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120105005547/en/Nielsen-Company
-Billboard%E2%80%99s-2011-Music-Industry-Report. It should be noted that Nielsen’s
reports track sales across vast swaths of the international music industry, including most
styles, genres, and niches.
68. Glenn Peoples, “Heavy Hitters,” Billboard 123 (2001): 5.
69. Will Page, “The Long Tail of P2P,” Economic Insight 14 (2009); see also Thompson,
“The Shazam Effect.”
70. Christman, “Average Sale of Albums”; Christman, “2005 Sales Data”; Nielsen-
Soundscan 2011 report.
71. Glenn Peoples, “The Long Tale?,” Billboard 121 (2009): 24–28; Peoples, “Heavy Hitters.”
72. Peoples, “The Long Tale?,” 28.
73. Ibid.
74. For the sake of clarity, it seems important to note that some retailers estimate that by
the end of 2006, 60 to 70 percent of albums from the CD era alone were out of print and
not available for sale, not to mention titles released in the vinyl era. Most of the big record
labels hadn’t even finished digitizing their active catalogs, much less their back catalogs
or deleted titles. Please see Ed Christman, “Grabbing Sales by the Long Tail,” Billboard 118
(2006): 23.
75. Fairchild, Pop Idols, 66.

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474 Fairchild
76. Mayfield and Caufield, “Seeds of Doubt,” 28.

77. Michael Kirk, dir., The Way the Music Died (PBS, 2004); Peter DiCola, False Premises,
False Promise: A Quantitative History of Ownership Consolidation in the Radio Industry (Wash-
ington, DC: Future of Music Coalition, 2006); Peter DiCola and Kristin Thomson, Radio
Deregulation: Has It Served Citizens and Musicians? (Washington, DC: Future of Music Coali-
tion, 2002); Charles Fairchild, Music, Radio and the Public Sphere: The Aesthetics of Democracy
(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
78. Mayfield and Caufield, “Seeds of Doubt,” 28.
79. Ibid., 27–30.
80. Brian Garrity, “Seeking Profits at 99¢,” Billboard 115 (2003): 64; Steve Knopper states
that the labels get 67 cents per track, but this most likely includes ancillary payments that
might not go exclusively to the label. See Knopper, Appetite for Self-Destruction, 172.
81. Antony Bruno and Glenn Peoples, “The Price You Pay,” Billboard 121 (2009): 22–25;
Glenn Peoples, “UpFront: Retail—Down Is the New Up,” Billboard 121 (2009): 5.
82. Bruno and Peoples, “The Price You Pay,” 22.
83. Edward Helmore, “Is the Album Dead?,” Guardian, November 3, 2013, http://www
.theguardian.com/music/2013/nov/02/is-music-album-dead-us-worst-ever-sales-figures.
84. Bruno and Peoples, “The Price You Pay,” 24.
85. See Sullivan, “MP3: Flash in the Pan”; Jones, “Digital Music at the Crossroads”;
Kretschmer, Klimis, and Wallis, “Music in Electronic Markets”; Mann, “The Year the Music
Dies.”
86. John Qualen, The Music Industry: The End of Vinyl? (London: Comedia, 1985), 13.
87. Ibid.; see also Simon Frith and Lee Marshall, “Making Sense of Copyright,” in Music
and Copyright, ed. Simon Frith and Lee Marshall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1993), 1–20.
88. Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down
Culture and Control Creativity (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Patrick Burkart, Music and
Cyberliberties (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010).
89. For the most comprehensive research on the emerging labor market for musicians,
see Matt Stahl, Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2013).
90. Brett Atwood, “High-Quality Real Audio3.0 Debuts,” Billboard 108 (1996): 84.
91. Bill Holland, “Majors Agree to Direct Payments,” Billboard 113 (2001): 3; Holland,
“Digital $$’s Stream In,” Billboard 116 (2004): 55.
92. Antony Bruno, “Fording the Stream,” Billboard 122 (2010): 10.
93. Neil Tyler, “Music Piracy and Diminishing Revenues: How Compulsory Licensing for
Interactive Webcasters Can Lead the Recording Industry Back to Prominence,” University
of Pennsylvania Law Review 161 (2013): 2118–25.
94. Doug Reece, “Internet Radio Clash,” Billboard 110 (1998): 81, 86.
95. Tyler, “Music Piracy and Diminishing Revenues,” 2122.
96. Ed Christman, Alex Pham, and Glenn Peoples, “The Pandora Wars,” Billboard 125
(2013): 20–24; Susan Butler, “Inside the Webcaster Outcry,” Billboard 119 (2007): 22; Frank
Saxe, “Radio, Record Labels Chafe over Streaming,” Billboard 113 (2001): 77.
97. Saxe, “Radio, Record Labels Chafe,” 77.
98. Brian Garrity, “Online Music Went Legit in 2001,” Billboard 113/114 (2002): 58.
99. Brian Garrity, “Sounds: 2001 in Review,” Billboard 113/114 (2002): 58; Furgason,
“Afraid of Technology?,” 161–62.
100. Brian Garrity, “Distant Profits or ‘Pipe Dreams,’” Billboard 113 (2001): 1, 89.
101. Starr v. Sony BMG, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, September
21, 2009.
102. Brian Garrity and Bill Holland, “Majors Face Antitrust Probe,” Billboard 113 (2001):
1, 100.
103. Ibid., 100.

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104. Ben Sheffner, “UpFront: Legal Matters,” Billboard 122 (2010): 8.

105. Charles Arthur, “ITunes Is Ten Years Old Today,” Observer (UK), April 28, 2013,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/28/itunes-10-years-old-best-idea
-apple-ever-had.
106. Glenn Peoples, “The Next Digital Battleground,” Billboard 124 (2012): 22–26.
107. Glenn Peoples, “Music Everywhere,” Billboard 124 (2012): 20–21.
108. Glenn Peoples, “The Quiet Storm,” Billboard 123 (2011): 11–14; Peoples, “Google
Pulls the Trigger,” Billboard 123 (2011): 6.
109. Kyle Bylin, Louis Hau, and Glenn Peoples, “Building Digital Businesses around
Music and Rights,” Billboard 123 (2011): 16–19.
110. Glenn Peoples and Antony Bruno, “The New Connectivity,” Billboard 123 (2011):
14.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid., 16.
113. As noted elsewhere, there has been a long list of would-be competitors to these
shows as well. See Fairchild, Pop Idols, 97.
114. Steven J. Horowitz, “The Boys! Are Back in Town,” Billboard 124 (2012). For essays on
the use of digital media in conjunction with music-television viewing, see Jostein Gripsund,
ed., Relocating Television: Television in the Digital Context (New York: Routledge, 2010).
115. Monica Herrera, “A Little Pitchy,” Billboard 122 (2010): 24–25.
116. Andre Paine, “Maximum Exposure: ‘X’ Marks the Spot,” Billboard 121 (2009): 24;
Phil Gallo, “‘Idol,’ ‘The Voice’: A True, New A&R,” Billboard 124 (2012): 10–11; Phil Gallo,
“Take Me Higher,” Billboard 123 (2011): 10; Steve Knopper, “Music Rules Prime-Time TV,”
Rolling Stone, June 23, 2011, 17, 20; Rob Sheffield, “‘The Voice’: ‘Idol’s’ Wild Child,” Rolling
Stone, June 9, 2011, 38.
117. Pfanner, “Music Industry Braces.”
118. Ben Butler and Eli Greenblat, “Signing Over Your Life: Inside the X Factor Con-
tract,” Sydney Morning Herald, September 16, 2013, http://www.smh.com.au/ business/
signing-over-your-life-inside-the-x-factor-contract-20130916–2tu9o.html. See also Stahl,
Unfree Masters.
119. Butler and Greenblat, “Signing Over Your Life”; Fairchild, Pop Idols, 61.
120. Fairchild, Pop Idols, chaps. 6 and 7. Here I show how the main point of Idol has
been to present to its audience the process of making a pop star and to do so in minute
detail. The show uses recording industry executives and veterans to provide guidance
and display their knowledge and influence. They also spend a lot of their air time telling
amateur performers how to make it in the industry by looking, sounding, and acting the
“right way.” The eventual winner is the living proof that the music industry works.
121. Sudip Bhattacharjee et al., “Re-Tuning the Music Industry: Can They Re-attain
Business Resonance,” Communications of the ACM 52 (2009): 137. Unfortunately, the authors
didn’t reveal their source. Even if they are half-right, that is still a lot of tie-ins.
122. Alison McCracken, “‘God’s Gift to Us Girls’: Crooning, Gender and the Re-creation
of American Popular Song, 1928–1933,” American Music 17 (1999): 365–95.
123. As a point of clarification, the first of these shows was Popstars, which started in
New Zealand in 1999. Its similarities to the Idol and The X Factor franchises are notable.
Please see David McNickel, “TrueBliss Flies onto NZ Charts via TV Program,” Billboard
111 (1999): 93, 116.
124. The most straightforward expression of this argument appears in Knopper, Appetite
for Self-Destruction, 142–43.
125. Pfanner, “Music Industry Braces.”
126. Joshua Friedlander, “News and Notes on RIAA Music Industry Shipment and
Revenue Statistics,” Recording Industry Association of America, 2012; “International Fed-
eration of Phonographic Industries, IFPI Digital Music Report 2013: Engine of a Digital
World,” www.ifpi.org; Helienne Lindvall, “Rise in Recorded Music Is Not All It Seems,”

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476 Fairchild
Guardian, April 9, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/apr/09/

recorded-music-revenue. Interestingly, in 2012 so-called physical sales still constituted
67 percent of the market in the UK and over 80 percent of the market globally. See Paul
Sexton, “Streaming Taking Hold Globally,” Billboard 124 (2012): 48.
127. Stuart Dredge, “Music Streams Are Up, Downloads Are Down. Why Is That a
Surprise?” Guardian, August 29, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/
aug/29/music-streams-downloads-mark-mulligan/.

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Crowds, Clouds, and Idols: New Dynamics and Old Agendas in the Music Industry, 1982-

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/americanmusic.33.4.0441

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Crowds, Clouds, and Idols:

Charles Fairchild is associate professor of popular music at the University of

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such a derelict state as was often suggested in this period: headphone

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the significant change in its technological base. It is precisely these bar-

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better means of distribution.8 We need to work toward some understand-

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The Consensus That Wasn’t

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one another in form, source, and methodology. However, when taken

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Persistent Barriers to Entry

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As noted in the introduction, there were many contending forces run-

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entities in that market had no choice but to emphasize: the importance of

Cue: Dramatic Interlude

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Selling the Album, Deleting the Single

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if simplistically, when he said that “pushing bundled products down

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dynamic interaction between the kinds of relationships enacted by the

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a structural standpoint, they are very similar to those offering music

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as somewhat novel iterations of increasingly onerous artist contracts.89

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Perhaps the most prominent issue surrounding the introduction of

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media such as weekly radio shows, glossy magazines, merchandise, and

Conclusion: Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda

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76. Mayfield and Caufield, “Seeds of Doubt,” 28.

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104. Ben Sheffner, “UpFront: Legal Matters,” Billboard 122 (2010): 8.

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Guardian, April 9, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-­blog/2013/apr/09/

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Guardian, April 9, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/apr/09/