The book would also have to cover the Best Buy story where they developed stores with huge back-catalog stocks of classical, jazz, easy listening, in addition to current pop, used them as loss-leaders which killed off all the nearby mall stores and even some of the established classical stores because of the back catalog, and then overnight went out of all but the current pop business. The returns destroyed many small labels, and many distributors.
Mike Biel [log in to unmask]
--------- Original Message --------- Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Music in the 1990s
From: "Tom Fine" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 6/11/15 11:57 am
To: [log in to unmask]
Dave, this is good stuff!
There's a book in all of this, "Recording the 90's," that could be written along the same lines that
Allan Sutton wrote about the early days of records, the 20's and the 30's. One section could cover
the material in these two articles. Another section could cover how the labels killed the classical
golden goose by flooding the market with dreck, paying egomaniac performers way too much, and
rushing from low-quality reissues of back-catalog to better-quality to a new fad called SACD, all
the while arbitrarily taking things out of print and putting them back into print based on the whims
of consultants that followed unchecked megaglomeration. Similar things happened in the jazz world,
but jazz music was just about dead by 1990 except as a semi-lucrative reissue business. Such a book
would also have to cover the rise of the audiobook, because I think it's pretty clear that
books-on-tape, then books-on-CD and then books-on-Audible/iTunes cannabilized a certain amount of
other audio sales, simply because people were all of a sudden spending so much time listening to
spoken word content during commutes, on airplanes, etc.
And, the book could end with the Napster era and the coming rise of Apple as the major
player/punisher in the music business. And there should be a whole chapter on the Edgar Bronfman Jr.
saga, how he burned to the ground a family fortune and then washed out in the music business. Oh,
also a whole chapter on the short-lived and somewhat dubious "blues revival."
Looking at the past 25 years in the music business, the only other era I can think of when so much
wealth was destroyed so quickly was when record sales completely collapsed in the depths of the
Depression. The big death-spiral happened in the 2000's, but all the seeds were sown in the 1990s.
-- Tom Fine
----- Original Message -----
From: "David Lewis" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2015 10:05 AM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Music in the 1990s
> As time soldiers on, more of the relatively recent past winds up in our
> wheelhouse, whether we like it or not. These two pieces usefully summarize
> some aspects of
> the music biz in the 1990s, an odd time where the major labels were
> searching for hit acts among underground bands, producing a mixed legacy
> fraught with failed
> projects, though there was a lot of money in it. I was in music retail on
> the West Coast in these years, and I witnessed that major label interests
> and money destroyed
> the underground music scene of that era.
>
> Steve Albini was the leader of an excellent Chicago-based band Big Black in
> the 1980s and turned to production midway during that time; he produced "In
> Utero," the
> third and last studio album for Nirvana. You might not like his foul
> language, though if you know Steve it is inseparable from his cranky
> personality. You also might not
> like his opinions about Neumann microphones. This was a highly
> controversial article in its time, but it was right enough that when
> Courtney Love copied whole
> paragraphs from it in a much later hate piece about the music industry,
> some people called her a "genius." I guess she'd figured enough time had
> passed that people
> had forgotten the Albini article.
>
> Tech-minded folks might get a kick out of his rant about best studio
> practices in 1993. I worked on an Unsane album, for Matador, at Wharton
> Tiers Fun City in 1991
> and we did use the open reel rather than DAT. The reason being that Unsane
> had done a previous album for a label called Circuit Records which went out
> of business
> suddenly, and in order to prevent Unsane from using that album elsewhere,
> the label owner easily destroyed the DAT master. Wharton figured the reel,
> though technically
> more backward, was a bit more durable.
>
> http://web.archive.org/web/20061115070529/http://www.thebaffler.com/albiniexcerpt.html
>
> This is a new, and poorly written, article reflecting on this same era.
> Certainly the major label door did not close to the underground until 1997,
> and some of these
> highly-praised, influential albums are, in fact, not so good, and of
> dubious forward influence. But it shows that writers are starting to think
> about this historic
> phenomenon. I dare say that underground music acts are a lot better off now
> than they were in 1995; they can create what they want and distribute it
> after a fashion,
> and still make the no money they would've made in 1995 without the
> compromises and obligations faced by the Indy bands of the 'nineties.
>
> http://www.avclub.com/article/1995-marked-end-major-label-explosion-weird-219969
>
> best,
>
> Uncle Dave Lewis
> Hamilton, OH
>
>
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