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The Political Economy of the Recorded Music Industry
Redefinitions and New Trajectories in the Digital Age
The fact of the matter is that popular music is one of the industries of the country. It’s all completely tied up with capitalism. It’s stupid to separate it.
Paul Simon
Introduction
Media and communication scholars often overlook the study of recorded music, so it may not be surprising that those who study the political economy of communications may neglect it as well. Yet recorded music is a significant component of the culture industry, providing entertainment and leisure activities for audiences and contributing to other media and cultural production. We need to understand how this cultural form has developed as a commodity and an industry. This chapter suggests a political economic approach to studying the recorded music industry that emphasizes history and technology. A review of various approaches to studying recorded music is presented, followed by an overview of the history of the recorded music industry. The current industry is briefly outlined, with possible future business models considered.
Of course, music has not always been a commodity. Before musical labor was incorporated into a tangible thing – what Attali has called an “immaterial pleasure turned commodity” (1985, 2) – it was consumed as representation without a distinct form. Marx (1863) thought that musical performance was an instance where labor did not result in a tangible commodity for sale, observing that: “the service a singer performs for me satisfies my aesthetic needs, but what I enjoy exists only in an action inseparable from the singer himself, and once his work, singing, has come to an end, my enjoyment is also at an end; I enjoy the activity itself – its reverberation in my ear.”
With the introduction of recording technologies, however, music did become commodified and the recorded music industry grew to become a formidable component of the cultural industries. This history will be summarized later in this chapter. But it is important here to emphasize that a political economy of culture framework is appropriate for understanding this cultural form. According to Golding and Murdock (2000, 70), this form of analysis “sets out to show how different ways of financing and organizing cultural production have traceable consequences for the range of discourse and representations in the public domain and for audiences’ access to them.” As Hesmondhalgh (2007, 12) notes, the “music industries” are one of the core cultural industries that “deal primarily with the industrial production and circulation of texts.” And while many studies of cultural industries have focused on commodified texts, it is important to remember that recorded music is both text and commodity. The focus here is on the commodity that is produced by the recorded music industry, not necessarily the text or the musical content itself.
The study of the political economy of recorded music draws on the theoretical foundations of political economy and its application to media and culture. The study of political economy is about how societies are organized and controlled, and thus involves the analysis of power. The study of political economy of the media is about the production, distribution, and consumption of media. Importantly, the approach is interested in how the media are organized and controlled within the larger political economy. In other words, it is concerned with who has power to make decisions about the media, and who benefits from these decisions. It is about understanding how power relations actually work within and around the media. More specifically, the study of political economy of the media entails the historical analysis of media commodities, industries, and institutions, including but not limited to corporations. The roles of labor and the state are fundamental components of political economic analysis, as well as issues relating to globalization.
Thus the study of the political economy of recorded music is concerned with the production, distribution, consumption, and reproduction of various forms of recorded music. While the “music industry” is composed of many related industries, the focus here is on recorded forms of music, which means a special interest in recording and distribution technologies. We suggest that the political economy of recorded music should be understood through its historical development as a commodity and the evolution of an industry through all its stages of production to consumption to reproduction. We also stress the technologies involved in the recorded music industry, arguing that recorded music has been more about technology and less about art/music from its inception. In other words, historically, technology has made music into a commodity.
The Study of the Recorded Music Industry
“Music is spiritual. The music business is not”
Van Morrison
When analyzing the industry that produces music as a commodity, few studies have explicitly linked critical political economy with recorded music. The brief review of literature that follows will hopefully provide a framework for how the recording industry has been studied, focusing especially on the ways that political economic analyses have been applied.
Many scholars agree that there is a dearth of serious writing about this industry (e.g., Gronow 1983, Chanan 1995) and that academic research in general has “shown little systematic interest in popular music” (Burnett 1996, 3). McQuail (2005, 36) notes that “little attention has been given to music as a mass medium in theory and research.” Malm and Wallis (1992, 15) also point out that until the late 1970s “remarkably few studies of the socio-economic aspects of the industrial processing of music” have come from communication scholars. Nevertheless, there still is a body of work that examines music and the recorded music industry, and may contribute to an understanding of the political economy of recorded music.
Classic studies of music
In his historical treatment of western classical music, Attali traces music’s transformation from a social experience as representation to its repetitive function as commodity. For Attali, music “became an industry, and its consumption ceased to be collective” (1985, 88, original italics) as people began the individualized act of stockpiling music commodities. The historical development of recording, which was a means of social control, pushed music into background noise as “a factor in centralization, cultural normalization, and the disappearance of distinctive cultures” (1985, 111).
Weber (1958) suggested that western music itself was the product of capitalist institutions, highlighting how seemingly “irrational” cultural production could become rationalized. However, Frith (1988, 12) later warned that industrialization doesn’t happen to music – a problematic argument “which fuses (and confuses) capital, technical, and musical arguments” – but instead, recorded music is the final product of that process.
Benjamin (1969/1936) considered the potential emancipatory effects of mechanical production on artworks, arguing that this historical development democratized access to, and critical thinking toward, cultural objects and destroyed the social control (“aura” and “authenticity”) of works of art that existed in a specific time and place. On the other hand, Horkheimer and Adorno (2001/1947, 95) argued that a monolithic “culture industry” logic existed which then transmuted art into “a species of commodity,” while earlier work by Adorno (1990/1941) tackled the standardized production/consumption of popular music. Adorno wasn’t concerned with industry structure, but how popular music applied an ideological “mechanical schemata” to its production, which promoted an audience who passively listened with rhythmic obedience as the commoditized and reified music maximized economic dividends.
Critical theory and Marxist approaches
In an argument reminiscent of Benjamin, Théberge (1997, 185) contends that, with the advent of the mechanical production/reproduction of sound, a “new relationship between technology, musical practice, and the capitalist organization of production began to evolve.” Breen (1995, 501) points out that the record business is just another element of corporate structure, and therefore, “Institutional economics is a valuable tool in describing the historical development of popular music within corporate society.”
Chapple and Garofalo (1977) apply an economic analysis to rock and roll, highlighting how capitalist corporations who control the means of production determine the actual music (as commodity and content) that consumers get. However, Garofalo (1986, 83), in some ways, rejects his initial assertion with Chapple, arguing that “there is no point-to-point correlation between controlling the marketplace economically and controlling the form, content, and meaning of music.”
More recent Marxist works on recorded music include Callahan (2005, 58), who believes the industry feeds consumers corporately controlled and homogenous “anti-music” produced by “the labor of the musician.” In a business concerned only with “money derived from the exploitation of musicians and copyright” (228), the industry “lords it” over musicians: “Within the capitalist market system, the productivity of [the musician’s] labor is not in the artistic creation, per se, but in the profit it generates for the record company or publisher through mass production, promotion and sales” (199). Eisenberg makes a Marxist argument that the music commodity transforms both the musician and consumer into a fetishist: “The musician need never see the working man behind the money; the listener need never see the working musician behind the vinyl” (2005, 20).
Studies of music genres
Other political economic analyses of specific genres within the recording industry include Hobart’s essay, “The Political Economy of Bop” (1981), which examines the contradictions of musical idiom between bop’s origins in the black ghettos and as a symbol of intellectualism. While George’s (1988) polemic explores how the white music industry transformed black culture into an exploitable commodity, Kelley (2005), in his poignant edited volume, explores how white-owned entertainment conglomerates have profited from a “structure of stealing” from the black community. Another important contribution includes Kofsky’s (1998) political economic analysis of how jazz musicians work and are exploited under capitalism.
Sociological studies of music
There has also been a considerable amount of sociological research on the industry with foci on the production, content, and reception of recorded music. For example, Frith (1981) makes an argument (similar to Benjamin) that corporations don’t necessarily co-opt popular culture as they tend to follow, rather than lead, in trends; therefore, the record industry has developed strategies for market control simply because they do not control the market. According to Dowd (2003) these genre-based markets are in fact manufactured by the industry itself to maintain as much control as possible (of the music and its consumption).
Keith Negus (1992, 1996, 1999) has made similar arguments about corporate control within the industry and of its market. Negus suggests that there is a corporate “machine” but also that we should consider the “human beings who inhabit the machine” (1996, 36) – those who make creative decisions and not just financial ones throughout the entire corporate structure. This idea is elaborated upon when Negus looks at the sometimes awkward interplay between economics and culture in the record business – a concept where “an industry produces culture and culture produces an industry” (1999, 14, italics in original). Swiss et al. (1998) refer to Negus’s concept as a “production-text-consumption” model where the industry affects musicians, marketing and genres, technology, and broadcasting, as well as musical aesthetics and meaning. Similarly, music commodities have a symbolic significance and thus two parallel economies are operating in the recorded music business: “the economy of use and the economy of exchange” (Storey 1996, 98).
Other sociologically grounded studies have looked at the tension between major and independent companies, which Negus (1999) suggests is based on distribution and not production. For instance, Hesmondhalgh (1998a) looks at the underground British dance music industry as one that, while pursuing profit and sometimes conforming to the capitalist system in order to reach a wider audience, may truly offer alternative messages/lifestyles. Other work by Hesmondhalgh (1998b, 1999) uses specific case studies of independent companies and genres (mainly punk) to demonstrate the tensions between the institutional politics of the recording industry and oppositional cultural forms. And, finally, Lee (1995), using Wax Trax! Records as a case study, examines “independent” as an industry concept.
Other sociological perspectives focus on the “empirical” relationship between market concentration and diversity (Peterson and Berger 1971, 1975, Peterson 1976, Lopes 1992, Dowd 2004) and organizational structure (Scott 1999, Huygens et al. 2001). These studies suggest that market concentration corresponds to homogeneity while competitive markets lead to diversity; however, Lopes (1992) contends that diversity and innovation depends more on the operations of companies and market structure than merely levels of concentration.
Legal studies of the music industry
Many scholars argue that, in order to properly understand the recording industry as a capitalist enterprise that exploits commodified labor, a political economic analysis of this industry should emphasize copyright (e.g., Fabbri 1993, Cvetkovski 2007, Hesmondhalgh 2007). Fabbri believes that researchers must explore copyright because a “considerable part of the overall turnover of the music industry is based on the exchange of immaterial items” (1993, 159).
Sanjek (1998) argues that music is no more than a “rights package” and thus we should examine the recording industry on two interrelated levels: (1) the “corporate regime” of mergers and influence in production and consumption; and (2) the “legal-legislative regime” of ownership deregulation and the increased scope and duration of intellectual property rights. According to Cvetkovski (2007, 27), “Copyright should be considered as the common thread that binds the entire industry … without it, there is no music business.”
While Lessig (2005, 2008) and Bollier (2005) argue that copyright’s scope and duration have deviated from its constitutional framing in favor of corporate interests, other discussions by McLeod (2001, 2005) and Vaidhyanathan (2001) demonstrate how the music industry, as part of the “copyright cartel,” privatizes culture and chills creativity. Other interesting research has looked at how the recording industry has relied on copyright law to curtail digital sampling, as well as addressing the cultural and economic tensions surrounding this issue (e.g., Demers 2006, Hesmondhalgh 2006, Toynbee 2006). Frith’s edited volume, Music and Copyright (1993), contains studies from international perspectives and serves as a strong point of departure from analyses of the American copyright system.
International studies of music
While many of the previously mentioned studies of the recording industry have focused on the US market, there are sources that focus on other markets (e.g., Gronow 1983, Manuel 1993, Taylor 1997), as well as how the hegemony of American industrialized music has affected music produced outside of the US (e.g., Robinson et al. 1991). Burnett (1996, 6) looks at how the Internet is helping the record business create a globalized cultural economy, suggesting that “the music industry, like others, constantly tries to develop new ways to control both supply and demand. …” Looking at the interaction between music in the mass media and the larger musical activities in society – specifically in the context of the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe – Malm and Wallis claim that the record industry has been at the forefront of the “global standardization of cultural products” (1992, 7).
Studies of digital music
There is also a growing body of research examining the music business and its challenges in the era of digital capitalism and technology (e.g., McCourt and Burkart 2003, Katz 2004). Alexander (2002) offers a helpful exploration of the relationship between market structure and digital distribution, as well as how the recording oligopoly’s dominance is fading along with its long-established distribution stronghold. In Burkart and McCourt’s (2006) historically grounded analysis, the authors document how the Internet has untied the industry’s physical business model in an age of the “celestial jukebox” where music commodities are instantly available.
Although the current economic outlook for the recording industry may be precarious, some authors have suggested future models for market capitalization (e.g., Fox 2004, Kusek and Leonard 2005). Interestingly, while the record industry has essentially criminalized its own market, Kusek and Leonhard (2005, x) suggest that the industry may have to accept a model “where access to music becomes a kind of ‘utility.’ Not for free, per se, but certainly for what feels like free.”
Popular sources for studying the music industry
While most of this literature is academic, more popular publications also provide important sources for understanding the recorded music industry. For instance, both Dannen’s Hitmen (1990) and Elliot’s Rockonomics (1993) are excellent accounts of the relationship between money and power within the industry during the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, since the music business itself is bound by legality – on both creative and financial ends – then who better to learn from than the entertainment lawyers who are involved in these processes? Therefore, “how-to” books (e.g., Passman 1997, Lathrop 2003, Rudsenske and Denk 2005) provide interesting insider accounts of how the recording industry operates, not only legally, but also through its stages of production and distribution.
The History of the Recorded Music Industry
We find that, as in other fields, capitalism has created the most magnificent apparatus for the production, distribution and consumption of music that the world has ever seen: yet this apparatus is so riddled with contradictions basically economic in origin that it negates its own potentialities and is rapidly becoming unable to function.
Composer, Elie Siegmeister, Worker’s Music Association, 1938
By reviewing the technological history of the recorded music industry, we find, much like Marx, that the present condition can be illuminated by examining the past. While historically new recording technologies, companies, and artists have come and gone, the prevalent logic of this industry and the music commodity itself has remained – capital. The history also reveals an ongoing battle between playback formats and the companies that produce them, the inevitable movement toward consolidation and conglomeration, and the tensions between recording companies and the consumers who have demanded cheap or free music. Technology has been a major historical contradiction within the industry as it has both helped to propel the music commodity to the far reaches of the globe, while simultaneously seeking to destroy it from its material core.
In other words, while the development of recorded music has been “completely carried out within the capitalist structure” (Chapple and Garofalo 1977, 300), the history of the recorded music industry is fundamentally about technology, as recorded music is very much the product of science. Millard writes, “This is a story primarily of change, for the industry built on the phonograph was driven by the constant disruption of innovation … one invention after another arrived to upset the fragile balance between the great companies and change the relationships of the old power with the new” (2005, 5–6).
In one of the most detailed technological histories of recorded sound and business, The Fabulous Phonograph, Gelatt (1977, 11) writes that a “history of the phonograph is at once the history of an invention, an industry, and a musical instrument.” Kenney (1999, 44) argues that a critical-cultural history of the phonograph “demonstrates the important ways in which economic and cultural forces have shaped technological inventions.” To analyze the record business through its history, Frith (1988, 13) suggests three specific issues: (1) the effects of technological change; (2) the economics of popular music; and (3) a new musical culture as technology transforms musical experiences, thus leading to “the rise of new sorts of musical consumption and use.” As these three scholars suggest, any historical analysis of the recorded music industry should consider the relationship between technologies, culture, and economics, as well as evolving modes of production and consumption.
Thus the history of the recorded music industry presented here is divided into four eras marked by different methods of recording and playback: the acoustic era (1877–1923), the electrical era (1924–1960s), the cassette era (1970–82), and the tangible digital era (roughly 1983–2000). This historical account will ultimately lead us to the present age of digital capitalism and its crowning format – the MP3.
The acoustic era
Shortly after Thomas Edison patented his phonograph in 1878, a device that used a vertical method for cutting sound onto a cylinder, the “talking machine” business was born and thus “music began to become a thing” (Eisenberg 2005, 13). At first, there was a proliferation of companies interested in recorded sound. However, by the turn of the twentieth century – a time marked by competition for hardware development and sales – three dominant companies emerged in the US: Edison’s National Phonograph Company, the Columbia Phonograph Company, and the Victor Talking Machine Company. These “Big Three” companies dominated the early industry because they were large enough to manufacture and market their products on a large scale, support research laboratories, and control almost every important patent for talking machines and records (Chanan 1995, Morton 2000, Coleman 2003, Millard 2005).
While Columbia was the first to release prerecorded music, initially all cylinder recordings were “original,” as no method for mass duplication existed until Berliner’s lateral gramophone discs were released in 1894. This is when the recording process became separate from the reproduction stage (Day 2000) as eventually discs would be reproduced using a gold master disc to stamp copies.
The disc was also important because, unlike Edison’s or Columbia’s devices that allowed consumers to record sound on cylinders, the gramophone was playback only, thus allowing for a one-way flow of musical content. While the earlier technologies were intended as dictation devices, Berliner’s disc recordings “would be made solely by manufacturers, not by consumers” (Morton 2000, 32). The mass production of discs ultimately lowered production costs and allowed for mass consumption; thus Berliner’s invention ultimately set the stage for the recorded music industry as we now know it.
The introduction of the disc also initiated the perpetual format war in the recording industry and the struggle for industry standardization. The disc forced Edison and Columbia to adapt in order to compete in the market, but because of the lack of industry standardization the disc initially confused consumers (Steffen 2005, 33). According to Millard (2005, 213), “standardization of recorded sound products is an invisible technology” – it can only be heard. Throughout the twentieth century, many sound delivery technologies would be released, but the successful ones were those that would achieve industry-wide standardization.
In 1897, 500,000 records were sold; two years later, that number increased to 2.8 million. Sometime between 1901 and 1903, Berliner sold his interests in the gramophone to Eldridge Johnson, a skilled inventor and an exceptional businessman, and the Victor Talking Machine Company was born.
By 1902 Victor was valued at $2.7 million, and through reinvestment into research and development, the company’s value increased to $12 million in 1905. This jump in value may have been due to the 1903 patent pool between Victor and Columbia. Because Victor developed the use of wax recordings and Columbia implemented the disc format (both clearly infringed on each other’s patent rights), this cross-licensing agreement virtually left Edison’s company and the cylinder in the dust.
Johnson realized that the phonographs of the early 1900s were, like most developments of modernity, aesthetically industrial. Thus by 1906 the Victor gramophone had become the Victrola, the first mass-market record player. This new playback device acted as “Victorian camouflage for the industrial machine” (Kenney 1999, 51) as it hid the mechanics within a wooden cabinet. By Johnson advertising the device as “a standard musical instrument,” the Victrola fostered the industry ideology that “phonographs should look as little like phonographs as possible” (Gelatt 1977, 192). While early recordings were used to sell playback hardware by displaying its technical virtues and the inventor’s genius, by 1907 the inventor had been replaced by the opera star as the selling point of the record (Millard 2005, 61) – the “moment at which one might pinpoint the reification of music” (Eisenberg 2005, 13). Because of the highbrow tastes of the men owning the Big Three, the music produced by their record companies reflected such values (Morton 2000, 29) – signaling that even in the early days of the record business, those in control of material production also had an influence on the ideological production of the era.
Before the prominence of musical recordings, the act of producing and consuming music relied on the sale of composers’ sheet music by publishers, as well as live performances of those compositions. In the same year that music “reified,” American composer and conductor John Philip Sousa wrote his famed essay, “The Menace of Mechanical Music” (1906), decrying the talking machine business and its “canned music.” Sousa’s piece demonstrated the tensions between different levels of musical production as he criticized the phonograph for victimizing the “moral rights” of composers’ musical works, as well as for encouraging a passive relationship to the world of music by transferring the human quality of music to a soulless machine.
By 1910 a mass market for recorded music was flourishing as Victor sold 94,557 machines (compared to 7,570 in 1901). Edison realized that grooved discs were the way of the future, and in 1913 released Edison Diamond Discs – a blatant rip-off of the Victrola – which faired poorly in the market. In 1914, the same year that ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers) formed to protect the publishing copyrights of Tin Pan Alley’s composers used in mechanical recordings, the Big Three controlled a market in which18 recorded sound companies brought in a total of $27 million in profits. While Victor’s value grew to $33 million in 1917, most of the basic patents for the phonograph and gramophone expired that same year, thus opening the market in 1918, when 166 recorded sound companies made $158 million in profit (a 500% profit increase in just four years). “The economics of record production during this period are easy to comprehend. The low cost of entry into the business stimulated new labels, catering to relatively small markets, thus a distinction appeared between independent companies and the majors” (Chanan 1995, 54).
With a surge in postwar consumption, Edison’s company experienced its best year in 1920 with $22 million in profits. However, this success would be short-lived as the sales of radio sets in the US nearly doubled from 1921–2, which cut into the record industry’s sales – a mere $106 million during that same period. Hit by falling sales and overproduction, as well as the new radio technology that provided music to consumers for free, the 1920s was a decade in which the recording industry felt its first real economic hardship.
The electrical era
The electrical era, represented by the shellac 78rpm disc and eventually transistor technology, is characterized by technological innovation, as well as increased industry concentration brought on by the Great Depression in the US. It is important to note that the dominant firms in the music business in the early twentieth century were not vertically integrated and the industry as a whole was quite fragmented. Hobart (1981) observes that four distinct forms of capital existed in the early twentieth century, each exerting its own pressures and priorities upon the character of music, its production and reproduction: publishing, touring, broadcasting, and sound recording. During this period, these discrete activities became controlled within vertically integrated recording companies.
By 1924 Western Electric had patented its electric sound recording microphones; before this recording development, sound was collected acoustically by a horn and piped to a diaphragm which vibrated the cutting stylus. This “acoustic process of recording therefore limited what music could be attempted, it affected how the musicians performed in various ways, and it seriously distorted the sounds they actually made” (Day 2000, 11). The new electric recording process (then known as Orthophonic recording) was able to capture the musical energy lost through the inefficient acoustic process.
In 1925 Victor was still trying to sell its stock of acoustic machines, but announced that November 2, 1925, would be “Victor Day” – the day they would release the first consumer phonograph, the Orthophonic Victrola, that would play electrically recorded discs. A week after “Victor Day,” there was more than $20 million in orders for Orthophonic Victrolas.
Throughout the late 1920s, profits for the industry remained steady at around $70 million yearly, but radio was cutting into the business and the record industry had to compete with broadcasting or join it. Finding a market for the sale of records when consumers could get the music free from radio proved to be a challenge. Victor had reached an agreement with RCA to incorporate Radiolas into Victrolas by 1925, and, a year later, with many profitable years behind him, Johnson sold his company for over $28 million to two New York banking houses. Johnson’s Victor Talking Machine Company had also successfully “reinforced the upper and middle levels of an American musical hierarchy in recorded music” (Kenney 1999, 64). In 1927 Columbia invested in United Independent Broadcasters to get airtime to promote its records, which signaled a convergence between industries and technologies. By 1929, RCA had completed its buyout of Victor to create the RCA-Victor subsidiary, had taken over Victor’s Camden, New Jersey, factory, and stopped manufacturing talking machines in order to start mass producing radios. RCA not only eliminated a major competitor from outside the burgeoning radio industry by absorbing all of Victor’s assets, but gained “an extensive plant and a well-organized system of distributors and dealers” for its radios (Gelatt 1977, 247).
Although the Depression affected the radio industry, it “decimated the record business” (Kenney 1999, 158) as record sales dropped from $75 million in 1929 to $16.9 million two years later. The early 1930s, then, marked the most “doleful phase” for the recording industry as both the sales of discs and phonographs plummeted (Gelatt 1977, 255). During the decade, new strategies developed between the radio and recording industries as the various mergers and acquisitions reflected a shift in power from record companies to large entertainment corporations. “They were now empires of sound,” writes Millard, “huge, integrated business organizations based on the reproduction and transmission of sound” (2005, 175). In this phase of recorded music’s history, the importance of the inventor was eclipsed by the business-oriented CEOs of these new sonic empires.
By 1931, UK Columbia merged with the Gramophone Company to create Electrical and Musical Instruments (EMI) – a deal that gave EMI licensing rights to the popular HMV record label in Europe – thus making it the largest record company in the world. After purchasing American Columbia in 1932 and selling six million units, the American Record Company (ARC) was the largest record company in the US and was the leader in the inexpensive record market. In 1936, two years after the incorporation of American Decca (another producer of cheap records) by Jack Kapp, more than 50 percent of the records being produced were destined for jukeboxes across America. Indeed, the 13 million discs used yearly by jukeboxes actually saved the music industry. American Decca was not only the first record company to create economies of scale through aggressive marketing schemes and jukebox sales, but they also introduced the star system within the recording industry (Sanjek and Sanjek 1991).
By the end of the 1930s, recorded music was no longer a distinct business, but was part of the integrated entertainment industry as a new Big Three had emerged: RCA-Victor, Decca, and Columbia. At this point, radio was king, and, in an effort to promote regional music (“hillbilly” and “race” records) while serving the local stations that ASCAP had largely ignored, radio broadcasters formed a rival performance rights organization in 1939, Broadcast Music, Incorporated (BMI).
While only 100 million discs sold in the US prior to entering World War II, military research and the US forces’ capture of Radio Luxembourg’s magnetic taping technology on September 11, 1944, as well as postwar consumerism, fueled the sale of 350 million records in 1946. However, as industry sales rose to $89 million and recording companies began shifting their focus toward instant successes in the form of the pop record, the lion’s share went to Columbia, Decca, RCA-Victor, and Capitol (85% or 300 million records).
In 1948 the music industry met another foe, television. But instead of succumbing to the new technology, as it had done with radio, the music industry fought back with a weapon of its own: the long-playing microgroove record (LP). Invented by Dr Peter Goldmark at CBS, the LP extended recording time to a half hour, and in its first year on the market the format topped $3 million in sales. RCA-Victor would not be outdone, so in 1949, after a $5 million marketing campaign, they debuted the 7inch 45rpm single disc – a four-minute format that was perfect for the pop single. Because CBS didn’t want to delay the release of the LP until it had a player, and perhaps learning from the past failures of delivery technologies that were introduced into the marketplace without industry-wide standardization, they developed an adapter that would play LPs on existing phonographs.
By the early 1950s, however, RCA-Victor began producing LPs and CBS 45s, once again proving that industry standardization between hardware and software was key to financial success. It is interesting to note that the industry move to the LP also encouraged record manufacturers to buy new pressing machines. In turn, the old machines were bought by people who used them to make bootleg copies of records produced by the industry. In 1952, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) formed to set a technical standard for recording and playback on vinyl records and to lobby in Washington on behalf of its members in the recording industry, but also partly in response to the new rash of LP piracy (Morton 2000).
Moving into the 1950s, the recording industry again experienced a flurry of independents (similar to the indie proliferation in 1918). With magnetic tape dramatically lowering recording costs, and LPs and 45s being relatively cheap to press, the barrier to entering the market decreased rapidly. However, the major players solidified their dominance through full vertical integration. The major companies “owned their own manufacturing plants and directly controlled their distribution outlets in addition to simply producing records” (Chapple and Garofalo 1977, 15) and were designated as “majors” because they did their own nationwide distribution (Dannen 1990, 112). Previously, market control had come from technological innovation and musical production, but, by the end of the 1950s, market domination was firmly in control of those firms with distribution power. Thus controlling the means of production was no longer enough; instead, the most profitable companies controlled distribution – the means by which a recording made its way to retailers and ultimately into the hands of the consumer.
From 1955 to 1959 record sales nearly doubled to $511 million, largely due to the rise of big-box store retailers such as Sam Goody, as well as the new “one-stop” distributors who would buy from the major distributors and sell to small independent stores. Undoubtedly, records were finding their place in a national market and were not limited to regional distribution. While the Big Four had a 75 percent share of the $277 million US market in 1955, by 1959 this share dwindled to a mere 34 percent of the booming $603 million market. The indies were producing most of the popular and profitable music and were marketing their records through radio disc jockeys. However, independent retailers and distributors began disappearing as the major companies controlled most distribution outlets and started their own record clubs for direct sale, and the big-box stores expanded. In addition, people who rented space in department stores to sell popular records, known as rack-jobbers, grew to become more important, accounting for more than half of US record sales at this time (Gelatt 1977).
During this era of consolidation, sales jumped from $600 million in 1960 to $1.2 billion by the decade’s end. Record companies were looking like enormous cash cows, ready for conglomerate slaying. The independents were introducing new popular music through radio, but in order to sell those records they relied on the major companies who had complete control over the channels of distribution. Instead of taking over the independents, the major companies made arrangements to invest in them and handle their distribution, but it wasn’t a big step to fully take over, as the majors “squashed the entrepreneurialism by putting it in the structure of a conglomerate” (Callahan 2005, 9). By 1967, the market was controlled by CBS Records, RCA-Victor, and Capitol, each with a 12–13 percent share of the US market. Behind the “independent” labels were a small number of integrated entertainment corporations; thus the multitude of independents was merely an “illusion” (Millard 2005, 333). By the end of the 1960s, the American market had attracted foreign companies, such as EMI, which took over Capitol, and the PolyGram group, which bought MGM, Verve, and the United Artists distribution system. Competition for the acquisition of independent record labels also began to heat up between the major companies. And, as these companies became further horizontally integrated, “label federations” developed. What we now refer to as “music groups” involved loosely affiliated labels that set up divisions (usually genre-based) within major conglomerates. This strategy offered the major companies a way to cope with market uncertainty by spreading their risks, and to reap synergistic benefits by creating company-wide manufacturing in order to exploit economies of scale.
Overall, these new highly diversified corporations became adept at promoting and distributing products. Equipped with music publishing arms and vertically integrated labels, the Big Six (CBS, Warner Bros, RCA, Capitol-EMI, PolyGram, and MCA), as well as a half dozen smaller companies, dominated the market. In the 1970s and into the 1980s, these media conglomerates grew even bigger, making independent production and distribution a thing of the past. In addition, many observers have argued that the logic of the corporation took over the creative logic of music-making (Chapple and Garofalo 1977, Chanan 1995, Morton 2000, Coleman 2003). According to Chapple and Garofalo, the merger movement of the 1960s was:
a “natural” process of centralization in which the successful companies joined to save expenses, to control prices and the market more effectively, and to amalgamate companies specializing in different types of music into one corporation that provided greater financing and simpler, central distribution. … Because the music business had become so profitable and because as part of the entertainment industry it was a high growth field, outside conglomerates looking for new acquisitions found music corporations attractive. (1977, 82)
The cassette era
While radio popularized the notion of free music in the 1920s, the cassette took this consumer empowerment to a whole new level. Philips, a Dutch electronics company, began the manufacture and sale of compact cassette tapes in 1963 (selling them under the Norelco brand in the US), and, by 1965 polls showed that 40 percent of the people buying tapes were doing so to make copies of LPs. This implied that record labels were coming up short and “did not satisfy the demands of consumers” (Morton 2000, 137). Nevertheless, cassette tapes did not produce major consumer waves until the oil crisis of the 1970s caused a shortage in the vinyl used to manufacture LPs. As Japanese manufacturers (Sony and Matsushita) began incorporating cassette players into home stereos that could rival the reel-to-reel format, the sale of blank cassette tapes soared to 125 million in 1970. After complaints of piracy by the RIAA and its representatives, Congress enacted the Sound Recording Act of 1971 to finally give mechanical recordings federal copyright protection.
With the growth of cassette piracy, music was for the first time circulated en masse outside of its market. Although Dr Peter Goldmark predicted, “The disc and tape will exist side by side” (quoted in Coleman 2003, 62), Americans spent $861 million on tape players and only $577 million on record players in 1973. The recording industry still raked in $2 billion as “Records were sold like toothpaste” (Gelatt 1977, 336), despite an estimated $200 million in losses from the sale of bootlegs. With the Big Six controlling more than 80 percent of the US market, sales of recorded music grew to $4.1 billion through 1978. 1978 was also the year that PolyGram had over $1.2 billion in sales – the first recording company to top the $1 billion mark. The constant market growth made the major record companies an attractive investment to large multinationals, an interest signaled when in 1979 Thorn Electrical Industries, a highly diversified British conglomerate, merged with EMI to form Thorn EMI. (This merger eventually allowed Thorn EMI to make a number of acquisitions – most notably the eventual high-profile purchase of Richard Branson’s Virgin Records in 1992.)
Nevertheless, 1979 proved to be problematic for the recording industry, with an 11 percent decrease in sales from the previous year – the first such decline since World War II (Dannen 1990). The major companies were forced to restructure, including cutting back on marketing and promotions, as well as the development of new talent. In the early 1980s tape sales were almost equal to LPs, but by 1986 the sale of prerecorded cassettes surpassed records and most home stereos came equipped with two cassette decks. Thus a CBS study claimed $700–800 million in losses to piracy, while the RIAA declared billions. Though radio and film had been the main conduit for music promotion for nearly 60 years, the introduction of MTV and the music video format in 1981 proved a far more effective marketing tool, reaching over 56 million homes by the end of the decade. As one observer noted, the major companies had become “too big for their own good, they never know where and when the next trend is going to emerge because they are not really in touch with the audience” (Chanan 1995, 156). It was at this point that the economic downturn really began to hit the music industry.
The recording industry, however, would not go down without a fight over piracy. Although Philips and Sony had released the compact disc (CD) as early as 1978, the industry didn’t begin to support the new digital format until 1982. Not only would the record industry see this new format as a way to curb piracy, but the CD encouraged market growth as consumers started to replace their LP and cassette collections with CDs. The introduction of the CD also led to an industry revelation: exploiting copyrights attached to old recordings could be very profitable. Because of this epiphany, the large entertainment conglomerates realized the inherent value of owning large back catalogs of music. Thus many of the mergers that took place in the 1980s were partly motivated by the profitable promise of acquiring extensive copyright catalogs. Not only did major companies become interested in owning the rights to sound recordings, they also began to purchase publishing companies so that they could fully exploit music through television, radio, and film, as well as license those rights to their competitors. According to Callahan (2005, 228), the record business became interested in “money derived from the exploitation of musicians and copyright.”
The tangible digital era
While the CD was slow to find a market, the recording industry went to great lengths to make sure that the format would succeed by quickly phasing out LPs and later cassettes (LP sales fell 80% in the 1980s). In addition, the CD signaled a return to a familiar format, as Steffen (2005, 30) argues: “The shape of recorded music that we are still most familiar with is the disc … the stamped record has been a mainstay delivery system of recorded music.” The CD’s similarity to Berliner’s disc may have contributed to the format’s consumer appeal; however, the “superior” sound quality of the CD and digital recording contributed to its success as well. During the same year that cassettes eclipsed LPs in sales (1986), the CD had its first big year with 50 million sold. While CBS and RCA battled over formats in the late 1940s, Philips and Sony were able to use piracy as the motivation for the Big Six recording companies to swiftly make the digital move – one that would give an industry lead to the two non-US-based consumer electronics companies.
While the 1980s was a decade marked by technological innovation, it was also an era filled with a series of mergers and acquisitions fueled by easy money and lax regulation. In 1988, Sony bought CBS Records for $2 billion, an acquisition that gave the electronics company a roster of artists and a back catalog. Three years earlier, GE had purchased the RCA Corporation, then sold its 50 percent interest in RCA Records and its subsidiaries to Bertelsmann (soon renamed BMG Music). Thus three of the six leading major record companies in the US were owned by international media conglomerates.
According to Frith (1988) and Dannen (1990), the increased consolidation of the 1980s had its effect on musical diversity as fewer titles were being released into the market (in the 1970s, 4,000–5,000 titles were released yearly, while in the 1980s that number dropped to about 2,000). Gronow (1983) observed that the industry’s corporate structure and mode of operations in the early 1980s were similar to that of the early 1900s. These large sound empires had spent the better part of the century swallowing up smaller competitors, and the 1990s would be no different as “this feeding continued at a faster pace in the digital era” (Millard 2005, 367).
With an increasing number of new releases available only on CD or cassette, record stores dropped LPs and 45s from the shelves. In 1989, vinyl sales dropped to 6 percent of the recorded music market, while CD sales rose to 200 million and cassettes to 450 million. By 1991, vinyl records had vanished from most stores. The CD had cut manufacturing and distribution costs dramatically, but as those costs decreased the retail price of CDs remained much the same through the early 2000s.
With 20 million CD players in use by 1990, the industry experienced a steep rise in sales of prerecorded CDs – an increase that happened to coincide with the rapid sale of blank cassettes. While the cassette had, in some ways, liberated consumers from the structure of the LP, the CD suggested a return to the “one-way, monopolistic, homogenizing tendencies” of the LP format (Manuel 1993, 15). With the flurry of formats and speeds introduced in a relatively short period of time, it is no wonder that consumers experienced confusion as technological innovation continued to change how consumers experienced music (Frith 1988).
In 1990, the Japanese electronics manufacturer Matsushita paid $6.13 billion in cash for MCA Inc. Thus by 1995 Sony, Matsushita, and Philips were the modern equivalent to the original Big Three as these companies developed hardware, software, and talent. However, in 1998 Seagram, in what was then the largest merger in the industry’s history, bought PolyGram for $10 billion. Two years later, Vivendi bought Seagram’s entertainment assets for $34 billion, and the PolyGram and MCA family of labels eventually became the Universal Music Group.
As the new millennium approached, the US recording industry was worth $13.7 billion, while the global market was valued at $38.1 billion. In early 2000, the Big Six of the 80s had morphed into the Big Five (UMG, BMG, EMI, WMG, and Sony), an oligopoly accounting for about 95 percent of all records sold globally in 2000. Consumers paid roughly $16 per CD for the format’s first two decades, but once they were able to buy blank CD-Rs and duplication hardware and see how cheap it was to produce music CDs, it became obvious how the industry had taken advantage of the market. The digital CD’s advantage of eliminating piracy disappeared as consumers gained access to duplication media and again music circulated outside the commercial market. While consumers used blank CDs for perfect replication of prerecorded discs, the industry was becoming involved in another format battle – actually, this time a war. The struggle would not occur between any of the major players as it had in the past – this time war was waged by the industry on its consumers and their new format: the MP3.
The contemporary recorded music industry
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side
Hunter S. Thompson
For the first 110 years of recorded music, the primary commodities produced by the industry were physical objects, which allowed the major companies to maintain control over the material production and distribution of records. By 2009, the recorded music industry was in disarray – the CD format dying and the physical distribution model crumbling, forcing the major recording companies to restructure and try to adapt to consumer demands. More than ever, the industry was being forced to follow trends rather than set them.
A review of MP3 technology illustrates some of the dilemmas facing the recorded music industry. It might be argued that the MP3 has been at the heart of the industry’s woes. The format was originally designed to compress video files in the early 1990s, and has been spreading on the web since 1994. Unlike many of its predecessors – from the phonogram to the CD – MP3 technologies were not introduced by the recording industry itself. Rather, the software and hardware used in the playback of digital music were developed and marketed by huge computer technology corporations (e.g., Apple and Microsoft) – companies with little interest in the production or marketing of recorded music.
The MP3 and music piracy became part of popular discourse because of the extensive media coverage surrounding the 2001 A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc. case, which pitted a successful recording company against the first popular peer-to-peer (p2p) file-sharing network. Napster enabled people to make copies and distribute MP3s, allowing music to circulate outside the market, which, of course, drew accusations of copyright infringement from the recording industry. The Napster company was decried and then sued by the RIAA, its members, and several mega-recording stars for direct and contributory copyright infringement. The recording industry won the suit, thus forcing Napster to shut down its operations and move into bankruptcy. However, the company was resurrected two years later as Napster 2.0, an à la carte and subscription service, which was then purchased by Best Buy Co.
With the recording industry emerging as victors, the Napster case set a precedent for future suits against p2p services (e.g., MGM v. Grokster in 2005). But despite the concern over lost revenues and various legal measures taken, the recording industry remained blind to evolving distribution platforms, customer demands, and supporting technologies in the early 2000s. The industry won several court battles, thousands of legal settlements, and the right to preserve its “properties” through an economy of scale production model and physical distribution infrastructure. In the process, however, it lost its grip on an increasingly volatile market. While the major recording companies fought illegal file-sharing, they failed to develop and implement digital distribution into their repertoire; therefore, many musicians and labels (independent or otherwise) successfully filled the void. Digital technology reduced both production and distribution costs, and, according to Fox (2004, 205), diminished the industry’s control over music production and “the major labels’ historical hegemony over traditional distribution methods.”
Finally, in 2009, the recording industry began to capitalize on digital distribution – another obvious example of how major record companies follow trends rather than set them. While physical distribution was giving way to new digital models, Roberts (2005, 38) notes that the recording industry is still “dominated by entities that control distribution and are less focused on production,” thus distribution should be understood as the key to generating profit and market power in the digital age.
Typically, recording artists work for specific record labels, which are owned mostly by major entertainment corporations. Corporate labels are able to draw on extensive capital resources to market and promote new albums, as well as to front large advances to recording artists, who must pay back these advances from the royalties they receive from album sales. In other words, an artist must pay all of the expenses associated with the production of the album (from sound engineers to licensing), as well as expenses involved in producing music videos, and so forth. Thus the label’s only risk in producing an album is fronting the money for marketing and promotion, which is typically recouped from sales.
After an album is recorded, the label arranges for manufacture and then focuses on distributing it through the company’s own distribution network. Distribution is not only the key to the success of the company’s labels, but also attracts products from independent labels that employ these distribution networks. A strong distribution network will ensure that an album will end up at retailers and then finally in consumers’ hands. Therefore, control over distribution leads to control of the market and the industry. Thus the major companies are currently trying to find ways to dominate channels of digital distribution.
In the industry, a record label is considered independent if it self-distributes or goes through an “independent” distributor (e.g., ADA, RED, Caroline, or E1 Entertainment Distribution). Therefore, a label owned by the Big Four may utilize independent distribution and thus claim to be independent (e.g., Zomba). It is interesting to note that both EMI and WMG are no longer owned by transnational entertainment conglomerates. WMG was bought from Time Warner in 2004 by an investment group (led by Edgar Bronfman Jr. of Seagram fame) for $2.6 billion, and, after an appalling financial year in 2006, the private equity firm Terra Firma Capital Partners bought EMI for £3.2 billion.
Since 2000, when the overall market in the US was $14.3 billion ($36.9 billion globally), revenues to $8.3 billion in 2008, an 18 percent decrease from 2007. Trade associations around the world blame illegal downloading for the loss in revenues. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) estimates a 20 to 1 ratio of illegally to legally downloaded music files, which is supported by a recent study by the Institute for Policy Innovation estimating that global piracy took a $12.5 billion slice out of the US economy, displaced 71,000 jobs and $2 billion in wages. These figures, however, have been created by the recording industry to paint itself as the victims and derive its estimates by equating illegal downloads of CDs to physical theft from a retailer. It is relevant to point out, though, that MP3 files are nonrivalrous goods, meaning that the consumption of an MP3 by one does not prohibit its consumption by others (nor does its theft).
While revenues have shrunk significantly according to RIAA data, the sale of product has increased dramatically: in 2008, 1.85 billion units were shipped, which is 730 million more than in 1999, one of the best years for industry sales. While the physical distribution model yielded more profit, digital distribution sold more product with less payoff – what NBC Universal’s CEO Jeff Zucker has referred to as “trading analog dollars for digital pennies” (quoted in Arango 2008).
The lion’s share of the US music market is controlled by Universal Music Group (30.2%), Sony Music Entertainment (28.58%), Warner Music Group (20.55%), and the EMI Group (9.2%), while the rest of the market goes to “indie” labels (11.47%) (Nielsen SoundScan 2009). These figures represent the production sector of the recorded music industry. In terms of distribution, the Big Four control approximately 95 percent of the music being shipped to physical and digital retailers.
The industry is finally restructuring itself to meet the consumer demand for cheap, and now even free, instant, and intangible recorded music, and has started to monetize legal digital distribution. Record companies are now exploiting new music through digital sales, including satellite radio and webcasting, ringtones and ringbacks, iTunes sales and subscription services. But they are also recycling old content sold as MP3s. Back catalogs can make up more than 40 percent of sales and 70 percent of profits for a typical major label (Singh 2001, 4). With new digital platforms, labels are looking at more than album sales as the barometer of success. Rio Caraeff, an executive at UMG, said, “We look at the total consolidated revenue from dozens of revenue lines behind a given artist or project, which include digital sales, the physical business, mobile sales and licensing income” (quoted in Sisario 2008).
In 2008, 32 percent of overall US sales were digital (compared to just 9% in 2005), while digital sales accounted for over 20 percent of the world market. Total physical units shipped were down 26 percent in 2008 in the US market (12% globally). With such a decrease in physical sales, big-box stores such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy (the second and third largest music retailers behind iTunes), which have typically accounted for 65 percent of all retail purchases, have sharply reduced the floor space allotted to recorded music (although Best Buy is now trying to sell vinyl records at some of its stores). However, in 2008 one physical format did exceptionally well: the EP/LP, which saw a 124 percent increase in units shipped from 2007. Conversely, while over one billion singles were downloaded in 2008, in the same year a mere 400,000 12 inch vinyl singles were shipped (down from 5.4 million in 1999).
The industry has started to embrace and capitalize on new digital distribution models, from à la carte MP3 stores (e.g., iTunes, where singles/albums are sold) to subscription services (e.g., Napster 2.0, where monthly fees are paid for unlimited downloads) to advertising-based sites (e.g., MySpace Music and YouTube, where “free” music is supplemented by advertising sales). However, many signs within the industry are pointing toward a model where music is “free” for consumers as they pay for recorded music indirectly, which is a model gaining momentum in Europe. Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Forrester Research, explains that the industry is shifting to its “Plan B”: “The record companies have realized that the only way they can fight free is with free itself” (quoted in Pfanner 2009).
The goal of these “free” models is to find new ways to connect music to consumers. One model, called “Comes With Music,” involves electronic devices, such as cellular phones, that include musical content. “Music can become an important element that enhances the value of consumer electronics devices, providing consumers with a very complete and satisfying experience,” said Thomas Hesse, an executive at Sony Music (IFPI 2009, 8). Record companies are also trying to find ways to connect their music with advertisers and specific campaigns, essentially branding a band and a product simultaneously.
In addition, the industry is increasingly exploring licensing deals with video games, as well as developing other models such as the “multiple rights” or “360” contracts. These deals focus less on the sale of recorded music and the need to quickly recoup label investments in advances and promotion, and more on how record companies can capitalize on a recording artist as a whole – from concert tickets and merchandise to fragrance and clothing lines. While 360 deals may allow (or force) labels to develop not only talent, but a coinciding fan-base, artists’ ancillary income also could potentially offset future declines in album sales. “We don’t sell records any more, we act wherever people experience music,” said Elio Leoni-Sceti, an executive at EMI, “Our role is not to put physical discs on the shelf but to reach consumers wherever they are” (IFPI 2009, 5). In other words, the major recording companies are scrambling to monetize the music they produce by further exploiting artists and copyrights in a desperate attempt to maintain their market hegemony.
Conclusion
Music is everybody’s possession. It’s only publishers who think that people own it.
John Lennon
This chapter has looked at the historical relationship between technology and music, a somewhat antagonistic connection that has created the contemporary recorded music industry. Through critical historical analysis, we have noted the cyclical nature of this industry, as well as how such an analytical framework may help to explore contemporary market conditions.
For nearly a century, as this chapter reveals, the major players in the recorded music industry have profited by creating artificial scarcity of the commodities they produced, using an economies of scale model, as well as by controlling physical distribution networks. While the industry struggled to standardize and control its playback formats and hardware, current problems facing it are not only because recorded music is circulating outside its market, but because the industry has lost much of its control over hardware production to companies in other industries. The MP3 format has in many ways destroyed the recorded music industry’s production and distribution models as very little is physically produced and thus made scarce.
However, the industry is increasingly realizing that it can make even intangible commodities such as MP3s scarce, and thus valuable, through the continued exploitation of the copyrights attached to music. It could be argued that the MP3 in reality merely represents, and in fact is, a copyright for which consumers pay (or do not pay). Indeed, recorded music itself is actually becoming a secondary commodity; that is, much as in the early 1900s, recorded music is being used to sell hardware and other commodities. This is evident, for example, in the licensing of its music for video games and ringtones, for use in branding other commodities, or to be included with hardware. In other words, we suggest that the industry will stay afloat by licensing its copyrighted music to other cultural industries or other corporations, based on nothing more than a legal process. In other words, copyrights may end up being the industry’s only valuable commodities.
It is interesting to note several signs indicating that the industry’s woes may possibly lead to a more “profitable” state of music as an art form. First, with digitization, more music is being produced, distributed, and consumed, but at a significantly lower rate of profit. Music is recorded, produced, and distributed much easier in the digital age and may free musicians from the control of major labels. This may be good for the art of music, but clearly not as beneficial to the business of music. Second, other indicators of musical experiences have been observed. For instance, Callahan (2005) notes that the sale of musical instruments recently has increased exponentially. Meanwhile, recent figures show an increase in the sale of concerts tickets in North America (accompanied by consolidation in the live music performance business).
The future of recorded music is indeed in a precarious state. As the market for digital music continues to grow, the industry is likely to respond with both promises and threats in attempts to monetize its assets and regain control of the market. While we can’t predict the future of this volatile industry, we can certainly look to the past to understand and possibly even predict how the recorded music business may adapt to new technologies. We suggest issues relating to this industry should be explored further through critical political economic analysis – issues which could be, as Smythe (1960) suggested, addressed in dissertations and other academic publications for decades to come.
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