artists picked up by a major.10
RADIO AND TELEVISION
The sudden explosion of nationally broadcast radio beginning in 1922 would have a major impact on the music industry and how people consume music. Musicians’ unions, composers’ rights organizations, record companies, and radio broadcasters were at odds with one another for decades, trying to figure out how to compensate artists from this new medium.
Radio transmission dates to Guglielmo Marconi transmitting Morse code signals several miles through the air via electromagnetic (radio) waves in 1896, building on Heinrich Hertz’s earlier experiments (see figure 4).11 In 1899 Marconi demonstrated his invention in the United States and established the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America. By 1907 Lee De Forest, who was patenting versions of his audion, a vacuum tube that could amplify an electrical signal (a crucial step in radio broadcasting), was transmitting sound (music recordings) from the top floor of a building in New York City, and in 1910 a live broadcast of Caruso from the Metropolitan Opera House, using the new microphone technology, was locally transmitted. Telephones, connected by wire, were in use since 1876; the ability to transmit sound without wires was revolutionary. After the government passed its first licensing law in 1912, the number of licensed amateur radio operators jumped from 322 in 1913 to over 10,000 in 1916. By 1916 American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) bought out De Forest’s patents and began to move into radio.
The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) was formed in 1919, taking hold of American Marconi’s assets and operations. The following year General Electric (GE) and RCA pooled their patents with AT&T and its subsidiary Western Electric. The November 1920 Westinghouse Corporation broadcast of returns of the presidential election from their newly licensed station KDKA at their Pittsburgh plant was a milestone. They soon made daily broadcasts and began selling home receivers to a curious public. Westinghouse joined GE, RCA, and AT&T in 1921, pooling about two thousand patents and controlling the radio industry in a monopoly. GE and Westinghouse would manufacture receivers and parts, RCA would market them under their trademark, and AT&T would sell the transmitters and control telephone service. Each of these corporations would soon begin operating their own radio stations.
Smulyan (1994: 1) opens her book on commercial radio broadcasting as follows: “When the first radio station began in 1920, no one knew how to make money from broadcasting.” That would change in 1921, when the U.S. Department of Commerce began issuing licenses in a new class of station, called broadcasting, to twenty-eight stations that year. In the initial boom year of 1922, over five hundred new broadcasting stations were licensed. Sales of radio sets and parts went from $60 million in 1922 to $640 in 1928.
In 1922 ASCAP began a fight with broadcasters to be paid royalties, in the form of an annual licensing fee, for the public performance (radio broadcast) of music composed by its members. Fees were negotiated station by station, ranging from a few hundred dollars up to $5,000 within several years. The radio boom had a devastating impact on the sales of recordings, excepting race records—African Americans had not abandoned records to purchase radio sets for programming that was excluding black musical genres (Smulyan 1994: 25). The sales of Bessie Smith’s blues records may have kept Columbia Records in business at this time (Barnouw 1966: 129).
Stations in the South and Midwest offered country music programs, including WSB in Atlanta in 1922, WLS in Chicago in 1924 (National Barn Dance), and WSM in Nashville in 1925 (which would become the Grand Ole Opry). National networks date to 1926, when AT&T left the broadcasting business and sold its New York station WEAF to RCA, which formed its subsidiary National Broadcasting Company (NBC) to operate the growing web of independent stations. At that point about five million homes in the United States had radios. By 1927 RCA had two networks: Red (WEAF) and Blue (WJZ, which became WABC).
Network radio and then television would provide a new model for the dispersion of U.S. culture. Music of a single artist or group could be instantly disseminated across the nation for the first time. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took advantage of the new medium with his first “fireside chats” in 1933, the intimacy of which helped push through his New Deal agenda.
The Radio Act of 1927 established the Federal Radio Commission, which would become the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1934. All radio licenses were to be voided, impacting the 732 stations broadcasting at the time (including about 90 operated by educational institutions), and new applications would provide a fresh start. In 1927 six hundred sponsors had supported the programming of a quarter of the NBC network’s hours, providing revenue to support noncommercial programming such as religious programs, talks, classical music concerts, and music-appreciation broadcasts.
United Independent Broadcasters was formed in 1927, which that year joined with Columbia Phonograph Record Company to form the Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System, the birth of the second national network. CPRC soon pulled out, and their name was shortened to Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1928. In the late 1930s a major dispute between ASCAP, which was planning to significantly raise the rates of their blanket licenses to radio stations, and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) led to the NAB founding the second performing rights organization, Broadcast Music, Inc. BMI attracted younger composers and especially those in nonmainstream styles not served by ASCAP.
As a result of an FCC monopoly probe, NBC’s red and blue networks split in 1943, and so NBC sold its blue network to American Broadcasting System, soon to be renamed American Broadcasting Company (ABC). Three major radio networks were now in place: CBS, NBC, and ABC. All three began commercial broadcasting on television in the 1940s, and to this day they remain the three major television networks (joined by Fox as the fourth in the 1990s).
In 1946 RCA put its black-and-white television sets on the market. By 1954, 354 television stations were broadcasting to more than half of U.S. households (twenty-six million). Contrary to fears of television putting them out of business, AM radio stations went from 948 in 1946 to 2,824 in 1954 (Douglas 1999: 219, 223). Popular music got a major boost in 1948, when CBS launched Toast of the Town, hosted by Ed Sullivan, soon renamed the Ed Sullivan Show, the most important single venue for launching national music acts from the mid-1950s through the 1960s (see figure 5). American Bandstand, hosted by Dick Clark in Philadelphia, became the first major show exclusively devoted to teen music. In 1957 it went on the air for ninety minutes every day. Within two years it was being broadcast to 101 affiliates to an audience of twenty million. Television began to be broadcast in color in 1965. A series of short-lived shows in the 1960s featured musical performances, and in the 1980s new cable networks, such as MTV and VH1, came on the air to broadcast music full-time, aimed at teens.12
As television initially expanded, taking advertisers with them, radio began to specialize in response. The immediate post–World War II era saw the rise of the disc jockey, who introduced and played records on the air. Radio stations playing R&B and jazz significantly expanded during this time, catering to an African American audience unable to afford the new TV sets and finding little interest in white middle-class television programming (Smulyan 1994: 159).
FM radio, with a better overall sound quality than AM, took off in 1965, when the FCC required that all AM/FM stations in markets of more than a hundred thousand people broadcast different material at least half of their airtime; this impacted more than half of the almost thousand FM stations. Some AM stations devoted FM to noncommercial programming. Tom Donahue (1967), a disc jockey and program director in San Francisco, was a pioneer in playing a wide variety of music on his eight-to-midnight FM show, including longer cuts with less chatter. It became known as free form, underground, or progressive radio, an alternative to AM. By 1972 about 400 of the 2,700 FM stations on the air were programming this format (Sanjek 1996: 543).
In the mid-1960s African Americans, long excluded from starring roles in television (with few exceptions such at Nat King Cole), began starring in a limited number of ongoing TV network prime-time series (see figure 6). In the early 1970s a flurry of Hollywood
