MTV and the music industry's funk

I was sitting in a Laundromat several weeks ago when on the television set was four of the original MTV “VJs” on the all-female talk show ‘The View”—Mark Goodman, Nina Blackwood, Alan Hunter and what’s-her-name; the fifth member of the fraternity—J.J. Jackson—had passed away of a heart attack in 2004. They were part of a long-lost historical artifact called “music television,” and for a moment I thought I was part of the heritage, so I purchased the book they were hawking from Amazon. Too late I recalled my true feelings about the channel: Particularly in the beginning, it was geared straight for a narrow, rock-oriented white audience. I looked at its Day One playlist, and I think the only song I liked was Juice Newton’s distinctly un-rock “Angel of the Morning”—probably added to the list because of a shortage of suitable videos. I simply didn’t like most of the songs they played, and watching their videos didn’t make them any more palatable. 

MTV was for white kids and arrested-adolescence. There was an audience for the more “adult”-oriented VH-1, but that would be a few years down the road. On “The View” the hosts tried to get the four to address the issue of racism during the early years of MTV. Naturally the question got the runaround treatment. In the book, VJ—The Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave, the Mississippi-born program director, Bill Pittman, wasn’t a “racist,” and Goodman says he was “ambushed” by David Bowie into offering corporate rationalizations for the lack of videos by black artists on MTV. What were they trying to say? That no one at MTV was a “racist”—but its target audience was? Surprisingly, despite the fact Thriller was well on its way to becoming an unprecedented phenomenon, the channel refused to air the video of Michael Jackson’s huge hit “Billy Jean” until CBS Records actually carried out its threat to remove all its artists’ videos from MTV’s playlist. It was subsequently claimed that the reason why MTV was “reluctant” to air Jackson’s video was that his music was too “pop.” 

I didn’t get much information from “The View,” but “shock jock” Howard Stern was another matter; Stern is the kind of host who can make guests feel comfortable making fools of themselves—particularly concerning their views on sexual matters. Hunter seemed to find the topic particularly “cathartic,” while Blackwood claimed to be a “prude.” However, she received some good-natured ribbing from her male cohorts for saying that the one thing she regrets most in her life is posing for Playboy in her pre-MTV days. She apparently did a test centerfold shoot, and a couple of the pictures ended-up in a “Girls of the Office” pictorial. One thing that can be ascertained for certain is that Blackwood is not a natural blonde. 

Quinn kinda got into my gourde when she claimed that the videos with “sexual” content that didn’t bother her in the old days bother her now that she has a daughter. Huh? If she was able to overlook the sales pitch then, why would her daughter not be smart enough to do so now, particularly when there is so much such content on television today to desensitize the mind into submission? Where are you going to see these videos anyway?—certainly not on MTV these days; even the "m" is barely visible in the channel's new logo. In the book, Quinn claims that she used to listen to the Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come on Eileen” on auto-rewind; now she hates the song for its "sexual innuendo.” I mean, who can understand what the singer is saying in that impenetrable accent? It’s just a catchy nonsense song, nothing more. I bet some people still don’t “get” what the “Afternoon Delight” is in the Starland Vocal Band’s subversive hit.

Politically, Blackwood writes that she saw through the fraud that was Ronald Reagan, but Goodman and Hunter both admit they voted for Reagan in 1980. Goodman says he regrets doing so, but Hunter says that we “need” someone “like Reagan” now. Earth-to-Alan: A lot of people believe that the problems we have in this country today are a direct result of the reactionary policies instituted by the Reagan administration. The last thing the country needs is another dose of his kind of poison--even when his mind was in a hazy cloud, which was most of the time.

During the 1980s I was busy rebuilding my record collection on CDs and relying on my ears to determine what new music was worth purchasing. In my mind, viewers of MTV didn’t get involved with the music—they just “watched” it. I had read of the “recession” in music sales after the 1970s, and figured that much of this had to do with MTV and the fact that people could “watch” songs rather than buy them; it might not have been the intent of video to “kill” the “radio star,” but if this was the result, it inadvertently did great harm to record sales and the record industry generally. And for what? MTV today is as much a useless acronym for a bygone era as “YMCA” is. 

But as much as I would like to blame MTV for the music industry’s woes today, that is something that I cannot honestly hang on them. I came across a 2010 article entitled “The Recession in the Music Industry – A Cause Analysis” on a website devoted to “music business research.” In it Peter Tschmuck (I can only imagine what it was like for him in school with that appellation) writes that “Filesharing is made primarily responsible for the decline in sales in the phonographic industry, especially in the CD segment. However, serious research on filesharing behavior shows that filesharing use does not necessarily have a negative impact on physical and digital sales. But if this is not the case, then there must be other causes for the now decade-long recession.”

He notes that dollar sales have seen more than double-digit yearly declines in recent years, but not necessarily in total unit sales. According to a chart he provides, vinyl LP sales peaked in 1981, with 1.14 billion in worldwide sales. While vinyl sales began to decline dramatically with the advent of the Compact Disc, cassette tapes actually saw a dramatic increase; cassette sales peaked in 1990, with 1.54 billion in unit sales. But after 1990 there was boom in CD sales, peaking at 2.45 billion in 2000; conversely, cassette sales decreased with the availability of affordable recordable CDs. Meanwhile, the singles format—either in 45s or CDs—peaked in 1983 at 800 million, before beginning a slow downward drift, bottoming out at 233 million in 2003. But since then there has been a dramatic rise in “singles” sales—mainly due to single-song digital downloads; songs legally purchased are now double the level of the early Eighties. Less impressive is the sale of complete digital albums; in 2008, these accounted for 113 million units. CD sales have almost halved since their peak, but are still by far the preferred medium for album purchases. 

Why the steep decrease in dollar sales then? Until the mid-Eighties, album sales generally outnumbered singles sales by a 2-1 margin, but then the ratio shifted dramatically in favor of album sales until the early 2000s.  Today, digital downloads of single songs match that of CDs and digital albums. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand what this means: The price point differential of albums compared to 99-cent digital downloads can be 10-1 or more. Thus a decrease in total dollar volume can be considerable if consumers are forgoing the purchase of whole albums and merely purchasing songs they like. 

Yet we see all these “music” stars who seem to be rather well off; what you don’t see is that there are fewer of them. In the “old” days, record companies broke new artists by initially releasing singles to see how the market reacted to their sound; you often hear of cases where a group has a huge hit, and the record company scrambles to record a quickie album to take advantage of this initial success. There seemed to be limitless supply of such recording acts that didn’t last much longer than two albums before fading. However, if an artist established a reliable fan base, singles served more as an “advertisement”—much the way music videos would later on. Sometimes potential hits were left on the table if it was believed their release would actually hurt album sales. However, such reliance on albums as an income generator also contained the seeds of its decline; if they were regarded as mostly “filler,” consumers would jump at the chance to purchase only the songs they liked, ignoring the album altogether. 

Another thing older pop music listeners will notice that market dynamics have changed. While there was once just a “white” and a “black” market, there was considerable overlap; Motown even styled itself “The sound of young America” in the 1960s. This was perhaps even more the case in the 1970s. But as Tschmuck points out, “The labels and above all the majors had realized that they could increase the profits by a target group-specific supply policy. New market segments such as Country & Western, folk, and many types of rock music – Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Art Rock, Jazz Rock, Hard Rock, Heavy Metal etc – were established. This segmentation strategy certainly met a landscape of differentiated musical tastes, and music consumers welcomed this.”

But it came at a cost that the music industry only belatedly recognized. The more the separation into “segments,” the smaller the consumer base for each genre. I grew-up on 1970s AM Top-40, and this was a time when soft-rock, “Countrypolitan,” “Art Rock,” Philly Soul, novelty songs, Funk and instrumentals (and Disco) resided comfortably side-by-side with more established styles; all a song had to be was tight and tuneful. One thing I remember most fondly was the sense of humor of the times—something that seems to be completely absent from today’s artists. But when record companies started targeting specific audiences instead of a general audience, the “general”—or “mainstream”—audience that was the biggest consumers of music started losing interest in other genres and stuck to a dwindling pool of songs that they liked. 

To combat this side-effect of fragmentation, “The majors then embarked on a new strategy,” writes Tschmuck. “The artist roster was severely reduced, and instead of serving all market segments, the majors were committed to the superstar principle. Thus, the 1980s were dominated by pop superstars like Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Elton John, George Michael, Lionel Ritchie, Bruce Springsteen, etc.” But even this model could not survive for long in the face of the digital download revolution. In this day and age of “reality” television, people want “instant” gratification, and fewer people see the “value” of purchasing an entire album, even by “superstars”; they can hear snippets of a song or stream it on YouTube, and pick and choose what they want to purchase (if they don’t want to spend time searching for it for free). 

Thus the market has returned to a “singles”-oriented market, but not in the same way as before. We are not talking about the same quality or even quantity of the old singles’ market—not to my ears, not by a long shot. The only way the music industry can recover to its former “glory” days is if recording artists are more focused on quality and reaching a broader market. Most of what I’m hearing these days—particularly the mind-numbing repetitiveness of hip-hop and its ancillaries that still dominates what passes for “Top-40” radio—I don’t have much hope for that.