Epilogue : The Day the Music Died

The evolution of standard practices in the music business: 1970s - 2020s

Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here

Photo by Soundtrap on Unsplash

No Filter

In the third instalment of this series we looked at the digital revolution of the late 20th century and the subsequent effects and ramifications for the consumer side of the music/entertainment industry.

In this final section I just wanted to cover the corollary of this: the music production itself, both technologically and in a broader business sense.

So here are some final thoughts on a few additional factors which (mostly) not by design, surely had a negative effect on the quality of material that got out there and into our ears whether through streaming platforms or the various physical formats down the years.

First there is the whole process of creating a consumer - quality recording. Technology has been available for twenty years or more which would allow a musician to create very acceptable multi-track recordings, with little more than a small room to play a few instruments, and a decent microphone and stand, along with a laptop and inexpensive recording, editing and mixing software.

To illustrate how impressive this stuff is: if I wanted to add an effect like reverb (technically, multiple tiny reflections of the original sound but not an echo) to an instrument or voice, I could simply click the on-screen raw recording and immediately be presented with a drop-down display offering me an exhaustive list of the various types of reverb effect. Do I want it to sound like I was playing a large club, or a small church, or maybe a cathedral?

The options are incredible even with my modest software which was bought for less than £100. Do I want my electric guitar to sound very clean and flat like the Beach Boys, or with huge distortion and repeat like….I don’t know….death metal. Death metal in a cathedral. Nice.

Even those instruments which aren't practical (a grand piano or string section for example) are easily emulated with onboard effects or plug-in samples (of real actual instruments…yes, the irony).

By contrast, I can recount a memory from my younger days on a visit to a modest 8-track recording studio. The band were listening back to some material, and I suggested that on the chorus, a big Phil Spector-type snare drum sound would be very effective. The engineer thought that we might be able to use the space immediately outside the studio, which was a ground floor concrete stairwell with a lot of acoustic reverberation due to the hard surfaces and vertical clearance, but close enough to run a microphone cable and stand to. This would definitely give a great reverberation, we agreed.

The drummer brought his snare drum out, and we set up the microphone and stand. The one slight problem was that the stairwell was next to the door leading to the side street outside, which had a small amount of traffic passing. This would be picked up by the microphone. So I went outside and when I had a clear view of the empty street both ways, I made a signal to the drummer through the glass door, who signalled to the engineer to start the reel-to-reel tape of the original recording, which the drummer had playing through his headphones as a guide track.

Then the overdubbed snare drums were added to a new track in real time, while we hoped that no trucks or cars would pass by….

We didn’t think we had done anything exceptional at the time, and of course we hadn’t. And maybe that is quite important. Maybe that need to get the maximum from limited resources made musicians think in different and unique ways when they were in a studio and time was very limited due to budgets. I don’t know. It’s possible.

Photo by Techivation on Unsplash

But back to contemporary recording. This inexpensive technology is an amazing enabler for millions of impoverished but ambitious writers and musicians, don't get me wrong. And of course all recording studios are now digitally based, so the essence is the same, it’s just the scale that differs to a large extent.

However… maybe something's lost when something's gained in living every day, as Joni sang once.

Now this is absolutely not going to be a whinge along the lines of “the technology making artists less creative…in my day musicians had to work harder to get the same sounds…blah, blah..”.

No, I don’t think it’s that simple. Truly creative people will , as others have pointed out when these discussions are had on public platforms, always be more innovative and resourceful than less gifted people given the same tools.

Whether that is a two-track analogue tape recorder and a cheap guitar; or at the other end of the scale a state-of-the-art recording studio and all the latest recording software.

Anyone who spends any time looking at music discussion content on Youtube will have seen some major online spats going on between very high-profile content creators there along these very lines. I won’t mention names, as they are easy to find, having huge view numbers. But for what it’s worth, I can see pros and cons in both sides of that particular discussion.

I am under no illusions that music was all great back in the 1970s and 1980s. There was plenty of dross, of course. But I am still of the opinion that the very best of that era was much better than the very best of the last couple of decades without question, at least in the AMOUNT of great music, and I would contest in the actual melodic, structural and harmonic content also. Anyway….after that lengthy qualification statement we shall continue.

Other People’s Money

Now, to hark back to the first part of this ramble: in earlier decades the whole business of recording, editing and having a finished product was a whole lot more complicated, and expensive; using record company money unless one had a generous benefactor or rich daddy.

Studio time was expensive and engineers and producers were involved. These people all would have opinions on what went on, and what got recorded and left out. And how it got recorded. With good reason, as they were putting their reputations out there when a recording went on the market.

I suppose the best way of contextualising things at the time might be by way of a pop folklore story (but based in fact) whereby in 1963 , the Rolling Stones’ first manager and producer, 19-year-old Andrew Loog Oldham, decided that Mick ‘n’ Keef needed to take the band beyond being simply another - albeit very individual - rhythm and blues covers band. And he was savvy enough to know that writing their own material was going to be essential in achieving this.

So the story goes that he locked the young troubadours in a room, telling them they weren’t getting out until they had written at least one song. The result was good enough to appear on their first album, and the creative floodgates were open, seemingly due to being forced out of their safety zone by a very shrewd young businessman.

Another early tune from the duo was a ballad, which they didn’t feel was their thing. So they passed it to a 17-year-old Marianne Faithfull. This video is a treasure as it has Marianne being introduced by none other than Brian Epstein. What a time to have been in the pop music world, is all I can say….

On a slightly comical note, and I suspect inspired by the Andrew Loog Oldham lock-in story, the makers of the slightly controversial (at the time) comedy show “Father Ted” gave us this classic scene where Irish rural priest Ted and his junior colleague try their hand at songwriting for a national competition. Priceless and very funny if you have not seen it.

Anyway, the point I make is that the Stones were already established as a successful gigging band before they were even on the radar of any part of the music business. And this was through another party (their manager) who had to be sure of their potential before he committed his own time and effort.

And after all this, a record company executive had to be convinced , just on the strength of a rough “demo” cassette tape or a few gigs that the material had real commercial potential.

His company was not going to invest in studios, producers and engineers for a considerable number of hours unless he was reasonably sure of at least getting a small but promising return on investment. So there we have already several obstacles, or more accurately, “filters” at work to ensure that what emerges from the actual recording environment is as good as it can be, and a whole lot more subject to scrutiny , criticism and refinement than it was at the start.

Photo by John Hult on Unsplash

The second difference to the DIY nature of most of today's music production line was that the finished recordings couldn't just be put out there. An audition of the tapes would need to satisfy another record company executive or maybe several of them. If they weren't impressed, then it was very unlikely they would throw good money after bad and continue with the mastering, pressing, distribution and advertising of an album.

So it is easy to understand how the quality of finished music from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s would have scored on average a lot higher than the vast majority of everything since. Simple commerce.

Too much information!

Now I am absolutely not saying that no good music is being recorded these days. Even some very good music, I am sure. But finding it all would be such a huge task, as you cannot possibly spend that much real time listening to all the stuff that is produced, due to the complete lack of any filtration process.

A few decades ago, it would have been quite possible to keep up with listening to the majority of new releases in any given genre; if you were, say, a music journalist and had free records landing on your desk by courtesy of the major record labels eager to have their product discussed in the (then) very widely-read print music publications like New Musical Express and Melody Maker in the UK, and their equivalents like Rolling Stone in the US.

There were only so many record labels and so many recording studios. But now it's an endless stream of undistilled product with nobody to curate any of it, discarding the junk and preserving that which is worth one's listening time. It would be analogous to the qualitative difference between raw spirit from the mash tun, and twelve-year-old oak-aged malt Whisky. I read recently that Spotify now has something like 100 million tracks, and that streaming services get around 120,000 new uploads every day!

It has to be considered of course that the environment back then possibly prevented many artists with great potential from realising that potential due to the many hurdles involved. And there are instances of artists who in retrospect were arguably misunderstood or not appreciated by risk-averse corporations (Nick Drake, Badfinger for example in my view from reading some of their history). Or it could be that the stars just didn’t align one way or another.

But the fact that record companies would just refuse to issue sub-standard or commercially unviable product shows that the process worked as designed for the majority of artists......whether their musical sensibilities liked it or not.

It could also be argued that the constant flow of re-issued classic albums from the era which contain “rare unreleased material” or alternative versions of songs therein, do seem to reinforce the point. That material was left off the record for a reason in most cases. It simply wasn't as good as the rest.

I can hardly recall any bonus material from re-issues I have bought down the years that was worth more than a couple of listens for curiosity and novelty value. But maybe I rank low on the nerdscale in that regard.

If anyone needs further proof of the “quality vs quantity via filtration” argument then they might listen to a random streamed selection of hits from three or four decades ago, and then repeat the process with a random selection from the last couple of decades. Good luck, soldier.

In Summary

Over the length of four essays here, we covered a lot of what I would consider milestone events in the story of popular music and the culture surrounding it:-

1) The birth of the music video and the adjacent introduction of satellite/cable TV; which enabled dedicated 24-hour programming of said product.

2) Music sampling technology and its incorporation as part of the hip hop/rap urban scene - which eventually became the dominant form of youth music/ culture; and the (arguably) adverse implications for conventional musicianship as an aspiration for music-loving young people.

3) The technology of music compression algorithms and file-sharing and downloading; which was in turn enabled by the explosion of the worldwide web and widely available broadband architecture to consumers.

4) Music streaming and the ramifications that has had for musicians who hitherto had relied on sales of physical media , and for whom in most cases streaming platforms make it much harder to make a living, simply by virtue of their design.

I appreciate that I frequently went off at tangents, but hopefully the diversions were worth taking out of interest or amusement! If you have stuck with it through all that, thank you and I hope you found something of interest.

“And in the End….”

Time to wrap up this opinion series with a couple of videos which give what I think give as reasonable a comparison as any of “the craft of the singer-songwriter - Then and Now”.

What do you think? Let me know. I hope you enjoyed the trip. Comments as always welcome below. And please share if the notion takes you !

Exhibit A - impoverished late 1960s and early 1970s artist so obscure that no concert footage even exists. He suffered from chronic stagefright and depression; and died of an overdose at his parents’ house at the age of 26, after recording three albums which went largely unnoticed by the music press and record buyers.

Exhibit B - no descriptors needed, other than : one of the most successful and revered singer-songwriters of the 21st century so far. I have nothing against this songwriter or his material, but I like the contrast in styles and production with the first one.

“…and the three men I admire most;

the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost.

They caught the last train for the coast,

the day the music died.”

(Don McLean – American Pie)