The Allure of Listening, Chapter 13 - Platforms Define Experiences

 Streaming arrives with all the subtlety of a Golden Corral all-you-can-eat buffet. Do independent musicians benefit, or does the infinite-playlist scroll mean a lot of vomiting? 2006-2011

The launch of iTunes in 2003-04 gave the music industry the first monetizable download market, but downloaded files had the shortest market dominance history in recorded music. While files still were downloaded in the 2020s, the era of market peak lasted only from 2003 to about 2008 or 2010. Opponents of streaming figured that even those customers who were short on space for physical objects would prefer downloaded files to streaming music, because there was a local instantiation of the music somewhere within the client’s control.

    But it turned out very few people cared if the piece of music was in “the cloud” or on a local disc. This may have been misplaced trust, since eventually Apple, Amazon Web Services and Google not only claimed to hold ultimate rights to music the consumer had downloaded from the streaming provider, they even claimed special rights to the consumer’s own music  – if users uploaded their own music from local storage to the cloud, the cloud owners claimed the right to modify, control, or delete that music supposedly owned by the consumer. The curmudgeon might grumble that “the cloud is never your friend,” but few people were listening, hence the short history of the dominance of downloads.

    The arrival of ubiquitous desktop broadband services and 4G/5G wireless services arrived at about the same time as Spotify’s 2011 launch. Download revenue fell at a rate of 3 percent per year from then on, estimated at $1.4 billion in 2023 and $1.23 billion by 2027. By the pandemic period, downloads already counted for less than either vinyl or CD sales. But here’s a funny thing: By 2005, vinyl LPs were making a return, even among people who did not own a turntable, because they were valued as objets d’art for the music collector to keep. In the mid-2000s, many were predicting that CDs would enjoy a similar renaissance, because lossless compression made for better audio quality than either downloads or streaming. But the latter didn’t happen. Indeed, by the mid-2020s, independent musicians were trying to scrape up the money for vinyl pressings, while distributing cassettes, Bandcamp links, links to direct file downloads, or ads for Spotify availability, because no one seemed to want the lowly CD.

     The CD’s failure to rebound was one of the only anomalies in the 20-year period from 2005 to 2025, when consumers were offered a potlatch of potential platforms and audio qualities to hear their music precisely as they wanted it. It helps to remember in the years prior to Facebook that many bands like Arctic Monkeys and Be Your Own Pet had their careers launched by the nearly-forgotten MySpace. But of all online environments, mobile streaming was the biggest winner. CDs were lagging so badly by 2015, most automobile manufacturers already had removed CD players as available options in new cars. Nevertheless, the audio industry seemed to care more about backward compatibility than the computer industry, where varieties of storage choices seemed to be made obsolete every few years. At the turn of the millenium, stacks of LPs in second-hand stores seemed as useless as VHS tapes. Twenty years later, the LPs were commanding top dollar, while VHSs (and DVDs) were just as useless as they had been in 2000.

    But did the format matter to most consumers? It depends on the habits they brought. I was one of the traditionalists who liked to arrange the spines of LPs and CDs alphabetically by artist, with works from different eras arranged chronologically. I carried that habit into folder groupings on my computer for music I had downloaded, though I tended to keep downloading to a minimum. Many consumers of streaming music on mobile media enjoyed the recommendations of services like Pandora, and the clever playlists developed by Apple and Spotify. Smaller independent artists complained that streaming was unprofitable, and this mattered to some of their fans – though far fewer people than the artists hoped. I developed a “guilt ratio” assessment for using streaming when it was necessary, but only as a last resort. I was in a tiny minority who even pretended to feel guilty about streaming.

    Meanwhile, the vinyl LP was becoming a fetish for a growing number of consumers. Before the first Record Store Day in 2007, broad-based retail outlets like Borders, Barnes & Noble, Target, and Urban Outfitters added LP sections, and even Walmart was not far behind. Record Store Day, intended to support independent record stores, was popular from its first nascent two or three years of existence, but it became apparent almost immediately that shoppers looking for rarities, particularly younger shoppers, had no turntables and no intention of purchasing such. The album was seen as a collectible. RSD in its early years could provide genuine collectibles, such as live sets and outtakes from studio recording sessions, but by the 2020s the new lists were dominated by reissues from legacy artists.

    There were many unique aspects of the new dominance of women in the charts in mid-decade. First, pop performers started dabbling in feminism, as evidenced by Lily Allen, Avril Lavigne, Alanis Morisette, and particularly Pink. They not only made up for the lackluster showings of many male artists, but women pop artists would grow increasingly adventurous to where they almost substituted for the waning of experimental noise as the decade ended. It wasn’t that all female pop artists were experimental (though Beyonce’s sister Solange Knowles and newcomer sci-fi artist Janelle Monae certainly proved that case), it was more that experimentation in the years after 2005-6 came more and more from the pop community than from rock, and particularly from women’s pop. Some women like Inca Ore were direct participants in the noise genre, and 2006’s three-disc Women Take Back the Noise compilation proved that case.

    It seemed almost inevitable that the mortgage liquidity crisis of 2007 and the heavy recession that followed would lead to a sparser music release environment in those years, and sheer volumes of new artists indeed took a hit, but the degree of buzz created by rising superstars like Taylor Swift, Adele, Lady Gaga, and Coldplay made it seem less severe than it may otherwise have been. What seemed more important from a political perspective was the number of musicians ready to speak out during the 2008 elections. Denver’s Flobots had set the tone with the powerful Fight With Tools album, and the reconstituted Rage Against the Machine, as well as Ted Leo and other performers, performed benefits for activists. 

This brief flurry of activism hit its stride in the summer of 2008 at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, when Flobots, RATM, Jello Biafra, and Wayne Kramer of MC5 took the lead in planning many demonstrations to influence policy platforms. While the nationwide series of actions led to some great one-off concerts, the activities were not sustained through the end of the year, and were largely forgotten in the aftermath of the far-bigger Occupy movement of 2011. Barack Obama’s inaugural concert had the broadest array of pop performers to date or since, but it didn’t translate to music-based social action, as Obama quickly found himself mired in the twin crises of TARP and Iraq.

    One victim of post-recession austerity seemed to be experimental and improvisational music. The death in 2007 of Sun City Girls founder Charles Gocher led to the demise of the band two years later, and suddenly the spigots turned off for constant new releases from the likes of Starving Weirdos, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and Sunburned Hand of the Man. Certainly, the cost of physical production of CDs or LPs was a factor in the waning of noise, but there seemed to be a global lack of energy as well. What was unexpected was the simultaneous expansion of sound experimentation in both pop and hip-hop fields, particularly among women artists (hip-hop had always been in the forefront of sampling both spoken word and other musicians’ works, but now this expanded to additional musical instruments and found sounds from nature). Notably absent in the race to get weird was mainstream rock. There were plenty of indie rock artists that proved exceptions to the rule, but mainstream rock acts were so late boarding the experimental sounds train, the genre could be considered the most conservative musical style out there by the 2020s.

    Social media in the Bush era, at least as far as musicians were concerned, centered largely on MySpace, though the rudimentary state of streaming pre-2010 made the network mostly a vehicle for connecting fans with bands’ pictures, tour schedules, videos, and links to purchase physical CDs or LPs. The arrival of Facebook and Twitter in the latter part of the 2000s eventually spelled the end of MySpace, though only due to laws of monopoly market dominance – neither Facebook nor Twitter really coalesced into centers for musician-artist connections. But Bandcamp and SoundCloud both were launched in 2007, and took the place of MySpace, even if both of the music hosting sites were designed less as central hubs with a common look and feel, and more for the musician to design and manage in a way they saw fit. Slowly over the course of a decade, the two sites expanded technology potentials to connect fans to unique music online, until the pandemic of the early 2020s made the hosting of remote live concerts seem a normal extension of this trend. (Apple expanded its iTunes and Apple Music services in similar ways, though in a manner that always served Apple’s proprietary interests more than the community at large.)

    Some subgenres were specific to a single online platform. Early proponents of “mumble rap,” such as Gucci Mane, Lil’ B, and Young Thug, were so specific to the SoundCloud environment, they became known as “SoundCloud rappers.” Obviously, with fame came a wider spread of platform, but many musicians from a variety of genres felt it necessary to show a little loyalty to their SoundCloud or Bandcamp roots.

    The arrival of streaming services at the turn of the decade fundamentally changed the way popularity was determined, in ways that were both democratic and overwhelming, particularly for smaller artists. First came the satellite radio services of Sirius and XM, which merged in 2008 to form a unified playlist-defined listener experience. Spotify was launched as an independent streaming company, while Pandora was acquired by SiriusXM in order to give the company a unique recommendation service using rudimentary AI features to determine what listeners might enjoy given their past listening preferences. The playlist compilation services of Spotify, Apple, and SiriusXM could genuinely be touted as making the listener more sophisticated in driving future choices, though it equally could be seen as driving listeners further into pre-defined boxes, where they seldom would listen to something outside the box.

    Hip-hop defined the million-seller side of the decade, as Eminem, Jay-Z, Kanye and Nas helped create a new megastar category where the artists achieved the type of fame earlier seen by Madonna and Whitney Houston. Regional hip-hop markets, particularly Atlanta with crunk and snap, became big sellers in their own right. It is no accident that hip-hop artists were the first to move away from all physical forms of music – the CD already was waning when the megastars emerged in mid-decade, and those same artists would not move to LPs until the very late 2010s. Kanye West was the first to say “No physical products” with Life of Pablo, but Chance the Rapper and others were right behind him.

    At the end of 2010, Billboard changed the way it compiled its Top 100 that further aided the streaming model. Instead of record labels and A&R executives pushing singles into the Billboard “New This Week” category, major artists such as David Cook, Taylor Swift, David Guetta, BoB, and the cast of Glee, would release new albums and have all the tracks from that album enter the “New This Week” category simultaneously. In theory, this allowed the listener to choose the best tracks to move up the charts into the Top 10. In practice, the vote-by-streaming method tended to favor the larger artist, as a newcomer had even less chance to break into the “New This Week” chart. It also meant that listeners had fewer filters imposed by music elites, which proved much more of a double-edged sword than most realized. This part of the streaming argument seemed to preview the debate between populism and elitism that took place in politics in the 2020s: Yes, the decision-making process of the elites had always been unfair, but without it, consumers faced a massive repository of streamed music that grew bigger every year. By the 2020s, everyone complained that drinking from such a firehose was virtually impossible. The environment for the music listener was bigger than ever, but the guides for knowing how to listen intelligently failed to emerge, which meant that hyper-democracy often equaled chaos.

    Because the vast bulk of listeners were casual in the ways they consumed music, the arrival of streaming led to a rapid decline in CD sales. The LP only survived through its art-object status. Since a USB or Bluetooth connection from a smartphone to a car was so easy to implement, CD players within automobiles began to be phased out by mid-decade. Since iPods had displaced Walkmans much earlier, very few portable players required anything more than streaming (or the arcane presence of a downloaded MP3 file). The number of consumers with audio component systems at home dwindled to a lonely few serious music wonks. Sure, mini-systems with powerful small Bose speakers remained popular, but they usually were used for streaming services. A few high-end audio component specialists survived, but dealt as much in Dolby 11.2 home theater systems as they did in audio-centric components. And as an ironic footnote for the home listener, preamp manufacturers who promoted dual-channel analog/digital preamps, dedicated the analog channel to a turntable, while the digital channel was for a streaming input, because “obviously, no one listened to CDs any more.”

Coming in three weeks (October 11) - Chapter 13, The Spread of Woke Arts in Unwoke Times - Was the supposed corporate fealty to DEI just a joke in the Trump era?

                                                         Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

The Allure of Listening, Chapter 12 - The Millenium Arrival of Craptastic Compression

 Turns out the format of a musical file downloaded to a local computer was the shortest-lived format dominance in popular music history! Was that the fault of MP3?    1998-2005

    Given how much the music industry later depended on lossy compression for downloads and streaming, it is a shocking anomaly to remember how the Recording Industry Association of America actually tried to block sales of the first Diamond Multimedia MP3 player in 1998, which itself was just a teaser as to how much RIAA would train the big guns on Napster two years later (Napster, the startup who promoted “free” downloading, was formed in the summer of 1999, before the millenium). Audio buffs sneered at the standardization of MP3, claiming many true music fans would demand either lossless compression like WAV, or direct dynamic compression, using pulse code modulation, in digital CDs or analog LPs. Wired magazine later pointed out that many millennials and Gen Z youth preferred the sound of MP3 to lossless compression, because they had grown up with lossy compression. The magazine called this trend “craptastic,” and pointed out that many boomers had themselves grown up listening to the Top 40 on tinny, monaural transistor radios (though few would say they actually preferred that sound to the high-end stereos they would hear in their college years).

     There was a significant difference between what happened to digital recording as a result of the CD’s introduction in the 1980s, and what happened to audio recording 15 years later due to the ubiquity of MP3. Digital recordings with high-bit-rate sampling could offer superior sound quality, but the turn to CDs also indirectly encouraged sloppy studio recording and mastering, favoring a bright and tinny sound, as we discussed in Chapter 9. Some die-hards might say that all audio compression should be kept to a minimum, but careful lossless compression taking place in the studio could lessen the overall dynamic range and impose a certain amount of gain reduction (some proponents of modern classical music, and of loud-soft progressive bands like King Crimson, would say that even reducing the dynamic range is compromising the integrity of the artist).

    In moving to lossy compression like MP3, the goal was different – reduce the overall size of a music file to make it storable on a local computer, or to optimize the bandwidth when streaming music over the Internet. The encoder removes data judged to be inaudible or irrelevant, and at high encoding rates like 320Kbits/sec and above, most people would not be able to tell the difference in the source. However, lossy compression introduces noise, distortion, and loss of detail. What is worse, each time a lossy file is sent back and forth among music editors, the file degrades, which is why most music editors insist on lossless files. So the CD was blamed for lower sound quality due to poor recording decisions made in studios in the 1980s, while MP3 reduced sound quality because quality was overtly sacrificed to improve file size. Many compressed files of the early 2000s debuted with bright and brassy bands like Foster the People, fun, and The Strokes, so it was often hard to tell the difference (which is not intended as a slur on the artist).

    What the arrival of MP3 delivery really underscored is that most people would prefer the convenience of a fully digitized music library, available through cloud services, to a local  physical instantiation of music in any format, which carried environmental costs alongside the simple reality of taking up too much space. The eventual revival of the LP, often sought out by people who did not even own turntables, showed that many people wanted the comfort of an art object in addition to an endless playlist. But the closing years of the 20^th century were the first time people became aware that digitization eventually would mean the availability of the entire music resources of the Library of Congress in an immediate form on handheld platforms. It wasn’t until the arrival of apps like Pandora and Spotify in the 21^st century that fans realized a potential downside: if the artistic output of millions of musicians was on tap all the time, how would music fans separate wheat from chaff? Labels attempted to revive interest in physical formats in 2000-01 through new digital platforms like Audio DVD and Super Audio CD. In 2004-05, a few artists like Fiona Apple, Son Volt, and Bruce Springsteen tried a “Dual Disc” flippable CD that had audio CD on one side and DVD on the other, though streaming would eventually make both CDs and DVDs all but obsolete. Instead, the biggest news of 2001 was Apple’s debut of the iTunes library and the iPod portable platform.

    While the full arrival of sampled and reassembled music would have to await the debut of better Mac ProTools, EDM music at the turn of the millenium already was feeling the impact of DJs who made as much or more use of laptops than turntables in their performances. This was not the simple song-sampling of earlier hip hop and pop tunes, or straight-out lip synching that landed Milli Vanilli in such trouble, but the full creation of new sounds using found and repurposed sounds from musical instruments and from the street itself. Musical purists would later grumble that they didn’t pay good money to see two faux-musicians drag laptops on stage, but Talking Heads founder David Byrne, in his seminal book How Music Works, said that there is no inherently greater authenticity or legitimacy between Alan Lomax dragging tape recorders to the Deep South to chronicle the blues masters, and newbie nerds creating music directly from the laptop. Byrne’s view would become accepted wisdom by the second decade of the 21^st century, but not without howls of protest from many, including the old-timey instrument community.

     In the final six months of 1999, individual artists and the music industry itself felt a sense of anticipation and palpable change awaiting the new millenium. (A stickler might say that a new millenium begins in 2001, but medieval pundits a thousand years ago considered the millenium to have begun in 1000, and the vast majority of modern global citizens felt the same way about 2000.) In the latter half of 1999, David Bowie offered the first downloadable album with Hours. Stephin Merritt encapsulated Tin Pan Alley-style pop with The Magnetic Fields’ massive three-disc 69 Love Songs. A few years later, Richard Thompson belatedly followed up with his 1000 Years of Popular Music, ending with a Brittney Spears cover. Even the somnambulant political activist world showed signs of life, with the anti-globalization Battle for Seattle offering its own musical soundtrack.

    And 2000 lived up to its billing. Many bands released defining works during the year – Radiohead’s Kid A, Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica, Pink’s debut, New Pornographers’ Mass Romantic, Death Cab for Cutie’s We Have the Facts, Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP, Elliott Smith’s Figure 8. The recording industry was at one of its highest points in history for sheer numbers of new album releases. Yet the hint of physical intangibility was in the air, as the recording industry launched some of its first lawsuits against Napster. The legal actions held a sense of irony, given that 15 years later, labels would bow to the inevitability of streaming, which superficially seemed a lot closer to piracy than the downloadable files targeted in the Napster cases. Metallica lost a good chunk of fans by taking a more aggressive stance against Napster than did industry groups like RIAA. Ironically, so many music fans with large servers had set up file-sharing sites, which updated the shared mixtape to a shared database from which to burn CDRs, that the actions against Napster only served to drive file-sharing underground.

    What really made the 21^st-century environment so rich was a mutual-support network of like-minded musicians who helped make musicians’ rosters almost as vast as one would discover a decade later in the nascent streaming world. In record stores and on web sites worldwide, multi-band compilations were everywhere, later leading to solo recording contracts for the better bands. The process of regeneration and rebirth was larger than either the 1965-66 garage era, or the punk era of the late 1970s. And this busy activity continued, even as CDs became less profitable for all concerned. It set the stage for a streaming era where there were too many musicians for even the most obsessed music fan to hear in one lifetime. (Again, this was not reflected in singles charts, because indie musicians, with rare exceptions, did not make these charts. In fact, the Top 40 underwent a major revision in 1999 to add more hip hop and country, not only to make the charts more inclusive, but also because there were only a handful of Everclear and Matchbox 20 types who ever made the list, and a greater participation by hip hop and country was needed to flesh out a very paltry radio playlist.)

    It was fair to point out that several bands launched in the 2000-01 period moved indie back into a direct-rock sound, including The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and White Stripes. Several such bands survive in the 2020s, though it is fair to say that this mini-wave was the last to place guitar-centric rock in the center of indie. After that, the genre became indie-pop by default. Later in the decade, bands like Panic at the Disco!, Paramore, My Chemical Romance, and Fall Out Boy helped drive the former niche category of emo into a pop mainstream.

    Of course, the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were bound to play a sobering influence on the millenium party, but the effect was milder and shorter-lived than the major cultural shifts of Reagan years. In the month of October following the attacks, major benefit concerts were held in New York, Washington, Atlanta and Dallas, and virtually no protests were made against the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, as it was perceived at the time as justifiable payback. Lee Greenwood hit the charts with “God Bless the USA” in October, as did Whitney Houston with her rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

    What was more disturbing was the music industry’s willingness to move to self-censorship: Clear Channel Communications sent out a list of songs “too sensitive” to play, The Strokes removed the song “NYC Cops” from the U.S. version of their debut album, Jimmy Eat World changed the name of its latest album from Bleed American to an eponymous title, and Reprise Records made its odd decision to drop the release of Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, to make it sound as though the refusal to release the album had something to do with 9/11 (the fact that the album was released by an affiliated label, Nonesuch, made the whole event seem like a misfire).  In any event, the effects were transient, as bands were back to their usual antics in 2002, and by 2003, anger at the invasion of Iraq was felt on both the streets and in the music industry.

    The 2003 preventive invasion of Iraq sparked transient opposition of a different sort. The invasion on false pretense had much less justification than U.S. involvement in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, or even Afghanistan a mere two years earlier. As a result, protests against the March 2003 invasion were massive and global – and had next to no effect. Because there was no draft and no long-term commitment of large numbers of U.S. troops (many advisors stayed for decades after the fact, but the Iraqi government collapsed within weeks), the protests were not sustained to any significant degree. And musicians’ interests were just as superficial as the public’s.

     Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, in his new role as curator of many musical projects, set up protest-records.com as a repository for four hours’ worth of protest songs from dozens of bands (the site was still active 20 years later). Instead of selling CDs to make money, the site allowed users to download the songs for free, only asking for donations to antiwar groups. There also were decent political works from Dan Bern and from moveon.org. In live performances, both Dixie Chicks and Pearl Jam made significant statements against the Bush administration in the weeks following the invasion. Given their audience, it was no surprise Dixie Chicks faced scorn and complaint from the country crowd. As for Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder was taken by surprise by the negative reaction from many fans to his antiwar stance. The latter rise of artists like Ted Nugent and Kid Rock displayed an ugly truth about the 21^st century – the music fan community could not be assumed to hold a progressive stance on many issues. Given how many artists asked Republican candidates not to use their music in later years, it was a safe assumption that many (though not all) musicians came from a progressive background, but often, their audiences were far more redneck than they were. The more generic form of disaster aid relief benefit concert remained strong, however, as events were held in 2005 for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami and of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

    Top 40 charts were by then given over to a clear majority of hip hop tunes, broken only by country artists like Gretchen Wilson or Big and Rich. The few indie-style rock bands that were exceptions, such as Hoobastank, Train, or Creed, tended to have presence solely within Top 40, and not much existence outside mass-audience charts.  Billboard moved slowly to adding a dedicated “Adult Alternative” chart (it was first published in print in 1996, but not tracked online until 2008). However, such charts began fragmenting almost immediately – New Music Express and Album of the Year were excoriated by many for hewing too close to a mainstream line, while the annual list for the Pitchfork music site was derided as too hipster. In short, there was a lot of fragmentation in popular music in mid-decade, even within indie-rock domains.

    Nevertheless, a few “signifier” albums broke through the noise in mid-decade, such as Ben Gibbard’s double hit of Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie and Give Up from his side project, The Postal Service. These albums meant so much to millennials that when Gibbard toured the two bands on the 20^th anniversary of the dual albums in 2023, concerts sold out everywhere. The irony from many anniversary re-hashings is that, even as millennials chided boomers for the multiple reunion concerts of bands like The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, the bands of the 1990s and 2000s were selling packaged nostalgia in similar formats by the late 2010s and the 2020s. In fact, there was almost a standard algorithm one could use for a reunion, tied to 15^th or 20^th anniversaries of a significant album release, or a band’s formation. Oasis, for example, waited until the 15^th anniversary of the band’s breakup to launch its own reunion.

    A significant number of music consumers responded to the mainstream tedium by diving ever deeply underground, and a few clever outsider bands responded with a cavalcade of releases. Bands such as Starving Weirdos, Charalambides, Sun City Girls, Vibracathedral Orchestra, and Sunburned Hand of the Man released dozens of improvisational albums on any format imaginable. Not only were very few of these destined to be streamed at future dates, but the handmade cassettes, CDs, and lathe-cut LPs were valued as limited-edition pieces of art.

    One mid-decade milestone appeared to be well outside the realms of recorded original music, though it was an indicator of future media platforms for music development. The first release of Guitar Hero in the summer of 2005 was one of several rhythm-based video games allowing users to emulate musical instruments and vie for prowess. Initially, the games shipped with licensed playlists of songs familiar to many. Over time, however, gaming platforms became a vehicle for introducing new songs, as relevant as films or TV shows. Gaming avatars were cited as an influence when Damon Albarn, lead singer of Blur, created the virtual cartoon-character band Gorillaz in 2002. Eventually, online multiplayer environments hosted live events, with rapper Travis Scott being an innovator for the Twitch network. The evolution would take more than a decade, but gaming became part of the music user platform in 2005. In the next 20 years, surreality and virtual environments would seep into popular music with as much inevitability as streaming.

Coming in three weeks (Sept. 20) - "The Allure of Listening, Chapter 13 - Platforms Define Experiences" - (2006-2012) - As the streaming Godzilla denudes the landscape, the people shout, "To infinity and beyond!"

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

The Allure of Listening - Chapter 11 - Indie Rock: Prospects and Problems

 The 1990s were so, so much more than grunge and the Pacific Northwest. But even among direct indie participants, very few understood the ramifications.  1990-98

Kurt Cobain’s unfortunate decision to take his own life in mid-decade immediately propelled Nirvana into the role of defining band for the 1990s indie era. And for many casual music fans not paying strict attention, indie was treated as a synonym for grunge and the Pacific Northwest. That is a profound misreading of the 1990s. The real revolution of the decade came in the development of independent distribution, independent labels, and yes, a new and large generation of independent artists fed by what is often called the “boomer echo” or “baby boom 2.0.” And among those artists, it was tough to find a unifying musical theme. Indie was about a state of mind centered on displacing the major labels.

    Michael Quercio, guitarist for 1980s psychedelic bands The Three O’Clock and Game Theory, said that the rise of grunge actually limited the audience for his early 1990s band Permanent Green Light, because flannel-powered hard rock swamped the lighter sound of jangle-pop.  This tells us two important things: First, the subgenres of indie could often work at cross-purposes to each other. Second, a narrowly-defined indie rock market might have been even more niche-oriented than the OG days of punk, at least in indie’s early days. The big news in early 1991 wasn’t necessarily Nirvana (at least at the time), but the fact that hip hop artists like LL Cool J and Beastie Boys finally were breaking through into mainstream charts. Metal bands also were grabbing tailwind from the unexpected success of Metallica’s Black Album. Meanwhile, the largely irrelevant Top 40 charts were filled with the type of crooners that defined the 1980s, as well as intelligent songwriters who should have known better, continuing the vapid production sound of 1980s digital synthesizers (think Susanna Hoffs’ “My Side of the Bed”).

    Still, what made the first few months of grunge so critical in defining new artists for decades to come is that small labels and regional artists finally found a path to breaking the stultifying power of the big labels. Sure, within 20 or 30 years the small artist was struggling due to low streaming profitability and the high cost of physical media production, but these factors affected newcomers and mega-stars alike. In the early 1990s, for the first time in a decade, pop music had second-string and third-string artists in the dugout, and many of them were great. And the major labels never recovered from the one-two punch of indie on the charts, followed by an Internet culture that made it impossible for the labels to regain the amount of control they wielded in the 1980s.

    In the final months of 1990, we moved to Colorado and had a baby girl at the same time, so there was a natural inclination to treat the world as brand new. I had to learn to balance my listening to “grown-up” pop with doses of Raffi and Kathy Dines, but that only taught me to widen my musical tastes. Meanwhile, by the time my daughter was a year old, she was attending the inaugural Lollapalooza, and let it be known that her favorite act was The Butthole Surfers. It truly was the beginning of a new age.

     Having more innovative small artists to choose from meant there would be a certain amount of tiresome acts that were over-hyped. We’d all rather forget the neo-hippies Rusted Root, for example. Lemonheads also comes to mind, though Juliana Hatfield grew up to be quite the solo artist (more so than her bandmate Evan Dando). Others drifted in a quasi-famous haze, like Buffalo Tom and Blind Melon. For the most part, though, the arrival of the indie machine meant that there were many more downright decent bands to listen to, covering the gamut from Built to Spill to Guided by Voices.

    The expansion of musical experiments also allowed a flowering of noise in its various sub-genres. There had been a 1980s market for Coil, Nurse with Wound, and John Zorn’s various experiments in that decade, but new labels like Siltbreeze and Road Cone provided enthusiastic fans (even if small in number) access to bands like Harry Pussy and Jackie-O Motherfucker. (More melodic but equally unmarketable bands like Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Sun City Girls rode along in this wake.) The development of a new market that could genuinely be called “the next underground” was a boon to special record stores like Kim’s and Other Music in NYC, Amoeba in San Francisco and L.A., The Quaker Goes Deaf in Chicago, and the Newbury Comics multiple franchises in Boston. The people that frequented such stores would often say that the hunt for unusual 45 rpm art objects or strangely-packaged cassettes brought back the fun of early punk-rock days.

    The rise of the smaller boutique record stores in the early 1990s underscored the precarious state many of the larger record or book/record chains found themselves in as the decade progressed. Tower Records, Virgin Music, and Borders Books all experienced hyper-growth in the 1990s after staying in relative health through the CD conversion of the mid-1980s. To their credit, they supported the first vinyl resurgence of the 1990s (which many latecomers forgot about, or were unaware of, as a larger vinyl resurgence took place in the 2000s). As a result, the stores managed to retain a certain credibility with snobbier music fans. But Tower in particular had an expansion rate that was not sustainable as downloads replaced CDs at decade’s end (the sight of the Tower mini-skyscraper in NYC across the street from the small and scrappy Other Music indicated the extent of the problem, though Tower’s 2006 demise was followed ten years later by the end of Other Music). By the mid-2000s, only Tower Japan, where CDs never fell out of favor, could stay alive following the global 30-year growth of the franchise. Virgin and Borders quickly followed suit into oblivion, leaving only Barnes & Noble left in the post-Covid 2020s to market books, CDs, and vinyl in brick-and-mortar stores.

            

    

     In the 1990s, innovation was bubbling down to the lowest level, and the number of new bands being formed climbed back to late 1970s levels, yet this artistic surge happened counter-cyclically to any political or social upheavals. In fact, the “Greed is Good” slogan characterizing the 1980s accelerated into overdrive during Clinton’s years – U.S. hubris at “winning” the Cold War aligned with further acceleration of the NASDAQ stock market in the early Internet era, to give rise to a make-money culture seemingly devoid of politics. With the exception of a group of European artists who released a protest single in response to Desert Storm at the start of 1991, the succeeding Clinton era was defined by American exceptionalist hubris, and entrepreneurs getting rich on high-tech. Bands seldom had reason to be in the forefront of social commentary, though songwriters like Elliott Smith often turned the personal into the political.

    Music fans had to be self-motivated to really appreciate the 1990s, however. Except for an odd showing by Toad the Wet Sprocket, Radiohead or The La’s, there was little representation of indie on the radio charts, either Top 40 or AOR (except for college stations). Hip-hop, however, was expanding into more experimental veins, thanks to the likes of Digable Planets and Wu-Tang Clan  – and was topping the charts while doing so. (It’s important to point out that, while the death of Tupac Shakur spurred more outsider hip hop, labels were simultaneously pushing “safe” R&B of the Whitney Houston/Toni Braxton variety.)

    Meanwhile, more expansive pop and rock had to be actively sought out. Since not everyone received a mixtape from a secret admirer, and since platforms like Pandora and Spotify were still a decade away, TV producers would insert songs by up-and-coming indie artists into shows like ER and Gilmore Girls, driving a fanbase interest that would have to be satisfied by visits to record stores. The potential for downloads still awaited broadband connections and standard compression formats for audio files (MP3 was approved in 1995, but not widely adopted until the end of the decade).

    Because the smaller independent labels could not demand fealty from bands (and often encouraged a bit of label-hopping), many musicians would issue music on multiple labels at once, particularly for vinyl-only releases. The line between official studio and “bootleg” release was blurred considerably. Sonic Youth had a series of official studio releases and a second set of SYR live and eclectic recordings. Guided by Voices regularly gave the nod to approved bootleg live recordings with exceedingly small vinyl press runs. Trumans Water may have taken the strangest approach in late 1993 with a series of “plausibly deniable” recordings coming from different record labels. The band’s own label, Homestead, released Godspeed the Punchline in early 1994 in both LP and CD formats. Simultaneously, three small labels issued LP-only improvisational variants – Godspeed the Static, Godspeed the Hemorrhage, and Godspeed the Vortex (the latter augmented with an extended CD release later) – which were distributed randomly, without catalog numbers, to record stores across the country, as well as sold at merch tables at shows. The band got kudos and laughs from fans by saying the Godspeed variations never existed.

    The arrival of the Netscape browser and web-based services allowed the first experiments to take place with downloadable music. Aerosmith offered a free digital single, “Head First,” via CompuServe in 1994, while Duran Duran could claim the first downloadable sale of a single in 1997, “Electric Barbarella” (establishing the baseline price of $0.99 for the single).  But since most of the world was still on dial-up modems, and audio compression still was not standardized, the efforts were unwieldy novelties. Music lovers were most likely to use the web first to check for physical product availability via a record store web site or artist’s label site. Since secure financial transactions were not yet available, these usually involved checking inventory and placing the order via phone or mail. But it was a start.

    Driven at least in part by Internet self-selection, the type of pop music bifurcation that drove a wedge between Top 40 and AOR in the 1970s created segmentation even within indie rock sectors by mid-decade in the 1990s. There was a cluster of radio-friendly artists who churned out regular hits, including Gin Blossoms, Blues Traveler, Folk Implosion (though the related band Sebadoh never charted), Bush, Lisa Loeb, Live, Soul Asylum, Sheryl Crow, Rusted Root, Blessid Union of Souls, and Matthew Sweet. Then there was the cluster of more esoteric bands that grew out of small labels and seemed destined to not hit chart status regardless of attempts to polish their sounds. This involved a far larger roster of artists, including P.J. Harvey, Cat Power, (smog)/Bill Callahan, Guided by Voices, 3 Mile Pilot, Trumans Water, and dozens of others. Many did not try for deliberately weird sounds (though some did), but seemed confined in advance to an underground realm – though once in a while a specific album might pop above the noise. But just as the big-seller pop audience could get lost in its own ignorance of the wider world, fans of the broader underground often displayed indie snobbery, sometimes unwillingly. I remained ignorant of many of the more popular bands because I simply never bothered to check out pop radio.

    It also helps to remind ourselves of the dozens of subcurrents vying for attention outside hip hop and indie rock. Deadheads got a new lease on jam life with the arrival of many bands of the Phish and Widespread Panic Ilk. Spaceage bachelor pad life got its second instantiation after the 1950s through the revival of bossa nova culture. EDM not only hit its 1990s drum-and-bass stride, but gave new life to the emerging shoegaze world of Stereolab, Tortoise, and Flying Saucer Attack. Young women experimenting with nonbinary culture could gain experience with feminism or gay/bisexual sexuality on the rocker side via Riot Grrl bands like Bikini Kill and Team Dresch, or on the folk/funk side through Ani DiFranco and her Righteous Babe label-mates. (It bears mentioning that a new generation of lesbian artists would show up every 15 years or so, and the late-teen/early-20s fans rarely had the slightest notion that previous generations of artists existed.) On the plus side, everyone got something to listen to, but the obvious downside was that popular music was too fragmented to provide anything like a unifying cultural statement. But in the midst of the Clinton era, that did not seem too important.

    Some media outlets like Spin declared in retrospect that the second half of the decade was when the indie rock bubble started to deflate. I observed something different taking place, a trend that benefited the music listener. The periods of renewal and reinvention that once took place every seven to ten years were compressed to ones every two to three years. Some bands managed to last through multiple such periods (GbV, for example, held on through reorganizations to celebrate its 40^th anniversary in 2023). Artists that were experiencing a slight sophomore slump in 1996, such as Sheryl Crow, continued to reach later heights in the new millenium.

    And here’s what the critics missed: It made little sense to talk of a punk revival, an indie revival, a nu-metal revival, a hip hop revival, when every genre was getting rebooted and refreshed every two to three years, from the late 1990s through the 2020s. Did the music industry have its down moments due to the advent of streaming, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2020 pandemic? No doubt. But one could choose any year as representative of a “new punk revival,” and that might be true for certain regions and certain subgenres. Contrary to what Spin and others might say, the unit numbers of CD sales, LP sales, concert tickets might go up and down, but serious creative slumps did not exist in the 30 years following the birth of grunge.

    In fact, the occasional surprise epic still could emerge from the mainstream, as witnessed in 1998 by Madonna’s turn to a more EDM-friendly dance style when she partnered with William Orbit for her groundbreaking album Ray of Light; by the overnight success of punky flyboys The Offspring; by Cher’s unexpected breakthrough return to the top with the album and single Believe; and by Lauryn Hill breaking records for her first solo work separate from Fugees, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (the absence of a follow-up was a major industry story in and of itself). My own tastes in the late 1990s, as a father of an elementary student, varied between mega-acts at Red Rocks or small gigs with the likes of Pavement and Elephant 6 artists, in addition to taking my daughter to a date on the global Spice Girls tour.

Coming in three weeks (Aug. 30) - Chapter 12, The Millenium Arrival of Craptastic Compression -

The shortest dominance of a music format was the downloadable file to store on a local

computer - but was that the fault of MP3? (well, maybe).

                                                           Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel

 

The Allure of Listening - Chapter 10 - Social Content WIthout Much Independence

 How did USA for Africa and Live Aid suddenly morph to a global insurrection at the end of the 1980s, and was Francis Fukuyama hstening to Top 40?   1985-1990

    I began 1985 with a move to the Bay Area to write business analyses for the high-tech industry. Just about the time of the move, the pop music industry suddenly found its social voice with a flurry of Live Aid, Farm Aid, and anti-Sun City (South Africa) concerts to raise money and awareness for worthy causes. Bob Geldof of The Boomtown Rats played a critical role in trying to meld artists who had already expressed a political conscience with those guaranteed to have a big draw. Live Aid, with separate concerts in London and Philadelphia, was the most iconic, and was a follow-on to the “We Are the World” single in early 1985, both efforts intended to address starvation in Ethiopia.

    The Live Aid concert was known as much for spectacle – a Led Zeppelin reunion, a Freddie Mercury performance with Queen, dual-continent appearances by Phil Collins, and the last Duran Duran performance for 20 years – as it was for philanthropy effectiveness, a topic which stirred much controversy. The hardcore punks enjoyed poking fun at big-name artists’ concern for East Africa. Live Aid also set the stage for later duds, like the multi-continent Net Aid sponsored by router manufacturer Cisco Systems Inc. in 1999.

    Initially, San Francisco was a big draw for those like me who were new to the city, with venues like I-Beam and Bottom of the Hill. Innovative artists like Barbara Manning and Seymour Glass formed bands such as San Francisco Seals and World of Pooh, harbingers of a larger 1990s Bay Area underground. The East Bay was the place for fundamentalist punk, thanks to the legendary 924 Gilman St. club in Berkeley. I was surprised to see the San Jose/Silicon Valley area was spawning its own bands like Daddy In His Deep Sleep, which seemed to follow an indie ethic more than the larger cities to the north.  There was a strange, nearly invisible tech underground manifested in the quarterly Processed World magazine, largely aimed at entry-level tech workers, but forming the basis of what later became boing boing. Yet the Silicon Valley critiques were drowned out by much larger movements in San Francisco and the East Bay to address AIDS (ACT UP) and continued struggles in South Africa and Central America.

    On the national front, a few artists tried to suggest a partial awakening from somnambulance – Bruce Cockburn’s fierce “If I Had a Rocket Launcher,” for example, or David Bowie’s collaboration with Pat Metheny, “This Is Not America.” But there was a lot of performance that masqueraded as rebel behavior, including women artists like Pat Benatar, and male faux-punks like Billy Idol. One might have thought, given the ACT-UP response to AIDS policies, a strong LGBTQ+ artist presence creating a unified front of musicians, but singers like Morrissey and Robert Smith seemed to stand for their own morosity, nothing more. In fact, the lesbian record labels of the late 1970s, who first brought Holly Near, Cris Williamson, and Meg Christian to national awareness, demonstrated more collective action for the queer community in those years than anything in the mid-1980s.

    Nevertheless, art without a cause or even a clear message hit great heights in 1985 – Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, the debut Suzanne Vega album, Husker Du’s New Day Rising, REM’s Fables of the Reconstruction. The intensely personal visions of the best new albums gave a preview of sorts to the diverse landscape of the DIY indie music that would arrive in the 1990s. The best rarely would carry a “we are the world” sort of message, but would make droll and very cryptic commentary on the world at large. And at least in the case of Kate Bush, people still were listening nearly 40 years later.

    What seemed equally true of both late-1980s and 1990s artists was that musicians in both eras appeared reticent to take on the yuppies – the 20-somethings who overtly abandoned social concerns in the early 1980s in favor of making lots of money. The continuing escalation in the stock market due to high-tech startups was only occasionally hit with such speed bumps as the late-1980s savings and loan crisis, the 2000 Internet slump, the much larger 2007-08 mortgage and banking crisis, yet yuppies kept up their pointless material striving for 10, 20, even 30 years, and few musicians wanted to address that. It may have been that, unlike when criticizing Reagan or faceless institutions, a finger pointed at yuppies would come too close to the cartoon character Pogo’s famous line that “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

    Since 1986 was the year I got married, I tended to associate the year with “putting away childish things,” and I worried that such changes would include dismissing pop music in general – certainly a common behavior for those approaching middle age. Enough new bands were simmering just below the surface – Pixies, Soundgarden, Chumbawamba, ‘Til Tuesday – to make me willing to remain an avid music consumer. And the expansion of rap into the mainstream certainly made pop music more interesting. Still, it would take four years of constant pushing by the independent artists to make the 1990s finally move beyond corporate control.

   At least two positive aspects of music digitization were evident by the mid-1980s, though a long way from fruition. First, the expansion of CD manufacturing into contract plants allowed smaller labels like Rhino, SST, and Dutch East India to offer both new releases and reissues from bands that were both obscure and eclectic, from Meat Puppets to Mission of Burma. These labels were ready to take advantage of the big indie breakthrough of 1990. It’s worth noting that many existing bands spent the last years of the ‘80s expanding their styles, to prepare ye the way of the DIY. Swans went from harsh metal to Middle Eastern-influenced orchestral rock; Sun City Girls went from Arizona hardcore to East Asian mysticism; Mudhoney and Alice in Chains moved from earlier styles to align closer to the Young Turks of the Pacific Northwest like Soundgarden and Nirvana. Something was definitely in the air.

    Another positive aspect was that the convergence of computer culture and pop music took its first hesitant steps in the mid-1980s. The world was still close to ten years away from the World Wide Web and ubiquitous web browsers like Netscape, and it would be a few more years beyond that before music downloads and streaming services were possible. But the first nascent online networks like The WELL (Whole Eath ‘Lectronic Link) popped up in mid-decade, followed by the arrival of Internet protocols like TCP/IP, which turned isolated local networks of computer nerds into global sharing communities. The music-centric interest groups on WELL and other networks allowed the acceleration of tape sharing, which became the equivalent of 1970s bootleg vinyl, but driven from the bottom up by the fans of bands. Mainstream culture was only aware of the explosion of tape sharing by Grateful Dead fans, but it actually expanded from dozens to hundreds of artists during the mid-1980s, driving the engine of decentralized fandom that became a key expander of music culture in the following decade.

    At a subconscious level, the summer of 1988 felt like a dam was about to break, exemplified by the reunion of Pere Ubu and release of its classic The Tenement Year album.  My wife and I were in Stockholm for the International AIDS Conference, and I found the new Ubu while perusing Stockholm music stores. On the same trip, we took a train and ferry trip to Leningrad (soon to be reverting to its old name of St. Petersburg), to check out what Gorbachev’s perestroika meant on the ground. There were plenty of street poets and buskers on the boulevards of pastel Victorians, along with agitators taking advantage of the new opening. By the time we got back to the U.S., new stirrings were happening in South Africa. Within months, the Tienanmen Square uprisings and East European revolutions were under way.

    Pop music still was taking its time to break out of years of predictability, but new tunes from They Might Be Giants, Midnight Oil, and Unwound had me convinced the great awakening was not my imagination. Even the top pop charts displayed much more hard rock than in mid-decade, exemplified by Poison, Bon Jovi, Van Halen, and Def Leppard in the Top 10 – maybe not innovative rock, but a step above crooners. On rarer occasion, a band with real indie cred, like Del Amitri or Faith No More, might crack the charts.

    What was evident throughout the last couple years of the 1980s is that nostalgia exploitation had found new markets. In the 1970s, nostalgia for the 1950s was satisfied by movies and TV shows like American Graffiti and Happy Days, as well as by bands like Sha Na Na. As the 1980s ended, a weekly chart would typically sport a re-recording of a 1960s or 1970s song by a newer artist. It was not until the latter 1990s that the trend of band reunions became common, but as more and more bands hit middle age, that 1990s reunion trend sported a shelf life extending to the 2020s and beyond, eventually being augmented by more and more tribute bands.

    The second half of 1989 seemed infused with era-defining events, beginning with Tienanmen Square in early June and ending with East European nation liberation and the fall of the Berlin Wall in Oct.-Nov. In mid-October, the Bay Area suffered a massive earthquake that finally convinced my wife it was time to leave (I had grown tired of Bay Area culture at least two years earlier). We began looking for affordable housing in Colorado by the end of the year.

    In retrospect, we were lucky that pop music didn’t display the same type of jingoist hubris that U.S. diplomats did after Gorbachev “freed” the Central European nations to pursue their own fates. Instead, the slacker sound, whether in the heavy Nirvana instantiation or the breezier Pavement version, displayed a languor that could not be turned into the type of tub-thumping displayed by Springsteen’s Born in the USA six years earlier. Even if most 1990s songs were at less than speedcore pace, 1990 began with its own type of excitement – career-defining albums by They Might Be Giants, Tori Amos, The Sundays, and Toad the Wet Sprocket. In fact, the entire year of 1990 in both album releases and singles charts carried the feel of waking from an opiated dream. There wasn’t a unifying theme as there had been in the psychedelic or punk eras, but there was palpable excitement.

    Conventional wisdom holds that the entire decade of the 1990s was the low point for the manufacture of vinyl LPs, followed by a slow-building resurgence in the 21^st century, but that’s not quite true. In aggregate numbers, the observation might hold water because of the small lots that indie record labels issued for both CDs and LPs. But the last half of the 1980s was when vinyl was reduced to little but 12” singles in the hip hop and dance/EDM worlds. I remember The Swans’ 12” EP of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was my only vinyl purchase of 1988, and that represented a point of low tide. The indie labels of the 1990s made a point of offering titles on vinyl, often as special art objects with hand-made covers. In most cases, a vinyl release cost less in a retail store than a CD release.

    Through all of the 1990s and 2000s the two formats were at least at price parity, and this held until the mid-2010s, when a shortage of lacquer worldwide, and a lack of vinyl pressing plants to respond to increased demand, caused the price of vinyl to explode to retail prices typically twice that of CDs.  But for a brief period of time in the early to mid-1990s, vinyl lovers experienced a special heyday. The catch was that most of the vinyl titles could only be found through special print catalogs or in special orders from record stores with savvy owners. This was well before the days of Discogs or eBay, and even prior to the era when every record label sported a web site taking customer orders. The first such online music ordering outlets only arrived around 1995-96. The vinyl was out there all right, but you had to know where to find it.

Coming in three weeks (Aug. 9) - Indie Rock, Prospects and Problems - 1990-1997
If you assumed it was all about Nirvana and grunge, you missed the entire message.

Copyright 2024 Loring Wirbel