PowerPoint presentation

PowerPoint presentation based on a type of music, singer, or band of your own choosing. Illustrate and explain that music or band’s role in reflecting or influencing American culture. You must evaluate the music beyond its entertainment value. The assignment allows you to expand your views on music, as well as allowing you to build on your previous writing and presentation skills.

Resource: Read Chapter 3 and 4 of Media and Culture.
Create Five (5) to Eight (8) slides of PowerPoint
Presentation provides illustration of the following:
In what ways have music and radio shaped American culture its value?
Identify and introduce your favorite musician, band, or type of music.
Explain how American culture and social behavior have been shaped by music you listen to.
Content is comprehensive, accurate, and persuasive.
Presentation includes visual aids and elegant graphics
Text line Limit is FIVE LINES or FIVE Words per bulleted item
Utilize appropriate font sizes.
The content is comprehensive, accurate, and persuasive
Presentation links theory to relevant examples of current experience and industry practice and uses of the vocabulary of the theory correctly.
Conclusion summarizing audio media and how it either influences or reflects social behaviors and attitudes.
Conclusion is logical, and reviews the major points.
Major points are stated clearly and supported with examples.
The paper MUST have APA (citations-in the body and references-at the bottom) style of formatting.
Please comply with the rules of grammar (correct spelling, punctuation, sentences are clear, complete, and concise).
Sentence transitions are present and maintain the flow of thought.
Post your paper as PowerPoint Presentation (slides) attachment only.

COLON CANCER – write a 500- to 750-word summary that includes the following:

Description of the disease

· Risk factors for the disease

· Lifestyle choices you can make in your life to decrease your modifiable risk factors for this disease

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��71

SOUNDS AND IMAGES

The Development
of Sound Recording

81
U.S. Popular Music
and the Formation
of Rock

88
A Changing Industry:
Reformations in
Popular Music

The Business of
Sound Recording

103
Sound Recording,
Free Expression,
and Democracy

Sound Recording
and Popular
Music
For years, the recording industry has been pan-
icking about file swappers who illegally down-
load songs and thereby decrease recorded
music sales. So it struck many in the industry as
unusual when the Grammy Award–winning Brit-
ish alternative rock group Radiohead decided to
sell its 2007 album In Rainbows on the Internet
(www.inrainbows.com) for whatever price fans
wished to pay, including nothing at all.

Radiohead was able to try this business model
because its contract with the record corporation
EMI had expired after its previous album, 2003’s
Hail to the Thief. Knowing it had millions of fans
around the world, the group turned down multi-
million-dollar offers to sign a new contract with
major labels, and instead decided to experiment
by offering its seventh studio album online with a
“pay what you wish” approach. “It’s not supposed
to be a model for anything else. It was simply a re-
sponse to a situation,” Thom Yorke, the lead singer
of Radiohead, said. “We’re out of contract. We have
our own studio. We have this new server. What the
hell else would we do? This was the obvious thing.
But it only works for us because of where we are.”1

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

72��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

Radiohead didn’t disclose the sales rev-
enue or numbers of the downloads, but
one source claimed at least 1.2 million
copies of the album were downloaded
in the first two days.2 In an interview
with an Australian newspaper, Yorke
mentioned that about 50 percent of the
downloaders took the album for free.3
But a study conservatively estimated
that Radiohead made an average of
$2.26 on each album download. If that’s
the case, Radiohead may have made
more money per recording than the tra-
ditional royalties the group might have
earned with a release by a major label.4

Although Radiohead’s Thom Yorke said
the online album release experiment
was not supposed to be a model for
anyone else, it ended up being just that.
Hip-hop artist Saul Williams released
digital downloads of The Inevitable
Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust
(saulwilliams.com) for $5, with a “free”
option to the first hundred thousand
customers. Williams’s recording was
produced by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch
Nails. In March 2008, Nine Inch Nails
released Ghosts I–IV, a four-album
recording with thirty-six songs, at
ghosts.nin.com. Ghost I, the package
of the first nine songs, was available as
a free download, with the rest avail-
able for purchase. Coldplay boosted
the release of its 2008 recording Viva
la Vida or Death and All His Friends by
giving away free downloads of its single
“Violet Hill” for a week.

Another alternate avenue music artists
are exploring for promoting their music
is posting their music videos on the
Internet. As MTV’s programming turned
away from videos, video-hosting
Web sites like YouTube, Dailymotion,

and Vevo have become a way to get less
expensive (free) and much wider music
video distribution. In 2006, the band
OK Go gained enormous attention by
posting its treadmill dancing video for
its song “Here It Goes Again” on You-
Tube. The video went viral and made
OK Go a profitable act for EMI. Yet EMI
later prohibited OK Go’s videos from
being embedded on any site but You-
Tube, since only YouTube paid royalties
to EMI for views on its site. Immediately,
views of the group’s videos dropped by
90 percent, and OK Go lost one of its
best methods of promotion. In March
2010, OK Go parted ways with EMI and
released an imaginative Rube Gold-
berg machine video for “This Too Shall
Pass” that, absent EMI’s constraints on
distribution, became another viral music
video. Without a major label, the band
creatively financed the video with sup-
port from State Farm Insurance (whose
logo appears a few times in the video)—
an approach that demonstrates, as OK
Go frontman Damian Kulash says, “We’re
trying to be a DIY [do-it-yourself] band in
a post–major label world.”5

“For years, the recording
industry has been
panicking about file
swappers who illegally
download songs and
thereby decrease recorded
music sales.”

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��73

THE MEDIUM OF SOUND RECORDING has had an immense impact on our culture. The
music that helps shape our identities and comfort us during the transition from childhood to
adulthood resonates throughout our lives, and it often stirs debate among parents and teenagers,
teachers and students, and politicians and performers, many times leading to social change.

Throughout its history, popular music has been banned by parents, school officials, and
even governments under the guise of protecting young people from corrupting influences. As far
back as the late 1700s, authorities in Europe, thinking that it was immoral for young people to
dance close together, outlawed waltz music as “savagery.” A hundred years later, the Argentinean
upper class tried to suppress tango music because the roots of this sexualized dancing style could
be traced to the bars and bordellos of Buenos Aires. When its popularity migrated to Paris in the
early twentieth century, tango was condemned by the clergy for its allegedly negative impact on
French youth. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, jazz music was criticized for its unbridled and
sometimes free-form sound and the unrestrained dance crazes (such as the Charleston and the
jitterbug) it inspired. Rock and roll from the 1950s onward and hip-hop from the 1980s to today
have also added their own chapters to the age-old musical battle between generations.

In this chapter, we will place the impact of popular music in context and:

• Investigate the origins of recording’s technological “hardware,” from Thomas Edison’s
early phonograph to Emile Berliner’s invention of the flat disk record and the development
of audiotape, compact discs, and MP3s

• Explore the impact of the Internet on music, including the effects of online piracy and how
the industry is adapting to the new era of convergence with new models for distributing
and promoting music

• Study radio’s early threat to sound recording and the subsequent alliance between the two
media when television arrived in the 1950s

• Examine the content and culture of the music industry, focusing on the predominant role
of rock music and its extraordinary impact on mass media forms and a diverse array of
cultures, both American and international

• Explore the economic and democratic issues facing the recording industry

As you consider these topics, think about your own relationship with popular music and
sound recordings. Who was your first favorite group or singer? How old were you, and what was
important to you about this music? How has the way you listen to music changed in the past five
years? For more questions to help you think through the role of music in our lives, see “Ques-
tioning the Media” on page 105 in the Chapter Review.

“If people knew
what this stuff
was about, we’d
probably all get
arrested.”

BOB DYLAN, 1966,
TALKING ABOUT ROCK
AND ROLL

The Development
of Sound Recording

New mass media have often been defined in terms of the communication technologies that
preceded them. For example, movies were initially called motion pictures, a term that derived
from photography; radio was referred to as wireless telegraphy, referring back to telegraphs; and
television was often called picture radio. Likewise, sound recording instruments were initially
described as talking machines and later as phonographs, indicating the existing innovations, the
telephone and the telegraph. This early blending of technology foreshadowed our contemporary
era, in which media as diverse as newspapers and movies converge on the Internet. Long before
the Internet, however, the first major media convergence involved the relationship between the
sound recording and radio industries.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

74��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

From Cylinders to Disks: Sound Recording
Becomes a Mass Medium
In the 1850s, the French printer Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville conducted the first experi-
ments with sound recording. Using a hog’s hair bristle as a needle, he tied one end to a thin
membrane stretched over the narrow part of a funnel. When the inventor spoke into the funnel,

the membrane vibrated and the free end of the bristle made grooves on a revolving cylinder
coated with a thick liquid called lamp black. De Martinville noticed that different sounds

made different trails in the lamp black, but he could not figure out how to play back the
sound. However, his experiments did usher in the development stage of sound record-
ing as a mass medium. In 2008, audio researchers using high-resolution scans of the
recordings and a digital stylus were able to finally play back some of de Martinville’s
recordings for the first time.6

In 1877, Thomas Edison had success playing back sound. He recorded his own
voice by using a needle to press his voice’s sound waves onto tinfoil wrapped around

a metal cylinder about the size of a cardboard toilet-paper roll. After recording his
voice, Edison played it back by repositioning the needle to retrace the grooves in the

foil. The machine that played these cylinders became known as the phonograph, derived
from the Greek terms for “sound” and “writing.”

Thomas Edison was more than an inventor—he was also able to envision the practical uses
of his inventions and ways to market them. Moving sound recording into its entrepreneurial
stage, Edison patented his phonograph in 1878 as a kind of answering machine. He thought the
phonograph would be used as a “telephone repeater” that would “provide invaluable records,
instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.”7 Edison’s phono-
graph patent was specifically for a device that recorded and played back foil cylinders. Because
of this limitation, in 1886 Chichester Bell (cousin of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell)
and Charles Sumner Tainter were able to further sound recording by patenting an improvement
on the phonograph. Their sound recording device, known as the graphophone, played back
more durable wax cylinders.8 Both Edison’s phonograph and Bell and Tainter’s graphophone

Sound Recording and Popular Music

Victrolas
Around 1910, music
players enter living
rooms as elaborate
furniture centerpieces,
replacing pianos as
musical entertainment
(p. 75).

Radio Threatens
the Sound Re-
cording Industry
By 1925, “free”
music can be
heard over the
airwaves
(p. 80).

Audiotape
Developed in
Germany in the early
1940s, audiotape
enables multitrack
recording. Taping
technology comes
to the United States
after WWII (p. 76).

1850 1880 1890 1910 1920 1930 19401900

Phonograph
In 1877, Edison
invents and figures out
how to play back sound,
thinking this invention
would make a good
answering machine
(p. 74).

Flat Disk
Berliner invents the flat disk
in 1887 and develops the gramo-
phone to play it. The disks are
easily mass-produced, a labeling
system is introduced, and sound
recording becomes a mass medium
(p. 75).

de Martinville
The first experiments
with sound are con-
ducted in the 1850s us-
ing a hog’s hair bristle as
a needle; de Martinville
can record sound, but he
can’t play it back (p. 74).

THOMAS EDISON
In addition to the
phonograph, Edison
(1847–1931) ran an
industrial research lab that
is credited with inventing
the motion picture camera
and the first commercially
successful light bulb, and
a system for distributing
electricity.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��75

had only marginal success as voice-recording office machines. Eventually, both sets of inventors
began to produce cylinders with prerecorded music, which proved to be more popular but dif-
ficult to mass-produce and not very durable for repeated plays.

Using ideas from Edison, Bell, and Tainter, Emile Berliner, a German engineer who had im-
migrated to America, developed a better machine that played round, flat disks, or records. Made
of zinc and coated with beeswax, these records played on a turntable, which Berliner called a
gramophone and patented in 1887. Berliner also developed a technique that enabled him to mass-
produce his round records, bringing sound recording into its mass medium stage. Previously,
using Edison’s cylinder, performers had to play or sing into the speaker for each separate record-
ing. Berliner’s technique featured a master recording from which copies could be easily dupli-
cated in mass quantities. In addition, Berliner’s records could be stamped with labels, allowing
the music to be differentiated by title, performer, and songwriter. This led to the development of
a “star system,” because fans could identify and choose their favorite sounds and artists.

By the early 1900s, record-playing phonographs were widely available for home use. In
1906, the Victor Talking Machine Company placed the hardware, or “guts,” of the record player
inside a piece of furniture. These early record players, known as Victrolas, were mechanical
and had to be primed with a crank handle. The introduction of electric record players, first
available in 1925, gradually replaced Victrolas as more homes were wired for electricity; this
led to the gramophone becoming an essential appliance in most American homes.

The appeal of recorded music was limited at first because of sound quality. While the
original wax records were replaced by shellac discs, shellac records were also very fragile and
didn’t improve the sound quality much. By the 1930s, in part because of the advent of radio and
in part because of the Great Depression, record and phonograph sales declined dramatically.
However, in the early 1940s shellac was needed for World War II munitions production, so the
record industry turned to manufacturing polyvinyl plastic records instead. The vinyl recordings
turned out to be more durable than shellac records and less noisy, paving the way for a renewed
consumer desire to buy recorded music.

In 1948, CBS Records introduced the 33⅓-rpm (revolutions-per-minute) long-playing record
(LP), with about twenty minutes of music on each side of the record, creating a market for

MP3
A new format com-
pressing music into digi-
tal files shakes up the
music industry in 1999,
as millions of Internet
users share music files
on Napster (p. 77).

Music in the Cloud
and on the Go
Streaming services
such as MOG and
Rhapsody launch
apps for the iPhone
and Android, making
it possible to stream
music anytime, any-
where (p. 79).

Radio Turns to Music
Industry
As television threatens
radio, radio turns to the
music industry in the
1950s for salvation. Ra-
dio becomes a marketing
arm for the sound record-
ing industry (p. 80).

Hip-Hop
This major musical
art form emerges
in the late 1970s
(pp. 93–94).

A Sound Recording
Standard
In 1953, this is
established at 33�1 3
rpm for long-playing
albums (LPs), 45 rpm
for two-sided singles
(pp. 75–76).

Rock and Roll
A new music form
arises in the mid-
1950s, challenging
class, gender, race,
geographic, and
religious norms in the
United States (p. 82).

Cassettes
This new format
appears in the
mid-1960s;
making music
portable, it gains
popularity
(p. 76).

CDs
The first
format to
incorporate
digital tech-
nology hits
the market in
1983 (p. 77).

1950

Online Music Stores
In 2008, iTunes
becomes the No.1
retailer of music in
the United States
(p. 78).

iTunes
In 2010, iTunes
sells its ten billionth
download (p. 79).

1960 1970 1990 2000 2010 20201980

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

76��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

multisong albums and classical music. This was an improvement over the three to four minutes
of music contained on the existing 78-rpm records. The next year, RCA developed a competing
45-rpm record that featured a quarter-size hole (best for jukeboxes) and invigorated the sales of
songs heard on jukeboxes throughout the country. Unfortunately, the two new record standards
were not technically compatible, meaning they could not be played on each other’s machines. A
five-year marketing battle ensued, similar to the Macintosh vs. Windows battle over computer-
operating-system standards in the 1980s and 1990s or the mid-2000s battle between Blu-ray
and HD DVD. In 1953, CBS and RCA compromised. The LP became the standard for long-playing
albums, the 45 became the standard for singles, and record players were designed to accommo-
date 45s, LPs, and, for a while, 78s.

From Phonographs to CDs: Analog Goes Digital
The invention of the phonograph and the record were the key sound recording advancements
until the advent of magnetic audiotape and tape players in the 1940s. Magnetic tape sound
recording was first developed as early as 1929 and further refined in the 1930s, but it didn’t
catch on initially because the first machines were bulky reel-to-reel devices, the amount of tape
required to make a recording was unwieldy, and the tape itself broke or damaged easily. How-
ever, owing largely to improvements by German engineers who developed plastic magnetic tape
during World War II, audiotape eventually found its place.

Audiotape’s lightweight magnetized strands finally made possible sound editing and
multiple-track mixing, in which instrumentals or vocals could be recorded at one location and
later mixed onto a master recording in another studio. This led to a vast improvement of studio
recordings and subsequent increases in sales, although the recordings continued to be sold pri-
marily in vinyl format rather than on reel-to-reel tape. By the mid-1960s, engineers had placed
miniaturized reel-to-reel audiotape inside small plastic cassettes and had developed portable
cassette players, permitting listeners to bring recorded music anywhere and creating a market
for prerecorded cassettes. Audiotape also permitted “home dubbing”: Consumers could copy
their favorite records onto tape or record songs from the radio. This practice denied sales to
the recording industry, resulting in a drop in record sales, the doubling of blank audiotape sales
during a period in the 1970s, and the later rise of the Sony Walkman, a portable cassette player
that foreshadowed the release of the iPod two decades later.

Some thought the portability, superior sound, and recording capabilities of audiotape
would mean the demise of records. Although records had retained essentially the same format
since the advent of vinyl, the popularity of records continued, in part due to the improved
sound fidelity that came with stereophonic sound. Invented in 1931 by engineer Alan Blumlein,
but not put to commercial use until 1958, stereo permitted the recording of two separate chan-
nels, or tracks, of sound. Recording-studio engineers, using audiotape, could now record many
instrumental or vocal tracks, which they “mixed down” to two stereo tracks. When played back
through two loudspeakers, stereo creates a more natural sound distribution. By 1971, stereo
sound had been advanced into quadrophonic, or four-track, sound, but that never caught on
commercially.

The biggest recording advancement came in the 1970s, when electrical engineer Thomas
Stockham made the first digital audio recordings on standard computer equipment. Although
the digital recorder was invented in 1967, Stockham was the first to put it to practical use. In
contrast to analog recording, which captures the fluctuations of sound waves and stores those
signals in a record’s grooves or a tape’s continuous stream of magnetized particles, digital
recording translates sound waves into binary on-off pulses and stores that information as
numerical code. When a digital recording is played back, a microprocessor translates these
numerical codes back into sounds and sends them to loudspeakers. By the late 1970s, Sony

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��77

and Philips were jointly working on a way to design a digitally recorded disc and player to take
advantage of this new technology, which could be produced at a lower cost than either vinyl
records or audiocassettes. As a result of their efforts, digitally recorded compact discs (CDs)
hit the market in 1983.

By 1987, CD sales were double the amount of LP record album sales (see Figure 3.1). By
2000, CDs rendered records and audiocassettes nearly obsolete, except for DJs and record
enthusiasts who continue to play and collect vinyl LPs. In an effort to create new product lines
and maintain consumer sales, the music industry promoted two advanced digital disc for-
mats in the late 1990s, which it hoped would eventually replace standard CDs. However, the
introduction of these formats was ill-timed for the industry, because the biggest development
in music formatting was already on the horizon—the MP3.

Convergence: Sound Recording in the Internet Age
Music, perhaps more so than any other mass medium, is bound up in the social fabric of our
lives. Ever since the introduction of the tape recorder and the heyday of homemade mixtapes,
music has been something that we have shared eagerly with friends.

It is not surprising then that the Internet, a mass medium that links individuals and com-
munities together like no other medium, became a hub for sharing music. In fact, the reason
college student Shawn Fanning said he developed the groundbreaking file-sharing site Napster
in 1999 was “to build communities around different types of music.”9

Music’s convergence with radio saved the radio industry in the 1950s. But music’s convergence
with the Internet began to unravel the music industry in the 2000s, and it became the precedent for
upheavals in every other media industry as more content—movies, TV shows, books—found distri-
bution over the Internet. The changes in the music industry were set in motion about two decades
ago with the proliferation of Internet use and the development of a new digital file format.

MP3s and File Sharing
The MP3 file format, developed in 1992, enables digital recordings to be compressed into
smaller, more manageable files. With the increasing popularity of the Internet in the mid-1990s,

S
a

le
s

in
M

il
li

o
n

s
o

f
D

o
ll

a
rs

Year

4,000

2,000

10,000

8,000

6,000

4,000
2,000

0
1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980

Compact Discs

Vinyl LP/EP

Mobile

Tapes Digital
(legal)

1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

FIGURE 3.1
ANNUAL VINYL, TAPE,
CD, MOBILE, AND DIGITAL
SALES
Source: Recording Industry
Association of America, 2009
year-end statistics.

Note: “Digital” includes singles,
albums, music videos, and kiosk
sales. Cassette tapes fell under
$1 million in sales in 2008.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

78��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

computer users began swapping MP3 music files online because they could be uploaded or
downloaded in a fraction of the time it took to exchange noncompressed music and because
they use up less memory.

By 1999, the year Napster’s now infamous free file-sharing service brought the MP3 format to
popular attention, music files were widely available on the Internet—some for sale, some legally
available for free downloading, and many traded in violation of copyright laws. Despite the higher
quality of industry-manufactured CDs, music fans enjoyed the convenience of downloading and
burning MP3 files to CD. Some listeners skipped CDs altogether, storing their music on hard drives
and essentially using their computers as stereo systems. Losing countless music sales to illegal
downloading, the music industry fought the proliferation of the MP3 format with an array of law-
suits (aimed at file-sharing companies and at individual downloaders), but the popularity of MP3s
continued to increase (see “Tracking Technology: Digital Downloading and the Future of Online
Music” on page 79).

In 2001, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the music industry and against Napster,
declaring free music file-swapping illegal and in violation of music copyrights held by recording
labels and artists. It was relatively easy for the music industry to shut down Napster (which later
relaunched as a legal service), because it required users to log into a centralized system. However,
the music industry’s elimination of illegal file-sharing was not complete, as decentralized peer-to-
peer (P2P) systems, such as Grokster, Limewire, Morpheus, Kazaa, eDonkey, eMule, and BitTor-
rent, once again enabled online free music file-sharing.

The recording industry fought back in 2002 by increasing the distribution of copy–
protected CDs, which could not be uploaded or burned. But the copy-protected CDs created
controversy, because they also prevented consumers from legally copying their CDs for their
own personal use, such as uploading tracks to their iPods or other digital players. In 2005,
P2P service Grokster shut down after it was fined $50 million by U.S. federal courts and, in
upholding the lower court rulings, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the music industry
could pursue legal action against any P2P service that encouraged its users to illegally share
music or other media. In 2006, eDonkey settled with the music industry and went out of
business, while Kazaa settled a lawsuit with the music industry and became a legal service.
Morpheus went bankrupt in 2008, and a federal court ruled against Limewire in 2010. More-
over, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed thousands of lawsuits,
with many of its legal efforts targeting university computer network users for copyright
infringement.

At the same time, the music industry realized that it would have to somehow adapt its
business to the digital format and embraced services like iTunes (launched by Apple in 2003,
to accompany the iPod), which has become the model for legal online distribution. By 2010,
iTunes had sold more than ten billion songs. It became the No. 1 music retailer in the United
States in 2008, surpassing Best Buy, Target, and Walmart. Even with the success of Apple’s

iTunes and other online music stores, illegal music file-
sharing still far outpaces legal downloading by a ratio of
at least 10 to 1.10

In some cases, unauthorized file-sharing may
actually boost legitimate music sales. Since 2002,
BigChampagne.com has tracked the world’s most popu-
lar download communities and compiled weekly lists
of the most popular file-shared songs for clients like the
radio industry. Radio stations, in turn, may adjust their
play-lists to incorporate this information and, ironically,
spur legitimate music sales.

“Today’s Internet
landscape—
with millions
of consumers
downloading songs
from the iTunes
Music Store,
watching videos
on YouTube or Hulu
and networking on
social media sites
like Facebook—can
be traced back to
the day in early
June of 1999
when [eighteen-
year-old inventor
Shawn] Fanning
made Napster
available for wider
distribution.”

SAN FRANCISCO
CHRONICLE, 2009

APPLE’S iPOD, the leading
portable music and video
player, began a revolution
in digital music.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��79

I t is a success story that could only have happened in the hyperspeed of the digital age. Since its debut
in April 2003, iTunes has gone from an
intriguing concept to the world’s No. 1
music retailer, accounting for 70 percent
of global online digital music sales.
Recently celebrating the occasion of its
ten billionth download (by seventy-
one-year-old Louie Slucer), iTunes has
conclusively proven that consumers, irre-
spective of age, have readily and happily
adapted to downloading, preferring it to
purchasing CDs. Frustrated by escalat-
ing CD prices and convinced that most
releases contain only a few good songs
and too much filler—not to mention the
physical clutter created by CDs—digital
music sites offer consumers an à la carte
menu where they can cherry-pick their
favorite tracks and build a music library
that is easily stored on a hard drive and
transferable to an MP3 player.

Digital downloading has also forever
altered locating and accessing non-
mainstream music and recordings by
unsigned bands. If iTunes resembles a
traditional retailer with a deep cata-
logue, then a competitor such as eMusic
(which Rolling Stone dubbed “iTunes’
cheaper, cooler cousin”) is the online
equivalent of a specialty record store,
designed for connoisseurs who are
uninterested in mass-marketed pop.
The success of social networking sites
such as Facebook (400 million active
users) and, to a lesser extent MySpace,
has made them important gathering
places for virtual communities of fans
for thousands of bands in dozens of
genres. By capitalizing on the Internet’s
ability to “marginalize the traditional
bodies of mediation between those
who make music and those who listen
to it,”1 social networking sites make

Digital Downloading and the Future of Online Music
by John Dougan

searching for new music and performers
much easier. Similarly, the Internet radio
service Pandora (available online and in
mobile versions for smartphones) allows
its forty-eight million listeners to access
nearly one million tracks in its library link-
ing listeners’ requests with other songs
or artists in its library deemed musically
similar. Pandora also connects directly
to iTunes and Amazon.com, so listeners
can purchase the tracks they enjoy.

The Internet is chang-
ing not only how
consumers are
exposed to
music but
how record
label A&R
(Artist &
Repertoire)
departments
scout talent.
A&R reps, who
no longer travel
as much to locate
talent, are searching for
acts who do their own marketing
and come with a built-in community
of fans. While MySpace’s attempt at
a major label supported music site
(MySpace Music) has underperformed,
YouTube has become a particularly
powerful player in turning unknown
performers into international phenom-
ena. One such example is middle-aged
Scottish singer Susan Boyle, whose
performance on Britain’s Got Talent in
2009 went viral on YouTube and, in the
past year, has racked up nearly forty-
three million views. Her debut album
went on to sell an astonishing eight
million copies in six weeks.

Despite Susan Boyle’s success, the
digital age has made the album-length

CD increasingly obsolete. While digital
downloading allows consumers greater
and more immediate access to music,
aesthetically it harkens back to the
late 1950s and early 1960s when
the 45-rpm single was dominant and
the most reliable indicator of whether a
song was a hit. Downloading a variety of
tracks means that consumers build their
own collection of virtual 45s that, when
taken as a whole, become a personalized
greatest hits collection. Increasingly, art-

ists are imagining a future where
they no longer release album-

length CDs, but rather a
series of individual tracks

that consumers can piece
together however they
please.

But if the death knell has
been sounded for the

compact disc, what of the
digital download? There

are those who claim that,
after only seven years, iTunes

is showing its age and will face a
stiff challenge from Google’s Android
mobile operating system. With Android,
users will be able to purchase music
from any computer and have the files
appear instantly on their phones. Users
will also be able to send the music on
their hard drive to the Internet, so they
can access it on their phone as long as
they have an Internet connection (unlike
iTunes’ syncing system, which requires
plugging your MP3 player into your
computer). With Apple said to be de-
veloping a Web-based iTunes, perhaps
the future means accessing music from
anywhere at any time.2

John Dougan is an Associate Professor in the
Department of the Recording Industry at Middle
Tennessee State University.

TRACKING
TECHNOLOGY

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

80��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

The Future: Music in the Stream, Music in the Cloud
If the history of recorded music tells us anything, it’s that over time tastes change and formats
change. While artists take care of the musical possibilities, technology companies are develop-
ing formats for the future. One potential successor to the MP3 is called MusicDNA, an enhanced
MP3 file that would contain images, lyrics, and news updates embedded into the file. The mak-
ers of MusicDNA are hoping that this will discourage piracy since only legal downloads of the
MusicDNA would contain the additional content.

Alternate music distribution channels could eliminate downloads entirely. Existing services
like Pandora stream user-formatted Internet music radio channels for free, with financial sup-
port from advertising and data mining. Other streaming services like Rhapsody, MOG, Deezer,
and Spotify have monthly subscriptions, but they enable listeners to play songs on-demand
and create playlists. These streaming services can be accessed via the Internet or a smartphone
device, but listeners don’t “own” physical copies of the music (though some link to outside
sources where listeners can purchase the music). Another system being tested by FreeAllMusic
.com would let consumers download songs for free, but only after watching an advertisement
or “liking” a company on Facebook. Finally, some companies (perhaps even Apple, with its
recent purchase of Lala.com) envision music to be purchased but not downloaded onto an MP3
player. Instead, one’s music would reside “in the cloud” of the Internet—meaning that songs
would never have to be downloaded or synchronized between mobile devices and computer,
but instead would always be available to stream on any Internet-connected device.11

The Rocky Relationship between Records and Radio
The recording industry and radio have always been closely linked. Although they work
almost in unison now, in the beginning they had a tumultuous relationship. Radio’s very
existence sparked the first battle. By 1915, the phonograph had become a popular form of
entertainment. The recording industry sold thirty million records that year, and by the end
of the decade sales more than tripled each year. In 1924, though, record sales dropped to
only half of what they had been the previous year. Why? Because radio had arrived as a com-
peting mass medium, providing free entertainment over the airwaves, independent of the
recording industry.

The battle heated up when, to the alarm of the recording industry, radio stations began
broadcasting recorded music without compensating the music industry. The American Soci-
ety of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), founded in 1914 to collect copyright fees
for music publishers and writers, charged that radio was contributing to plummeting sales of
records and sheet music. By 1925, ASCAP established music rights fees for radio, charging sta-
tions between $250 and $2,500 a week to play recorded music—and causing many stations to
leave the air.

But other stations countered by establishing their own live, in-house orchestras, dissemi-
nating “free” music to listeners. This time, the recording industry could do nothing, as original
radio music did not infringe on any copyrights. Throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, record
and phonograph sales continued to fall, although the recording industry got a small boost when
Prohibition ended in 1933 and record-playing jukeboxes became the standard musical entertain-
ment in neighborhood taverns.

The recording and radio industries only began to cooperate with each other after television
became popular in the early 1950s. Television pilfered radio’s variety shows, crime dramas,
and comedy programs and, along with those formats, much of its advertising revenue and audi-
ence. Seeking to reinvent itself, radio turned to the record industry, and this time both indus-
tries greatly benefited from radio’s new “hit songs” format. The alliance between the recording

“The one good thing
I can say about
file-sharing is it
affords us a chance
to get our music
heard without the
label incurring
crazy marketing
expenses.”

GERARD COSLEY,
COPRESIDENT OF THE
INDIE RECORD LABEL
MATADOR, 2003

“Music should
never be harmless.”

ROBBIE ROBERTSON,
THE BAND

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��81

industry and radio was aided enormously by rock and roll music, which was just emerging in
the 1950s. Rock created an enduring consumer youth market for sound recordings and provid-
ed much-needed new content for radio precisely when television made it seem like an obsolete
medium. In 2010, though, the music industry—seeking to improve its revenues—was proposing
to charge radio broadcast performance royalty fees for playing music on the air, something
radio stations opposed.

U.S. Popular Music
and the Formation of Rock

Popular or pop music is music that appeals either to a wide cross section of the public or to
sizable subdivisions within the larger public based on age, region, or ethnic background (e.g.,
teenagers, southerners, Mexican Americans). U.S. pop music today encompasses styles as
diverse as blues, country, Tejano, salsa, jazz, rock, reggae, punk, hip-hop, and dance. The word
pop has also been used to distinguish popular music from classical music, which is written
primarily for ballet, opera, ensemble, or symphony. As various subcultures have intersected,
U.S. popular music has developed organically, constantly creating new forms and reinvigorating
older musical styles.

The Rise of Pop Music
Although it is commonly assumed that pop music developed simultaneously with the phono-
graph and radio, it actually existed prior to these media. In the late nineteenth century, the sale
of sheet music for piano and other instruments sprang from a section of Broadway in Manhattan
known as Tin Pan Alley, a derisive term used to describe the way that these quickly produced
tunes supposedly sounded like cheap pans clanging together. Tin Pan Alley’s tradition of song
publishing began in the late 1880s with music like the marches of John Philip Sousa and the
ragtime piano pieces of Scott Joplin. It continued through the first half of the twentieth century
with the show tunes and vocal ballads of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter; and
into the 1950s and 1960s with such rock-and-roll writing teams as Jerry Leiber–Mike Stoller and
Carole King–Gerry Goffin.

At the turn of the twentieth century, with the newfound ability of song publishers to mass-
produce sheet music for a growing middle class, popular songs moved from being a novelty to
being a major business enterprise. With the emergence of the phonograph, song publishers also
discovered that recorded tunes boosted interest in and sales of sheet music. Although the popu-
larity of sheet music would decline rapidly with the introduction of radio in the 1920s, songwrit-
ing along Tin Pan Alley played a key role in transforming popular music into a mass medium.

As sheet music grew in popularity, jazz developed in New Orleans. An improvisational
and mostly instrumental musical form, jazz absorbed and integrated a diverse body of musical
styles, including African rhythms, blues, and gospel. Jazz influenced many bandleaders through-
out the 1930s and 1940s. Groups led by Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, Duke
Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller were among the most popular of the “swing” jazz
bands, whose rhythmic music also dominated radio, recording, and dance halls in their day.

The first pop vocalists of the twentieth century were products of the vaudeville circuit,
which radio, movies, and the Depression would bring to an end in the 1930s. In the 1920s,
Eddie Cantor, Belle Baker, Sophie Tucker, and Al Jolson were all extremely popular. By the

SCOTT JOPLIN (1868–
1917) published more than
fifty compositions during his
life, including “Maple Leaf
Rag”—arguably his most
famous piece.

“Frank Sinatra
was categorized
in 1943 as ‘the
glorification of
ignorance and
musical illiteracy.’�”

DICK CLARK, THE FIRST
25 YEARS OF ROCK &
ROLL

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

82��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

ROBERT JOHNSON (1911–
1938), who ranks among
the most influential and
innovative American
guitarists, played the
Mississippi delta blues
and was a major influence
on early rock and rollers,
especially the Rolling Stones
and Eric Clapton. His intense
slide-guitar and finger-
style playing also inspired
generations of blues artists,
including Muddy Waters,
Howlin’ Wolf, Bonnie Raitt,
and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
To get a sense of his style,
visit The Robert Johnson
Notebooks, http://xroads
.virginia.edu/~MUSIC/
rjhome.html.

1930s, Rudy Vallée and Bing Crosby had established themselves as the first “crooners,” or sing-
ers of pop standards. Bing Crosby also popularized Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” one of
the most covered songs in recording history. (A song recorded or performed by another artist
is known as cover music.) Meanwhile, the bluesy harmonies of a New Orleans vocal trio, the
Boswell Sisters, influenced the Andrews Sisters, whose boogie-woogie style helped them sell
more than sixty million records in the late 1930s and 1940s. In one of the first mutually ben-
eficial alliances between sound recording and radio, many early pop vocalists had their own

network of regional radio programs, which vastly increased their exposure.
Frank Sinatra arrived in the 1940s, and his romantic ballads foreshadowed

the teen love songs of rock and roll’s early years. Nicknamed “The Voice” early in
his career, Sinatra, like Crosby, parlayed his music and radio exposure into movie
stardom. (Both singers made more than fifty films apiece.) Helped by radio, pop vo-
calists like Sinatra—and many others, including Rosemary Clooney, Ella Fitzgerald,
Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Lena Horne, Judy Garland, and Sarah Vaughan—were
among the first vocalists to become popular with a large national teen audience.
Their record sales helped stabilize the industry, and in the early 1940s Sinatra’s
concerts caused the kind of audience riots that would later characterize rock-and-
roll performances.

Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay
The cultural storm called rock and roll hit in the mid-1950s. As with the term
jazz, rock and roll was a blues slang term for “sex,” lending it instant controversy.
Early rock and roll combined the vocal and instrumental traditions of pop with the
rhythm-and-blues sounds of Memphis and the country twang of Nashville. It was
considered the first “integrationist music,” merging the black sounds of rhythm
and blues, gospel, and Robert Johnson’s screeching blues guitar with the white
influences of country, folk, and pop vocals.12 From a cultural perspective, only a
few musical forms have ever sprung from such a diverse set of influences, and no
new style of music has ever had such a widespread impact on so many different
cultures as rock and roll. From an economic perspective, no single musical form
prior to rock and roll had ever simultaneously transformed the structure of two
mass media industries: sound recording and radio. Rock’s development set the
stage for how music is produced, distributed, and performed today. Many social,

cultural, economic, and political factors leading up to the 1950s contributed to the growth of
rock and roll, including black migration, the growth of youth culture, and the beginnings of
racial integration.

Blues and R&B: The Foundation of Rock and Roll
The migration of southern blacks to northern cities in search of better jobs during the first half
of the twentieth century had helped spread different popular music styles. In particular, blues
music, the foundation of rock and roll, came to the North. Influenced by African American spiri-
tuals, ballads, and work songs from the rural South, blues music was exemplified in the work of
Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, Son House, Bessie Smith, Charley Patton, and others. The introduc-
tion in the 1930s of the electric guitar—a major contribution to rock music—made it easier for
musicians “to cut through the noise in ghetto taverns” and gave southern blues its urban style,
popularized in the work of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, B.B. King, and
Buddy Guy.13

During this time, blues-based urban black music began to be marketed under the name
rhythm and blues, or R&B. Featuring “huge rhythm units smashing away behind screaming

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��83

blues singers,” R&B appealed to young listeners fascinated by the explicit (and forbidden)
sexual lyrics in songs like “Annie Had a Baby,” “Sexy Ways,” and “Wild Wild Young Men.”14
Although it was banned on some stations, by 1953 R&B continued to gain airtime. In those
days, black and white musical forms were segregated: Trade magazines tracked R&B
record sales on “race” charts, which were kept separate from white record sales tracked
on “pop” charts.

Youth Culture Cements Rock and Roll’s Place
Another reason for the growth of rock and roll can be found in the repressive and uneasy atmo-
sphere of the 1950s. To cope with the threat of the atomic bomb, the Cold War, and communist
witch-hunts, young people sought escape from the menacing world created by adults. Teens
have always sought out music that has a beat— music they can dance to. In Europe in the late
1700s, they popularized the waltz; and in America during the 1890s, they danced the cakewalk
to music that inspired marches and ragtime. The trend continued during the 1920s with the
Charleston, in the 1930s and 1940s with the jazz swing bands and the jitterbug, in the 1970s with
disco, and in the 1980s and 1990s with hip-hop. Each of these twentieth-century musical forms
began as dance and party music before its growing popularity eventually energized both record
sales and radio formats.

Racial Integration Expands Rock and Roll
Perhaps the most significant factor in the growth of rock and roll was the beginning of the
integration of white and black cultures. In addition to increased exposure of black literature,
art, and music, several key historical events in the 1950s broke down the borders between
black and white cultures. In the early 1950s, President Truman signed an executive order
integrating the armed forces, bringing young men from very different ethnic and economic
backgrounds together. Even more significant was the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Edu-
cation decision in 1954. With this ruling, “separate but equal” laws, which had kept white and
black schools, hotels, restaurants, restrooms, and drinking fountains segregated for decades,
were declared unconstitutional. Thus mainstream America began to wrestle seriously with
the legacy of slavery and the unequal treatment of its African American citizens. A cultural
reflection of the times, rock and roll would burst forth from the midst of these social and
political tensions.

Rock Muddies the Waters
In the 1950s, legal integration accompanied a cultural shift, and the music industry’s race and
pop charts blurred. White deejay Alan Freed had been playing black music for his young audi-
ences in Cleveland and New York since the early 1950s, and such white performers as Johnnie
Ray and Bill Haley had crossed over to the race charts to score R&B hits. Meanwhile, black
artists like Chuck Berry were performing country songs, and for a time Ray Charles even played
in an otherwise all-white country band. Although continuing the work of breaking down racial
borders was one of rock and roll’s most important contributions, it also blurred other long-
standing boundaries. Rock and roll exploded old distinctions between high and low culture,
masculinity and femininity, the country and the city, the North and the South, and the sacred
and the secular.

High and Low Culture
In 1956, Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” merged rock and roll, considered low culture
by many, with high culture, thus forever blurring the traditional boundary between them with
lyrics like: “You know my temperature’s risin’ / the jukebox is blowin’ a fuse . . . Roll over

BESSIE SMITH (1895–
1937) is considered the
best female blues singer
of the 1920s and 1930s.
Mentored by the famous Ma
Rainey, Smith’s hits include
“Down Hearted Blues” and
“Gulf Coast Blues.” She also
appeared in the 1929 film
St. Louis Blues.

“The songs of
Muddy Waters
impelled me to
deliver the down-
home blues in the
language they
came from, Negro
dialect. When I
played hillbilly
songs, I stressed
my diction so that
it was harder and
whiter. All in all it
was my intention to
hold both the black
and white clientele.”

CHUCK BERRY, THE
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 1987

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

84��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

Beethoven / and tell Tchaikovsky the news.” Although such early rock-and-roll lyr-
ics seem tame by today’s standards, at the time they sounded like sacrilege. Rock
and rollers also challenged music decorum and the rules governing how musicians
should behave or misbehave: Berry’s “duck walk” across the stage, Elvis Presley’s
pegged pants and gyrating hips, and Bo Diddley’s use of the guitar as a phallic
symbol were an affront to the norms of well-behaved, culturally elite audiences.
Such antics would be imitated endlessly throughout rock’s history. In fact, rock
and roll’s live shows and the legends surrounding them became key ingredients in
promoting record sales.

The blurring of cultures works both ways. Since the advent of rock and roll,
musicians performing in traditionally high culture genres such as classical have
even adopted some of rock and roll’s ideas in an effort to boost sales and popular-
ity. Some virtuosos like violinist Joshua Bell and cellist Matt Haimovitz (who does
his own version of Jimi Hendrix’s famous improvisation of the national anthem)
have performed in jeans and in untraditional venues like bars and subway stations
to reinterpret the presentation of classical music.

Masculinity and Femininity
Rock and roll was also the first popular music genre to overtly confuse issues of
sexual identity and orientation. Although early rock and roll largely attracted
males as performers, the most fascinating feature of Elvis Presley, according to the
Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, was his androgynous appearance.15 During this early
period, though, the most sexually outrageous rock-and-roll performer was Little
Richard (Penniman), who influenced a generation of extravagant rock stars.

Wearing a pompadour hairdo and assaulting his Steinway piano, Little Richard was consid-
ered rock and roll’s first drag queen, blurring the boundary between masculinity and feminin-
ity (although his act had been influenced by a flamboyant 6½-foot-tall gay piano player named
Esquerita, who hosted drag-queen shows in New Orleans in the 1940s).16 Little Richard has said
that given the reality of American racism, he blurred gender and sexuality lines because he
feared the consequences of becoming a sex symbol for white girls: “I decided that my image
should be crazy and way out so that adults would think I was harmless. I’d appear in one show
dressed as the Queen of England and in the next as the pope.”17 Although white parents in the
1950s may not have been concerned about their daughters falling for Little Richard, many saw
him as a threat to traditional gender roles and viewed his sexual identity and possible sexual
orientation as anything but harmless. Little Richard’s playful blurring of gender identity and
sexual orientation paved the way for performers like David Bowie, Elton John, Boy George, An-
nie Lennox, Prince, Grace Jones, Marilyn Manson, and Adam Lambert.

The Country and the City
Rock and roll also blurred geographic borders between country and city, between the black ur-
ban rhythms of Memphis and the white country & western music of Nashville. Early white rock-
ers such as Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins combined country or hillbilly music, southern gospel,
and Mississippi delta blues to create a sound called rockabilly. Raised on bluegrass music and
radio’s Grand Ole Opry, Perkins (a sharecropper’s son from Tennessee) mixed these influences
with music he heard from black cotton-field workers and blues singers like Muddy Waters and
John Lee Hooker, both of whom used electric guitars in their performances.

Conversely, rhythm and blues spilled into rock and roll. The urban R&B influences on early
rock came from Fats Domino (“Blueberry Hill”), Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton (“Hound
Dog”), and Big Joe Turner (“Shake, Rattle, and Roll”). Many of these songs, first popular on R&B

ROCK AND ROLL PIONEER
A major influence on early
rock and roll, Chuck Berry,
born in 1926, scored major
hits between 1955 and
1958, writing “Maybellene,”
“Roll Over Beethoven,”
“School Day,” “Sweet Little
Sixteen,” and “Johnny B.
Goode.” At the time, he
was criticized by some
black artists for sounding
white and by conservative
critics for his popularity
among white teenagers.
Today, young guitar players
routinely imitate his style.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��85

labels, crossed over to the pop charts during the mid- to late 1950s (although
many were performed by more widely known white artists). Chuck Berry bor-
rowed from white country & western music (an old country song called “Ida
Red”) and combined it with R&B to write “Maybellene.” His first hit, the song
was No. 1 on the R&B chart in July 1955 and crossed over to the pop charts the
next month.

Although rock lyrics in the 1950s may not have been especially provoca-
tive or overtly political, soaring record sales and the crossover appeal of the
music itself represented an enormous threat to long-standing racial and class
boundaries. In 1956, the secretary of the North Alabama White Citizens Council
bluntly spelled out the racism and white fear concerning the new blending of
urban/black and rural/white culture: “Rock and roll is a means of pulling the
white man down to the level of the Negro. It is part of a plot to undermine the
morals of the youth of our nation.”18 These days, distinctions between traditionally rural music
and urban music continue to blur, with older hybrids such as country rock (think of the Eagles)
and newer forms like “alternative country,” with performers like Ryan Adams, Steve Earle,
Wilco, and Kings of Leon.

The North and the South
Not only did rock and roll muddy the urban and rural terrain, it also combined northern and
southern influences. In fact, with so much blues, R&B, and rock and roll rising from the South
in the 1950s, this region regained some of its cultural flavor, which (along with a sizable portion
of the population) had migrated to the North after the Civil War and during the early twentieth
century. Meanwhile, musicians and audiences in the North had absorbed blues music as their
own, eliminating the understanding of blues as specifically a southern style. Like the many
white teens today who are fascinated by hip-hop (buying the majority of hip-hop CDs on the
commercial market), Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, and Buddy Holly—all from the rural South—
were fascinated with and influenced by the black urban styles they had heard on the radio or
seen in nightclubs. These artists in turn brought southern culture to northern listeners.

But the key to record sales and the spread of rock and roll, according to famed record
producer Sam Phillips of Sun Records, was to find a white man who sounded black. Phillips
found that man in Elvis Presley. Commenting on Presley’s cultural importance, one critic wrote:
“White rockabillies like Elvis took poor white southern mannerisms of speech and behavior
deeper into mainstream culture than they had ever been taken.”19

The Sacred and the Secular
Although many mainstream adults in the 1950s complained that rock and roll’s sexuality and
questioning of moral norms constituted an offense against God, in fact many early rock figures
had close ties to religion. As a boy, Elvis Presley dreamed of joining the Blackwoods, one of
country-gospel’s most influential groups; Jerry Lee Lewis attended a Bible institute in Texas
(although he was eventually thrown out); Ray Charles converted an old gospel tune he had first
heard in church as a youth into “I Got a Woman,” one of his signature songs; and many other
artists transformed gospel songs into rock and roll.

Still, many people did not appreciate the blurring of boundaries between the sacred and
the secular. In the late 1950s, public outrage over rock and roll was so great that even Little Rich-
ard and Jerry Lee Lewis, both sons of southern preachers, became convinced that they were
playing the “devil’s music.” By 1959, Little Richard had left rock and roll to become a minister.
Lewis, too, feared that rock was no way to salvation. He had to be coerced into recording “Great
Balls of Fire,” a song by Otis Blackwell that turned an apocalyptic biblical phrase into a highly

ADAM LAMBERT
Like Little Richard, David
Bowie, and Prince before
him, Lambert is the most
recent popular artist to push
the boundaries between
traditional gender roles. As
a contestant on American
Idol, he became known for
his music as much as for his
glam-rock leather outfits and
consistent use of makeup
and “guyliner.”

“[Elvis Presley’s]
kind of music
is deplorable, a
rancid smelling
aphrodisiac.”

FRANK SINATRA, 1956

“There have been
many accolades
uttered about
[Presley’s] talent
and performan-
ces through the
years, all of which
I agree with
wholeheartedly.”

FRANK SINATRA, 1977

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

86��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

charged sexual teen love song that was banned by many radio
stations, but nevertheless climbed to No. 2 on the pop charts
in 1957. Throughout the rock and roll era to today, the bound-
aries between sacred and secular music and religious and
secular concerns continue to blur, with some churches using
rock and roll to appeal to youth, and some Christian-themed
rock groups recording music as seemingly incongruous as
heavy metal.

Battles in Rock and Roll
The blurring of racial lines and the breakdown of other con-
ventional boundaries meant that performers and producers
were forced to play a tricky game to get rock and roll accepted
by the masses. Two prominent white disc jockeys used differ-
ent methods. Cleveland deejay Alan Freed, credited with popu-
larizing the term rock and roll, played original R&B recordings
from the race charts and black versions of early rock and roll
on his program. In contrast, Philadelphia deejay Dick Clark be-
lieved that making black music acceptable to white audiences

required cover versions by white artists. By the mid-1950s, rock and roll was gaining acceptance
with the masses, but rock and roll artists and promoters still faced further obstacles: Black
artists found that they were often undermined by white cover versions; the payola scandals
portrayed rock and roll as a corrupt industry; and fears of rock and roll as a contributing factor
in juvenile delinquency resulted in censorship.

White Cover Music Undermines Black Artists
By the mid-1960s, black and white artists routinely recorded and performed one another’s
original tunes. For example, established black R&B artist Otis Redding covered the Rolling
Stones’ “Satisfaction” and Jimi Hendrix covered Bob Dylan’s “All along the Watchtower,” while
just about every white rock and roll band established its career by covering R&B classics. Most
notably, the Beatles covered “Twist and Shout” and “Money” and the Rolling Stones—whose
name came from a Muddy Waters song—covered numerous Robert Johnson songs and other
blues staples.

Although today we take such rerecordings for granted, in the 1950s the covering of black
artists’ songs by white musicians was almost always an attempt to capitalize on popular songs
from the R&B “race” charts and transform them into hits on the white pop charts. Often, white
producers would not only give co-writing credit to white performers like Elvis Presley (who
never wrote songs himself ) for the tunes they only covered, but they would also buy the rights
to potential hits from black songwriters who seldom saw a penny in royalties or received song-
writing credit.

During this period, black R&B artists, working for small record labels, saw many of their
popular songs covered by white artists working for major labels. These cover records, boosted
by better marketing and ties to white deejays, usually outsold the original black versions. For
instance, the 1954 R&B song “Sh-Boom,” by the Chords on Atlantic’s Cat label, was immediately
covered by a white group, the Crew Cuts, for the major Mercury label. Record sales declined for
the Chords, although jukebox and R&B radio play remained strong for their original version. By
1955, R&B hits regularly crossed over to the pop charts, but inevitably the cover music versions
were more successful. Pat Boone’s cover of Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” went to No. 1
and stayed on the Top 40’s pop chart for twenty weeks, whereas Domino’s original made it only

ELVIS PRESLEY
Although his unofficial title,
“King of Rock and Roll,” has
been challenged by Little
Richard and Chuck Berry,
Elvis Presley remains the
most popular solo artist of all
time. From 1956 to 1962,
he recorded seventeen
No. 1 hits, from “Heartbreak
Hotel” to “Good Luck Charm.”
According to Little Richard,
Presley’s main legacy was
that he opened doors for
many young performers and
made black music popular in
mainstream America.

“Consistently
through history
it’s been black
American music
that’s been at the
cutting edge of
technology.”

MARK COLEMAN,
MUSIC HISTORIAN,
2004

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��87

to No. 10. During this time, Pat Boone ranked as the king of cover music, with thirty-
eight Top 40 songs between 1955 and 1962. His records were second in sales only
to Presley’s. Slowly, however, the cover situation changed. After watching Boone
outsell his song “Tutti-Frutti” in 1956, Little Richard wrote “Long Tall Sally,” which
included lyrics written and delivered in such a way that he believed Boone would
not be able to adequately replicate them. “Long Tall Sally” went to No. 6 for Little
Richard and charted for twelve weeks; Boone’s version got to No. 8 and stayed there
for nine weeks.

Overt racism lingered in the music business well into the 1960s. When the Mar-
velettes scored a No. 1 hit with “Please Mr. Postman” in 1961, their Tamla/Motown
label had to substitute a cartoon album cover because many record-store owners
feared customers would not buy a recording that pictured four black women. A
turning point, however, came in 1962, the last year that Pat Boone, then age twenty-
eight, ever had a Top 40 rock-and-roll hit. That year, Ray Charles covered “I Can’t
Stop Loving You,” a 1958 country song by the Grand Ole Opry’s Don Gibson. This
marked the first time that a black artist, covering a white artist’s song, had notched
a No. 1 pop hit. With Charles’s cover, the rock-and-roll merger between gospel and
R&B, on one hand, and white country and pop, on the other, was complete. In fact,
the relative acceptance of black crossover music provided a more favorable cultural
context for the political activism that spurred important Civil Rights legislation in
the mid-1960s.

Payola Scandals Tarnish Rock and Roll
The payola scandals of the 1950s were another cloud over rock and roll music and its artists. In
the music industry, payola is the practice of record promoters paying deejays or radio program-
mers to play particular songs. As recorded rock and roll became central to commercial radio’s
success in the 1950s and the demand for airplay grew enormous, independent promoters hired
by record labels used payola to pressure deejays into playing songs by the artists they repre-
sented.

Although payola was considered a form of bribery, no laws prohibited its practice. How-
ever, following closely on the heels of television’s quiz-show scandals (see Chapter 5), congres-
sional hearings on radio payola began in December 1959. After a November announcement of
the upcoming hearings, stations across the country fired deejays, and many others resigned.
The hearings were partly a response to generally fraudulent business practices, but they were
also an opportunity to blame deejays and radio for rock and roll’s negative impact on teens by
portraying it as a corrupt industry.

The payola scandals threatened, ended, or damaged the careers of a number of rock and
roll deejays and undermined rock and roll’s credibility for a number of years. In 1959, shortly
before the hearings, Chicago deejay Phil Lind decided to clear the air. He broadcast secretly
taped discussions in which a representative of a small independent record label acknowledged
that it had paid $22,000 to ensure that a record would get airplay. Lind received calls threaten-
ing his life and had to have police protection. At the hearings in 1960, Alan Freed admitted to
participating in payola, although he said he did not believe there was anything illegal about such
deals, and his career soon ended. Dick Clark, then an influential deejay and the host of TV’s
American Bandstand, would not admit to participating in payola. But the hearings committee
chastised Clark and alleged that some of his complicated business deals were ethically question-
able, a censure that hung over him for years.

Congress eventually added a law concerning payola to the Federal Communications Act, pre-
scribing a $10,000 fine and/or a year in jail for each violation. But given both the interdependence

MUSIC INDUSTRY
RACISM manifested in
many ways. Despite The
Marvelettes’ song “Please
Mr. Postman” reaching No. 1
in 1961, fear that customers
might not buy an album
that pictured black women
caused the record label to
substitute their images with
a cartoon.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

88��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

between radio and recording and the high stakes involved in creating a hit, the practice of payola
persists. In 2005, for example, Sony BMG and Warner Music paid millions to settle payola cases
brought by New York State (see Chapter 4).

Fears of Corruption Lead to Censorship
Since rock and roll’s inception, one of the uphill battles it faced was the perception that it was a
cause of juvenile delinquency. In truth, juvenile delinquency was statistically on the rise in the
1950s. Looking for an easy culprit rather than considering contributing factors such as neglect,
the rising consumer culture, or the growing youth population, many assigned blame to rock and
roll. The view that rock and roll corrupted youth was widely accepted by social authorities, and
rock and roll music was often censored, eventually even by the industry itself.

By late 1959, many key figures in rock and roll had been tamed. Jerry Lee Lewis was exiled
from the industry, labeled southern “white trash” for marrying his thirteen-year-old third cous-
in; Elvis Presley, having already been censored on television, was drafted into the army; Chuck
Berry was run out of Mississippi and eventually jailed for gun possession and transporting a mi-
nor across state lines; and Little Richard felt forced to tone down his image and leave rock and
roll to sing gospel music. A tragic accident led to the final taming of rock and roll’s first frontline.
In February 1959, Buddy Holly (“Peggy Sue”), Ritchie Valens (“La Bamba”), and the Big Bopper
(“Chantilly Lace”) all died in an Iowa plane crash—a tragedy mourned in Don McLean’s 1971 hit
“American Pie” as “the day the music died.”

Although rock and roll did not die in the late 1950s, the U.S. recording industry decided
that it needed a makeover. To protect the enormous profits the new music had been generating,
record companies began to discipline some of rock and roll’s rebellious impulses. In the early
1960s, the industry introduced a new generation of clean-cut white singers, like Frankie Avalon,
Connie Francis, Ricky Nelson, Lesley Gore, and Fabian. Rock and roll’s explosive violations of
racial, class, and other boundaries were transformed into simpler generation gap problems, and
the music developed a milder reputation.

A Changing Industry:
Reformations in Popular Music

As the 1960s began, rock and roll was tamer and “safer,” as reflected in the surf and road music of
the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, but it was also beginning to branch out. For instance, the success
of producer Phil Spector’s “girl groups,” such as the Crystals (“He’s a Rebel”) and the Ronettes
(“Be My Baby”), and other all-female groups, such as the Shangri-Las (“Leader of the Pack”) and
the Angels (“My Boyfriend’s Back”), challenged the male-dominated world of early rock and roll.
In addition, rock and roll music and other popular styles went through cultural reformations that
significantly changed the industry, including the international appeal of the “British invasion”;
the development of soul and Motown; the political impact of folk-rock; the experimentalism of
psychedelic music; the rejection of music’s mainstream by punk, grunge, and alternative rock
movements; and the reassertion of black urban style in hip-hop.

The British Are Coming!
Rock recordings today remain among America’s largest economic exports, bringing in billions
of dollars a year from abroad. In cultural terms, the global trade of rock and roll is even more

“Hard rock was
rock’s blues base
electrified and
upped in volume . . .
heavy metal
wanted to be the
rock music equiv-
alent of a horror
movie—loud,
exaggerated, rude,
out for thrills only.”

KEN TUCKER,
ROCK OF AGES, 1986

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��89

evident in exchanges of rhythms, beats, vocal styles, and musical instruments to and from the
United States, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia/New Zealand. The origin of
rock’s global impact can be traced to England in the late 1950s, when the young Rolling Stones
listened to the urban blues of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and the young Beatles tried to
imitate Chuck Berry and Little Richard.

Until 1964, rock-and-roll recordings had traveled on a one-way ticket to Europe. Even
though American artists regularly reached the top of the charts overseas, no British performers
had yet appeared on any Top 10 pop lists in the States. This changed almost overnight. In 1964,
the Beatles invaded America with their mop haircuts and pop reinterpretations of American
blues and rock and roll. Within the next few years, more British bands as diverse as the Kinks,
the Zombies, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, the Who, the Yardbirds, Them, and the Troggs
had hit the American Top 40 charts.

Ed Sullivan, who booked the Beatles several times on his TV variety show in 1964, helped
promote their early success. Sullivan, though, reacted differently to the Rolling Stones, who
were always perceived by Sullivan and many others as the “bad boys” of rock and roll in con-
trast to the “good” Beatles. The Stones performed black-influenced music without “whitening”
the sound and exuded a palpable aura of sexuality, particularly frontman Mick Jagger. Although
the Stones appeared on his program as early as 1964 and returned on several occasions, Sul-
livan remained wary and forced them to change the lyrics of “Let’s Spend the Night Together”
to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” for a 1967 broadcast. The band complied, but it had no
effect on their “dangerous” reputation.

With the British invasion, “rock and roll” unofficially became “rock,” sending popular mu-
sic and the industry in two directions. On the one hand, the Stones would influence generations
of musicians emphasizing gritty, chord-driven, high-volume rock, including bands in the glam
rock, hard rock, punk, heavy metal, and grunge genres. On the other hand, the Beatles would
influence countless artists interested in a more accessible, melodic, and softer sound, in genres
such as pop-rock, power-pop, new wave, and alternative rock. In the end, the British invasion
verified what Chuck Berry and Little Richard had already demonstrated—that rock-and-roll

BRITISH ROCK GROUPS
like the Beatles (above,
left) and the Rolling Stones
(above) first invaded
American pop charts in the
1960s. When the Beatles
broke up in 1970, each
member went on to work on
solo projects. The Stones
are still together and touring
over forty years later.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

90��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

performers could write and produce popular songs as well as Tin Pan Alley had. The success of
British groups helped change an industry arrangement in which most pop music was produced
by songwriting teams hired by major labels and matched with selected performers. Even more
important, the British invasion showed the recording industry how older American musical
forms, especially blues and R&B, could be repackaged as rock and exported around the world.

Motor City Music: Detroit Gives America Soul
Ironically, the British invasion, which drew much of its inspiration from black influences, drew
many white listeners away from a new generation of black performers. Gradually, however,
throughout the 1960s, black singers like James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Ike and
Tina Turner, and Wilson Pickett found large and diverse audiences. Transforming the rhythms
and melodies of older R&B, pop, and early rock and roll into what became labeled as soul, they
countered the British invaders with powerful vocal performances. Mixing gospel and blues with
emotion and lyrics drawn from the American black experience, soul contrasted sharply with
the emphasis on loud, fast instrumentals and lighter lyrical concerns that characterized much of
rock music.20

The most prominent independent label that nourished soul and black popular music was
Motown, started in 1959 by former Detroit autoworker and songwriter Berry Gordy with a $700
investment and named after Detroit’s “Motor City” nickname. Beginning with Smokey Robinson
and the Miracles’ “Shop Around,” which hit No. 2 in 1960, Motown enjoyed a long string of hit
records that rivaled the pop success of British bands throughout the decade. Motown’s many
successful artists included the Temptations (“My Girl”), Mary Wells (“My Guy”), the Four Tops
(“I Can’t Help Myself ”), Martha and the Vandellas (“Heat Wave”), Marvin Gaye (“I Heard It
through the Grapevine”), and, in the early 1970s, the Jackson 5 (“ABC”). But the label’s most suc-
cessful group was the Supremes, featuring Diana Ross, who scored twelve No. 1 singles between
1964 and 1969 (“Where Did Our Love Go,” “Stop! In the Name of Love”). The Motown groups
had a more stylized, softer sound than the grittier southern soul (later known as funk) of Brown

THE SUPREMES
One of the most successful
groups in rock-and–roll
history, the Supremes
started out as the Primettes
in Detroit in 1959. They
signed with Motown’s
Tamla label in 1960 and
changed their name in 1961.
Between 1964 and 1969
they recorded twelve No. 1
hits, including “Where Did
Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,”
“Come See about Me,” “Stop!
In the Name of Love,” “I Hear
a Symphony,” “You Can’t
Hurry Love,” and “Someday
We’ll Be Together.” Lead
singer Diana Ross (center)
left the group in 1969 for a
solo career. The group was
inducted into the Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��91

and Pickett. Motown producers realized at the outset that by cultivating romance and
dance over rebellion and politics, black music could attract a young, white audience.

Folk and Psychedelic Music Reflect the Times
Popular music has always been a product of its time, so the social upheavals of the
Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and
the Vietnam War naturally brought social concerns into the music of the 1960s and
early 1970s. Even Motown acts sounded edgy, with hits like Edwin Starr’s “War”
(1970) and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” (1971). By the late 1960s, the Beatles had
transformed themselves from a relatively lightweight pop band to one that spoke for
the social and political concerns of their generation, and many other groups followed
the same trajectory.

Folk Inspires Protest
The musical genre that most clearly responded to the political happenings of the time
was folk music, which had long been the sound of social activism. In its broadest
sense, folk music in any culture refers to songs performed by untrained musicians
and passed down mainly through oral traditions, from the banjo and fiddle tunes of
Appalachia to the accordion-led zydeco of Louisiana and the folk-blues of the legend-
ary Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter). During the 1930s, folk was defined by the music of
Woody Guthrie (“This Land Is Your Land”), who not only brought folk to the city but
also was extremely active in social reforms. Groups such as the Weavers, featuring
labor activist and songwriter Pete Seeger, carried on Guthrie’s legacy and inspired a
new generation of singer-songwriters, including Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Peter, Paul,
and Mary; Phil Ochs; and—perhaps the most influential—Bob Dylan. Dylan’s career
as a folk artist began with acoustic performances in New York’s Greenwich Village in
1961, and his notoriety was spurred by his measured nonchalance and unique nasal
voice. Significantly influenced by the blues, Dylan identified folk as “finger pointin’”
music that addressed current social circumstances. At a key moment in popular mu-
sic’s history, Dylan walked onstage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival fronting a full,
electric rock band. He was booed and cursed by traditional “folkies,” who saw amplified music
as a sellout to the commercial recording industry. However, Dylan’s move to rock was aimed at
reaching a broader and younger constituency, and in doing so he inspired the formation of folk-
rock artists like the Byrds, who had a No. 1 hit with a cover of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,”
and led millions to protest during the turbulent 1960s.

Rock Turns Psychedelic
Alcohol and drugs have long been associated with the private lives of blues, jazz, country, and
rock musicians. These links, however, became much more public in the late 1960s and early
1970s, when authorities busted members of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. With the increas-
ing role of drugs in youth culture and the availability of LSD (not illegal until the mid-1960s),
more and more rock musicians experimented with and sang about drugs in what were frequently
labeled rock’s psychedelic years. Many groups and performers of the psychedelic era (named
for the mind-altering effects of LSD and other drugs) like the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and
the Holding Company (featuring Janis Joplin), the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Doors, and the
Grateful Dead (as well as established artists like the Beatles and the Stones) believed that artistic
expression could be enhanced by mind-altering drugs. The 1960s drug explorations coincided
with the free-speech movement, in which many artists and followers saw experimenting with
drugs as a form of personal expression and a response to the failure of traditional institutions

BOB DYLAN
Born Robert Allen Zimmerman
in Minnesota, Bob Dylan took
his stage name from Welsh
poet Dylan Thomas. He led a
folk music movement in the
early 1960s with engaging,
socially provocative lyrics.
He also was an astute media
critic, as is evident in the
seminal documentary Don’t
Look Back (1967).

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

92��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

to deal with social and political problems such as racism and America’s involvement in the
Vietnam War. But after a surge of optimism that culminated in the historic Woodstock concert
in August 1969, the psychedelic movement was quickly overshadowed. In 1970, a similar con-
cert at the Altamont racetrack in California started in chaos and ended in tragedy when one of
the Hell’s Angels hired as a bodyguard for the show murdered a concertgoer. Around the same
time, the shocking multiple murders committed by the Charles Manson “family” cast a negative
light on hippies, drug use, and psychedelic culture. Then, in quick succession, a number of the
psychedelic movement’s greatest stars died from drug overdoses, including Janis Joplin, Jimi
Hendrix, and Jim Morrison of the Doors.

Punk, Grunge, and Alternative Respond
to Mainstream Rock
Considered a major part of the rebel counterculture in the 1960s, rock music in the 1970s was
increasingly viewed as just another part of mainstream consumer culture. With major music
acts earning huge profits, rock soon became another product line for manufacturers and retail-
ers to promote, package, and sell. Although some rock musicians like Bruce Springsteen and
Elton John; glam artists like David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop; and soul artists like Curtis
Mayfield and Marvin Gaye continued to explore the social possibilities of rock or at least keep
its legacy of outrageousness alive, the radio and sound recording businesses had returned to

marketing music primarily to middle-class white male teens.
According to critic Ken Tucker, this situation gave rise to
“faceless rock—crisply recorded, eminently catchy,” featuring
anonymous hits by bands with “no established individual per-
sonalities outside their own large but essentially discrete audi-
ences” of young white males.21 Challenging artists, for the most
part, didn’t sell records anymore. They had been replaced by
“faceless” supergroups like REO Speedwagon, Styx, Boston,
and Kansas that could fill up stadiums and entertain the largest
number of people with the least amount of controversy. By the
late 1970s, rock could only seem to define itself by saying what
it wasn’t; “Disco Sucks” became a standard rock slogan against
the popular dance music of the era.

Punk Revives Rock’s Rebelliousness
After a few years, punk rock rose in the late 1970s to challenge
the orthodoxy and commercialism of the record business. By

this time, the glory days of rock’s competitive independent labels had ended, and rock music
was controlled by just a half-dozen major companies. By avoiding rock’s consumer popular-
ity, punk attempted to return to the basics of rock and roll: simple chord structures, catchy
melodies, and politically or socially challenging lyrics. The premise was “do it yourself”: Any
teenager with a few weeks of guitar practice could learn the sound and make music that was
both more democratic and more provocative than commercial rock.

The punk movement took root in the small dive bar CBGB in New York City around bands
such as the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads. (The roots of punk essentially lay in four
pre-punk groups from the late 1960s and early 1970s—the Velvet Underground, the Stooges,
the New York Dolls, and the MC5—none of whom experienced commercial success in their
day.) Punk quickly spread to England, where a soaring unemployment rate and growing class
inequality ensured the success of socially critical rock. Groups like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the
Buzzcocks, and Siouxsie and the Banshees sprang up and even scored Top 40 hits on the U.K.

“Through their
raw, nihilistic
singles and violent
performances,
the [Sex Pistols]
revolutionized the
idea of what rock
and roll could be.”

STEPHEN THOMAS
ERLEWINE,
ALL-MUSIC GUIDE,
1996

THE TALKING HEADS’ first
gig was opening for the
Ramones at the infamous
New York City punk club
CBGB. Over a two decade-
plus career, the band become
music legends with songs like
“Psycho Killer,” “Life during
Wartime,” and “Burning Down
the House.” Known for their
artistic style, the original
three band members (David
Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Tina
Weymouth) all went to the
Rhode Island School of Design
together.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��93

charts. Despite their popularity, the Sex Pistols, one of the most controversial
groups in rock history, was eventually banned for offending British decorum.

Punk, which condemned the mainstream music industry, was not a com-
mercial success in the United States, where (not surprisingly) it was shunned
by radio. However, punk’s contributions continue to be felt. Punk broke down
the “boy’s club” mentality of rock, launching unapologetic and unadorned
front women like Patti Smith, Joan Jett, Debbie Harry, and Chrissie Hynde; and
it introduced all-women bands (writing and performing their own music) like
the Go Go’s into the mainstream. It also reopened the door to rock experimen-
tation at a time when the industry had turned music into a purely commercial
enterprise. The influence of experimental, or post-punk, is still felt today in
popular bands such as Interpol, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Franz Ferdinand.

Grunge and Alternative Reinterpret Rock
Taking the spirit of punk and updating it, the grunge scene represented a
significant development in rock in the 1990s. Getting its name from its often
messy guitar sound and the anti-fashion torn jeans and flannel shirt appear-
ance of its musicians and fans, grunge’s lineage can be traced back to 1980s
bands like Sonic Youth, the Minutemen, and Hüsker Dü. In 1992, after years of
limited commercial success, the younger cousin of punk finally broke into the
American mainstream with the success of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
on the album Nevermind. Led by enigmatic singer Kurt Cobain—who committed
suicide in 1994—Nirvana produced songs that one critic described as “stunning,
concise bursts of melody and rage that occasionally spilled over into haunting,
folk-styled acoustic ballad.”22 Nirvana opened up the floodgates to bands such
as Green Day, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, the Breeders, Hole, Nine Inch Nails, and
many others.

In some critical circles, both punk and grunge are considered subcategories or fringe
movements of alternative rock, even though grunge was far more commercially successful
than punk. This vague label describes many types of experimental rock music that offered a
departure from the theatrics and staged extravaganzas of 1970s glam rock, which showcased
such performers as David Bowie and Kiss. Appealing chiefly to college students and twenty-
somethings, alternative rock has traditionally opposed the sounds of Top 40 and commercial
FM radio. In the 1980s and 1990s, U2 and R.E.M. emerged as successful groups often associ-
ated with alternative rock. A key dilemma for successful alternative performers, however,
is that their popularity results in commercial success, ironically a situation that their music
often criticizes. While alternative rock music has more variety than ever, it is also not produc-
ing new mega-groups like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Green Day. Still, alternative groups like
Friendly Fires, Vampire Weekend, and MGMT have launched successful recording careers the
old-school way, but with a twist: starting out on independent labels, playing small concerts,
and growing popular quickly with alternative music audiences through the immediate buzz of
the Internet.

Hip-Hop Redraws Musical Lines
With the growing segregation of radio formats and the dominance of mainstream rock by
white male performers, the place of black artists in the rock world diminished from the late
1970s onward. By the 1980s, few popular black successors to Chuck Berry or Jimi Hendrix had
emerged in rock, though Michael Jackson and Prince were extremely popular exceptions. These
trends, combined with the rise of “safe” dance disco by white bands (the Bee Gees), black artists

NIRVANA’S lead singer,
Kurt Cobain, during his brief
career in the early 1990s.
The release of Nirvana’s
Nevermind in September
1991 bumped Michael
Jackson’s Dangerous from
the top of the charts and
signaled a new direction in
popular music. Other grunge
bands soon followed Nirvana
onto the charts, including
Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains,
Stone Temple Pilots, and
Soundgarden.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

94��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

(Donna Summer), and integrated groups (the Village People), created a space for a new sound
to emerge: hip-hop, a term for the urban culture that includes rapping, cutting (or sampling) by
deejays, breakdancing, street clothing, poetry slams, and graffiti art.

Similar to punk’s opposition to commercial rock, hip-hop music stood in direct opposi-
tion to the polished, professional, and often less political world of soul. Its combination of
social politics, swagger, and confrontational lyrics carried forward long-standing traditions in
blues, R&B, soul, and rock and roll. Like punk, hip-hop was driven by a democratic, nonpro-
fessional spirit—accessible to anyone who could rap or cut records on a turntable. Deejays,
like the pioneering Jamaica émigré Clive Campbell (a.k.a. DJ Kool Herc), emerged first in New
York, scratching and re-cueing old reggae, disco, soul, and rock albums. These deejays, or
MCs (masters of ceremony), used humor, boasts, and “trash talking” to entertain and keep the
peace at parties.

Not knowing about the long-standing party tradition, the music industry initially saw
hip-hop as a novelty, despite the enormous success of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight”
in 1979 (which sampled the bass beat of a disco hit from the same year, Chic’s “Good Times”).
Then, in 1982, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released “The Message” and forever
infused hip-hop with a political take on ghetto life, a tradition continued by artists like Public
Enemy and Ice-T. By 1985, hip-hop exploded as a popular genre with the commercial successes
of groups like Run-DMC, the Fat Boys, and LL Cool J. That year, Run-DMC’s album Raising Hell
became a major crossover hit, the first No. 1 hip-hop album on the popular charts (thanks
in part to a collaboration with Aerosmith on a rap version of the group’s 1976 hit “Walk This
Way”). Like punk and early rock and roll, hip-hop was cheap to produce, requiring only a few
mikes, speakers, amps, turntables, and vinyl record albums. Because most major labels and
many black radio stations rejected the rawness of hip-hop, the music spawned hundreds of new
independent labels. Although initially dominated by male performers, hip-hop was open to
women, and some—Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah among them—quickly became major players.
Soon, white groups like the Beastie Boys, Limp Bizkit, and Kid Rock were combining hip-hop
and punk rock in a commercially successful way, while Eminem found enormous success emu-
lating black rap artists.

On the one hand, the conversational style of rap makes it a forum in which performers
can debate issues of gender, class, sexuality, violence, and drugs. On the other hand, hip-hop,
like punk, has often drawn criticism for lyrics that degrade women, espouse homophobia,

THE BUSINESS OF HIP-HOP
Jay-Z and Beyoncé are two of
the most recognizable faces
in hip-hop and R&B. With his
1998 album Vol. 2 . . . Hard
Knock Life, Jay-Z became
one of the most critically and
commercially successful
hip-hop artists of the decade,
parlaying his musical career
into several successful
business ventures. After
launching her solo career
with Dangerously in Love in
2003, Beyoncé expanded
her empire through her acting
career (Dreamgirls, Cadillac
Records), clothing line, and
endorsement deals. With
their combined earning power
and media influence, the pair
was recognized as Forbes
magazine’s top “power couple”
in 2008.

“We’re like report-
ers. We give them
[our listeners] the
truth. People where
we come from hear
so many lies the
truth stands out
like a sore thumb.”

EAZY-E, N.W.A., 1989

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��95

and applaud violence. Although hip-hop encompasses many different styles,
including various Latin and Asian offshoots, its most controversial subgenre is
probably gangster rap, which, in seeking to tell the truth about gang violence
in American culture, has been accused of creating violence. Gangster rap drew
national attention in 1996 with the shooting death of Tupac Shakur, who lived
the violent life he rapped about on albums like Thug Life. Then, in 1997, Notori-
ous B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls), whose followers were
prominent suspects in Shakur’s death, was shot to death in Hollywood. The
result was a change in the hip-hop industry. Most prominently, Sean “Diddy”
Combs led Bad Boy Entertainment (former home of Notorious B.I.G.) away
from gangster rap to a more danceable hip-hop that combined singing and
rapping with musical elements of rock and soul. Today, hip-hop’s stars in-
clude artists such as 50 Cent, who emulates the gangster genre, and artists like
will.i.am, Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli, who bring an old-school social
consciousness to their performances.

The Reemergence of Pop
After waves of punk, grunge, alternative, and hip-hop, the decline of Top
40 radio, and the demise of MTV’s Total Request Live countdown show, it
seemed like pop music and the era of big pop stars was waning. But, pop
music has endured, and even flourished in recent years, with American
Idol spawning a few genuine pop stars like Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Un-
derwood. More recently, the television show Glee has given a second life
to older hits like Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and Madonna’s “Like a
Prayer” on the pop charts. But perhaps the biggest purveyor of pop is iTunes, which is
also the biggest single seller of recorded music. As iTunes celebrated its ten billionth
download in 2010, it listed its all-time top songs—all by leading pop artists like Black Eyed
Peas, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Jason Mraz, Rihanna, Leona Lewis, Miley Cyrus, P!nk, Katy
Perry, and Beyoncé.

The Business of
Sound Recording

For many in the recording industry, the relationship between music’s business and artistic
elements is an uneasy one. The lyrics of hip-hop or alternative rock, for example, often ques-
tion the commercial value of popular music. Both genres are built on the assumption that mu-
sical integrity requires a complete separation between business and art. But, in fact, the line
between commercial success and artistic expression is hazier than simply arguing that the
business side is driven by commercialism and the artistic side is free of commercial concerns.
The truth, in most cases, is that the business needs artists who are provocative, original,
and appealing to the public; and the artists need the expertise of the industry’s marketers,
promoters, and producers to hone their sound and reach the public. And both sides stand
to make a lot of money from the relationship. But such factors as the enormity of the major
labels and the complexities of making, selling, and profiting from music affect the business of
sound recording.

LADY GAGA is currently
leading the pack of artists
reclaiming the pop/dance
music scene. With four
No. 1 hits in 2009 and
multiple Billboard, Grammy,
and MTV Music Video
awards, Gaga was an instant
media sensation for her
unique fashion choices,
artistic and edgy videos,
and catchy pop songs.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

96��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

Sony Music
Entertainment

28.5%

Warner Music Group

Universal
Music Group

30.2%

Independents

EMI Music

11.6%

9.2%

20.5%

Music Labels Influence the Industry
After several years of steady growth, revenues for the recording
industry experienced significant losses beginning in 2000 as file-
sharing began to undercut CD sales. By 2009, U.S. music sales
fell to $7.7 billion, down from a peak of $14.5 billion in 1999. The
U.S. market accounts for about one-third of global sales, followed
by Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Canada.
Despite the losses, the U.S. and global music business still consti-
tutes a powerful oligopoly: a business situation in which a few
firms control most of an industry’s production and distribution
resources. This global reach gives these firms enormous influ-
ence over what types of music gain worldwide distribution and
popular acceptance. (See “What Sony Owns” on page 97.)

Fewer Major Labels Control More Music
From the 1950s through the 1980s, the music industry, though powerful, consisted of a large num-
ber of competing major labels, along with numerous independent labels. Over time, the major la-
bels began swallowing up the independents and then buying one another. By 1998, only six major
labels remained—Universal, Warner, Sony, BMG, EMI, and Polygram. That year, Universal acquired
Polygram, and in 2003 BMG and Sony merged. (BMG left the partnership in 2008.) Today, only
four major music corporations remain: Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, EMI,
and Warner Music Group. Together, the four companies control more than 85 percent of the re-
cording industry market in the United States (see Figure 3.2). By 2010, EMI experienced continued
financial difficulties, and its possible sale threatened to bring more consolidation to the industry.

The Indies Spot the Trends
In contrast to the four global players, some five thousand large and small independent produc-
tion houses—or indies—record less commercially viable music, or music they hope will become
commercially viable. Producing between 11 and 15 percent of America’s music, indies often enter
into deals with majors to gain wider distribution for their artists. The Internet has also become a
low-cost distribution outlet for independent labels, which sell recordings and merchandise and
list tour schedules online. (See “Alternative Voices” on page 101.)

The majors frequently rely on indies to discover and initiate distinctive musical trends that
first appear on a local level. For instance, indies such as Sugarhill, Tommy Boy, and Uptown
emerged in the 1980s to produce regional hip-hop. In the early 2000s, bands of the “indie-rock”
movement, such as Yo La Tengo and Arcade Fire, found their home on indie labels Matador and
Merge. Once indies become successful, the financial inducement to sell out to a major label is
enormous. Seattle indie Sub Pop (Nirvana’s initial recording label) sold 49 percent of its stock to
Time Warner for $20 million in 1994. However, the punk label Epitaph rejected takeover offers as
high as $50 million in the 1990s and remains independent. All four major labels look for and swal-
low up independent labels that have successfully developed artists with national or global appeal.

Making, Selling, and Profiting from Music
Like most mass media, the music business is divided into several areas, each working in a dif-
ferent capacity. In the music industry, those areas are making the music (signing, developing,
and recording the artist), selling the music (selling, distributing, advertising, and promoting the
music), and sharing the profits. All of these areas are essential to the industry but have always
shared in the conflict between business concerns and artistic concerns.

FIGURE 3.2
U.S. MARKET SHARE
OF THE MAJOR LABELS
IN THE RECORDING
INDUSTRY, 2009
Source: Nielsen
SoundScan, 2010

“We’re on the
threshold of a
whole new system.
The time where
accountants decide
what music people
hear is coming to an
end. Accountants
may be good at
numbers, but they
have terrible taste
in music.”

ROLLING STONES
GUITARIST
KEITH RICHARDS, 2002

Making the Music
Labels are driven by A&R (artist & repertoire) agents, the talent scouts of the music business,
who discover, develop, and sometimes manage artists. A&R executives scan online music sites
and listen to demonstration tapes, or demos, from new artists and decide whom to sign and
which songs to record. A&R executives naturally look for artists who they think will sell, and
they are often forced to avoid artists with limited commercial possibilities or to tailor artists to
make them viable for the recording studio.

A typical recording session is a complex process that involves the artist, the producer, the
session engineer, and audio technicians. In charge of the overall recording process, the producer
handles most nontechnical elements of the session, including reserving studio space, hiring
session musicians (if necessary), and making final decisions about the sound of the recording.
The session engineer oversees the technical aspects of the recording session, everything from
choosing recording equipment to managing the audio technicians. Most popular records are
recorded part by part. Using separate microphones, the vocalists, guitarists, drummers, and
other musical sections are digitally recorded onto separate audio tracks, which are edited and
remixed during postproduction and ultimately mixed down to a two-track stereo master copy
for reproduction to CD or online digital distribution.

Selling the Music
Selling and distributing music is a tricky part of the business. For years, the primary sales out-
lets for music were direct-retail record stores (independents or chains such as Sam Goody) and
general retail outlets like Walmart, Best Buy, and Target. Such direct retailers could specialize
in music, carefully monitoring new releases and keeping large, varied inventories. But as digital
sales have climbed, CD sales have fallen, hurting direct retail sales considerably. In 2006, Tower
Records declared bankruptcy, closed its retail locations, and became an online-only retailer.
Sam Goody stores were shuttered in 2008, and Virgin closed its last U.S. megastore in 2009.
Meanwhile, other independent record stores either went out of business or experienced great
losses, and general retail outlets began to offer considerably less variety, stocking only top-
selling CDs.

At the same time, in just a decade digital sales have grown to capture about 40 percent of
the U.S. market and 27 percent of the global market. Apple opened iTunes, the first successful
digital music store, in 2003 and now sells songs at prices ranging from $0.69 to $1.49. It has be-
come the leading music retailer, selling 28 percent of all music purchased in the United States.23
Amazon.com, which sells digital downloads and physical CDs at its online store, and Walmart,
which also sells digital downloads online and CDs at its traditional store locations, are tied for
second, with each accounting for 12 percent of U.S. music sales. In just CD sales, Walmart leads
with a 17 percent share, with Best Buy at 14 percent, and Amazon at 11 percent of the market.
(To explore how personal taste influences music choices, see “Media Literacy and the Critical
Process: Music Preferences across Generations” on page 99.)

As noted earlier, some established rock acts like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails are tak-
ing the “alternative” approach to their business model, shunning major labels and using the
Internet to directly reach their fans. By selling music online at their own Web sites or CDs at
live concerts, music acts generally do better, cutting out the retailer and keeping more of the
revenue themselves.

Despite the growing success of legitimate online music sales (there are now more than
four hundred legal online music services worldwide), overall music sales globally declined for
the tenth year in a row in 2009, much of it because of online piracy—unauthorized online file-
sharing.24 Other unauthorized recordings, which skirt official copyright permissions, include
counterfeiting—illegal reissues of out-of-print recordings and the unauthorized duplication

WHAT
SONY OWNS
Consider how Sony
connects to your life;
then turn the page for
the bigger picture.

MUSIC
• Sony Music Entertainment

– Arista, Arista Nashville,
Columbia, Epic, Jive,
RCA, RCA Victor, Sony
Masterworks

• Sony/ATV Music Publishing
(50% ownership)

MOVIES
• Sony Pictures

Entertainment Inc.
• Columbia TriStar Motion

Picture Group
– Columbia Pictures, Sony

Pictures Classics. Screen
Gems, TriStar Pictures

• Sony Pictures Studios
• Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Studios
• Sony Pictures Home

Entertainment

TELEVISION
• Sony Pictures Television

– Jeopardy!, Wheel of
Fortune, The Young and the
Restless, Breaking Bad,
Seinfeld, The Big C

• Crackle
• Game Show Network (GSN)

ELECTRONICS
• Sony Electronics Inc.

– DVD and Blu-Ray Disc
players

– Bravia HDTVs and
projectors

– VAIO computers
– Handycam Camcorders
– Cyber-shot Digital Cameras
– Walkman Video MP3

players
– Sony Reader Digital Book

SOFTWARE
• Sony Creative Software:

Vegas, ACID Pro, and
Sound Forge software

DIGITAL GAMES
• Sony Computer

Entertainment America Inc.
– PlayStation (PS2 and

PS3)
– PlayStation Portable

(PSP)
– PlayStation Games

MOBILE PHONES
• Sony Ericsson Mobile

Communications (50%
ownership)

Turn page for more

of manufacturer recordings sold on the black market at cut-rate prices; and bootlegging—the
unauthorized videotaping or audiotaping of live performances, which are then sold illegally
for profit.

Dividing the Profits
The upheaval in the music industry in recent years has shaken up the once predictable (and
high) cost of CDs. But for the sake of example, we will look at the various costs and profits
from a typical CD that retails at $16.98. The wholesale price for that CD is about $10.70, leav-
ing the remainder as retail profit. Discount retailers like Walmart and Best Buy sell closer to
the wholesale price to lure customers to buy other things (even if they make less profit
on the CD itself ). The wholesale price represents the actual cost of producing and promoting
the recording, plus the recording label’s profits. The record company reaps the highest profit
(close to $5.50 on a typical CD) but, along with the artist, bears the bulk of the expenses:
manufacturing costs, packaging and CD design, advertising and promotion, and artists’
royalties (see Figure 3.3). The physical product of the CD itself costs less than a quarter to
manufacture.

New artists usually negotiate a royalty rate of between 8 and 12 percent on the retail price
of a CD, while more established performers might negotiate for 15 percent or higher. An artist
who has negotiated a typical 11 percent royalty rate would earn about $1.80 per CD whose sug-
gested retail price is $16.98. So a CD that “goes gold”—that is, sells 500,000 units—would net
the artist around $900,000. But out of this amount, artists must repay the record company
the money they have been advanced (from $100,000 to $500,000). And after band members,
managers, and attorneys are paid with the remaining money, it’s quite possible that an artist
will end up with almost nothing—even after a certified gold CD. (See “Case Study: In the Jungle,
the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory” on page 100.)

The profits are divided somewhat differently in digital download sales. A $0.99 iTunes
download generates about $0.33 for iTunes and a standard $0.09 mechanical royalty for the song

WHAT DOES
THIS MEAN?
Sony’s unique blend of
content and hardware
means that it owns
what you watch and
what you watch it on.

• Revenue: Electronics and
videogames make up two-
thirds of Sony’s revenue,1
which was $78 billion in
2009.2 That’s almost twice
as much as the Homeland
Security Office budget.

• Innovations: Codeveloped
the CD, DVD, Super Audio
CD, and Blu-ray Disc 3

• Major Artists: Recording
artists include Justin
Timberlake, Beyoncé, Dixie
Chicks, Carrie Underwood,
Britney Spears, and Shakira.

• Music Copyrights: Co-
owns or administers music
copyrights by artists like the
Beatles, Neil Diamond, Bob
Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joni
Mitchell, and Hank Williams.

• Movies: Releases about
25 films per year, including
Salt, The Green Hornet,
The Smurfs, and Priest in
2010 and 2011.

• Content Library: Owns
more than 3,500 feature
films, 500 television series,
and 150,000 television
episodes.4

• 3D: Sony is the only global
company that is fully
immersed in every link of
the 3-D value chain. Sony
controls the content creation,
production, distribution, and
presentation in theaters and
our homes with its new line of
3-D TVs.

• Synergy: Sony has 1,006
consolidated subsidiaries
worldwide, including bank
and life insurance companies
in Japan, and divisions in
countries ranging from India,
Indonesia, and Malaysia to
New Zealand, Panama, and
South Africa.

$5–5.50
Recording

label

profits

$3–4
Wholesale

distributors
and retail store

profits

50¢–$2
Artist’s royalty

$1–2

Recording
and studio

costs

$1–2
Design

and
packaging

$1–2

Miscellaneous:
shipping,
musicians’
fees, trust fundPromotion

and advertising

Where Artist’s Royalty
Goes on a Gold Record

(500,000 copies)

$250,000–
550,000

Profit*

$150,000
Reserve
account

$100,000–
500,000
Payback
advance

*(before additional expenses
that may result in little net profit)

FIGURE 3.3
WHERE MONEY GOES ON
A $16.98 CD

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��99

publisher and writer, leaving about $0.57 for the record company25 (see Figure 3.4 on page 101).
With no CD printing and packaging costs, record companies can retain more of the revenue on
download sales. Some record companies retain this entire amount for recordings in which artists
have no provisions for digital download royalties in their contract. For more recent contracts,
artists typically get royalties for downloads, but the percentage depends on how online sales are
defined—artists and recording labels don’t often see eye to eye on this issue. A federal district
court in Los Angeles resolved one such dispute in 2009. In the case, producers of Eminem’s music
argued for a 50 percent royalty rate for digital downloads, stating that digital downloads should
be treated as licensed use, like the music used in a television commercial. But the jury came down
on the side of the recording label and ruled that digital downloads should be treated the same as
in-store retail sales and that artists should be compensated at the same 12 percent royalty rate.

Artist compensation can vary widely depending on the distribution method. For example, for
solo artists to earn a minimum monthly wage of $1,160, they would have to sell: 143 self-published

Music Preferences across Generations
We make judgments about music all the time. Older
generations don’t like some of the music younger people
prefer, and young people often dismiss some of the music
of previous generations. Even among our peers, we have
different tastes in music and often reject certain kinds of
music that have become too popular or that don’t conform
to our own preferences. The following exercise aims to un-
derstand musical tastes beyond our own individual choices.
Always include yourself in this project.

1 DESCRIPTION. Arrange to interview four to eight friends
or relatives of different ages about their
musical tastes and influences. Devise
questions about what music they listen
to and have listened to at different stages
of their lives. What music do they buy
or collect? What’s the first album (or
single) they acquired? What’s the latest
album? What stories or vivid memories
do they relate to particular songs or art-
ists? Collect demographic and consumer
information: age, gender, occupation,
educational background, place of birth,
and current place of residence.

2 ANALYSIS. Chart and organize your results. Do you recognize
any patterns emerging from the data or
stories? What kinds of music did your in-
terview subjects listen to when they were
younger? What kinds of music do they
listen to now? What formed/influenced
their musical interests? If their musical
interests changed, what happened? (If
they stopped listening to music, note
that and find out why.) Do they have any
associations between music and their
everyday lives? Are these music associa-
tions and lifetime interactions with songs
and artists important to them?

Media Literacy and
the Critical Process

3 INTERPRETATION. Based on what you have discovered and
the patterns you have charted, deter-
mine what the patterns mean. Does age,
gender, geographic location, or educa-
tion matter in musical tastes? Over time,
are the changes in musical tastes and
buying habits significant? Why or why
not? What kind of music is most impor-
tant to your subjects? Finally, and most
important, why do you think their music
preferences developed as they did?

4 EVALUATION. Determine how your interview subjects came
to like particular kinds of music. What
constitutes “good” and “bad” music for
them? Did their ideas change over time?
How? Are they open- or closed-minded
about music? How do they form judg-
ments about music? What criteria did

your interview subjects offer for making
judgments about music? Do you think
their criteria are a valid way to judge
music?

5 ENGAGEMENT. To expand on your findings and see how
they match up with industry practices,
contact music professionals. Track down
record label representatives from a small
indie label and a large mainstream label,
and ask them whom they are trying to
target with their music. How do they find
out about the musical tastes of their con-
sumers? Share your findings with them,
and discuss whether these match their
practices. Speculate whether the music
industry is serving the needs and tastes
of you and your interview subjects. If
not, what might be done to change the
current system?

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

100��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

A s Solomon Linda first recorded it in 1939, it was a tender melody, almost childish in its
simplicity—three chords, a couple of
words and some baritones chanting in
the background.

But the saga of the song now known
worldwide as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”
is anything but a lullaby. It is fraught
with racism and exploitation and, in
the end, 40-plus years after his death,
brings a measure of justice. Were he
still alive, Solomon Linda might turn it
into one heck of a ballad. Born in 1909
in the Zulu heartland of South Africa,
Mr. Linda never learned to read or
write, but in song he was supremely
eloquent. After moving to Johannes-
burg in his midtwenties, he quickly
conquered the weekend music scene
at the township beer halls and squalid
hostels that housed much of the city’s
black labor force.

He sang soprano over a four-part
harmony, a vocal style that was soon
widely imitated. By 1939, a talent
scout had ushered Mr. Linda’s group,
the Original Evening Birds, into a
recording studio where they produced
a startling hit called “Mbube,” Zulu for
“The Lion.” Elizabeth Nsele, Mr. Linda’s
youngest surviving daughter, said it
had been inspired by her father’s child-
hood as a herder protecting cattle in
the untamed hinterlands.

From there, it took flight worldwide. In
the early fifties, Pete Seeger recorded
it with his group, the Weavers. His ver-
sion differed from the original mainly
in his misinterpretation of the word
“mbube” (pronounced “EEM-boo-beh”).
Mr. Seeger sang it as “wimoweh,” and
turned it into a folk music staple.

There followed a jazz version, a night-
club version, another folk version by the
Kingston Trio, a pop version and finally,
in 1961, a reworking of the song by an
American songwriter, George Weiss.
Mr. Weiss took the last 20 improvised
seconds of Mr. Linda’s recording and
transformed it into the melody. He added
lyrics beginning “In the jungle, the mighty
jungle.” A teen group called the Tokens
sang it with a doo-wop beat—and it
topped charts worldwide. Some 150
artists eventually recorded the song.
It was translated into languages from
Dutch to Japanese. It had a role in more
than 13 movies. By all rights, Mr. Linda
should have been a rich man.

Instead, he lived in Soweto with barely
a stick of furniture, sleeping on a dirt
floor carpeted with cow dung. Mr. Linda
received 10 shillings—about 87 cents
today—when he signed over the copy-
right of “Mbube” in 1952 to Gallo Stu-
dios, the company that produced his
record. When Mr. Linda died in 1962,
at 53, with the modern equivalent of
$22 in his bank account, his widow had
no money for a gravestone.

How much he should have collected
is in dispute. Over the years, he and
his family have received royalties for
“Wimoweh” from the Richmond Organi-
zation, the publishing house that holds
the rights to that song, though not as
much as they should have, Mr. Seeger
said. But where Mr. Linda’s family really
lost out, his lawyers claim, was in “The
Lion Sleeps Tonight,” a megahit. From
1991 to 2000, the years when “The
Lion King” began enthralling audiences
in movie theaters and on Broadway,
Mr. Linda’s survivors received a total of
perhaps $17,000 in royalties, according
to Hanro Friedrich, the family’s lawyer.

The Lindas filed suit in 2004,
demanding $1.5 million in damages,
but their case was no slam-dunk. Not
only had Mr. Linda signed away his
copyright to Gallo in 1952, Mr. Dean
said, but his wife, who was also
illiterate, signed them away again
in 1982, followed by his daughters
several years later. In their lawsuit,
the Lindas invoked an obscure 1911
law under which the song’s copyright
reverted to Mr. Linda’s estate 25
years after his death. On a separate
front, they criticized the Walt Disney
Company, whose 1994 hit movie
“The Lion King” featured a meerkat
and warthog singing “The Lion Sleeps
Tonight.” Disney argued that it had
paid Abilene Music for permission
to use the song, without knowing
its origins.

In February 2006, Abilene agreed to
pay Mr. Linda’s family royalties from
1987 onward, ending the suit. No
amount has been disclosed, but the
family’s lawyers say their clients should
be quite comfortable.
Source: Excerpted from Sharon Lafraniere, “In the
Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory,” New
York Times, March 22, 2006, p. A1.

In the Jungle, the Unjust Jungle, a Small Victory
by Sharon Lafraniere

CASE
STUDY

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��101

$0.09

$0.33

$0.57
Full record

company share

From record company
share: Artist royalty

if a “retail sale”

From record
company share:

Artist royalty
if a “licensing

deal”

($0.29)

($0.12)

$0.33 – iTunes retains
$0.09 – Mechanical royalty
to publisher/writer
$0.57 – Net money to
record company

CDs (gaining about $8 for each CD sold), about 1,160 retail CDs (with a high-end royalty contract
that earns them about 10 percent, or $1 a CD), about 12,399 single digital track downloads at
iTunes or Amazon (which earn about $0.09 each), or about 849,817 streams on Rhapsody
(which generates $0.0022 per stream).26

In addition to sales royalties, there are performance and mechanical royalties.
A performance royalty is paid when the song is played on the radio, on television,
in a film, in a public space, and so on. Performance royalties are collected and
paid to artists and publishers by the three major music performance rights
organizations: the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers
(ASCAP); the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers (SESAC);
and Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). These groups keep track of recording
rights, collect copyright fees, and license music for use in commercials
and films; on radio, television, and the Internet; and in public places. For
example, commercial radio stations pay licensing fees of between 1.5 and 2
percent of their gross annual revenues, and they generally play only licensed
music. Large restaurants and offices pay from a few hundred to several thou-
sand dollars annually to play licensed background music.

Songwriters protect their work by obtaining an exclusive copyright on each
song, ensuring that it will not be copied or performed without permission. Then they
receive a mechanical royalty each time a recording of their song is sold. The mechanical
royalty is usually split between the music publisher and the songwriter. However, songwriters
sometimes sell their copyrights to music publishers for a short-term profit and forgo the long-
term royalties they could receive if they retained the copyright.

Alternative Voices
A vast network of independent (indie) labels, distributors, stores, publications, and Internet
sites devoted to music outside of the major label system has existed since the early days of
rock and roll. Although not as lucrative as the major label music industry, the indie industry

FIGURE 3.4
WHERE MONEY GOES
ON A $0.99 iTUNES
DOWNLOAD

INDIE LABELS often find
and sign new musicians or
bands with a distinctive
sound. Such was the case
with neo-psychedelic band
MGMT and their first label,
Cantora Records. After
releasing a successful EP
with the indie Cantora, the
band was signed to Columbia
Records in 2006, where
they released the full-length
albums Oracular Spectacular
and Congratulations.

SOUND RECORDING AND POPULAR MUSIC

102��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

nonetheless continues to thrive, providing music fans access to all styles of
music, including some of the world’s most respected artists.

Independent Record Labels
The rise of rock and roll in the 1950s and early 1960s showcased a rich
diversity of independent labels, all vying for a share of the new music.
These labels included Sun, Stax, Chess, and Motown. As discussed above,
most of the original indies have folded or have been bought by the major
labels. Often struggling enterprises, indies require only a handful of
people to operate them. They identify and reissue forgotten older artists
and record new innovative performers. To keep costs down, indies usu-
ally depend on wholesale distributors to promote and sell their music.
Indies may also entrust their own recordings or contracts to independent
distributors, who ship new recordings to retail outlets and radio stations.
Indies play a major role as the music industry’s risk-takers, since major
labels are reluctant to invest in commercially unproven artists.

The Internet and Promoting Music
Independent labels have become even more viable by using the Internet
as a low-cost distribution and promotional outlet for CD and merchan-
dise sales, fan discussion groups, regular e-mail updates of tour sched-
ules, promotion of new releases, and music downloads. Consequently,
bands that in previous years would have signed to a major label have
found another path to success in the independent music industry, with
labels like Rounder (Alison Krauss, Sondre Lerche), Matador (Yo La Ten-
go, Sonic Youth, Pavement), Saddle Creek (Bright Eyes, the Mynabirds,
Land of Talk) and Epitaph (Bad Religion, Alkaline Trio, Frank Turner).

Unlike an artist on a major label needing to sell 500,000 copies or more in order to recoup
expenses and make a profit, indie artists “can turn a profit after selling roughly 25,000 copies
of an album.”27 Some musical artists also self-publish CDs and sell them at concerts or use
popular online services like CD Baby, the largest online distributer of independent music,
where artists can earn $6 to $12 per CD.

In addition to signing with indies, unsigned artists and bands now build online communi-
ties around their personal Web sites—a key self-promotional tool—listing shows, news, tours,
photos, downloadable songs, and locations where fans can buy albums. But the biggest new
players in the online music scene are social networking sites like MySpace—“the prime con-
vergence point for bands and fans.”28 MySpace and other social media sites like Facebook,
Friendster, and MOG, and video sites like YouTube and Vevo, have created spaces for bands to
promote their music and themselves. Currently, more than three million bands and individual
artists use MySpace “to upload songs and videos, announce shows, promote albums and inter-
act with fans.” 29 With millions of active users, MySpace also has the power to launch new artists.
For example, when she was just sixteen years old, a friend of British soul music singer-songwriter
Adele set up a MySpace page to feature her music. The page attracted fans, and two years later
independent label XL Recordings (home of Thom Yorke, The White Stripes, Vampire Weekend,
Beck, and others) contacted her. “The A&R guy emailed me and I was ignoring it. . . . I didn’t
realize they did all these amazing names,” Adele said.30 In 2009, she won Grammy Awards for
Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

JUSTIN BIEBER began
posting videos of himself
singing on YouTube when
he was only twelve. By
the time he was fifteen,
his YouTube channel had
over a million views and he
caught the attention of a
music executive. Signed to a
major label (Island Records)
in 2008, Bieber is now a
certified teen sensation,
with multiple hit songs and
legions of teenage female
fans that have caused at
least three stampedes at
various appearances.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��103

Sound Recording, Free Expression,
and Democracy

From sound recording’s earliest stages as a mass medium, when the music industry began
stamping out flat records, to the breakthrough of MP3s and Internet-based music services,
fans have been sharing music and pushing culture in unpredictable directions. Sound record-
ings allowed for the formation of rock and roll, a genre drawing from such a diverse range of
musical styles that its impact on culture is unprecedented: Low culture challenged high-brow
propriety; black culture spilled into white; southern culture infused the North; masculine and
feminine stereotypes broke down; rural and urban styles came together; and artists mixed the
sacred and the profane. Attempts to tame music were met by new affronts, including the British
invasion, the growth of soul, and the political force of folk and psychedelic music. The gradual
mainstreaming of rock led to the establishment of other culture-shaking genres, including punk,
grunge, alternative, and hip-hop.

The battle over rock’s controversial aspects speaks to the heart of democratic expression.
Nevertheless, rock and other popular recordings—like other art forms—also have a history of
reproducing old stereotypes: limiting women’s access as performers, fostering racist or homo-
phobic attitudes, and celebrating violence and misogyny.

Popular musical forms that test cultural boundaries face a dilemma: how to uphold a legacy
of free expression while resisting giant companies bent on consolidating independents and
maximizing profits. Since the 1950s, forms of rock music have been breaking boundaries, then
becoming commercial, then reemerging as rebellious, and then repeating the pattern. The con-
gressional payola hearings of 1959 and the Senate hearings of the mid-1980s triggered by Tipper
Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center (which led to music advisory labels) are a few of the many
attempts to rein in popular music, whereas the infamous antics of performers from Elvis Presley
onward, the blunt lyrics of artists from rock and roll and rap, and the independent paths of the
many garage bands and cult bands of the early rock-and-roll era through the present are among
those actions that pushed popular music’s boundaries.

Still, this dynamic between popular music’s clever innovations and capitalism’s voracious
appetite is crucial to sound recording’s constant innovation and mass appeal. The major labels
need resourceful independents to develop new talent. So, ironically, successful commerce
requires periodic infusions of the diverse sounds that come from ethnic communities, backyard
garages, dance parties, and neighborhood clubs. At the same time, nearly all musicians need
the major labels if they want wide distribution or national popularity. Such an interdependent
pattern is common in contemporary media economics.

No matter how it is produced and distributed, popular music endures because it speaks to
both individual and universal themes, from a teenager’s first romantic adventure to a nation’s
outrage over social injustice. Music often reflects the personal or political anxieties of a society.
It also breaks down artificial or hurtful barriers better than many government programs do.
Despite its tribulations, music at its best continues to champion a democratic spirit. Writer and
free-speech advocate Nat Hentoff addressed this issue in the 1970s when he wrote, “Popular mu-
sic always speaks, among other things, of dreams—which change with the times.”31 The record-
ing industry continues to capitalize on and spread those dreams globally, but in each generation
musicians and their fans keep imagining new ones.

“People seem to
need their peers
to validate their
musical tastes,
making the
Internet a perfect
medium for the
intersection of
MP3s and mob
psychology.”

INTERNATIONAL
HERALD TRIBUNE,
2008

“The music
business, as a
whole, has lost its
faith in content.”

“The subscription
model is the only
way to save the
music business.”

DAVID GEFFEN, MUSIC
MOGUL, 2007

104��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

COMMON THREADS

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod in
2001, he said that it would enable you to listen to your music
“wherever you go” and that “listening to music will never be the
same again.” Although iPod users have more recorded music
available at their fingertips than ever before, the idea of taking
your music “wherever you go” is not a new one. A generation
earlier, in the 1980s and 1990s, people used Sony Walkmans
and Discmans on their commutes and workouts. Others toted
boom box stereos (the bigger, the better) that pumped out the
heavy bass lines of hip-hop or rock. In the 1950s, music was
made portable with the transistor radio. You didn’t have your
own music per se, but you did have powerful Top 40 stations,
which played the music that mattered. And since Motorola’s
first car radio in the 1930s, cars have had built-in music. (Car
stereo systems today can communicate the deep thump of
subwoofers from more than a block away.)

What does it mean to take our music with us, playing
it directly to our ears with conspicuous devices, or play-
ing it loud enough that everyone in earshot is aware of our

presence and music? Why is it that we need our music
with us? Are we connecting ourselves to, or disassociating
ourselves from, others?

Portable media do not end with sound. In the 1980s,
Sony gave the world the Watchman, a handheld television.
Today, iPods and smartphones can store and play movies
and TV shows on demand. Satellite television companies
offer portable satellite TV dish systems, usable almost
anywhere. Cheap, portable DVD players have flooded the
market, and a laptop computer or iPad connected with Wi-Fi
can connect to anything on the Internet.

Which brings us to newspapers, magazines, and the
book, the original portable medium. As Chapter 9 explains,
since the development of the printing press by Gutenberg in
the 1450s, “people could learn for themselves . . . they could
differentiate themselves as individuals; their social identi-
ties were no longer solely dependent on what their leaders
told them or on the habits of their families, communities, or
social class.” Is this what the iPod revolution is all about?

One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is about the commercial nature of mass media. This includes the
idea of portability—being able to take your media content with you wherever you go. Media technologies have evolved
to become increasingly small and portable. But what do portable media mean in terms of cultural expression?

CHAPTER
REVIEW

audiotape, 76
stereo, 76
analog recording, 76
digital recording, 76
compact discs (CDs), 77
MP3, 77
pop music, 81
jazz, 81
cover music, 82
rock and roll, 82

blues, 82
rhythm and blues (or R&B), 82
rockabilly, 84
payola, 87
soul, 90
folk music, 91
folk-rock, 91
punk rock, 92
grunge, 93
alternative rock, 93

hip-hop, 94
gangster rap, 95
oligopoly, 96
indies, 96
A&R (artist & repertoire) agents, 97
online piracy, 97
counterfeiting, 97
bootlegging, 98

KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book.
The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.

CHAPTER 3 ○ SOUND RECORDING��105

1. If you ran a noncommercial campus radio station, what
kind of music would you play and why?

2. Think about the role of the 1960s drug culture in rock’s
history. How are drugs and alcohol treated in contempo-
rary and alternative forms of rock and hip-hop today?

3. Is it healthy for, or detrimental to, the music business
that so much of the recording industry is controlled by
four large international companies? Explain.

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
4. Do you think the Internet as a technology helps or hurts

musical artists? Why do so many contemporary musical
performers differ in their opinions about the Internet?

5. How has the Internet changed your musical tastes? Has
it exposed you to more global music? Do you listen to a
wider range of music because of the Internet?

For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links
to media-related Web sites, and more, go to
bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture.

The Development of Sound Recording

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. The technological configuration of a particular medium
sometimes elevates it to mass market status. Why did
Emile Berliner’s flat disk replace the wax cylinder, and
why did this reconfiguration of records matter in the
history of the mass media? Can you think of other mass
media examples in which the size and shape of the tech-
nology have made a difference?

2. How did sound recording survive the advent of radio?
3. How did the music industry attempt to curb illegal down-

loading and file sharing?
U.S. Popular Music and the Formation of Rock

4. How did rock and roll significantly influence two mass
media industries?

5. Although many rock-and-roll lyrics from the 1950s are
tame by today’s standards, this new musical develop-
ment represented a threat to many parents and adults
at that time. Why?

6. What moral and cultural boundaries were blurred by rock
and roll in the 1950s?

7. Why did cover music figure so prominently in the devel-
opment of rock and roll and the record industry in the
1950s?

A Changing Industry: Reformations in Popular Music

8. Explain the British invasion. What was its impact on the
recording industry?

9. What were the major influences of folk music on the
recording industry?

10. Why did hip-hop and punk rock emerge as significant
musical forms in the late 1970s and 1980s? What do
their developments have in common, and how are they
different?

11. Why does pop music continue to remain powerful today?
The Business of Sound Recording

12. What companies control the bulk of worldwide music
production and distribution?

13. Why are independent labels so important to the music
industry?

14. What are the three types of unauthorized recordings
that plague the recording business?

15. Who are the major parties who receive profits when a
digital download, music stream, or physical CD is sold?

Sound Recording, Free Expression, and Democracy

16. Why is it ironic that so many forms of alternative music
become commercially successful?

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO��107

SOUNDS AND IMAGES

109
Early Technology and
the Development of
Radio

116

The Evolution
of Radio

123

Radio Reinvents
Itself

128

The Sounds of
Commercial Radio

135
The Economics of
Broadcast Radio

139
Radio and the
Democracy
of the Airwaves

Popular Radio
and the Origins
of Broadcasting
In the early 2000s, Clear Channel Communica-
tions was at its high point. Just a few years ear-
lier, in 1995, it owned only 39 radio stations,
near the maximum number then allowed by the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
But the Telecommunications Act of 1996 over-
turned most radio ownership rules, and Clear
Channel went on a station- buying spree. By
2000, it owned more than 1,000 stations, and
within a few more years it surpassed 1,200—
over three times the number of its nearest
competitor. It was also the largest billboard
company in the world, the nation’s largest live
music concert promoter, operator of an athlete
management firm, owner of 56 television sta-
tions, and an investor in 240 radio stations in
other countries.

WITH HUNDREDS of
radio channels across the
country, Clear Channel’s
broad reach means that
listeners from New York
to Florida to Ohio are
exposed to the same
cookie-cutter artists and
radio programming.

108��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

POPULAR RADIO

The corporate world loved the ever-
growing communication’s behemoth,
and Fortune magazine lauded Clear
Channel’s business model of domination
by naming it to its list of “America’s Most
Admired Companies” for several consec-
utive years. Yet regular radio -listening
Americans in places like Atlanta, Chi-
cago, Cincinnati, Denver, Houston, Los
Angeles, Phoenix, and Washington,
D.C., weren’t so admiring of Clear Chan-
nel, which owned the majority of their
cities’ major radio stations.

Clear Channel’s rise ushered in a new
era of homogenized corporate radio,
characterized by centralized control
and a greater reliance on syndicated
radio programming. Citizens and com-
munity groups complained about the
decline of minority ownership; the lack
of musical diversity on the airwaves;
the near- disappearance of local radio
news; and the replacement of live,
local radio deejays with imported or
prerecorded announcers.1 Concerns
about Clear Channel inspired a formal
grassroots media reform movement in
2002. Citizen pressure forced the FCC
to begin public hearings on localism
in broadcasting, and more than three
million Americans contacted the FCC
to oppose further relaxation of media
ownership rules.

Ultimately, in its move to make itself into
an extraordinary vehicle for advertis-
ers, Clear Channel lost sight of its most
precious commodity—listeners—and its
duty to operate in the public interest.
While Clear Channel was amassing an
unprecedented number of radio sta-
tions as an advertising vehicle, listeners
found homogenized local radio increas-
ingly less relevant to their lives and
began migrating to satellite and Internet
radio, or to their own iPods.

In 2005, just ten years after its mete-
oric rise began, Clear Channel failed to
make Fortune’s “Most Admired” list and
began to generate revenue by disas-
sembling itself—selling its concert busi-
ness and its television station group,
and offering some of its radio stations
for sale. In 2008, it was bought for
$24 billion by private equity investors
Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Part-
ners. Clear Channel, now struggling
financially with debt from years of
expansion, is still the largest radio
station chain in the country, with almost
nine hundred stations.

Still, there remains little diversity in
radio station ownership these days. A
study indicated that women, who con-
stitute 51 percent of the U.S. popula-
tion, own just 6 percent of full-power
commercial broadcast radio stations.
Racial minorities, who make up 33
percent of the country’s population,
own only 7.7 percent of the stations.2
Diversity in media ownership is crucial
to democracy, argues Loris Taylor, ex-
ecutive director of Native Public Media,
an advocacy group for the country’s
thirty -three American Indian–owned
public stations. “If you don’t have access
and ownership and control of a media
system, you really don’t exist,” she says.
“You don’t matter in terms of being citi-
zens in a democracy who are entitled to
the ability to tell, and have a conversa-
tion about, your own stories.”3

“Clear Channel’s rise ushered
in a new era of homogenized
corporate radio.”

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��109

EVEN WITH THE ARRIVAL OF TV IN THE 1950s and the “corporatization” of broad-
casting in the 1990s, the historical and contemporary roles played by radio have been immense.
From the early days of network radio, which gave us “a national identity” and “a chance to
share in a common experience,”4 to the more customized, demographically segmented medium
today, radio’s influence continues to reverberate throughout our society. Though television
displaced radio as our most common media experience, radio specialized and adapted. The
daily music and persistent talk that resonate from radios all over the world continue to play a
key role in contemporary culture.

In this chapter, we examine the scientific, cultural, political, and economic factors sur-
rounding radio’s development and perseverance. We will:

• Explore the origins of broadcasting, from the early theories about radio waves to the criti-
cal formation of RCA as a national radio monopoly.

• Probe the evolution of commercial radio, including the rise of NBC as the first network, the
development of CBS, and the establishment of the first federal radio legislation.

• Review the fascinating ways in which radio reinvented itself in the 1950s.
• Examine television’s impact on radio programming, the invention of FM radio, radio’s

convergence with sound recording, and the influence of various formats.
• Investigate newer developments like satellite and HD radio, their impact on the radio

industry, and the convergence of radio with the Internet.
• Survey the economic health, increasing conglomeration, and cultural impact of commer-

cial and noncommercial radio today, including the emergence of noncommercial low-
power FM service.

As you read through this chapter, think about your own relationship with radio. What are
your earliest memories of listening to radio? Do you remember a favorite song or station? How
old were you when you started listening? Why did you listen? What types of radio stations are in
your area today? If you could own and manage a commercial radio station, what format would
you choose, and why? For more questions to help you think through the role of radio in our
lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.

Radio did not emerge as a full-blown mass medium until the 1920s, though the technology that
made radio possible had been evolving for years. The telegraph—the precursor of radio tech-
nology—was invented in the 1840s. American inventor Samuel Morse developed the first practi-
cal system, sending electrical impulses from a transmitter through a cable to a reception point.
Using what became known as Morse code—a series of dots and dashes that stood for letters in
the alphabet—telegraph operators transmitted news and messages simply by interrupting the
electrical current along a wire cable. By 1844, Morse had set up the first telegraph line between
Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. By 1861, telegraph lines ran coast to coast. By 1866, the first
transatlantic cable, capable of transmitting about six words a minute, ran between Newfound-
land and Ireland along the ocean floor.

Although it was a revolutionary technology, the telegraph had its limitations. For instance,
while it dispatched complicated language codes, it was unable to transmit the human voice.
Moreover, ships at sea still had no contact with the rest of the world. As a result, navies could

Early Technology and
the Development of Radio

“The telegraph
and the telephone
were instruments
for private
communication
between two
individuals.
The radio was
democratic;
it directed its
message to
the masses and
allowed one person
to communicate
with many.
The new medium
of radio was to the
printing press what
the telephone had
been to the letter:
it allowed imme-
diacy. It enabled
listeners to exper-
ience an event as
it happened.”

TOM LEWIS,
EMPIRE OF THE AIR,
1991

110��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

POPULAR RADIO

not find out that wars had ceased on land and often continued fighting for
months. Commercial shipping interests also lacked an efficient way to coordinate
and relay information from land and between ships. What was needed was a
telegraph without the wires.

Maxwell and Hertz Discover Radio Waves
The key development in wireless transmissions came from James Maxwell,
a Scottish physicist who in the mid-1860s theorized the existence of elec-
tromagnetic waves: invisible electronic impulses similar to visible light.
Maxwell’s equations showed that electricity, magnetism, light, and heat are
part of the same electromagnetic spectrum and that they radiate in space at
the speed of light, about 186,000 miles per second (see Figure 4.1). Maxwell
further theorized that a portion of these phenomena, later known as radio
waves, could be harnessed so that signals could be sent from a transmission
point to a reception point.

It was German physicist Heinrich Hertz, however, who in the 1880s proved Maxwell’s theo-
ries. Hertz created a crude device that permitted an electrical spark to leap across a small gap
between two steel balls. As the electricity jumped the gap, it emitted waves; this was the first
recorded transmission and reception of an electromagnetic wave. Hertz’s experiments signifi-
cantly advanced the development of wireless communication.

Marconi and the Inventors of Wireless Telegraphy
In 1894, Guglielmo Marconi, a twenty-year-old, self-educated Italian engineer, read Hertz’s
work and understood that developing a way to send high-speed messages over great distances

A TELEGRAPH
OPERATOR reads the
perforated tape. Sending
messages using Morse code
across telegraph wires was
the precursor to radio, which
did not fully become a mass
medium until the 1920s.

Popular Radio and the Origins of Broadcasting

Amateur Radio
Shutdown
The navy closes
down all amateur
radio operations in
1917 to ensure mili-
tary security as the
United States enters
World War I (p. 115).

Practical Use for
Wireless Technology
Wireless operators
save 705 lives during
the Titanic tragedy
in 1912, boosting
interest in amateur ra-
dio across the United
States (p. 114).

Commercial Radio
The first advertise-
ments beginning in
1922 cause an uproar
as people question
the right to pollute the
public airwaves with
commercial messages
(p. 116).

1830 1850 1890 19101870

Lee De Forest
The American inventor
writes the first dis-
sertation on wireless
technology in 1899
and goes on to invent
wireless telephony and
a means for amplifying
radio sound (p. 113).

Guglielmo Marconi
The Italian inventor
begins experiments
on wireless telegra-
phy in 1894. He sees
his invention as a
means for point-to-
point communication
(pp. 110–113).

Samuel Morse
The first telegraph line is
set up between Washing-
ton, D.C., and Baltimore,
Maryland, in 1844. For
the first time in history,
communication exceeds
the speed of land trans-
portation (p. 109).

Nikola Tesla
The Serbian-Croatian
inventor creates a wire-
less device in America
in 1892. His transmit-
ter can make a tube
thirty feet away light up
(p. 112).

Wireless Ship Act
In 1910, Congress
passes this act re-
quiring that all major
ships be equipped
with wireless radio
(p. 114).

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��111

would transform communication, the military, and commercial shipping. Although revolu-
tionary, the telephone and the telegraph were limited by their wires, so Marconi set about
trying to make wireless technology practical. First, he attached Hertz’s spark-gap transmitter to
a Morse telegraph key, which could send out dot-dash signals. The electrical impulses traveled
into a Morse inker, the machine that telegraph operators used to record the dots and dashes
onto narrow strips of paper. Second, Marconi discovered that grounding—connecting the
transmitter and receiver to the earth—greatly increased the distance over which he could
send signals.

In 1896, Marconi traveled to England, where he received a patent on wireless telegra-
phy, a form of voiceless point-to-point communication. In London, in 1897, he formed the
Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company, later known as British Marconi, and began installing

FIGURE 4.1
THE ELECTROMAGNETIC
SPECTRUM
Source: NASA, http://imagine.gsfc
.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/
emspectrum.html.

Long Wavelength
Low Frequency

Low Energy

Aircraft and
Shipping

Bands
AM Radio

Shortwave
Radio

TV and
FM Radio

Microwaves
Radar

Infrared
Light

Visible Ultraviolet
Light

X-rays Gamma-rays

Short Wavelength
High Frequency
High Energy

Radio Act of 1927
Radio stations are
required to operate
in the “public inter-
est, convenience, or
necessity“ (p. 120).

William Paley
CBS is found-
ed in 1928
and becomes a
competitor to
NBC (p. 119).

Communications Act
of 1934
After intense lobbying
by the radio industry,
Congress passes this act,
which allows commercial
interests to control the
airwaves (p. 120).

David Sarnoff
The first lasting network of
radio stations, NBC, is cre-
ated in 1926. Connected
by AT&T long lines, the
network broadcasts pro-
grams nationally and plays
a prominent role in unifying
the country (p. 117).

Golden Age of Radio
By 1930, living
rooms are filled
with music, drama,
comedy, variety and
quiz shows, and news
(p. 120).

Radio Suffers
In the wake of
TV’s popularity
in the 1950s, ra-
dio suffers but is
resurrected via
rock and roll and
transistor radios
(pp. 123–125).

Podcasting
Podcasting is
developed in
2004, allow-
ing users to
listen to audio
content and
their favorite
radio programs
on-the-go
(p. 134).

FM
A new radio
format begins
to gain national
popularity in
the 1960s
(pp. 124–125).

1930

Webcaster
Settlement
Act of 2009
This law saves
Internet radio, allow-
ing Webcasters to
negotiate royalties
directly with the mu-
sic industry rather
than paying for each
song ( p. 135) .

1950 1970 1990 2010 2020

Talk Radio
Talk radio be-
comes the most
popular format
of the 1990s,
especially on AM
stations (p. 127).

Telecommunications
Act of 1996
This law effects a
rapid, unprecedented
consolidation in radio
ownership across the
United States
(p. 137).

112��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

wireless technology on British naval and private commercial ships. In 1899, he opened a
branch in the United States, establishing a company nicknamed American Marconi. That
same year, he sent the first wireless Morse code signal across the English Channel to
France, and in 1901 he relayed the first wireless signal across the Atlantic Ocean. Although
Marconi was a successful innovator and entrepreneur, he saw wireless telegraphy only as
point-to-point communication, much like the telegraph and the telephone, not as a
one-to-many mass medium. He also confined his applications to Morse code messages
for military and commercial ships, leaving others to explore the wireless transmission of
voice and music.

History often cites Marconi as the “father of radio,” but another inventor unknown to
him was making parallel discoveries about wireless telegraphy in Russia. Alexander Popov,
a professor of physics in St. Petersburg, was experimenting with sending wireless mes-
sages over distances just as Marconi was undertaking similar work in Bologna, Italy. Popov
announced to the Russian Physicist Society of St. Petersburg on May 7, 1895, that he had
transmitted and received signals over a distance of six hundred yards.5 Yet Popov was an aca-
demic, not an entrepreneur, and after Marconi accomplished a similar feat that same sum-
mer, Marconi was the first to apply for and receive a patent. However, May 7 is celebrated as
“Radio Day” in Russia.

It is important to note that the work of Popov and Marconi was preceded by that of Nikola
Tesla, a Serbian-Croatian inventor who immigrated to New York in 1884. Tesla, who also
conceived the high-capacity alternating current systems that made worldwide electrification
possible, invented a wireless system in 1892. A year later, Tesla successfully demonstrated his
device in St. Louis, with his transmitter lighting up a receiver tube thirty feet away.6 However,

NIKOLA TESLA
A double-exposed photo-
graph combines the image
of inventor Nikola Tesla
reading a book in his
Colorado Springs, Colorado,
laboratory in 1899 with
the image of his Tesla coil
discharging several million
volts.

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��113

Tesla’s work was overshadowed by Marconi’s; Marconi used much of Tesla’s work in his own
developments, and for years Tesla was not associated with the invention of radio. Tesla never
received great financial benefits from his breakthroughs, but in 1943 (a few months after he
died penniless in New York) the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Marconi’s wireless patent and
deemed Tesla the inventor of radio.7

Wireless Telephony: De Forest and Fessenden
In 1899, inventor Lee De Forest (who, in defiance of other inventors, liked to call himself
the “father of radio”) wrote the first Ph.D. dissertation on wireless technology, building on
others’ innovations. In 1901, De Forest challenged Marconi, who was covering New York’s
International Yacht Races for the Associated Press, by signing up to report the races for a
rival news service. The competing transmitters jammed each other’s signals so badly, however,
that officials ended up relaying information on the races in the traditional way—with flags
and hand signals. The event exemplified a problem that would persist throughout radio’s
early development: noise and interference from competition for the finite supply
of radio frequencies.

In 1902, De Forest set up the Wireless Telephone Company to compete head-on with
American Marconi, by then the leader in wireless communication. A major difference between
Marconi and De Forest was the latter’s interest in wireless voice and music transmissions, later
known as wireless telephony and, eventually, radio. Although sometimes an unscrupulous
competitor (inventor Reginald Fessenden won a lawsuit against De Forest for using one of his
patents without permission), De Forest went on to patent more than three hundred inventions.

De Forest’s biggest breakthrough was the development of the Audion, or triode, vacuum
tube, which detected radio signals and then amplified them. De Forest’s improvements greatly
increased listeners’ ability to hear dots and dashes and, later, speech and music on a receiver
set. His modifications were essential to the development of voice transmission, long-distance
radio, and television. In fact, the Audion vacuum tube, which powered radios until the arrival
of transistors and solid-state circuits in the 1950s, is considered by many historians to be
the beginning of modern electronics. But again, bitter competition taints De Forest’s legacy;
although De Forest won a twenty-year court battle for the rights to the Audion patent, most en-
gineers at the time agreed that Edwin Armstrong (who later developed FM radio) was the true
inventor and disagreed with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1934 decision on the case that favored
De Forest.8

The credit for the first voice broadcast belongs to Canadian engineer Reginald Fessen-
den, formerly a chief chemist for Thomas Edison. Fessenden went to work for the U.S. Navy
and eventually for General Electric (GE), where he played a central role in improving wire-
less signals. Both the navy and GE were interested in the potential for voice transmissions. On
Christmas Eve in 1906, after GE built Fessenden a powerful transmitter, he gave his first public
demonstration, sending a voice through the airwaves from his station at Brant Rock, Massachu-
setts. A radio historian describes what happened:

That night, ship operators and amateurs around Brant Rock heard the results: “someone speaking!
. . . a woman’s voice rose in song. . . . Next someone was heard reading a poem.” Fessenden himself
played “O Holy Night” on his violin. Though the fidelity was not all that it might be, listeners were
captivated by the voices and notes they heard. No more would sounds be restricted to mere dots and
dashes of the Morse code.9

Ship operators were astonished to hear voices rather than the familiar Morse code. (Some
operators actually thought they were having a supernatural encounter.) This event showed that

“I discovered an
Invisible Empire of
the Air, intangible,
yet solid as granite.”

LEE DE FOREST,
INVENTOR

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POPULAR RADIO

the wireless medium was moving from a point-to-point communication tool (wireless opera-
tor to wireless operator) toward a one-to-many communication tool. Broadcasting, once an
agricultural term that referred to the process of casting seeds over a large area, would come to
mean the transmission of radio waves (and, later, TV signals) to a broad public audience. Prior
to radio broadcasting, wireless was considered a form of narrowcasting, or person-to-person
communication, like the telegraph and telephone.

In 1908, De Forest—declaring he was the record holder for long-distance wireless
transmissions—said he transmitted gramophone music recordings from an experimental device
atop the Eiffel Tower in Paris to locations more than four hundred miles away. In 1910, De Forest
transmitted a performance of Tosca by the Metropolitan Opera to friends in the New York area
with wireless receivers. At this point in time, radio passed from the novelty stage to the entre-
preneurial stage, where various practical uses would be tested before radio would launch as a
mass medium.

Regulating a New Medium
The two most important international issues affecting radio in
the 1900s were ship radio requirements and signal interference.
Congress passed the Wireless Ship Act in 1910, which required
that all major U.S. seagoing ships carrying more than fifty passen-
gers and traveling more than two hundred miles off the coast be
equipped with wireless equipment with a one-hundred-mile range.
The importance of this act was underscored by the Titanic disaster
two years later. A brand-new British luxury steamer, the Titanic
sank in 1912. Although more than fifteen hundred people died in
the tragedy, wireless reports played a critical role in pinpointing
the Titanic’s location, enabling rescue ships to save over seven
hundred lives.

Radio Waves as a Natural Resource
In the wake of the Titanic tragedy, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1912, which addressed
the problem of amateur radio operators increasingly cramming the airwaves. Because radio
waves crossed state and national borders, legislators determined that broadcasting consti-
tuted a “natural resource”—a kind of interstate commerce. This meant that radio waves could
not be owned; they were the collective property of all Americans, just like national parks.
Therefore, transmitting on radio waves would require licensing in the same way that driving a
car requires a license.

A short policy guide, the first Radio Act required all wireless stations to obtain radio
licenses from the Commerce Department. This act, which governed radio until 1927, also
formally adopted the SOS Morse-code distress signal that other countries had been using for
several years. Further, the “natural resource” mandate led to the idea that radio, and eventually
television, should provide a benefit to society—in the form of education and public service. The
eventual establishment of public radio stations was one consequence of this idea, and the Fair-
ness Doctrine was another.

The Impact of World War I
By 1915, more than twenty American companies sold wireless point-to-point communication
systems, primarily for use in ship-to-shore communication. Having established a reputation for
efficiency and honesty, American Marconi (a subsidiary of British Marconi) was the biggest and

NEWS OF THE TITANIC
Despite the headline in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
actually 1,523 people died
and only 705 were rescued
when the Titanic hit an
iceberg on April 14, 1912
(the ship technically sank at
2:20 A.M. on April 15). The
crew of the Titanic used the
Marconi wireless equipment
on board to send distress
signals to other ships. Of
the eight ships nearby, the
Carpathia was the first to
respond with lifeboats.

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��115

best of these companies. But in 1914, with World War I beginning in Europe and with America
warily watching the conflict, the U.S. Navy questioned the wisdom of allowing a foreign-
controlled company to wield so much power. American corporations, especially GE and AT&T,
capitalized on the navy’s xenophobia and succeeded in undercutting Marconi’s influence.

As wireless telegraphy played an increasingly large role in military operations, the navy
sought tight controls on information. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the navy
closed down all amateur radio operations and took control of key radio transmitters to ensure
military security. As the war was nearing its end in 1919, British Marconi placed an order with
GE for twenty-four potent new alternators, which were strong enough to power a transoceanic
system of radio stations that could connect the world. But the U.S. Navy—influenced by Franklin
Roosevelt, at that time the navy’s assistant secretary—grew concerned and moved to ensure that
such powerful new radio technology would not fall under foreign control.

Roosevelt was guided in turn by President Woodrow Wilson’s goal of developing the United
States as an international power, a position greatly enhanced by American military successes
during the war. Wilson and the navy saw an opportunity to slow Britain’s influence over com-
munication and to promote a U.S. plan for the control of the emerging wireless operations.
Thus corporate heads and government leaders conspired to make sure radio communication
would serve American interests.

The Formation of RCA
Some members of Congress and the corporate community opposed federal legislation that
would grant the government or the navy a radio monopoly. Consequently, GE developed a com-
promise plan that would create a private sector monopoly—that is, a private company that would
have the government’s approval to dominate the radio industry. First, GE broke off negotiations
to sell key radio technologies to European-owned companies like British Marconi, thereby limit-
ing those companies’ global reach. Second, GE took the lead in founding a new company, Radio
Corporation of America (RCA), which soon acquired American Marconi and radio patents of
other U.S. companies. Upon its founding in 1919, RCA had pooled the necessary technology and
patents to monopolize the wireless industry and expand American communication technology
throughout the world.10

Under RCA’s patents pool arrangement, wireless patents from the navy, AT&T, GE, the
former American Marconi, and other companies were combined to ensure U.S. control over
the manufacture of radio transmitters and receivers. Initially, AT&T, then the government-
sanctioned monopoly provider of telephone services, manufactured most transmitters, while
GE (and later Westinghouse) made radio receivers. RCA administered the pool, collecting patent
royalties and distributing them to pool members. To protect these profits, the government did
not permit RCA to manufacture equipment or to operate radio stations under its own name for
several years. Instead, RCA’s initial function was to ensure that radio parts were standardized
by manufacturers and to control frequency interference by amateur radio operators, which
increasingly became a problem after the war.

A government restriction at the time mandated that no more than 20 percent of RCA—and
eventually any U.S. broadcasting facility—could be owned by foreigners. This restriction, later
raised to 25 percent, became law in 1927 and applied to all U.S. broadcasting stocks and facili-
ties. It is because of this rule that in 1985 Rupert Murdoch, the head of Australia’s giant News
Corp., became a U.S. citizen so he could buy a number of TV stations and form the Fox televi-
sion network.

RCA’s most significant impact was that it gave the United States almost total control over
the emerging mass medium of broadcasting. At the time, the United States was the only country
that placed broadcasting under the care of commercial, rather than military or government,
interests. By pooling more than two thousand patents and sharing research developments, RCA

116��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

POPULAR RADIO

ensured the global dominance of the United States in mass communication, a position it main-
tained in electronic hardware into the 1960s and maintains in program content today.

When Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad set up a crude radio studio above his Pittsburgh
garage in 1916, placing a microphone in front of a phonograph to broadcast music and news
to his friends (whom Conrad supplied with receivers) two evenings a week on experimental
station 8XK, he unofficially became one of the medium’s first disc jockeys. In 1920, a Westing-
house executive, intrigued by Conrad’s curious hobby, realized the potential of radio as a mass
medium. Westinghouse then established station KDKA, which is generally regarded as the first
commercial broadcast station. KDKA is most noted for airing national returns from the Cox–
Harding presidential election on November 2, 1920, an event most historians consider the first
professional broadcast.

Other amateur broadcasters could also lay claim to being first. One of the earliest stations,
operated by Charles “Doc” Herrold in San Jose, California, began in 1909 and later became
KCBS. Additional experimental stations—in places like New York; Detroit; Medford, Massachu-
setts; and Pierre, South Dakota—broadcast voice and music prior to the establishment of KDKA.
But KDKA’s success, with the financial backing of Westinghouse, signaled the start of broadcast
radio.

In 1921, the U.S. Commerce Department officially licensed five radio stations for operation;
by early 1923, more than six hundred commercial and noncommercial stations were operating.
Some stations were owned by AT&T, GE, and Westinghouse, but many were run by amateurs
or were independently owned by universities or businesses. By the end of 1923, as many as
550,000 radio receivers, most manufactured by GE and Westinghouse, had been sold for about
$55 each (about $701 in today’s dollars). Just as the “guts” of the phonograph had been put
inside a piece of furniture to create a consumer product, the vacuum tubes, electrical posts,
and bulky batteries that made up the radio receiver were placed inside stylish furniture and
marketed to households. By 1925, 5.5 million radio sets were in use across America, and radio
was officially a mass medium.

The RCA Partnership Unravels
In 1922, in a major power grab, AT&T, which already had a government-sanctioned monopoly in
the telephone business, decided to break its RCA agreements in an attempt to monopolize radio
as well. Identifying the new medium as the “wireless telephone,” AT&T argued that broadcast-
ing was merely an extension of its control over the telephone. Ultimately, the corporate giant
complained that RCA had gained too much monopoly power. In violation of its early agreements
with RCA, AT&T began making and selling its own radio receivers.

In the same year, AT&T started WEAF (now WNBC) in New York, the first radio station to
regularly sell commercial time to advertisers. AT&T claimed that under the RCA agreements
it had the exclusive right to sell ads, which AT&T called toll broadcasting. Most people in radio
at the time recoiled at the idea of using the medium for crass advertising, viewing it instead as
a public information service. In fact, stations that had earlier tried to sell ads received “cease
and desist” letters from the Department of Commerce. But by August 1922, AT&T had nonethe-
less sold its first ad to a New York real estate developer for $50. The idea of promoting the new

The Evolution
of Radio

“I believe the
quickest way to
kill broadcasting
would be to use
it for direct
advertising.”

HERBERT HOOVER,
SECRETARY OF
COMMERCE, 1924

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��117

medium as a public service, along the lines of today’s non-
commercial National Public Radio (NPR), ended when execu-
tives realized that radio ads offered another opportunity for
profits. Advertising would ensure profits long after radio-set
sales had saturated the consumer market.

The initial strategy behind AT&T’s toll broadcasting idea
was an effort to conquer radio. By its agreements with RCA,
AT&T retained the rights to interconnect the signals between
two or more radio stations via telephone wires. In 1923,
when AT&T aired a program simultaneously on its flagship
WEAF station and on WNAC in Boston, the phone company
created the first network: a cost-saving operation that links
(at that time, through special phone lines; today, through
satellite relays) a group of broadcast stations that share pro-
gramming produced at a central location. By the end of 1924,
AT&T had interconnected twenty-two stations to air a talk
by President Calvin Coolidge. Some of these stations were
owned by AT&T, but most simply consented to become AT&T
“affiliates,” agreeing to air the phone company’s programs.
These network stations informally became known as the
telephone group and later as the Broadcasting Corporation of America (BCA).

In response, GE, Westinghouse, and RCA interconnected a smaller set of competing sta-
tions, known as the radio group. Initially, their network linked WGY in Schenectady, New York
(then GE’s national headquarters), and WJZ in Manhattan. The radio group had to use inferior
Western Union telegraph lines when AT&T denied them access to telephone wires. By this time,
AT&T had sold its stock in RCA and refused to lease its lines to competing radio networks. The
telephone monopoly was now enmeshed in a battle to defeat RCA for control of radio.

This clash, among other problems, eventually led to a government investigation and an
arbitration settlement in 1925. In the agreement, the Justice Department, irritated by AT&T’s
power grab, redefined patent agreements. AT&T received a monopoly on providing the wires,
known as long lines, to interconnect stations nationwide. In exchange, AT&T sold its BCA net-
work to RCA for $1 million and agreed not to reenter broadcasting for eight years (a banishment
that actually extended into the 1990s).

Sarnoff and NBC: Building the “Blue”
and “Red” Networks
After Lee De Forest, David Sarnoff was among the first to envision wireless telegraphy as a modern
mass medium. From the time he served as Marconi’s personal messenger (at age fifteen), Sarnoff
rose rapidly at American Marconi. He became a wireless operator, helping to relay information
about the Titanic survivors in 1912. Promoted to a series of management positions, Sarnoff was
closely involved in RCA’s creation in 1919, when most radio executives saw wireless merely as point-
to-point communication. But with Sarnoff as RCA’s first commercial manager, radio’s potential as a
mass medium was quickly realized. In 1921, at age thirty, Sarnoff became RCA’s general manager.

After RCA bought AT&T’s telephone group network (BCA), Sarnoff created a new subsidiary
in September 1926 called the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). Its ownership was shared
by RCA (50 percent), General Electric (30 percent), and Westinghouse (20 percent). This loose
network of stations would be hooked together by AT&T long lines. Shortly thereafter, the origi-
nal telephone group became known as the NBC-Red network, and the radio group (the network
previously established by RCA, GE, and Westinghouse) became the NBC-Blue network.

WESTINGHOUSE
ENGINEER FRANK
CONRAD
Broadcasting from his
garage, Conrad turned his
hobby into Pittsburgh’s
KDKA, one of the first radio
stations. Although this early
station is widely celebrated
in history books as the first
broadcasting outlet, one
can’t underestimate the
influence Westinghouse had
in promoting this “historical
first.” Westinghouse clearly
saw the celebration of
Conrad’s garage studio as a
way to market the company
and its radio equipment.
The resulting legacy of
Conrad’s garage studio
has thus overshadowed
other individuals who also
experimented with
radio broadcasting.

118��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

Although NBC owned a number of stations by the late 1920s, many independent stations
also began affiliating with the NBC networks to receive programming. An affiliate station, though
independently owned, signs a contract to be part of a network and receives money to carry the
network’s programs. In exchange, the network reserves time slots, which it sells to national ad-
vertisers. Networks centralized costs and programming by bringing the best musical, dramatic,
and comedic talent to one place, where programs could be produced and then distributed all
over the country. By 1933, NBC-Red had twenty-eight affiliates and NBC-Blue had twenty-four.

Network radio may actually have helped modernize America by de-emphasizing the local
and the regional in favor of national programs broadcast to nearly everyone. For example, when
Charles Lindbergh returned from the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, an estimated twenty-five
to thirty million people listened to his welcome-home party on the six million radio sets then in
use. At the time, it was the largest shared audience experience in the history of any mass medium.

David Sarnoff’s leadership at RCA was capped by two other negotiations that solidified his stat-
ure as the driving force behind radio’s development as a modern medium. In 1929, Sarnoff cut a deal
with General Motors for the manufacture of car radios, which had been invented a year earlier by
William Lear (later the designer of the Learjet), who sold the radios under the brand name Motorola.
Sarnoff also merged RCA with the Victor Talking Machine Company. Afterward, until the mid-1960s,
the company was known as RCA Victor, adopting as its corporate symbol the famous terrier sitting
alertly next to a Victrola radio-phonograph. The merger gave RCA control over Victor’s records and
recording equipment, making the radio company a major player in the sound recording industry. In
1930, David Sarnoff became president of RCA, and he ran it for the next forty years.

Government Scrutiny Ends RCA-NBC Monopoly
As early as 1923, the Federal Trade Commission had charged RCA with violations of antitrust
laws but allowed the monopoly to continue. By the late 1920s, the government, concerned

DAVID SARNOFF
As a young man, Sarnoff
taught himself Morse
code and learned as much
as possible in Marconi’s
experimental shop in New
York. He was then given a job
as wireless operator for the
station on Nantucket Island.
He went on to create NBC
and network radio. Sarnoff’s
calculated ambition in the
radio industry can easily
be compared to Bill Gates’s
drive to control the computer
software and Internet
industries.

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��119

about NBC’s growing control over radio content, intensified its scrutiny. Then, in 1930, when
RCA bought GE and Westinghouse’s interests in the two NBC networks, federal marshals
charged RCA/NBC with a number of violations, including exercising too much control over
manufacturing and programming. Although the government had originally sanctioned a closely
supervised monopoly for wireless communication, RCA products, its networks, and the growth
of the new mass medium dramatically changed the radio industry by the late 1920s. After the
collapse of the stock market in 1929, the public became increasingly distrustful of big business.
In 1932, the government revoked RCA’s monopoly status.

RCA acted quickly. To eliminate its monopolizing partnerships, Sarnoff’s company bought
out GE’s and Westinghouse’s remaining shares in RCA’s manufacturing business. Now RCA
would compete directly against GE, Westinghouse, and other radio manufacturers, encouraging
more competition in the radio manufacturing industry. Ironically, in the mid-1980s, GE bought
RCA, a shell of its former self and no longer competitive with foreign electronics firms.11 GE was
chiefly interested in RCA’s brand-name status and its still-lucrative subsidiary, NBC.

CBS and Paley: Challenging NBC
Even with RCA’s head start and its favored status, the two NBC networks faced competitors in
the late 1920s. The competitors, however, all found it tough going. One group, United Indepen-
dent Broadcasters (UIB), even lined up twelve prospective affiliates and offered them $500 a
week for access to ten hours of station time in exchange for quality programs. UIB was cash-
poor, however, and AT&T would not rent the new company its lines to link the affiliates.

Enter the Columbia Phonograph Company, which was looking for a way to preempt RCA’s
merger with the Victor Company, then the record company’s major competitor. With backing
from Columbia, UIB launched the new Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System, a wobbly
sixteen-affiliate network in 1927, nicknamed CPBS. But after losing $100,000 in the first month,
the record company pulled out. Later, CPBS dropped the word Phonograph from its title, creat-
ing the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).

In 1928, William Paley, the twenty-seven-year-old son of Sam Paley, owner of a Philadelphia
cigar company, bought a controlling interest in CBS to sponsor their cigar brand, La Palina. One
of Paley’s first moves was to hire the public relations pioneer (and Sigmund Freud’s nephew)
Edward Bernays to polish the new network’s image. (Bernays played a significant role in the
development of the public relations industry; see Chapter 11.) Paley and Bernays modified a
concept called option time, in which CBS paid affiliate stations $50
per hour for an option on a portion of their time. The network pro-
vided programs to the affiliates and sold ad space or sponsorships
to various product companies. In theory, CBS could now control
up to twenty-four hours a day of its affiliates’ radio time. Some
affiliates received thousands of dollars per week merely to serve as
conduits for CBS programs and ads. Because NBC was still charg-
ing some of its affiliates as much as $96 a week to carry its network
programs, the CBS offer was extremely appealing.

By 1933, Paley’s efforts had netted CBS more than ninety affili-
ates, many of them defecting from NBC. Paley also concentrated on
developing news programs and entertainment shows, particularly
soap operas and comedy-variety series. In the process, CBS suc-
cessfully raided NBC, not just for affiliates but for top talent as well.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Paley lured a number of radio
stars from NBC, including Jack Benny, Frank Sinatra, George Burns,
Gracie Allen, and Groucho Marx. During World War II, Edward R.

“I have in
mind a plan of
development which
would make radio a
‘household utility’
in the same sense
as the piano or
phonograph. The
idea is to bring
music into the
house by wireless.”

DAVID SARNOFF,
AGE 24, 1915 MEMO

CBS HELPED ESTABLISH
ITSELF as a premier radio
network by attracting top
talent like comedic duo
George Burns and Gracie
Allen from NBC. They first
brought their “Dumb Dora”
and straight man act from
stage to radio in 1929, and
then continued on various
radio programs in the 1930s
and 1940s, with the most
well known being The Burns
and Allen Show. CBS also
reaped the benefits when
Burns and Allen moved
their eponymous show to
television in 1950.

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POPULAR RADIO

Murrow’s powerful firsthand news reports from bomb-riddled London established CBS as the
premier radio news network, a reputation it carried forward to television. In 1949, near the end
of big-time network radio, CBS finally surpassed NBC as the highest-rated network. Although Wil-
liam Paley had intended to run CBS only for six months to help get it off the ground, he ultimately
ran it for more than fifty years.

Bringing Order to Chaos with the Radio Act of 1927
In the 1920s, as radio moved from narrowcasting to broadcasting, the battle for more frequency
space and less channel interference intensified. Manufacturers, engineers, station operators,
network executives, and the listening public demanded action. Many wanted more sweeping
regulation than the simple licensing function granted under the Radio Act of 1912, which gave
the Commerce Department little power to deny a license or to unclog the airwaves.

Beginning in 1924, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover ordered radio stations to share
time by setting aside certain frequencies for entertainment and news and others for farm and
weather reports. To challenge Hoover, a station in Chicago jammed the airwaves, intentionally
moving its signal onto an unauthorized frequency. In 1926, the courts decided that based on the
existing Radio Act, Hoover had the power only to grant licenses, not to restrict stations from
operating. Within the year, two hundred new stations clogged the airwaves, creating a chaotic
period in which nearly all radios had poor reception. By early 1927, sales of radio sets had de-
clined sharply.

To restore order to the airwaves, Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927, which stated
an extremely important principle—licensees did not own their channels but could only license
them as long as they operated to serve the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.” To over-
see licenses and negotiate channel problems, the 1927 act created the Federal Radio Commis-
sion (FRC), whose members were appointed by the president. Although the FRC was intended
as a temporary committee, it grew into a powerful regulatory agency. In 1934, with passage of
the Communications Act of 1934, the FRC became the Federal Communications Commis-
sion (FCC). Its jurisdiction covered not only radio but also the telephone and the telegraph
(and later television, cable, and the Internet). More significantly, by this time Congress and
the president had sided with the already-powerful radio networks and acceded to a system of
advertising-supported commercial broadcasting as best serving “public interest, convenience,
or necessity,” overriding the concerns of educational, labor, and citizen broadcasting advo-
cates.12 (See Table 4.1.)

In 1941, an activist FCC went after the networks. Declaring that NBC and CBS could no lon-
ger force affiliates to carry programs they did not want, the government outlawed the practice
of option time that Paley had used to build CBS into a major network. The FCC also demanded
that RCA sell one of its two NBC networks. RCA and NBC claimed that the rulings would bank-
rupt them. The Supreme Court sided with the FCC, however, and RCA eventually sold NBC-Blue
to a group of businessmen for $8 million in the mid-1940s. It became the American Broadcast-
ing Company (ABC). These government crackdowns brought long-overdue reform to the radio
industry, but they had not come soon enough to prevent considerable damage to noncommer-
cial radio.

The Golden Age of Radio
Many programs on television today were initially formulated for radio. The first weather fore-
casts and farm reports on radio began in the 1920s. Regularly scheduled radio news analysis
started in 1927, with H. V. Kaltenborn, a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle, providing commentary
on AT&T’s WEAF. The first regular network news analysis began on CBS in 1930, featuring Low-
ell Thomas, who would remain on radio for forty-four years.

“Overnight, it
seemed, everyone
had gone into
broadcasting:
newspapers, banks,
public utilities,
department stores,
universities and
colleges, cities and
towns, pharmacies,
creameries, and
hospitals.”

TOM LEWIS,
RADIO HISTORIAN

“It is my personal
opinion that
American listeners
would not stand
for the payment
of a receiving-set
[radio] tax. It is
my judgment that
it would be most
unpopular in this
country. It is not
the American way
of accomplishing
things.”

ANNING S. PRALL,
CHAIRMAN OF THE
FCC, 1936

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��121

Early Radio Programming
Early on, only a handful of stations operated in most large radio markets, and popular stations
were affiliated with CBS, NBC-Red, or NBC-Blue. Many large stations employed their own in-
house orchestras and aired live music daily. Listeners had favorite evening programs, usually
fifteen minutes long, to which they would tune in each night. Families gathered around the
radio to hear such shows as Amos ’n’ Andy, The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, The Green Hornet, and
Fibber McGee and Molly, or one of President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats.

Among the most popular early programs on radio, the variety show was the forerunner to pop-
ular TV shows like the Ed Sullivan Show. The variety show, developed from stage acts and vaudeville,
began with the Eveready Hour in 1923 on WEAF. Considered experimental, the program presented
classical music, minstrel shows, comedy sketches, and dramatic readings. Stars from vaudeville,
musical comedy, and New York theater and opera would occasionally make guest appearances.

By the 1930s, studio-audience quiz shows—Professor Quiz and the Old Time Spelling Bee—had
emerged. Other quiz formats, used on Information Please and Quiz Kids, featured guest panelists.
The quiz formats were later copied by television, particularly in the 1950s. Truth or Consequences,
based on a nineteenth-century parlor game, first aired on radio in 1940 and featured guests per-
forming goofy stunts. It ran for seventeen years on radio and another twenty-seven on television,
influencing TV stunt shows like CBS’s Beat the Clock in the 1950s and NBC’s Fear Factor in the
early 2000s.

Dramatic programs, mostly radio plays that were broadcast live from theaters, developed
as early as 1922. Historians mark the appearance of Clara, Lu, and Em on WGN in 1931 as the first
soap opera. One year later, Colgate-Palmolive bought the program, put it on NBC, and began
selling the soap products that gave this dramatic genre its distinctive nickname. Early “soaps”
were fifteen minutes in length and ran five or six days a week. It wasn’t until mid-1960s televi-
sion that soaps were extended to thirty minutes, and by the late 1970s some had expanded to
sixty minutes. Still a fixture on CBS, Guiding Light actually began on radio in 1937 and moved to
television in 1952 (the only radio soap to successfully make the transition). By 1940, sixty differ-
ent soap operas occupied nearly eighty hours of network radio time each week.

Most radio programs had a single sponsor that created and produced each show. The
networks distributed these programs live around the country, charging the sponsors advertising

Wireless Ship Required U.S. seagoing ships carrying more than fifty Saved lives at sea, including more
Act of 1910 passengers and traveling more than two hundred miles off than seven hundred rescued by ships
the coast to be equipped with wireless equipment with a responding to the Titanic’s distress signals
one-hundred-mile range. two years later.

Radio Act of 1912 Required radio operators to obtain a license, gave the Commerce The federal government began to assert control
Department the power to deny a license, and began a over radio. Penalties were established for
uniform system of assigning call letters to identify stations. stations that interfere with other stations’ signals.

Radio Act of 1927 Established the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) as a First expressed the now-fundamental
temporary agency to oversee licenses and negotiate channel principle that licensees did not own their
assignments. channels but could only license them as long
as they operated to serve the “public interest,
convenience, or necessity.”

Communications Established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Congress tacitly agreed to a system of
Act of 1934 to replace the FRC. The FCC regulated radio, the telephone, advertising-supported commercial
the telegraph, and later television, cable, and the Internet. broadcasting despite concerns of the public.

Telecommunications Eliminated most radio and television station ownership rules, Enormous national and regional station
Act of 1996 some dating back more than fifty years. groups formed, dramatically changing the sound
and localism of radio in the United States.

Act Provisions Effects

TABLE 4.1
MAJOR ACTS IN THE
HISTORY OF U.S. RADIO

“There are three
things which I shall
never forget about
America—the
Rocky Mountains,
Niagara Falls, and
Amos ‘n’ Andy.”

GEORGE BERNARD
SHAW, IRISH
PLAYWRIGHT

122��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

POPULAR RADIO

fees. Many shows—the Palmolive Hour, General Motors Family Party, the Lucky Strike Orchestra,
and the Eveready Hour among them—were named after the sole sponsor’s product.

Radio Programming as a Cultural Mirror
The situation comedy, a major staple of TV programming today, began on radio in the mid-
1920s. By the early 1930s, the most popular comedy was Amos ’n’ Andy, which started on Chicago
radio in 1925 before moving to NBC-Blue in 1929. Amos ’n’ Andy was based on the conventions of
the nineteenth-century minstrel show and featured black characters stereotyped as shiftless and
stupid. Created as a blackface stage act by two white comedians, Charles Correll and Freeman
Gosden, the program was criticized as racist. But NBC and the program’s producers claimed
that Amos ’n’ Andy was as popular among black audiences as among white listeners.13

Amos ’n’ Andy also launched the idea of the serial show: a program that featured continu-
ing story lines from one day to the next. The format was soon copied by soap operas and other
radio dramas. The show aired six nights a week from 7:00 to 7:15 P.M. During the show’s first
year on the network, radio-set sales rose nearly 25 percent nationally. To keep people com-
ing to restaurants and movie theaters, owners broadcast Amos ’n’ Andy in lobbies, rest rooms,
and entryways. Early radio research estimated that the program aired in more than half of all
radio homes in the nation during the 1930–31 season, making it the most popular radio series in

FIRESIDE CHATS
This giant bank of radio
network microphones
makes us wonder today
how President Franklin D.
Roosevelt managed to
project such an intimate and
reassuring tone in his famous
fireside chats. Conceived
originally to promote FDR’s
New Deal policies amid
the Great Depression,
these chats were delivered
between 1933 and 1944
and touched on topics of
national interest. Roosevelt
was the first president to
effectively use broadcasting
to communicate with
citizens; he also gave
nearly a thousand press
conferences during his
twelve-plus years as
president, revealing a strong
commitment to use media
and news to speak early
and often with the American
people.

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��123

history. In 1951, it made a brief transition to television (Correll and Gosden sold the rights to CBS
for $1 million), becoming the first TV series to have an entirely black cast. But amidst a strength-
ening Civil Rights movement and a formal protest by the NAACP (which argued that “every
character is either a clown or a crook”), CBS canceled the program in 1953.14

The Authority of Radio
The most famous single radio broadcast of all time was an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of
the Worlds on the radio series Mercury Theater of the Air. Orson Welles produced, hosted, and
acted in this popular series, which adapted science fiction, mystery, and historical adventure
dramas for radio. On Halloween eve in 1938, the twenty-three-year-old Welles aired the 1898
Martian invasion novel in the style of a radio news program. For people who missed the open-
ing disclaimer, the program sounded like a real news report, with eyewitness accounts of battles
between Martian invaders and the U.S. Army.

The program created a panic that lasted several hours. In New Jersey, some people walked
through the streets with wet towels around their heads for protection from deadly Martian heat
rays. In New York, young men reported to their National Guard headquarters to prepare for battle.
Across the nation, calls jammed police switchboards. Afterward, Orson Welles, once the radio voice
of The Shadow, used the notoriety of this broadcast to launch a film career. Meanwhile, the FCC
called for stricter warnings both before and during programs that imitated the style of radio news.

EARLY RADIO’S EFFECT
AS A MASS MEDIUM
On Halloween eve in
1938, Orson Welles’s radio
dramatization of War of the
Worlds (far left) created
a panic up and down the
East Coast, especially in
Grover’s Mill, New Jersey—
the setting for the fictional
Martian invasion that many
listeners assumed was
real. A seventy-six-year-old
Grover’s Mill resident (left)
guards a warehouse against
alien invaders.

Older media forms do not generally disappear when confronted by newer forms. Instead, they
adapt. Although radio threatened sound recording in the 1920s, the recording industry ad-
justed to the economic and social challenges posed by radio’s arrival. Remarkably, the arrival

Radio Reinvents
Itself
(c) Bedford/St. Martin’s bedfordstmartins.com 1-457-62096-0 / 978-1-457-62096-6

124��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

POPULAR RADIO

of television in the 1950s marked the only time in media
history in which a new medium stole virtually every national
programming and advertising strategy from an older medium.
Television snatched radio’s advertisers, program genres, major
celebrities, and large evening audiences. The TV set even physi-
cally displaced the radio as the living room centerpiece across
America. Nevertheless, radio adapted and continued to reach
an audience.

The story of radio’s evolution and survival is especially im-
portant today, as newspapers and magazines appear online and
as publishers produce audio books and e-books for new genera-
tions of “readers.” In contemporary culture, we have grown
accustomed to such media convergence, but to best understand
this blurring of the boundaries between media forms, it is use-
ful to look at the 1950s and the ways in which radio responded
to the advent of television.

Transistors Make Radio Portable
A key development in radio’s adaptation to television occurred
with the invention of the transistor by Bell Laboratories in 1947.
Transistors were small electrical devices that, like vacuum
tubes, could receive and amplify radio signals. However, they
used less power and produced less heat than vacuum tubes,
and they were more durable and less expensive. Best of all,
they were tiny. Transistors, which also revolutionized hearing
aids, constituted the first step in replacing bulky and delicate
tubes, leading eventually to today’s integrated circuits.

Texas Instruments marketed the first transistor radio in
1953 for about $40. Using even smaller transistors, Sony introduced the pocket radio in 1957.
But it wasn’t until the 1960s that transistor radios became cheaper than conventional tube and
battery radios. For a while, the term transistor became a synonym for a small, portable radio.

The development of transistors let radio go where television could not—to the beach, to the
office, into bedrooms and bathrooms, and into nearly all new cars. (Before the transistor, car
radios were a luxury item.) By the 1960s, most radio listening took place outside the home.

The FM Revolution and Edwin Armstrong
By the time the broadcast industry launched commercial television in the 1950s, many people,
including David Sarnoff of RCA, were predicting radio’s demise. To fund television’s develop-
ment and to protect his radio holdings, Sarnoff had even delayed a dramatic breakthrough in
broadcast sound, what he himself called a “revolution”—FM radio.

Edwin Armstrong, who first discovered and developed FM radio in the 1920s and early
1930s, is often considered the most prolific and influential inventor in radio history. He under-
stood the impact of De Forest’s vacuum tube, and he used it to invent an amplifying system that
enabled radio receivers to pick up distant signals. Armstrong’s innovations rendered obsolete
the enormous alternators used for generating power in early radio transmitters. In 1922, he sold
a “super” version of his circuit to RCA for $200,000 and sixty thousand shares of RCA stock,
which made him a millionaire as well as RCA’s largest private stockholder.

Armstrong also worked on the major problem of radio reception—electrical interference.
Between 1930 and 1933, the inventor filed five patents on FM, or frequency modulation. Offering

ADVERTISEMENTS for
pocket transistor radios,
which became popular in the
1950s, emphasized their
portability.

“Armstrong was a
lone experimenter,
Sarnoff a company
man.”

ERIK BARNOUW,
MEDIA HISTORIAN

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��125

static-free radio reception, FM supplied
greater fidelity and clarity than AM, making
FM ideal for music. AM, or amplitude
modulation (modulation refers to the varia-
tion in waveforms), stressed the volume, or
height, of radio waves; FM accentuated the
pitch, or distance, between radio waves
(see Figure 4.2).

Although David Sarnoff, the president of
RCA, thought that television would replace
radio, he helped Armstrong set up the first
experimental FM station atop the Empire
State Building in New York City. Eventually,
though, Sarnoff thwarted FM’s development
(which he was able to do because RCA had an
option on Armstrong’s new patents). Instead,
in 1935 Sarnoff threw RCA’s considerable
weight behind the development of television. With the FCC allocating and reassigning scarce
frequency spaces, RCA wanted to ensure that channels went to television before they went to
FM. But most of all, Sarnoff wanted to protect RCA’s existing AM empire. Given the high costs of
converting to FM and the revenue needed for TV experiments, Sarnoff decided to close down
Armstrong’s station.

Armstrong forged ahead without RCA. He founded a new FM station and advised other
engineers, who started more than twenty experimental stations between 1935 and the early
1940s. In 1941, the FCC approved limited space allocations for commercial FM licenses. During
the next few years, FM grew in fits and starts. Between 1946 and early 1949, the number of com-
mercial FM stations expanded from 48 to 700. But then the FCC moved FM’s frequency space to
a new band on the electromagnetic spectrum, rendering some 400,000 prewar FM receiver sets
useless. FM’s future became uncertain, and by 1954 the number of FM stations had fallen to 560.

On January 31, 1954, Edwin Armstrong, weary from years of legal skirmishes over patents
with RCA, Lee De Forest, and others, wrote a note apologizing to his wife, removed the air
conditioner from his thirteenth-story New York apartment window, and jumped to his death. A
month later, David Sarnoff announced record profits of $850 million for RCA, with TV sales ac-
counting for 54 percent of the company’s earnings. In the early 1960s, the FCC opened up more
spectrum space for the superior sound of FM, infusing new life into radio.

Although AM stations had greater reach, they could not match the crisp fidelity of FM,
which made FM preferable for music. In the early 1970s, about 70 percent of listeners tuned
almost exclusively to AM radio. By the 1980s, however, FM had surpassed AM in profitability. By
the 2000s, more than 75 percent of all listeners preferred FM, and about 3,600 commercial and
almost 2,900 educational FM stations were in operation. The expansion of FM represented one
of the chief ways radio survived television and Sarnoff’s gloomy predictions.

The Rise of Format and Top 40 Radio
Live and recorded music had long been radio’s single biggest staple, accounting for 48 percent
of all programming in 1938. Although live music on radio was generally considered superior to
recorded music, early disc jockeys made a significant contribution to the latter. They demon-
strated that music alone could drive radio. In fact, when television snatched radio’s program
ideas and national sponsors, radio’s dependence on recorded music became a necessity and
helped the medium survive the 1950s.

FIGURE 4.2
AM AND FM WAVES
Source: Adapted from David
Cheshire, The Video Manual,
1982.

“Radio affects
most people
intimately,
person-to-person,
offering a world
of unspoken
communication
between writer-
speaker and
listener. That is the
immediate aspect
of radio. A private
experience.”

MARSHALL MCLUHAN,
UNDERSTANDING
MEDIA, 1964

126��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

POPULAR RADIO

As early as 1949, station owner Todd Storz in Omaha, Nebraska, experimented with
formula-driven radio, or format radio. Under this system, management rather than deejays
controlled programming each hour. When Storz and his program manager noticed that bar
patrons and waitresses repeatedly played certain favorite songs from the forty records avail-
able in a jukebox, they began researching record sales to identify the most popular tunes. From
observing jukebox culture, Storz hit on the idea of rotation: playing the top songs many times
during the day. By the mid-1950s, the management-control idea combined with the rock-and-
roll explosion, and the Top 40 format was born. Although the term Top 40 derived from the
number of records stored in a jukebox, this format came to refer to the forty most popular hits
in a given week as measured by record sales.

As format radio grew, program managers combined rapid deejay chatter with the best-
selling songs of the day and occasional oldies—popular songs from a few months earlier. By
the early 1960s, to avoid “dead air,” managers asked deejays to talk over the beginning and
the end of a song so that listeners would feel less compelled to switch stations. Ads, news,
weather forecasts, and station identifications were all designed to fit a consistent station
environment. Listeners, tuning in at any moment, would recognize the station by its distinc-
tive sound.

In format radio, management carefully coordinates, or programs, each hour, dictating
what the deejay will do at various intervals throughout each hour of the day (see Figure 4.3).
Management creates a program log—once called a hot clock in radio jargon—that deejays must
follow. By the mid-1960s, one study had determined that in a typical hour on Top 40, listen-
ers could expect to hear about twenty ads; numerous weather, time, and contest announce-
ments; multiple recitations of the station’s call letters; about three minutes of news; and
approximately twelve songs.

Radio managers further sectioned off program-
ming into day parts, which typically consisted of time
blocks covering 6 to 10 A.M., 10 A.M. to 3 P.M., 3 to
7 P.M., and 7 P.M. to midnight. Each day part, or block,
was programmed through ratings research according
to who was listening. For instance, a Top 40 station
would feature its top deejays in the morning and
afternoon periods when audiences, many riding in
cars, were largest. From 10 A.M. to 3 P.M., research
determined that women at home and secretaries at
work usually controlled the dial, so program manag-
ers, capitalizing on the gender stereotypes of the day,
played more romantic ballads and less hard rock.
Teenagers tended to be heavy evening listeners, so
program managers often discarded news breaks at this
time, since research showed that teens turned the dial
when news came on.

Critics of format radio argued that only the top
songs received play and that lesser-known songs

deserving air time received meager attention. Although a few popular star deejays continued to
play a role in programming, many others quit when managers introduced formats. Owners ap-
proached programming as a science, but deejays considered it an art form. Program managers
argued that deejays had different tastes from those of the average listener and therefore could
not be fully trusted to know popular audience tastes. The owners’ position, which generated
more revenue, triumphed.

********************************* MusicMaster *********************************

93.5 The Mix 12N-1PM

Lunch Time Rewind LIVE

0:00 01890 DON HENLEY :26/5:59/FADE
SUNSET GRILL

5:59 00617 ROBERT PALMER :24/3:45/FADE
ADDICTED TO LOVE

9:44 00852 JOHN LENNON :14/2:49/FADE
IMAGINE

12:33 00405 MADONNA :17/:32/4:00/FADE
PAPA DON’T PREACH

16:33 02252 EDDIE MONEY 15/3:28/COLD
BABY HOLD ON
——————————————————————————–
20:01 STOP SET
——————————————————————————–

22:01 02225 DOOBIE BROTHERS 11/3:24/FADE
TAKE ME IN YOUR ARMS

25:25 02396 STEVIE WONDER 07/3:18/FADE
ISN’T SHE LOVELY

28:43 01679 A-HA 08/3:42/FADE
TAKE ON ME

32:25 00110 THE GUESS WHO :21/3:39/FADE
THESE EYES

FIGURE 4.3
RADIO PROGRAM
LOG FOR AN ADULT
CONTEMPORARY
(AC) STATION
Source: KCVM, Cedar Falls, IA,
2010.

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��127

T he origins of contemporary political talk radio can be traced to three phenomena of the
1980s. The first of these involved
AM music stations getting absolutely
murdered by FM, which could broad-
cast music in stereo and allowed for
much better fidelity on high and low
notes. The human voice, on the other
hand, is midrange and doesn’t require
high fidelity. The eighties’ prolifera-
tion of talk formats on the AM band
also provided new careers for some
music deejays—e.g., Don Imus, Morton
Downey Jr.—whose chatty
personas didn’t fit well
with FM’s all- about-
the- music ethos.

The second big
factor was the re-
peal, late in Ron-
ald Reagan’s sec-
ond term, of what
was known as the
Fairness Doctrine.
This was a 1949
FCC rule designed
to minimize any possible
restrictions on free speech
caused by limited access to broad-
casting outlets. The idea was that, as
one of the conditions for receiving an
FCC broadcast license, a station had
to “devote reasonable attention to the
coverage of controversial issues of
public importance,” and consequently
had to provide “reasonable, although
not necessarily equal” opportunities for
opposing sides to express their views.
Because of the Fairness Doctrine,
talk stations had to hire and program
symmetrically: if you had a three- hour

program whose host’s politics were on
one side of the ideological spectrum,
you had to have another long-form pro-
gram whose host more or less spoke
for the other side. Weirdly enough, up
through the mid-eighties it was usually
the U.S. right that benefited most from
the Doctrine. Pioneer talk syndicator
Ed McLaughlin, who managed San
Francisco’s KGO in the 1960s, recalls
that “I had more liberals on the air than
I had conservatives or even moderates
for that matter, and I had a hell of a
time finding the other voice.”

The Fairness Doctrine’s
repeal was part of the

sweeping deregula-
tions of the Reagan

era, which aimed
to liberate all
sorts of industries
from government
interference and
allow them to

compete freely in
the marketplace. The

old, Rooseveltian logic of
the Doctrine had been that

since the airwaves belonged to
everyone, a license to profit from those
airwaves conferred on the broadcast
industry some special obligation to
serve the public interest. Commercial
radio broadcasting was not, in other
words, originally conceived as just
another for-profit industry; it was sup-
posed to meet a higher standard of so-
cial responsibility. After 1987, though,
just another industry is pretty much
what radio became, and its only real re-
sponsibility now is to attract and retain
listeners in order to generate revenue.

In other words, the sort of distinction
explicitly drawn by FCC Chairman
Newton Minow in the 1960s—namely,
that between “the public interest” and
“merely what interests the public”—no
longer exists.

More or less on the heels of the Fair-
ness Doctrine’s repeal came the West
Coast and then national syndication
of The Rush Limbaugh Show through
Mr. McLaughlin’s EFM Media. Lim-
baugh is the third great progenitor
of today’s political talk radio partly
because he’s a host of extraordinary,
once-in-a-generation talent and
charisma—bright, loquacious, witty,
complexly authoritative—whose show’s
blend of news, entertainment, and
partisan analysis became the model
for legions of imitators. But he was
also the first great promulgator of
the Mainstream Media’s Liberal Bias
(MMLB) idea. This turned out to be a
brilliantly effective rhetorical move,
since the MMLB concept functioned
simultaneously as a standard around
which Rush’s audience could rally, as
an articulation of the need for righ-
twing (i.e., unbiased) media, and as a
mechanism by which any criticism or
refutation of conservative ideas could
be dismissed (either as biased or as the
product of indoctrination by biased me-
dia). Boiled way down, the MMLB thesis
is able both to exploit and to perpetu-
ate many conservatives’ dissatisfaction
with extant media sources—and it’s this
dissatisfaction that cements political
talk radio’s large and loyal audience.

Source: Excerpted from David Foster Wallace,
“Host: The Origins of Talk Radio,” Atlantic, April
2005, 66–68.

Host: The Origins of Talk Radio
by David Foster Wallace

CASE
STUDY

128��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

POPULAR RADIO

Resisting the Top 40
The expansion of FM in the mid-1960s created room for experimenting, particularly with clas-
sical music, jazz, blues, and non–Top 40 rock songs. Progressive rock emerged as an alterna-
tive to conventional formats. Many noncommercial stations broadcast from college campuses,
where student deejays and managers rejected the commercialism associated with Top 40 tunes
and began playing lesser-known alternative music and longer album cuts (such as Bob Dylan’s
“Desolation Row” and The Doors’ “Light My Fire”). Until that time, most rock on radio had
been consigned almost exclusively to Top 40 AM formats, with song length averaging about
three minutes.

Experimental FM stations, both commercial and noncommercial, offered a cultural space
for hard-edged political folk music and for rock music that commented on the Civil Rights move-
ment and protested America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. By the 1970s, however, progres-
sive rock had been copied, tamed, and absorbed by mainstream radio under the format labeled
album-oriented rock (AOR). By 1972, AOR-driven album sales accounted for more than 85
percent of the retail record business. By the 1980s, as first-generation rock and rollers aged and
became more affluent, AOR stations became less political and played mostly white, post-Beatles
music featuring such groups as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Cream, and Queen.15 Today, AOR has
been subsumed under the more general classic rock format.

Contemporary radio sounds very different from its predecessor. In contrast to the few
stations per market in the 1930s, most large markets today include more than forty sta-
tions that vie for listener loyalty. With the exception of national network–sponsored news
segments and nationally syndicated programs, most programming is locally produced and
heavily dependent on the music industry for content. Although a few radio personalities,
such as Glenn Beck, Ryan Seacrest, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Joyner, Tavis Smiley, and
Jim Rome, are nationally prominent, local deejays and their music are the stars at most
radio stations.

However, listeners today are unlike radio’s first audiences in several ways. First, listeners
in the 1930s tuned in to their favorite shows at set times. Listeners today do not say, “Gee, my

favorite song is coming on at 8 P.M., so I’d better be home to listen.” Instead, radio has
become a secondary, or background, medium that follows the rhythms of daily life.
Radio programmers today worry about channel cruising—listeners’ tendency to search
the dial until they find a song they like.

Second, in the 1930s, peak listening time occurred during the evening hours—
dubbed prime time in the TV era—when people were home from work and school.
Now, the heaviest radio listening occurs during drive time, between 6 and 9 A.M.
and 4 and 7 P.M., when people are commuting to and from work or school.

Third, stations today are more specialized. Listeners are loyal to favorite sta-
tions, music formats, and even radio personalities, rather than to specific shows.

People generally listen to only four or five stations that target them. More than
fourteen thousand radio stations now operate in the United States, customizing

their sounds to reach niche audiences through format specialization and alternative
programming.

The Sounds of
Commercial Radio

RYAN SEACREST may
be best known for his job
hosting TV’s American Idol,
but he began his career in
radio when he hosted a local
radio show while attending
the University of Georgia.
In the style of his own
idols—Dick Clark and Casey
Kasem—Seacrest now hosts
two nationally syndicated
radio shows, On Air with
Ryan Seacrest and American
Top 40, in addition to his
television projects.

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��129

Format Specialization
Stations today use a variety of formats based on
managed program logs and day parts. All told, more
than forty different radio formats, plus variations,
serve diverse groups of listeners (see Figure 4.4).
To please advertisers, who want to know exactly
who is listening, formats usually target audiences
according to their age, income, gender, or race/
ethnicity. Radio’s specialization enables advertisers
to reach smaller target audiences at costs that are
much lower than those for television.

Targeting listeners has become extremely
competitive, however, because forty or fifty sta-
tions may be available in a large radio market.
About 10 percent of all stations across the country
switch formats each year in an effort to find a
formula that generates more advertising money.
Some stations, particularly those in large cities,
even rent blocks of time to various local ethnic or civic groups; this enables the groups to dictate
their own formats and sell ads.

News, Information, and Talk Radio
The nation’s fastest-growing format throughout much of the 1990s was the news/talk/informa-
tion format (see “Case Study—Host: The Origins of Talk Radio” on page 127). In 1987, only 170
radio stations operated formats dominated by either news programs or talk shows, which tend
to appeal to adults over age thirty-five (except for sports talk programs, which draw mostly male
sports fans of all ages). Buoyed by the notoriety and popularity of personalities like Tavis Smiley
and Rush Limbaugh, more than 1,500 stations used the format by 2010, and it was the most
popular format (by number of listeners) in the nation (see Table 4.2). A news/talk/information
format, though more expensive to produce than a music format, appeals to advertisers looking
to target working- and middle-class adult consumers. Nevertheless, most radio stations continue
to be driven by a variety of less expensive music formats.

Music Formats
The adult contemporary (AC) format, also known as middle-of-the-road or MOR, is among
radio’s oldest and most popular formats, reaching about 8.2 percent of all listeners, most of them
over age forty, with an eclectic mix of news, talk, oldies, and soft rock music—what Broadcasting

Other
35.2

News/Talk/Information 12.6%

Country 12.5%

Adult Contemporary (AC) 8.2%

Pop Contemporary Hit Radio
(CHR) 5.9%

Classic Rock 4.7%

Classic Hits 3.9%
Rhythmic CHR 3.7%
Urban AC 3.6%
Hot AC 3.5%
Urban Contemporary 3.3%
Mexican Regional 2.9%

Rush Limbaugh (Conservative) 14.5 13.5 15

Sean Hannity (Conservative) 11.75 12.5 14

Glenn Beck (Conservative) * 3 10

Dr. Laura Schlessinger (General Advice) 8.5 8 9
(Ended show in December 2010)

Michael Savage (Conservative) 7 8.25 8.5

Mark Levin (Conservative) N/A 1 8.5

Dave Ramsey (Financial Advice) * 2.75 8

Laura Ingraham (Conservative) 1.25 5 6

Neal Boortz (Conservative) * * 6

Talk Show Host 2003 2006 2010

TABLE 4.2
TALK RADIO WEEKLY
AUDIENCE (IN MILLIONS)
Source: Talkers magazine, “Top
Talk Radio Audiences,” Spring
2010.
Note: * = Information
unavailable; N/A = Talk host not
nationally broadcast.

FIGURE 4.4
THE MOST POPULAR
RADIO FORMATS IN THE
UNITED STATES AMONG
PERSONS AGE TWELVE
AND OLDER
Source: Arbitron, Radio Today,
2009 Edition.
Note: Based on listener shares for
primary AM and FM stations, plus
HD stations and Internet streams
of radio stations.

130��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

POPULAR RADIO

magazine describes as “not too soft, not too loud, not too fast, not too slow, not too hard, not too
lush, not too old, not too new.” Variations on the AC format include urban AC, hot AC, rhythmic
AC, modern AC, and smooth AC. Now encompassing everything from rap to pop punk songs,
Top 40 radio—also called contemporary hit radio (CHR)—still appeals to many teens and
young adults. Since the mid-1980s, however, these stations have lost ground steadily as younger
generations have followed music first on MTV and now online rather than on radio.

The country format claims the most stations—almost 1,700. Many stations are in tiny
markets where country is traditionally the default format for communities with only one radio
station. Country music has old roots in radio, starting in 1925 with the influential Grand Ole Opry
program on WSM in Nashville. Although Top 40 drove country music out of many radio markets
in the 1950s, the growth of FM in the 1960s brought it back, as station managers looked for
market niches not served by rock music. As diverse as rock music, country today includes such
subdivisions as classic country, new country, and southern gospel.

Many formats appeal to particular ethnic or racial groups. In 1947, WDIA in Memphis was
the first station to program exclusively for black listeners. Now called urban contemporary,
this format targets a wide variety of African American listeners, primarily in large cities. Urban
contemporary, which typically plays popular dance, rap, R&B, and hip-hop music (featuring
performers like Rihanna and Ludacris), also subdivides by age, featuring an Urban AC category
with performers like Maxwell, Alicia Keys, and Mary J. Blige.

Spanish-language radio, one of radio’s fastest-growing formats, is concentrated mostly in
large Hispanic markets such as Miami, New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, California, Arizona, New
Mexico, and Texas (where KCOR, the first all-Spanish-language station, originated in San Anto-
nio in 1947). Besides talk shows and news segments in Spanish, this format features a variety of
Spanish, Caribbean, and Latin American musical styles, including calypso, flamenco, mariachi,
merengue, reggae, samba, salsa, and Tejano.

In addition, today there are other formats that are spin-offs from AOR. Classic rock serves
up rock favorites from the mid-1960s through the 1980s to the baby-boom generation and other
listeners who have outgrown the Top 40. The oldies format originally served adults who grew
up on 1950s and early 1960s rock and roll. As that audience has aged, oldies formats now target

EDDIE “PIOLÍN” SOTELO
is a popular Los Angeles
radio personality on
Univision-owned KSCA
(101.9 FM), which has a
regional Mexican format and
is the highest-rated station
in the market. Sotelo is a
major supporter of immigrant
rights and helped to organize
a huge rally in 2006. His
nickname, “Piolín,” means
“Tweety Bird” in Spanish.

“National Public
Radio . . . has
bolstered its
listener base
over the last ten
years, showing a
steady increase
in audience in
contrast to other
mainstream media
companies.”

THE BOND BUYER
2010

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��131

younger audiences with the classic hits format featuring songs from the 1970s and 1980s. The
alternative music format recaptures some of the experimental approach of the FM stations of
the 1960s, although with much more controlled playlists, and has helped to introduce artists
such as the Dead Weather and Cage the Elephant.

Research indicates that most people identify closely with the music they listened to as ado-
lescents and young adults. This tendency partially explains why classic hits and classic rock sta-
tions combined have surpassed CHR stations today. It also helps to explain the recent nostalgia
for music from the 1980s and early 1990s.

Nonprofit Radio and NPR
Although commercial radio (particularly those stations owned by huge radio conglomerates)
dominates the radio spectrum, nonprofit radio maintains a voice. But the road to viability for
nonprofit radio in the United States has not been easy. In the 1930s, the Wagner-Hatfield Amend-
ment to the 1934 Communications Act intended to set aside 25 percent of radio for a wide
variety of nonprofit stations. When the amendment was defeated in 1935, the future of educa-
tional and noncommercial radio looked bleak. Many nonprofits had sold out to for-profit owners
during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The stations that remained were often banished from
the air during the evening hours or assigned weak signals by federal regulators who
favored commercial owners and their lobbying agents. Still, nonprofit public radio
survived. Today, more than three thousand nonprofit stations operate, most of them
on the FM band.

The Early Years of Nonprofit Radio
Two government rulings, both in 1948, aided nonprofit radio. First, the government
began authorizing noncommercial licenses to stations not affiliated with a labor,
religion, education, or civic group. The first license went to Lewis Kimball Hill, a radio
reporter and pacifist during World War II who started the Pacifica Foundation to
run experimental public stations. Pacifica stations, like Hill, have often challenged the
status quo in radio as well as in government. Most notably, in the 1950s they aired the
poetry, prose, and music of performers considered radical, left-wing, or communist
who were blacklisted by television and seldom acknowledged by AM stations. Over
the years, Pacifica has also been fined and reprimanded by the FCC and Congress
for airing programs that critics considered inappropriate for public airwaves. Today,
Pacifica has more than one hundred affiliate stations.

Second, the FCC approved 10-watt FM stations. Prior to this time, radio stations
had to have at least 250 watts to get licensed. A 10-watt station with a broadcast range
of only about seven miles took very little capital to operate, so more people could
participate, and they became training sites for students interested in broadcasting.
Although the FCC stopped licensing new 10-watt stations in 1978, about one hundred
longtime 10-watters are still in operation.

Creation of the First Noncommercial Networks
During the 1960s, nonprofit broadcasting found a Congress sympathetic to an old idea: using
radio and television as educational tools. As a result, National Public Radio (NPR) and the
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) were created as the first noncommercial networks. Under
the provisions of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting (CPB), NPR and PBS were mandated to provide alternatives to commercial
broadcasting. Now, NPR’s popular news and interview programs, Morning Edition and All Things
Considered, are thriving, and they contribute to the network’s audience of thirty-four million
listeners per week.

MICHELE NORRIS is
one of the hosts on NPR’s
All Things Considered,
a daily news show that
features a “trademark
mix of news, interviews,
commentaries, reviews and
offbeat features.” All Things
Considered has been on
the air since 1971 and is
one of NPR’s most popular
programs.

“We have a huge
responsibility to
keep the airwaves
open for what
I think is the
majority—
representing the
voices that are
locked out of the
mainstream media.”

AMY GOODMAN,
CO-HOST OF RADIO’S
DEMOCRACY NOW!
2001

132��SOUNDS & IMAGES

Radio Mogadishu
last three years, earning Somalia the
title “Africa’s deadliest country for the
media” from the international organiza-
tion Reporters Without Borders.1 The
media workers under attack include
radio workers, who were threatened by
militias in April 2010 to stop playing
foreign programs from the BBC and
Voice of America, and then to stop
playing all music (which was deemed
un-Islamic) or face “serious conse-
quences.”2 Although most radio sta-
tions in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu,
have succumbed to the threats, they

have found creative (and ironic) ways
to jab back at the militants, like

playing sound effects instead
of music to introduce

programs. A newscast,
for example, might be
introduced by recorded
gunshots, animal noises,
or car sounds.

One station, Radio
Mogadishu, is still bravely

broadcasting music and
independent newscasts.

The station is supported by the
transitional government as a critical

tool in bringing democracy back to the
country, but radio work in the name
of democracy has never been more
dangerous than it is in Somalia today.
“Radio Mogadishu’s 100 or so em-
ployees are marked men and women,
because the insurgents associate them
with the government,” the New York
Times reported.3 Many of the journal-
ists, sound engineers, and deejays eat
and sleep at the station for fear of be-
ing killed; some have not left the radio

GLOBAL
VILLAGE

station compound to visit their families
for months, even though they live in the
same city. Their fears are well-founded:
One veteran reporter who still lived at
home was gunned down by hooded as-
sassins as he returned to his house one
night in May 2010.

Radio Mogadishu (in English, Somali,
and Arabic on the Web at http://radio
muqdisho.net/) speaks to the enduring
power of independent radio around
the globe and its particular connec-
tion to Somali citizens, for whom it
is a cultural lifeline. The BBC reports
that Somali citizens love pop music
(like that of popular Somali artists
Abdi Shire Jama (Joogle) and K’Naan,
who record abroad), and they resent
being told that they cannot listen to
it on the radio. Somali bus drivers
reportedly sneak music radio for their
passengers, turning the music on and
off depending on whether they are in
a safe, government-controlled district
or a dangerous, militia-controlled area.
The news portion of radio broadcasts is
also important, especially in a country
where only about 1 percent of the
population has Internet access. “In
a fractured state like Somalia, radio
remains the most influential medium,”
the BBC noted.4

For radio stations in the United States,
the most momentous decision is
deciding what kind of music to play—
maybe CHR, country, or hot AC. For
Radio Mogadishu, simply deciding to
play music and broadcast independent
news is a far more serious, and life-
threatening matter.

F or two decades, Somalia has been without a properly functioning government. The
nation of about nine million people on
the eastern coast of Africa has been
embroiled in a civil war since 1991
in which competing clans and militias
have fought in see-saw battles for
control of the country. During this
time, more than a half million Somalis
have died from famine and war. Once
a great economic and cultural center,
Somalia’s biggest contribution to
global culture in recent years has been
modern-day seagoing
pirates.

A more mod-
erate tran-
sitional
government
has tried to
take leader-
ship of the
war-weary
nation, but
radical Islamist
militias, including
one with ties to Al
Qaeda called Al-Shabaab,
have been its biggest adversaries.
Al-Shabaab has terrorized African
Union peacekeepers and humanitar-
ian aid workers with assassinations
and suicide bombings, and it has used
amputations, stonings, and beatings
to enforce its harsh rules against
civilians.

Journalists in Somalia have not been
immune from the terror. Nearly twenty
journalists have been killed there in the

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��133

Over the years, however, more time and attention have been devoted to public television
than to public radio. When government funding tightened in the late 1980s and 1990s, televi-
sion received the lion’s share. In 1994, a conservative majority in Congress cut financial support
and threatened to scrap the CPB, the funding authority for public broadcasting. Consequently,
stations became more reliant on private donations and corporate sponsorship. While depend-
ing on handouts, especially from big business, public broadcasters steered clear of some contro-
versial subjects, especially those that critically examined corporations. (See “Media Literacy and
the Critical Process: Comparing Commercial and Noncommercial Radio” above.)

Like commercial stations, nonprofit radio has adopted the format style. Unlike commercial
radio, however, the dominant style in public radio is a loose variety format whereby a station
may actually switch from jazz, classical music, and alternative rock to news and talk during differ-
ent parts of the day. Noncommercial radio remains the place for both tradition and experimen-
tation, as well as for programs that do not draw enough listeners for commercial success. (See
“Global Village: Radio Mogadishu” on page 132 for more on public radio internationally.)

Comparing Commercial and Noncommercial Radio
After the arrival and growth of commercial TV, the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was created in
1967 as the funding agent for public broadcasting—an
alternative to commercial TV and radio for educational and
cultural programming that could not be easily sustained by
commercial broadcasters in search of large general audi-
ences. As a result, NPR (National Public Radio) developed to
provide national programming to public stations to supple-
ment local programming efforts. Today, NPR affiliates get
as little as 2 percent of their funding from the government.
Most money for public radio comes instead from corporate
sponsorships, individual grants, and private donations.

1 DESCRIPTION. Listen to a typical morning or late after-
noon hour of a popular local com-
mercial talk-news radio station and a
typical hour of your local NPR station,
from the same time period over a
two- to three-day period. Keep a log of
what topics are covered and what news
stories are reported. For the commer-
cial station, log what commercials are
carried and how much time in an hour
is devoted to ads. For the noncom-
mercial station, note how much time
is devoted to recognizing the station’s
sources of funding support and who the
supporters are.

2 ANALYSIS. Look for pat-terns. What kinds of stories
are covered? What kinds of topics are
discussed? Create a chart to categorize
the stories. To cover events and issues,
do the stations use actual reporters at
the scene? How much time is given to
reporting compared to time devoted to
opinion? How many sources are cited
in each story? What kinds of interview
sources are used? Are they expert
sources or regular person-on-the-street
interviews? How many sources are men
and how many are women?

Media Literacy and
the Critical Process

3 INTERPRETATION. What do these patterns mean? Is there a
balance between reporting and opin-
ion? Do you detect any bias, and if so,
how did you determine this? Are the
stations serving as watchdogs to ensure
that democracy’s best interests are be-
ing served? What effect, if any, do you
think the advertisers/supporters have
on the programming? What arguments
might you make about commercial and
noncommercial radio based on your
findings?

4 EVALUATION. Which station seems to be doing a better job
serving its local audience? Why? Do you
buy the 1930s argument that noncom-

mercial stations serve narrow, special
interests while commercial stations serve
capitalism and the public interest? Why
or why not? From which station did you
learn the most, and which station did
you find most entertaining? Explain.
What did you like and dislike about
each station?

5 ENGAGEMENT. Join your college radio station. Talk to
the station manager about the goals
for a typical hour of programming and
what audience they are trying to reach.
Finally, pitch program or topic ideas that
would improve your college station’s
programming.

134��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

POPULAR RADIO

New Radio Technologies Offer More Stations
Over the past decade or so, two alternative radio technologies have helped to expand radio be-
yond its traditional AM and FM bands and bring more diverse sounds to listeners: satellite and
HD (digital) radio.

Satellite Radio
A series of satellites launched to cover the continental United States created a subscription national
satellite radio service. Two companies, XM and Sirius, completed their national introduction by
2002 and merged into a single provider in 2008. The merger was precipitated by their struggles to
make a profit after building competing satellite systems and battling for listeners. Together, they
offer more than 180 digital music, news, and talk channels to the continental United States via sat-
ellite, with monthly prices starting at $12.95 and satellite radio receivers costing from $30 to $300.

Programming includes a range of music channels, from rock to reggae, to Spanish Top 40
and opera, as well as channels dedicated to NASCAR, NPR, cooking, and comedy. Another fea-
ture of satellite radio’s programming is popular personalities who host their own shows or have
their own channels, including Howard Stern, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, and Bob Dylan.
U.S. automakers (investors in the satellite radio companies) now equip most new cars with a
satellite band, in addition to AM and FM, in order to promote further adoption of satellite radio.

However, satellite radio continues to have financial problems even after the merger of XM
and Sirius. In an attempt to further expand their market, Sirius XM began offering free apps
for the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android in 2009 so listeners can access satellite radio via their
smartphones. They also began offering limited service to other cell phone carriers.

HD Radio
Available to the public since 2004, HD radio is a digital technology that enables AM and FM radio
broadcasters to multicast two to three additional compressed digital signals within their tradi-
tional analog frequency. For example, KNOW, a public radio station at 91.1 FM in Minneapolis–St.
Paul, runs its National Public Radio news/talk/information format on 91.1 HD1, Radio Heartland
(acoustic and Americana music) on 91.1 HD2, and the BBC News service on 91.1 HD3. About two
thousand radio stations now broadcast in HD. To tune in, listeners need a radio with the HD band,
which brings in CD-quality digital signals. Digital HD radio also provides program data, like artist
name and song title, and enables listeners to tag songs for playlists that can later be downloaded
to an iPod and purchased on iTunes. But the roll-out of HD has been slow. By 2010, one national
survey noted that only 31 percent of people had heard or read anything recently about HD radio.16

Radio and Convergence
Like every other mass medium, radio is moving into the future by converging with the Internet.
Interestingly, this convergence is taking radio back to its roots in some aspects. Internet radio
allows for much more variety in radio, which is reminiscent of radio’s earliest years when nearly
any individual or group with some technical skill could start a radio station. Moreover, podcasts
bring back content like storytelling, instructional programs, and local topics of interest that
have largely been missing in corporate radio. And portable listening devices like the iPod and
radio apps for the iPad and smartphones harken back to the compact portability that first came
with the popularization of transistor radios in the 1950s.

Internet Radio
Internet radio emerged in the 1990s with the popularity of the Web. Internet radio stations
come in two types. The first involves an existing AM, FM, satellite, or HD station “streaming” a

“[Pandora’s iPhone
app has] changed
the perception
people have of
what Internet radio
is, from computer-
radio to radio,
because you can
take the iPhone
and just plug it into
your car, or take it
to the gym.”

TIM WESTERGREN,
PANDORA FOUNDER,
WIRED.COM, 2010

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��135

simulcast version of its on-air signal over the Web. According to the Arbitron radio
rating service, more than 6,400 radio stations stream their programming over the
Web today.17 The second kind of online radio station is one that has been created
exclusively for the Internet. Pandora, Yahoo! Music, AOL Radio, Last.fm, and
Slacker are some of the leading Internet radio station services. In fact, services like
Pandora allow users to have more control over their listening experience and the
selections that are played. Listeners can create individualized stations based on a
specific artist or song that they request. Pandora also enables users to share their
musical choices on Facebook. Internet radio is clearly in sync with younger radio
listeners: a majority of younger consumers, ages twelve to thirty-four, select the
Internet (52 percent) over radio (32 percent) as the medium to which they turn first
to learn about music.18

Beginning in 2002, a Copyright Royalty Board established by the Library
of Congress began to assess royalty fees for streaming copyrighted songs over
the Internet based on a percentage of each station’s revenue. In 2007, the board
proposed to change the royalty fees to a per-song basis, which would increase
station payments to the recording industry anywhere from 300 to 1,200 percent.
Although the recording industry was pleased with the plan, Webcasters—who have millions
of online listeners each week—claimed the higher rates threatened their financial viability.19
In 2009, Congress passed the Webcaster Settlement Act, which was considered a lifeline for
Internet radio. The act enabled Internet stations to negotiate royalty fees directly with the
music industry, at rates presumably more reasonable than what the Copyright Royalty Board
had proposed.

Podcasting and Portable Listening
Developed in 2004, podcasting (the term marries iPod and broadcasting) refers to the prac-
tice of making audio files available on the Internet so listeners can download them onto their
computers and transfer them to portable MP3 players or listen to the files on the computer. This
popular distribution method quickly became mainstream, as mass media companies created
commercial podcasts to promote and extend existing content, such as news and reality TV,
while independent producers kept pace with their own podcasts on niche topics like knitting,
fly fishing, and learning Russian.

Podcasts have led the way for people to listen to radio on mobile devices like the iPod
and Microsoft’s Zune. Satellite radio, Internet-only stations like Pandora and Slacker, sites that
stream traditional broadcast radio like the iheartradio.com, and public radio like NPR all offer
apps for smartphones and touchscreen devices like the iPad, which has also led to a resurgence
in portable listening. Traditional broadcast radio stations are becoming increasingly mindful
that they need to reach younger listeners on the Internet, and that Internet radio is no longer
tethered to a computer.

ONE OF THE MOST
POPULAR Internet radio
sites, Pandora.com, allows
you to tailor-make radio
stations based on a favorite
artist or song. Listeners
have an enormous amount
of autonomy–you can like
or dislike a song, move it to
another station, ask why a
certain song was selected,
and even ban a song from
being played on your stations
for a month.

The Economics of
Broadcast Radio

Radio continues to be one of the most-used mass media, reaching 93 percent of American
teenagers and adults every week.20 Because of radio’s broad reach, the airwaves are very desir-
able real estate for advertisers, who want to reach people in and out of their homes; for record

136��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

POPULAR RADIO

labels, who want their songs played; and for radio station owners, who want to create large
radio groups to dominate multiple markets.

Local and National Advertising
About 8 percent of all U.S. spending on media advertising goes to radio stations. Like newspa-
pers, radio generates its largest profits by selling local and regional ads. Thirty-second radio
spot ads range from $1,500 in large markets to just a few dollars in the smallest markets. Today,
gross advertising receipts for radio are more than $16 billion (about three-quarters of the rev-
enues from local ad sales, with the remainder in national spot, network, and digital radio sales),
up from about $12.4 billion in 1996. Although industry revenue has dropped from a peak of
$21.7 billion in 2006, the number of stations keeps growing, now totaling about 14,500 stations
(almost 4,800 AM stations, about 6,500 FM commercial stations, and about 3,200 FM educa-
tional stations).21 Unlike television, where nearly 40 percent of a station’s expenses goes to buy
syndicated programs, local radio stations get much of their content free from the recording
industry. Therefore, only about 20 percent of a typical radio station’s budget goes to cover pro-
gramming costs. But that free music content was in doubt by 2010, as the music industry—which
already charges royalties for Internet radio stations—proposed charging radio broadcast perfor-
mance royalty fees for playing music on the air. The radio industry strongly opposed any new
royalty charges, fearing that the increased fees would force smaller radio stations off the air.

When radio stations want to purchase programming, they often turn to national network
radio, which generates more than $1 billion in ad sales annually by offering dozens of special-
ized services. For example, Westwood One, the nation’s largest radio network service, man-
aged by CBS Radio, syndicates more than 150 programs, including regular news features (e.g.,
CBS Radio News, CNN Radio News), entertainment programs (e.g., Country Countdown USA,
the Billy Bush Show), talk shows (e.g., the Dennis Miller Show, Loveline), and complete twenty-
four-hour formats (e.g., adult rock and roll, bright adult contemporary, hot country, main-
stream country, and CNN Headline News). More than sixty companies offer national program
and format services, typically providing local stations with programming in exchange for time
slots for national ads. The most successful radio network programs are the shows broadcast by
affiliates in the Top 20 markets, which offer advertisers half of the country’s radio audience.

Manipulating Playlists with Payola
Radio’s impact on music industry profits—radio airplay can help to popularize recordings—has
required ongoing government oversight to expose illegal playlist manipulation. Payola, the
practice by which record promoters pay deejays to play particular records, was rampant during

1 Clear Channel Communications (Top Property: WLTW-FM, New York) $2,358

2 CBS Corp. (KROQ-FM, Los Angeles) 1,270

3 Citadel Broadcasting Corp. (WPLJ-FM, New York) 595

4 Cumulus Media (KNBR-AM, San Francisco) 412

5 Entercom Communications Corp. (WEEI-AM, Boston) 384

6 Cox Enterprises (WSB-AM, Atlanta) 362

7 Univision Communications (KLVE-FM, Los Angeles) 324

8 Radio One (WKYS-FM, Washington, D.C.) 226

9 Bonneville International (KIRO-AM, Seattle) 216

10 Emmis Communications (WKQX, Chicago) 182

Rank Company Radio Net Revenue*

TABLE 4.3
TOP RADIO INDUSTRY
COMPANIES, 2009
*Dollars in millions.
Source: Mark Fratrik, BIA/Kelsey
Digital Strategies for Broadcast-
ing, May 10, 2010.
Note: Citadel’s rank is expected
to fall after it declared bankruptcy
in late 2009.

the 1950s as record companies sought to guarantee record sales (see Chapter 3). In response,
management took control of programming, arguing that if individual deejays had less impact on
which records would be played, the deejays would be less susceptible to bribery.

Despite congressional hearings and new regulations, payola persisted. Record promoters
showered their favors on a few influential, high-profile deejays, whose backing could make or
break a record nationally, or on key program managers in charge of Top 40 formats in large
urban markets. Although a 1984 congressional hearing determined that there was “no credible
evidence” of payola, NBC News broke a story in 1986 about independent promoters who had
alleged ties to organized crime. A subsequent investigation led major recording companies to
break most of their ties with independent promoters. Prominent record labels had been paying
such promoters up to $80 million per year to help records become hits.

Recently, there has been increased enforcement of payola laws. In 2005, two major labels—
Sony-BMG and Warner Music—paid $10 million and $5 million, respectively, to settle payola
cases in New York State, where label executives were discovered bribing radio station program-
mers to play particular songs. A year later in New York State, Universal Music Group paid $12
million to settle payola charges, which included allegations of bribing radio program direc-
tors with baseball tickets, hotel rooms, and laptop computers. And in 2007, four of the largest
broadcasting companies—CBS Radio, Clear Channel, Citadel, and Entercom—agreed to pay $12.5
million to settle an FCC payola investigation. The companies also agreed to an unprecedented
“independent music content commitment,” which requires them to provide 8,400 half-hour
blocks of airtime to play music from independent record labels.

Radio Ownership: From Diversity to Consolidation
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 substantially changed the rules concerning ownership
of the public airwaves because the FCC eliminated most ownership restrictions on radio. As
a result, 2,100 stations and $15 billion changed hands that year alone. From 1995 to 2005, the
number of radio station owners declined by one-third, from 6,600 to about 4,400.22

Once upon a time, the FCC tried to encourage diversity in broadcast ownership. From the
1950s through the 1980s, a media company could not own more than seven AM, seven FM, and
seven TV stations nationally, and only one radio station per market. Just prior to the 1996 act,
the ownership rules were relaxed to allow any single person or company to own up to twenty
AM, twenty FM, and twelve TV stations nationwide, but only two in the same market.

The 1996 act allows individuals and companies to acquire as many radio stations as they
want, with relaxed restrictions on the number of stations a single broadcaster may own in the
same city: The larger the market or area, the more stations a company may own within that
market. For example, in areas where forty-five or more stations are available to listeners, a
broadcaster may own up to eight stations, but not more than five of one type (AM or FM). In
areas with fourteen or fewer stations, a broadcaster may own up to five stations (three of any
one type). In very small markets with a handful of stations, a broadcast company may not own
more than half the stations.

With few exceptions, for the past two decades the FCC has embraced the consolidation
schemes pushed by the powerful National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) lobbyists in Wash-
ington, D.C., under which fewer and fewer owners control more and more of the airwaves.

The consequences of the 1996 Telecommunications Act and other deregulation have been
significant. Consider the cases of Clear Channel Communications and CBS Radio, which are
the two largest radio chain owners in terms of total revenue (see Table 4.3 on page 136). Clear
Channel Communications was formed in 1972 with one San Antonio station. In 1998, it swal-
lowed up Jacor Communications, the fifth-largest radio chain, and became the nation’s second-
largest group, with 454 stations in 101 cities. In 1999, Clear Channel gobbled up another growing

WHAT
CLEAR
CHANNEL
OWNS
Consider how Clear
Channel connects to
your life; then turn the
page for the bigger
picture.

RADIO
BROADCASTING (U.S.)

• 894 radio stations
• Premiere Radio Network

(syndicates 90 radio
programs, including The
Glenn Beck Program, Keep
Hope Alive with Reverend
Jesse Jackson, On Air with
Ryan Seacrest, and Fox
Sports Radio)

• iheartradio.com

INTERNATIONAL RADIO
• Clear Channel International

Radio (Joint Partnerships)
–Australian Radio Network
–The Radio Network (New

Zealand)

ADVERTISING
• Clear Channel Outdoor

Advertising (billboards,
airports, malls, taxis)
–North American Division
–International Division

MEDIA REPRESENTATION
• Katz Media Group

SATELLITE
COMMUNICATIONS

• Clear Channel Satellite

INFORMATION SERVICES
• Clear Channel Total Traffic

Network
• Clear Channel

Communications News
Networks

MARKETING/VIDEO
PRODUCTION

• Twelve Creative

BROADCAST SOFTWARE
• RCS Sound Software

RADIO RESEARCH
AND CONSULTATION

• Broadcast Architecture

TRADE INDUSTRY
PUBLICATIONS

• InsideRadio.com
• TheRadioJournal.com
• The Radio Book

Turn page for more

conglomerate, AMFM (formerly Chancellor Media Corporation), which had 463 stations and an
estimated $1.6 billion in revenue. The deal broadened Clear Channel’s operation to 874 sta-
tions in 187 U.S. markets, providing access to more than 110 million listeners. By 2010, Clear
Channel had shed some of the 1,205 stations it owned at its peak in 2005. Today, it owns nearly
900 radio stations and about one million billboard and outdoor displays in the United States
and around the world, and an interest in about 140 stations internationally. Clear Channel also
distributes many of the leading syndicated programs, including The Rush Limbaugh Show, The
Jim Rome Show, On Air with Ryan Seacrest, Delilah, and The Bob & Tom Show. (See “What Clear
Channel Owns” on page 137.)

CBS Radio, formerly Infinity Broadcasting, was created when media giant Viacom split
into two companies in late 2005. CBS Radio is the second leading radio conglomerate in terms
of revenue, with 130 stations. It is also one of the leading outdoor advertising companies in
the nation. CBS streams all of its stations on the Internet through AOL Radio and Yahoo! Music
Radio. It also owns Last.fm, a popular music streaming site.

CBS Radio also operates the Westwood One radio network, the nation’s leading program-
ming and radio news syndicator. Combined, Clear Channel and CBS own roughly 1,000 radio
stations (about 7 percent of all commercial U.S. stations), dominate the fifty largest markets
in the United States, and control about one-quarter of the entire radio industry’s $16 billion
revenue. Competing major radio groups that have grown in the recent radio industry consolida-
tions include Cox, Entercom, Cumulus, Citadel, and Radio One. As a result of the consolidations
permitted by deregulation, in most American cities just two corporations dominate the radio
market. But as radio corporations accumulated debt to buy more stations, and as the economic
recession hit in 2008, many radio groups fell on hard times. Citadel declared bankruptcy in
2009, and Clear Channel has struggled to repay its debts.

A smaller but perhaps the most dominant radio conglomerate in a single format area is
Univision. With a $3 billion takeover of Hispanic Broadcasting in 2003, Univision is the top
Spanish-language radio broadcaster in the United States. The company is also the largest
Spanish-language television broadcaster in the United States (see Chapter 5), as well as being
the owner of the top two Spanish-language cable networks (Galavisión and Telefutura) and
Univision Online, the most popular Spanish-language Web site in the United States.

Alternative Voices
As large corporations gained control of America’s radio airwaves, activists in hundreds of com-
munities across the United States in the 1990s protested by starting up their own noncommer-
cial “pirate” radio stations capable of broadcasting over a few miles with low-power FM signals
of 1 to 10 watts. The NAB and other industry groups pressed to have the pirate broadcasters
closed down, citing their illegality and their potential to create interference with existing sta-
tions. Between 1995 and 2000, more than five hundred illegal micropower radio stations were
shut down. Still, an estimated one hundred to one thousand pirate stations are in operation in
the United States, in both large urban areas and small rural towns.

The major complaint of pirate radio station operators was that the FCC had long ago ceased
licensing low-power community radio stations. In 2000, the FCC, responding to tens of thou-
sands of inquiries about the development of a new local radio broadcasting service, approved
a new noncommercial low-power FM (LPFM) class of 10- and 100-watt stations in order to
give voice to local groups lacking access to the public airwaves. LPFM station licensees included
mostly religious groups but also high schools, colleges and universities, Native American tribes,
labor groups, and museums.

The technical plans for LPFM located the stations in unused frequencies on the FM dial.
Still, the NAB and National Public Radio fought to delay and limit the number of LPFM stations,

WHAT DOES
THIS MEAN?
Clear Channel’s radio
stations and outdoor
advertising combine to
reach the ears and eyes
of mobile consumers.

• Revenue: Clear Channel’s
2009 revenue was $5.55
billion, down from $6.68
billion in 2008. Fully 50%
comes from broadcasting.
The rest comes from
outdoor advertising and
national media sales.

• Major Markets: Clear
Channel has 149 stations
in the top 25 markets.
They reach more than 110
million people every week
or about one-third of the
U.S. population.

• Outdoor Advertising:
Clear Channel has outdoor
advertising operations in 49
of the top 50 U.S. markets,
including the giant video
billboards in Times Square
and the Las Vegas strip.

• National Programming:
Premiere Radio Network
produces, distributes, or
represents approximately 90
syndicated radio programs.
Syndicated program hosts
include Rush Limbaugh,
Sean Hannity, Elvis Duran,
and Steve Harvey.

• Internet: Clear Channel
delivers more than 750 of
its stations, plus custom
channels, through its
Internet radio portal,
iheartradio.com.

• Global Footprint: Clear
Channel has joint ventures
with over 140 radio stations
in Australia and New Zealand,
with more than 5.5 million
listeners weekly.1

KFI-AM
One of Clear Channel’s
major assets is KFI-AM, the
dominant talk radio station in
Los Angeles.

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO ��139

LOW-POWER FM RADIO
To help communities
or organizations set up
LPFM stations, some
nonprofit groups like the
Prometheus Radio Project
provide support in obtaining
government licenses as well
as actually constructing
stations. For construction
endeavors known as “barn
raisings,” the Prometheus
project will send volunteers
“to raise the antenna mast,
build the studio, and flip on
the station switch.” Shown
above is the barn raising for
station WRFU 104.5 FM in
Urbana, Illinois.

arguing that such stations would cause interference with existing
full-power FM stations. Then FCC chairman William E. Kennard, who
fostered the LPFM initiative, responded: “This is about the haves—the
broadcast industry—trying to prevent many have-nots—small community
and educational organizations—from having just a little piece of the pie.
Just a little piece of the airwaves which belong to all of the people.”23
By 2010, about 870 LPFM stations were broadcasting, and another 52
organizations had gained permission to build LPFM stations. A major
advocate of LPFM stations is the Prometheus Radio Project, a nonprofit
formed by radio activists in 1998. Prometheus has helped to educate
community organizations about low-power radio and has sponsored
at least a dozen “barn raisings” to build community stations in places
like Hudson, New York; Opelousas, Louisiana; Woodburn, Oregon; and
Greenville, South Carolina.

Radio and the Democracy
of the Airwaves

As radio was the first national electronic mass medium, its influence in the formation of Ameri-
can culture cannot be overestimated. Radio has given us soap operas, situation comedies, and
broadcast news; it helped to popularize rock and roll, car culture, and the politics of talk radio.
Yet, for all of its national influence, broadcast radio is still a supremely local medium. For de-
cades, listeners have tuned in to hear the familiar voices of their community’s deejays and talk-
show hosts and hear the regional flavor of popular music over airwaves that the public owns.

The early debates over radio gave us one of the most important and enduring ideas in com-
munication policy: a requirement to operate in the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.”
But the broadcasting industry has long been at odds with this policy, arguing that radio cor-
porations invest heavily in technology and should be able to have more control over the radio
frequencies on which they operate, and moreover own as many stations as they want. Deregu-
lation in the past few decades has moved closer to that corporate vision, as nearly every radio
market in the nation is dominated by a few owners, and those owners are required to renew
their broadcasting licenses only every eight years.

This trend in ownership has moved radio away from its localism, as radio groups often man-
age hundreds of stations from afar. Given broadcasters’ reluctance to publicly raise questions
about their own economic arrangements, public debate regarding radio as a natural resource has
remained minuscule. As citizens look to the future, a big question remains to be answered: With
a few large broadcast companies now permitted to dominate radio ownership nationwide, how
much is consolidation of power restricting the number and kinds of voices permitted to speak
over public airwaves? To ensure that mass media industries continue to serve democracy and
local communities, the public needs to play a role in developing the answer to this question.

140��SOUNDS AND IMAGES

telegraph, 109
Morse code, 109
electromagnetic waves, 110
radio waves, 110
wireless telegraphy, 111
wireless telephony, 113
broadcasting, 114
narrowcasting, 114
Radio Act of 1912, 114
Radio Corporation of

America (RCA), 115
network, 117
option time, 119
Radio Act of 1927, 120
Federal Radio Commission (FRC), 120

Communications Act of 1934, 120
Federal Communications Commission

(FCC), 120
transistors, 124
FM, 124
AM, 125
format radio, 126
rotation, 126
Top 40 format, 126
progressive rock, 128
album-oriented rock (AOR), 128
drive time, 128
news/talk/information, 129
adult contemporary (AC), 129
contemporary hit radio (CHR), 130

country, 130
urban contemporary, 130
Pacifica Foundation, 131
National Public Radio (NPR), 131
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 131
Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, 131
Corporation for Public

Broadcasting (CPB), 131
satellite radio, 134
HD radio, 134
Internet radio, 134
podcasting, 135
payola, 136
Telecommunications Act of 1996, 137
low- power FM (LPFM), 138

COMMON THREADS

In radio’s novelty stage, several inventors transcended the
wires of the telegraph and telephone to solve the problem
of wireless communication. In the entrepreneurial stage,
inventors tested ship-to-shore radio, while others devel-
oped person-to-person toll radio transmissions and other
schemes to make money from wireless communication. Fi-
nally, when radio stations began broadcasting to the general
public (who bought radio receivers for their homes), radio
became a mass medium.

As the first electronic mass medium, radio set the pat-
tern for an ongoing battle between wired and wireless tech-
nologies. For example, television brought images to wireless
broadcasting. Then, cable television’s wires brought televi-
sion signals to places where receiving antennas didn’t work.
Satellite television (wireless from outer space) followed as an

One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is about the development of the mass media. Like other mass
media, radio evolved in three stages. But it also influenced an important dichotomy in mass media technology: wired
versus wireless.

KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book.
The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.

innovation to bring TV where cable didn’t exist. Now, broad-
cast, cable, and satellite all compete against one another.

Similarly, think of how cell phones have eliminated mil-
lions of traditional phone, or land, lines. The Internet, like the
telephone, also began with wires, but Wi-Fi and home wireless
systems are eliminating those wires, too. And radio? Most
listeners get traditional local (wireless) radio broadcast sig-
nals, but now listeners may use a wired Internet connection to
stream Internet radio or download Webcasts and podcasts.

Both wired and wireless technology have advantages
and disadvantages. Do we want the stability but the teth-
ers of a wired connection? Or do we want the freedom and
occasional instability (“Can you hear me now?”) of wireless
media? Can radio’s development help us understand wired
versus wireless battles in other media?

CHAPTER
REVIEW

CHAPTER 4 ○ RADIO��141

For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links
to media-related Web sites, and more, go to
bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Why was the development of the telegraph important in
media history? What were some of the disadvantages of
telegraph technology?

2. How is the concept of the wireless different from that of
radio?

3. What was Guglielmo Marconi’s role in the development
of the wireless?

4. What were Lee De Forest’s contributions to radio?
5. Why were there so many patent disputes in the develop-

ment of radio?
6. Why was the RCA monopoly formed?
7. How did broadcasting, unlike print media, come to be

federally regulated?
The Evolution of Radio

8. What was AT&T’s role in the early days of radio?
9. How did the radio networks develop? What were the

contributions of David Sarnoff and William Paley to
network radio?

10. Why did the government-sanctioned RCA monopoly end?
11. What is the significance of the Radio Act of 1927 and

the Federal Communications Act of 1934?
Radio Reinvents Itself

12. How did radio adapt to the arrival of television?
13. What was Edwin Armstrong’s role in the advancement

of radio technology? Why did RCA hamper Armstrong’s
work?

1. Count the number and types of radio stations in your
area today. What formats do they use? Do a little re-
search, and find out who are the owners of the stations
in your market. How much diversity is there among the
highest-rated stations?

2. If you could own and manage a commercial radio station,
what format would you choose, and why?

3. If you ran a noncommercial radio station in your area,
what services would you provide that are not being met
by commercial format radio?

QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
4. How might radio be used to improve social and political

discussions in the United States?
5. If you were the head of a large radio group, what argu-

ments would you make in response to charges that your
company has limited the number of voices in the local
media?

14. How did music on radio change in the 1950s?
15. What is format radio, and why was it important to the

survival of radio?
The Sounds of Commercial Radio

16. Why are there so many radio formats today?
17. Why did Top 40 radio diminish as a format in the 1980s

and 1990s?
18. What is the state of nonprofit radio today?
19. How does the Internet affect the business of standard

broadcast radio?
The Economics of Broadcast Radio

20. What are the current ownership rules governing Ameri-
can radio?

21. What has been the main effect of the Telecommunica-
tions Act of 1996 on radio station ownership?

22. Why did the FCC create a new class of low-power FM
stations?

23. Why did existing full-power radio broadcasters seek to
delay and limit the emergence of low-power FM stations?

Radio and the Democracy of the Airwaves

24. Throughout the history of radio, why did the government
encourage monopoly or oligopoly ownership of radio
broadcasting?

25. What is the relevance of localism to debates about own-
ership in radio?

Early Technology and the Development of Radio

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