Who killed the music industry?

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 22:34:00 +0000

In the 1920s, the recording industry faced a new medium that threatened to make it obsolete: commercial radio. Suddenly, stations around the country could broadcast music hundreds of miles in every direction, which meant listeners could hear for free the same songs they had previously purchased. Record companies went into a frenzy. As Sean Wilentz writes in “360 Sound: The Columbia Records Story,” “Record company executives blamed their new troubles less on the sweeping forces of politics, law, and economics than on the arrival of commercial radio, and with good reason.”

Radio proved immensely popular, thanks to crisper sounds and lower prices. That meant, of course, that record sales tanked. “The record companies claimed that existing copyright law permitted them to ban the radio stations from broadcasting commercially recorded music and, in effect, stealing their product. Records appeared with labels warning that they were not licensed for broadcasting, and, even though the claim lacked formal legal sanction, live music did remain the rule on radio through the 1920s.”

Salon.com > Sean Wilentz

Who killed the music industry?